I intend to discuss the nature of self and the conflicting theories of the French philosopher Rene Descartes and the English philosopher Derek Parfit. Firstly I will be briefly outlining Descartes theory of self and then I will be discussing Parfit’s theory and highlighting areas in which it has similarities and where it contrasts to establish whether or not the two philosophers have a shared idea of the self.
The French philosopher Descartes looked for the nature of man in the existence of god. What he asks in a nutshell is; ‘Is what I believe a product of god or truth or does it come from false extraneous elements’. He wants to know if he believes in god because god is real or if simply he was raised to believe in god because he was ‘told’ god was real when all evidence points to him/her/it not existing at all. The importance of this is related what it means to be a person because everything we base our lives on comes down to some religious principle in one form or another. He starts by attacking the foundations of his knowledge so that he can begin a fresh and try to discern one factor which he knows without a doubt to be true from which he can build new beliefs on. In his first meditation is he questions the validity of the beliefs he held up to that point. The reason for this is simple; Descartes wanted to find something that it was impossible not to be true, something that was core and irrefutable, his method of doubting was one of isolating that belief that he knew to be true and then breaking it down and analyzing all its elements and pick out what about it put that truth above doubt. He hoped that from this one truth he could build a new set of absolutely true beliefs on a foundation that left absolutely no room for doubt. He realised then that the only thing he knew absolutely for certain was that “I am, I exist” from this he is certain he exists in some capacity because he is thinking and feeling and is self aware but he is yet to establish what exactly he is.
"But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses." (p. 31)
Descartes (1641)
He goes on to elaborate that because he is thinking he must be a thing that thinks; a thinking thing. When Descartes talks about thinking he’s speaking broadly about the soul and the mind as sort of being one and the same, the mind is the spiritual component of the entity. That is a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, has a will of its own, refuses, has an imagination and senses.
"There is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible."
Descartes (1641)
Parfit uses the example of a teleporter which is a device used in science fiction to transfer matter from one space to another. In theory it does this by breaking it up into its individual molecules or information and transferring as such, like an email. In his theory if this were to happen to a person the original person would be destroyed and a copy would be created on the other side of the teleporter. This replica will essentially carry on from where you left off with the same psychological makeup as you, it will not be you but possess all your faculties.Descartes on the other believes that the mind and the body are separate the body is essentially the avatar of the mind. The body is the ship of which the mind is the captain. In this respect the new replica body would not be as important as your mind, this replica would still have your mind but with a new body, so it would still be you.
Parfit explains that the teleporter will never get ‘you’ to mars as you won’t be you. The you that reaches mars will be someone else entirely. This line of reasoning, he argues, is fallacious because it falls under the Ego Theory. Another split they both have is that Descartes believes that the mind is spiritual and that because it is not made of matter like the body it cannot be divided, it exists in unison with the body but is not actually made of anything; because he was religious he saw this as a soul. Parfit believes that a person’s continued existence is explained through a series of experiences, basically identity is that which happens in experiences through time for example when you die you supposedly look back at your life, these memorable experiences bring justification to the fact you were alive. Descartes on the other hand could doubt these experiences as dream and would not see simple experience as evidence of anything as the act of waking can completely devalue the experience as simply a dream. In other words if you lived a whole life and died and woke up it was just a dream, it didn’t exist.
I will conclude my essay by repeating the cogito of which Parfit contests "I think, therefore I am." Descartes explains that his existence is epitomised by thinking and the continuing experiences of self awareness. Parfit denies that there is a self and denies that we know there is a self. His perspective comes from that of a so called ‘split-brain’ experiment conducted by psychologists where a patient has brain hemispheres have been severed thus resulting in two separate streams of consciousness of which neither is aware of the other. This begins his theory of a what he calls the ‘bundle theory’ in which is different experience or mental state constitutes another life in itself, so each hemisphere of the brain essentially when they were divided became a different person which denies Descartes idea that the mind and body are separate. It stands to reason Parfit and Descartes do not agree on the nature of the self.
References
Descartes, Rene (1641) Meditations on First Philosophy. Print
