Remembering a person who was never really there | thearticle

What makes you the same person today that you were a year ago, or even five minutes ago? Is the relevant criterion this: that you are the same person because you inhabit the same body? But

this would be merely to restate the problem: given that your molecular composition at birth will be completely different from your molecular composition at death, what makes your body the

same thing over time? What makes your body the same body that it was five minutes ago? The stardust is significantly altered, so what stays the same? Is the process of physical

reconfiguration itself the criterion of “sameness”? If the continuation of “you” as a person is not down to the continuity of your body, then perhaps it’s your mind. The philosopher John

Locke argued that personal identity (the identity of yourself over time) is secured by memory. What makes the “me” of today the same “me” as the person of 20 years ago is that I can remember

that person, and everything they did. A person’s life is bequeathed a sort of unity because memory functions to gather experience into a defining whole. Locke’s argument is open to many

objections (do animals have memory?) but many of the objections themselves overlook a structural issue: that the nature of memory is itself deeply beguiling. There are almost ineffable

implications, metaphysical and ethical, to what is happening when we remember ourselves in previous times. And if memory is an implausible guarantor of our personal identity then it might be

that we are remembering not ourselves in previous times, but someone else in a different life. We are tempted to think that our memories function as time-stamps on our experiences. That we

are somehow replaying a tape of the past. But as Mary Warnock points out in her book on the subject, memory is not like that. To remember something is to be involved in an act of the

imagination: when I remember something I once did — say, an extra-marital affair — I am not merely summoning facts into an arena of consciousness. I am creatively representing them to

myself, usually without realising it. The example of the affair brings this out: the affair and the lying about it happened at about the same time, but the memories are not of the same type.

I remember the affair with less shame than I do the lying: because the memory is not of a single thing and, overall, it is shaped by myself. It follows that the “me” bit must be logically

prior to the memory and that therefore my memories cannot define what I am over time. So, what’s left? One option is that we actually are not the “same” person this week as a month ago. In

his _Reasons and Persons_, Derek Parfit offers a series of thought experiments intended to undermine the intuition that we are the “same person” over the course of our lives, if by “same”

you mean some strict version of identity. Roger Scruton once said that he considered the indexical “I” to be the most misleading word in the English language. Needless to say, both of these

eminent people (rightly) continued to draw a salary (Scruton’s point was more about what philosophers call “synchronic” identity — identity at a given moment). There is something about the

idea that we must be the same person at every point in our lives that bursts through the scepticism. Parfit’s seminal book announcing his scepticism on the coherence of “personal identity”

came out in 1984. He was still accepting offers to talk about it in 2015. Because this is the point: there is something about memory that is inextricable from our sense of identity; to lose

your memory is to descend into existential crisis. But it doesn’t follow that the identity is logically grounded in the memory. Memory is more subtle, complex and ethically challenging

possibly than the problem Locke is trying to solve. And as Warnock points out, there is a way in which literature is at its most interesting when it is parasitic on the mystery of memory.

I’ll leave you with this thought: that there is something very strange about the phenomenology of memory, what it is like to remember something. If you remember something that happened last

Wednesday and contrast it with something that happened a year ago it isn’t just that you remember the temporal ordering. The memory has a certain feel to it which is not adequately

assimilated into accounts of the phenomenon, which attempt to reduce it to events in the brain, all of which are happening now. This was something that occupied me throughout my postgraduate

and teaching years. Or at least, I think it did.