Functionalism and Personal Identity—A Reply

Abstract

Two recent papers in this journal, Nicholas Agar's and Personal Identity (Agar 2003) and Eric Olson's What Does Functionalism Tell Us About Personal Identity (Olson 2002), address an account of mine (in my 1984 and 1997) which appeals to a functionalist view of mental states in support of a psychological continuity view of personal identity. Despite my title, this paper is not primarily a reply to Agar's paper. Agar and I are not in disagreement, although he thinks we are (he and one of my past selves are in disagreement). I agree with his functional necessary condition for two mental states to be copersonal, namely that is possible to trace a chain of actual and potential causes between them that includes no non-psychological intermediate (p. 62), and that this rules out the possibility of teletransportation and the like. This is in accord with, and is a helpful supplement to, the view in my 1997 that persons are autonomous self-perpetuators, and that the successive stages of their careers are linked by immanent causation. While this rules out teletransportation and brain state transfer procedures as person preserving, it does not rule out the possibility of changes of body by way of cerebrum transfers. The latter is part of is at issue between me and Eric Olson. According to Olson, my functionalist argument for a Neo-Lockean view of personal offers what looks to be the only serious defense of the psychological continuity view against a crucial objection (p. 682). But this turns out to be not much of a compliment; he goes on to claim that my view has extremely surprising consequences, which include its ruling out our being material beings, and he concludes his discussion by saying that functionalism offers no support for a psychological-continuity view of personal identity (p. 697). Briefly put, the functionalist view in question says that the psychological continuity that Neo-Lockean views take to constitute personal is