I Am a Strange Loop

Even though all eight of these sections are rife with insight, it is the last section that I admire the most, because in the end, Parfit asks himself if he really believes in the edifice he has just built. It is as if Albert Einstein had just realized that his own ideas would bring Newtonian mechanics crashing down in rubble, and then paused to ask himself, “Do I really have such deep faith in my own mind’s pathways that I can believe in the bizarre, intuition-defying conclusions I have reached? Am I not being enormously arrogant in rejecting a whole self-consistent web of interlocked ideas that were carefully worked out by two or three centuries’ worth of extraordinary physicists who came before me?”

And although Einstein was exceedingly modest throughout his lifetime, his answer to himself (though to my knowledge he never wrote any such introspective essay) was, in effect, “Yes, I do have this strange faith in my own mind’s correctness. Nature has to be this way, no matter what other people have said before me. I have somehow been given the opportunity to glimpse the inner logic of nature more deeply and more accurately than anyone else before me has. I am unaccountably lucky in this fact, and though I take no personal credit for it, I do wish to publish it so that I may share this valuable vision with others.”

Self-confidence, Humility, and Self-doubt

Parfit is far more prudent than this. His conclusions, to my mind, are just as radical as those of Einstein (although I find it a bit of a stretch to imagine radical ideas about the ineffability of personal identity leading to any marvelous technological consequences, whereas Einstein’s ideas of course did), but he is not quite as convinced of them as Einstein must have been. He feels confident, but not absolutely confident, of his edifice of thought. He doesn’t think it will start to shake and soon tumble down if he stands on it, but then again he admits that it just might do so. Let us hear him express himself on this topic in his own words:

[The philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel] once claimed that, even if the Reductionist View is true, it is psychologically impossible for us to believe this. I shall therefore briefly review my arguments given above. I shall then ask whether I can honestly claim to believe my conclusions. If I can, I shall assume that I am not unique. There would be at least some other people who can believe the truth.

[A few pages later] .…I have now reviewed the main arguments for the Reductionist View. Do I find it impossible to believe this View?

What I find is this. I can believe this view at the intellectual or reflective level. I am convinced by the arguments in favour of this view. But I think it likely that, at some other level, I shall always have doubts.…

I suspect that reviewing my arguments would never wholly remove my doubts. At the reflective or intellectual level, I would remain convinced that the Reductionist View is true. But at some lower level I would still be inclined to believe that there must always be a real difference between some future person’s being me, and his being someone else. Something similar is true when I look through a window at the top of a sky-scraper. I know that I am in no danger. But, looking down from this dizzying height, I am afraid. I would have a similar irrational fear if I was about to press the green button.

….It is hard to be serenely confident in my Reductionist conclusions. It is hard to believe that personal identity is not what matters. If tomorrow someone will be in agony, it is hard to believe that it could be an empty question whether this agony will be felt by me. And it is hard to believe that, if I am about to lose consciousness, there may be no answer to the question “Am I about to die?”

I must say, I find Parfit’s willingness to face and to share his self-doubts with his readers to be extremely rare and wonderfully refreshing.

Morphing Parfit into Bonaparte