To get around failures of transitivity, neo-Lockeans like myself use a criterion of mental continuity (once again, overlapping chains of connectedness). Even though there’s a sharp break in connectedness between John Smith and the earlier Doctor, because the later Doctor remembers being various stages of John Smith and also remembers being various stages of the earlier Doctor, there are, in fact, overlapping chains of connectedness between John Smith and the earlier Doctor. Whew! (So, Joan Redfern is being a bit melodramatic when she says, “John Smith is dead.”)
But what about cases where the amnesiac never recovers the crucial lost memories? Suppose John Smith had just gone on being John Smith? Here the neo-Lockean has two choices. Either he takes it on the chin, and just grants that severe amnesia is loss of the original person; or else he allows that there’s more to your mental life than remembering who you are, and that other states can support mental connectedness and continuity. John Smith remembers how to speak a natural language, for instance, and he got that from the Doctor.
Who Is Jackson Lake?
In “The Next Doctor” (2008), Jackson Lake thinks he’s the Doctor, but we discover that he really isn’t. He’s experiencing a kind of fugue state, thanks to a personal trauma and a bit of Cyber-technology, the infostamp. In a more ordinary fugue case, the new personality is more or less made up of whole cloth, presumably out of the brain’s ability to confabulate to protect us. That’d be more like the case of John Smith. (Though fugue patients often can’t remember the fugue, once they recover their old selves, and we might have to resort to other states to claim persistence through it.)
But Lake takes on an existing persona, and, more disturbingly for the neo-Lockean account, one that seems related in the right way to the original Doctor.
Let me explain. Suppose that the Doctor encounters a crazy, obsessed fan. This fan believes with all his heart and soul that he is the Doctor. (The Fifth Doctor thinks he has encountered just such a fan in “Time Crash”!) But the fan has limited access to the Doctor’s actual adventures, and so “remembers” mostly made-up nonsense. Of course, the fan is not the Doctor, not even qualifying for mental continuity with him.
However, in Lake’s case, the infostamp gives him “everything you could want to know about the Doctor.” Intuitively, Jackson Lake isn’t the Doctor, but why not? Doesn’t he have what it takes, in terms of mental continuity? To find the answer, we have to consider another weird sort of transformation that turns up in Doctor Who.
What’s in Teleportation?
The tertiary literature on Doctor Who tells us that teleportation is a form of “instantaneous matter transport,” or some such. Rubbish. That’d be the dumbest technology anyone ever invented, for two reasons. First, it’d never make sense for short-range transport, since it’d be incredibly expensive in terms of the energy costs of converting matter into energy and back again. The speed advantage just wouldn’t be worth it.
And it wouldn’t make sense for long-range transport, because there’s a much better alternative: just send the information, and use recruited matter at the other end to build a replica. Much cheaper!
The idea of teleportation—which I shall from now on understand as information-only transmission—gives most people the heebie jeebies. It seems to them too much like death, especially when I explain that if you’re worried about there being two of you, don’t—we’re going to painlessly kill the original.
But this is one of those times when ordinary intuition is in conflict with itself. Consider a case Locke described in 1690. He imagined a scenario familiar to us from umpteen Hollywood movies: a Prince finds himself somehow in the body of a cobbler. Of course, everyone else at first thinks that the person in front of them is the cobbler, but it’s really the Prince.
Body-swap movies play this out well. Inevitably, close friends become convinced that the “cobbler” really is the Prince, and so do we, the audience! We readily grant that the Prince goes where his mind goes. If we were to seek out the Prince’s body and find he thinks he’s the cobbler, this would just confirm our suspicions. But it isn’t necessary. Suppose that conspirators have snuck in and killed the Prince during the night. Now he won’t be able to swap bodies back again, but on the other hand, he survived what would otherwise have ended him!
Did you notice that the scenario I’ve just described is structurally identical to teleportation? So if you can survive it, you can survive teleportation. Make up your mind.
Who’s Your Closest Continuer?
Suppose we teleport you, by scanning you and then sending the information. But we don’t kill you here, and the replica is produced there. What gives? The clear ordinary intuition is that the one here is you, and the one there isn’t. I think this is true.
This would be like seeking out the Prince’s body, and discovering that he also thought he was the Prince, knew everything the Prince would know, and so on. We would conclude that he’s right, and the cobbler-body person is wrong. So even if Jackson Lake is mentally continuous with some version of the Doctor, he isn’t the Doctor.
I think the way to understand this is through what Robert Nozick calls the closest continuer schema for identity.14 Really, it’d be more accurate to call it the closest close-enough continuer schema, but that’s a mouthful. If I’m right (and I always am), then for Jackson Lake to be close enough, he has to mentally continuous with the Doctor, and there’s a case for saying he is. But unless he’s the closest such continuer, bad luck—and there’s a Doctor who’s closer. (I’m not sure who it is, since I’m not sure of the complete temporal sequence—a chronic problem with time travelers.)
Now we can make sense of “Journey’s End.” Neither the regrown Doctor nor the Doctor/Donna is the Doctor. Each seems mentally continuous with him, though goodness knows how—unless a Time Lord’s consciousness is had by his right hand, reminiscent of Locke noting that if consciousness was contained in the “little finger,” then you would go where your little finger goes. (In “The End of Time,” the Master regenerates from a ring and a biometric imprint, and somehow this supports mental continuity!) Mental continuity isn’t enough, though, and there’s a closer candidate around—the one and the only, the Doctor.
What’s Persistence Without Identity?
So far, so good. But it may leave you feeling that personal identity isn’t what it used to be. After all, if Jackson Lake had had enough mental continuity with the Doctor, and had been the closest continuer, then he would have been the Doctor!
This makes personal identity rather like the story identity we considered earlier. It seems not a very deep fact about the world, and heavily dependent upon our interests. I think this is true.
The philosopher Derek Parfit has gone so far as to say that persistence isn’t really what matters in personal survival.15 Suppose you undergo fission teleportation: we scan you, and we kill you. But two signals are sent, and two replicas produced. Each of the replicas would have been you if not for the other, but it is not you because of the other.
So you don’t persist through such a process. How bad is that? Surely, Parfit argues, it isn’t as bad as ordinary death—rather, it’s about as good as ordinary survival. So what you really should want in personal survival is not persistence, but that someone exists in the future who is mentally continuous with you.
There’re ways to preserve the role of persistence in personal survival. David Lewis holds the view mentioned earlier that persons are space-time worms, individuated by mental continuity.16 In the fission case above, there was no single you prior to the fission. What we called “you” was in fact two overlapping persons sharing a person stage, much the way that two distinct highways might share a stretch of road surface.
But what happens in “Journey’s End,” according to Lewis’s view? That depends. He might regard “the Doctor” as undergoing triple fission, so there really was no single Doctor in the first place. Or he might employ some version of the closest continuer schema, to preserve the ordinary intuiti
on that neither the regrown Doctor, nor the Doctor/Donna, really is the Doctor.
4
Is the Doctor Still the Doctor—Am I Still Me?
DAVID KYLE JOHNSON
K’ANPO RINPOCHE: The Doctor is alive.
SARAH JANE: No, you’re wrong. He’s dead.
K’ANPO RINPOCHE: All the cells of his body have been devastated . . . but you forget he is a Time Lord.... His cells will regenerate. He will become a new man.
BRIGADIER: Literally?
K’ANPO RINPOCHE: Of course, he will look quite different . . . and it will shake up the brain cells a little. You may find his behavior somewhat . . . erratic....
SARAH JANE: Look, Brigadier, look. I think it’s starting.
BRIGADIER: Well, here we go again.
—“Planet of the Spiders,” 1974
According to K’anpo Rinpoche, each time the Doctor regenerates his cells are replaced and his brain structure is rearranged. Consequently, each Doctor has been quite unique. The First was a crotchety old man—a white-haired grandfather giving those young whipper-snappers “what for.” By contrast, the Tenth was an exuberant young man—a great-haired lover, brash and impetuous. In between, he’s been a clown (Sixth), a pleasant uncle (Third), a cricket player (Fifth), a scatterbrained jelly-baby-offering comedian (Fourth), and Moe from the Three Stooges (Second).
But does regeneration make the Doctor, literally, a different person? K’anpo Rinpoche suggests the difference is merely metaphorical. He’ll behave and look different, sure, but he won’t be literally a different person—like twins are literally different persons. The Doctor still is the Doctor, regeneration after regeneration. If we saw the First and Tenth Doctor together, however, there’d be nothing to make us think they are, literally, the same person. They’re more different than they’re the same—more different than you and the person across the room. You and he or she aren’t the same person, right? So how could each regeneration of the Doctor be, literally, the same person?
Who Cares?
So you’re my replacements? A dandy and a clown?
—The FIRST DOCTOR, to the Second and Third (“The Three Doctors,” 1972)
What we’re asking is how the “replacements” could all be one in the same person. Non-Who fans might wonder, “Who cares?” But think about yourself at age ten. You acted differently, had a different worldview, a different personality, and different beliefs. As you learned, your brain structure was rearranged. In fact, gradually, your body completely replaced all of its cells using material and energy you ingested.17 Just like the Doctor, you regenerate; and “you at ten” is less like “you now” than that person across the room. How could you at ten and you now possibly be the same person?
So our question about the Doctor’s identity is very relevant. By answering it, we can answer an important question about ourselves: How is it that we retain our identity over time?
I’m a Soul Man
THIRD DOCTOR: Jo, it’s all quite simple. I am he, and he is me.
JO GRANT: And we are all together, coo coo cachou?
SECOND DOCTOR: What?
JO GRANT: It’s a song by The Beatles.
SECOND DOCTOR: Really? How does it go?
—(“The Three Doctors”)
A common answer is that me at ten and me now are the same person because we have the same soul. So perhaps what makes the Third and the Second Doctor the same person is their having the same soul. If persons (and Time Lords) are “ensouled” beings, this answer is fair enough. And the assumption that we have souls is widespread indeed. Yet, it’s hardly ever questioned and not many can even articulate what a “soul” is supposed to be. If we don’t even know what souls are, how do we know that persons have them?
The “soul”—as first defended by Plato (429-347 B.C.E.) and later defended by Descartes (1596-1650)—is the immaterial part of you.18 It’s not comprised of atoms and has no spatial location, but it’s “where” decisions are made, self-control is exercised, emotions and sensations are felt, “where” memories are stored and recalled, reasoning occurs, your personality is housed and religious experience is generated. It can interact with the body, causing it to move; when your soul decides to raise your arm, your arm will rise. But it’s not dependent upon your body for existence, so when you die, it “floats away.” This was the conception accepted for thousands of years, and some version of this is what people who believe in a soul accept today.
But the problem with using “souls” to account for personal identity is that the concept of soul has been totally debunked. One might say it started when a rail road spike shot through Phineas Gage’s head. A chunk of his forebrain was rendered inactive (pulverized), and Phineas was changed from “a purposeful, industrious worker into a drunken drifter,” unable to control himself or make decisions. “Ladies were advised not to stay in his presence” and he would devise plans which were “no sooner arranged than they [were] abandoned.”19 “Wait a minute,” people said. “If the soul—this separate from the body non-material thing—is where decisions and self-control happen and personality is housed, how could damage to Phineas’s brain, a physical thing, affect them?” The answer: It couldn’t. Those things must be housed in the brain—the part that Phineas lost—not the soul.
That was just the start. Wilder Penfield found where our sensations of touch are housed, along with where some memories are stored. (Stimulating different parts of the brain directly can bring about a touch sensation on your hand or a distant childhood memory). Centers for emotion have been found, as well as for reasoning and intelligence. There’s even a part of the brain responsible for religious experience. People who have seizures in that area “enjoy” a life of repeated “religious experiences” and deep “significance.” You can even bring about such experiences by stimulating that part of the brain with magnets.20 For every “thing” that we thought went on in the soul—which would be a separate-from-the-body, immaterial thing—we’ve found that it actually goes on in the brain—a completely-tied-to-the-body, material thing. As Tom Wolfe put it, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died.”21 And since it’s dead, it will not suffice for an answer to our question.
Remember the Good Ole Days?
FIFTH DOCTOR: I’ve never met anyone else who could fly the TARDIS like that.
TENTH DOCTOR: Sorry mate, you still haven’t.
FIFTH DOCTOR: You didn’t have time to work all that out. Even I could-n’t do it.
TENTH DOCTOR: I didn’t work it out. I didn’t have to.
FIFTH DOCTOR: You remembered.
TENTH DOCTOR: Because you will remember.
FIFTH DOCTOR: You remembered being me, watching you, doing that. You only knew what to do because I saw you do it.
TENTH DOCTOR: Wibbly Wobbly . . .
BOTH: ... Timey Wimey!
—TENTH and FIFTH Doctor (“Time Crash,” 2007)
One big difference between you and the person across the room is that you don’t share any memories or mental states. But you do, at least vaguely, with your ten year old self. The philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) therefore suggested that memory access is what accounts for personal identity over time. According to Locke, the reason the Tenth and the Fifth Doctor are the same person is because the Tenth Doctor remembers being the Fifth.
Although the memory link is good reason to conclude they’re the same person, there are a few problems with saying that is what makes them the same person. One such problem was observed by Thomas Reid (1710-1796). Recall transitivity from math. If A=B and B=C then A=C. Likewise, if a first person is identical to a second and a third, then the second and third must be identical as well. But on Locke’s criterion it doesn’t always work that way.
Recall Donna Noble, who had the memory of her adventures with the Doctor wiped in “Journey’s End” (2008) because she became the half human-half Time Lord “DoctorDonna.” By Locke’s criteria, Pre-Doctor Donna is identical to DoctorDonna because DoctorDonna remembers her life before the Doctor. And
Post-Doctor Donna is also identical to Pre-Doctor Donna, for the same reason. So far, so good. According to transitivity, DoctorDonna must be identical to Post-Doctor Donna as well. And that makes sense; even though she acts differently, we don’t think Post-Doctor Donna is, literally, a different person. But since Post-Doctor Donna doesn’t remember being DoctorDonna, Locke would have to say that they are, literally, different individuals. So Locke’s theory gets it wrong.
Paul Grice (1913-1988) modified Locke’s theory to try to solve similar problems, and we can modify his to solve the “Donna Identity Problem.”22 Contrary to fact, let’s say the Eleventh Doctor can’t remember being the First—it was just too long ago. Grice would say that this doesn’t keep the Eleventh and the First Doctor from being the same person. The Eleventh can remember being the Tenth, the Tenth the Ninth, and so on, all the way back to the Second remembering the First. There’s a “chain of memory” running back that connects the Eleventh and the First Doctor. Grice would suggest that personal identity can run backwards along that chain and thus the Eleventh and First Doctor are identical, even if the Eleventh Doctor doesn’t remember the First.
Let us suppose that personal identity can run backwards and forwards along a memory chain. If so, the “Donna Identity Problem” is solved. Since Post-Doctor Donna remembers Pre-Doctor Donna, and DoctorDonna remembers Pre-Doctor Donna as well, there’s a as memory chain that connects Post-Doctor Donna to DoctorDonna.
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