Synthese (2008) 162:341–372DOI 10.1007/s11229-007-9252-z

Room for a view: on the metaphysical subjectof personal identity

Daniel Kolak

Received: 1 June 2007 / Accepted: 16 August 2007 / Published online: 22 December 2007© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract Sydney Shoemaker leads today’s “neo-Lockean” liberation of personsfrom the conservative animalist charge of “neo-Aristotelians” such as Eric Olson,according to whom persons are biological entities and who challenge all neo-Lockeanviews on grounds that abstracting from strictly physical, or bodily, criteria plays fastand loose with our identities. There is a fundamental mistake on both sides: a falsedichotomy between bodily continuity versus psychological continuity theories of per-sonal identity. Neo-Lockeans, like everyone else today who relies on Locke’s analysisof personal identity, including Derek Parfit, have either completely distorted or notunderstood Locke’s actual view. Shoemaker’s defense, which uses a “package deal”definition that relies on internal relations of synchronic and diachronic unity andemploys the Ramsey–Lewis account to define personal identity, leaves far less roomfor psychological continuity views than for my own view, which, independently ofits radical implications, is that (a) consciousness makes personal identity, and (b)in consciousness alone personal identity consists—which happens to be also Locke’sactual view. Moreover, the ubiquitous Fregean conception of borders and the so-called“ambiguity of is” collapse in the light of what Hintikka has called the “Frege trichot-omy.” The Ramsey–Lewis account, due to the problematic way Shoemaker tries tobind the variables, makes it impossible for the neo-Lockean ala Shoemaker to fulfillthe uniqueness clause required by all such Lewis style definitions; such attempts avoidcircularity only at the expense of mistaking isomorphism with identity. Contrary towhat virtually all philosophers writing on the topic assume, fission does not destroypersonal identity. A proper analysis of public versus perspectival identification, derivedusing actual case studies from neuropsychiatry, provides the scientific, mathematical

D. Kolak (B)Department of Philosophy, William Paterson University of New Jersey,265 Atrium Building, 200 Pompton Road, Wayne, NJ 07470, USAe-mail: kolakdan@msn.com

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and logical frameworks for a new theory of self-reference, wherein “consciousness,”“self-consciousness,” and the “I ,” can be precisely defined in terms of the subject andthe subject-in-itself.

Keywords Personal identity · Consciousness · Self-consciousness · Fission ·The subject · The subject-in-itself · Frege trichotomy · Transplant intuition ·Animalism · Psychological continuity · Ramsey–Lewis sentences · Public versusperspectival identification · Self-reference · Identification disorder syndrome (IDS) ·Neuropsychiatry · Demonstratives · Quantifiers · Cogito · Metaphysics · Locke ·Neo-Lockean · Parfit · Frege · Hintikka · David Lewis · Shoemaker · Descartes ·Wittgenstein

“I am not an animal,” declares the Elephant Man, the all-to human monster in themovie of the same name. It is less a denial than an assertion. He does not mean reallyto deny he is an animal but, rather, to assert his moral standing in the universe assomething more than just an animal, namely, a self-conscious being aware of his ownexistence and identity: a person.

Probably the only persons encountered thus far have been animals. Is a person,therefore, essentially, an animal? Many people claim to have encountered personswho are not animals: God, spirits, angels, aliens of the non-carbon based variety(e.g. intelligent machines), and so on. We may doubt such claims but not their sig-nificance. What can be conceived, unlike the proverbial square triangle, is possible.Conceptually speaking (or speaking conceptually), “animalhood” and “personhood”express (or subsist in) different modalities. For animals such as ourselves who happenalso to be persons, this poses a metaphysical dilemma over which philosophers havedivided themselves ever since John Locke brought the issue to a head (literally) withhis prince/cobbler example: wherein does the identity of the person reside—with theanimal or with consciousness?

“The history of the topic of personal identity has been a series of footnotes toLocke,” writes Shoemaker (2008), the opening salvo of which he takes to be Locke’sthought experiment wherein “the prince’s ‘consciousness’ and memories of his life,” asShoemaker spins it, are switched with that of the cobbler. Shoemaker leads today’s“neo-Lockean” liberation of persons from the conservative animalist charge of “neo-Aristotelians” such as Eric Olson, according to whom persons are biological entitiesand who challenge all neo-Lockean views on grounds that abstracting from strictlyphysical, or bodily, criteria plays fast and loose with our identities. Both sides agreethe stakes could not be higher. “The metaphysical issue of personal identity,” saysShoemaker, “boils down to the issue of whether this challenge succeeds.”

The purpose of the present paper is not so much to weigh in on their (mis)take on theissue (essentially, a false dichotomy between bodily continuity versus psychologicalcontinuity theories of personal identity) but, rather, to show how Shoemaker’s defense,which uses “package deal” definition that relies on internal relations of synchronic anddiachronic unity and employs the Ramsey–Lewis account to define personal identity,leaves far less room for his view than Shoemaker thinks and much more for my own,thereby considerably raising the stakes. My view, independently of its more radicalimplications, is that

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(1) consciousness makes personal identity, and(2) in this alone personal identity consists.

Lest I be throttled in the new theory of reference tradition of (long ostensive) fingerpointing, let me confess I stole both (1) and (2) from a well-known philosopher whosename I am compelled to reveal, as his actual view on the topic of personal identityseems to have gone almost entirely unnoticed. His name is John Locke.

1 Out-locking the neo-Lockeans: a very brief history of consciousness

What Locke actually says bears repeating in some detail, and not only because manyperhaps most philosophers weighing in on either side of the debate seem either to nothave read the actual text or glossed over its meaning, or both:

. . . to find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what personstands for; which I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason andreflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in differenttimes and places, which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparablefrom thinking, and it seems to me essential to it: it being impossible for anyoneto perceive, without perceiving that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell,taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always asto our present sensations and perceptions: and by this everyone is to himself thatwhich he calls self; it not being considered, in this case, whether the same selfbe continued in the same or divers substances. For since consciousness alwaysaccompanies thinking, and it is that that makes everyone to be what he calls self. . . in this alone consists personal identity . . . Consciousness makes personalidentity.1

In case anyone missed that: consciousness makes personal identity, and in this aloneconsists personal identity. Call me retro, but Locke’s insightful view on the (non)matter is here so directly and explicitly expressed there certainly is no need in mybook to call it “neo.” Now, although Locke nowhere defines consciousness, he tries toexplain why he thinks personal identity consists in consciousness, and consciousnessalone, and why consciousness is not a substance, neither physical nor immaterial:

But it is farther inquired whether it be the same identical substance . . . I say, inall these cases, our consciousness being interrupted, and we losing the sight ofour past selves, doubts are raised whether we are the same thinking thing, i.e., thesame substance, or no. Which, however reasonable or unreasonable, concernsnot personal identity at all: the question being, what makes the same person, andnot whether it be the same identical substance which always thinks in the sameperson, which in this case matters not at all; different substances, by the sameconsciousness (where they do partake in it) being united into one person, as wellas different bodies by the same life are united into one animal, whose identity ispreserved, in that change of substance, by the unity of one continued life. For it

1 Locke, Ch. 27, paragraph 9.

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being the same consciousness that makes a man be himself to himself, personalidentity depends on that only, whether it be annexed solely to one individualsubstance, or can be continued in a succession of several substances . . . For itis by the consciousness it has of its present thoughts and actions that it is selfto itself now, and so will be the same self, as far as the same consciousness canextend to actions past or to come; and would be by distance of time, or changeof substance, no more two persons than a man be two men, by wearing otherclothes today than he did yesterday, with a long or short sleep between: thesame consciousness uniting those distant actions into the same person, whateversubstances contributed to their production.2

Now, when Shoemaker, in (mis)describing Locke’s example, says “prince’s ‘con-sciousness’ and memories of his life” are switched with that of the cobbler, he is notnearly as far off the mark as when for instance Derek Parfit says, “Locke suggestedthat experience-memory provides the criterion of personal identity,” (Reasons andPersons, p. 205). Having read Parfit’s immensely influential book and related worksa number of times now and discussed it with him in person and in print, I am lesssure of what he means by “experience memory” than I am that Locke would haveshaken his head at the locution, utterly at a loss. Shoemaker at least makes out of theterm consciousness a conjunction albeit to then ignore it in favor of the second term,“memories,” to be able to claim to be part of a longstanding Locke-inspired philosoph-ical tradition that amounts to a memory view or, when troubled by counterexamples,still further with the notion of “continuity of psychology.”3 I am, in any case, far lessinterested in scholarly arguments or making a case for Locke’s “actual” (historicallyresuscitated) view as “developed” by neo-Lockeans and criticized by their opponentsas a matter of philosophical history—a concerted and disconcerting bait and switchperpetrated on both sides of the debate, consisting in the substitution of psychologicalidentification (by proponents) and physiological identifications (by opponents) forpersonal identity—than I am in (re)turning to the real subject of personal identity:consciousness.

To talk in this way openly about consciousness nowadays is of course extremelydangerous. What is the principium individuationis for consciousness? And what isconsciousness? The entire stormy debate on personal identity over the past thirtyyears has been if anything a concerted effort to avoid having to ask the former anddefine the latter. This is all the more remarkable, given Locke’s actual answer to hisown question. Why does he answer as he does?

Well, when presented4 with Locke’s example the puzzle is that from the outwardlydenoted domain of public reference we are dealing with human beings (animals) iden-

2 Locke, Book II, Ch. 27, paragraph 10.3 By my lights the only proper way to use the word “psychology” is with the word “department” after itto denote an academic discipline having something roughly and vaguely to do with the study of variousaspects of the human mind by people distinguished if by nothing else than their reticence to define (or evenuse) the term consciousness even more so, if that is to be believed, than their colleagues in philosophydepartments.4 Locke in that respect reminds me of the man who, to make sure his pants don’t fall down, wears bothsuspenders and a belt. (Where the suspenders are “atoms” and the belt, God.)

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tified as A and B up until time t after which from this same “objective,” “non-perspec-tival,” “third person” public point of view their identity remains outwardly, publiclyidentifiably, the same while, from their own first-person perspectival point of view(or, as we “project” ourselves into that view), they identify themselves as each other.After t , A says “I am B” and B says, “I am A.” (Notice how one cannot express thisstate of affairs without questionable linguistic contortions and the bending of namingconventions.) Nothing about their outward physical appearance changes. What doeschange? From the standpoint of public identification, what an “outside” observer cansay is this: after time t (when “the switch” happens) A claims to be B, B claims to beA, and furthermore when we put personal questions to A (“Who are you?” “What isyour name?” “What is your favorite food?” “With whom did you last have sex?” andso on) the answers we get are what before t we got from B, and vice versa. We can thuspublicly “verify” that the information formerly “stored,” “expressed,” “realized”—usewhatever pseudo-technical expression you like—by A is now “stored,” or whatever, onB, and vice versa. We can further along such lines also fill in lots of other interestingdetails, such as that what the experience reported from the first-person point of viewof A and B would be like: “I was over there, where A now is,” we hear from the mouthof B, “Thinking ‘I am A,’ and wondering whether this experiment will work and nowsuddenly I find myself having been transported all at once here several feet to the leftinto the body of B, looking at the world from this point of view shifted three feet tothe left, and thinking it worked, ‘I am A’ in B’s body,” and so on. We can imaginehow this would be the case since along with personal historical information would gothe current phenomenological (visual and tactile) perspectival information about thesubject’s location in relation to objects perceived in that subject’s world.

The question presently before us is not about the single “correct” answer to Locke’squestion but, rather, what guides Locke to answer as he does, namely, that B at timet is now the same person as A was at t−1 and that A at time t is now the same personas B was at t−1. (I don’t mean to rush but why didn’t Locke for instance conclude,on the basis of his example, that consciousness—the subject—is a universal beingrevealed by his example to be, essentially, no one and, therefore, potentially, every-one? Perhaps because in his own day Locke, like present philosophers who tend notto look too closely at Locke, did not rush out to read Ibn Rushd.) A little reflectionreveals the answer: a singular intuition at the very heart of virtually every one of thesesorts of puzzle cases up to the present day, so ubiquitous Shoemaker names it the“transplant intuition:”

Locke says that the cobbler-body person would then be the same person as theprince—and that of course is an expression of the “transplant intuition” that hasbeen at the heart of the case for memory continuity and psychological continuityaccounts of personal identity. But Locke also says that the cobbler-body personwould not be the same man as the prince. And that poses a bit of a problem. Ifboth the prince and the cobbler-body person are persons, and both are men, howcan they be the same person and not the same man?5

5 Shoemaker (2008).

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Before we have a closer look at both the role such intuitions play and the even moreimportant role played by our two incommensurately different (under the received logic)modes of identification, let us first see how Shoemaker and other “memory continuity”and “psychological continuity” theorists deal with the problem just raised.

2 How two different human beings can be one and the same person: a briefhistory of borders from Aristotle to Frege to Hintikka

According to Locke, the particular human being that gets the consciousness of theprince is the same person, but not the same animal, as the prince. It then in Shoemaker’sview follows that I can be this physical organism without being personally identi-cal to it, which is exactly the sort of prima facie counterintuitive result that feedsneo-Aristotelian animalists such as Eric Olson who, anchored in the even more con-servative, essentially pre-Fregean, Aristotelian conception of existence, identity andreference, along with the corresponding intuitions, view persons as essentially biolog-ical categories, constituting thereby, in Shoemaker’s words,

A powerful challenge to neo-Lockean views . . . Denying that persons are iden-tical with human animals is . . . prima facie counterintuitive. The claim that weare “rational animals” goes back . . . to Aristotle, and we can scarcely be rationalanimals if we are not animals. And it is standard both in biology and in ordinarydiscourse to equate persons with human beings and to take human beings to bea species of animals.6

For well over twenty years now Shoemaker and other “psychological continuity” theo-rists who try (consciously or unconsciously) to avoid the counter-intuitive implicationsof as it were unlocking consciousness (think subject) from the natural separatenessconditions (think signatures) derived from the boundaries of individual objects (thinkproduct codes), have found sanctuary from the above sort of counter-intuitive resultby a convenient verbal fiat to avoid the difficult if not impossible task of definingconsciousness and articulating its existence and identity in fundamentally Fregeanterms:

In taking this view one can allow that there is a sense of “is” in which a personis an animal. But this will not be the “is” of predication or of identity; it will be,perhaps, the sort of “is” we have in “The statue is a hunk of bronze”—it willmean something like “is composed of the very same stuff as. (Shoemaker andSwinburne 1984, p. 113)

Derek Parfit too exploits the same (surface structure) verbal ambiguity (and is like-wise criticized for it by [short-term]7 bodily continuity theorists no less steeped in theFregean—rather than Aristotelian—conception such as Peter Unger) to draw suppos-

6 Shoemaker (2008).7 According to the latest formulation of Unger’s view (1990) identity is what matters primarily in survivaland you have identity for as long as the “physical realizer” of your “psychology” persists, which by hisreckoning gives us each less than seven years to live.

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edly state-of-the-art metaphysical implications by noting that the “is” in “a statue is apiece of bronze,”

is not the is of identity. A statue and a piece of bronze are not one and the samething. This is shown by the fact that, if we melt the statue, we destroy the statuebut do not destroy the piece of bronze. Such a statue is composed of a piece ofbronze. (Parfit 1984, p. 211)

Such verbal maneuvers stem from the still widely shared notion among most main-stream (pre-Hintikka) analysts of the semantics of natural language about the ambi-guity of “is,” inherited from Russell, according to whom

The word is is terribly ambiguous . . . We have (1) the sense in which it assertsBeing, as in “A is”; (2) the sense of identity; (3) the sense of predication, in“A is human” (4) the sense of “A is a man” . . . which is very like identity.(Russell 1903, p. 64)

This ubiquitous Russelianism, which actually originates with Peano and Frege, bleedsso deeply into the broken heart of what is commonly called first-order logic (Eklundand Kolak 2002; Hintikka 2002)—where “=” expresses the “is” of identity, “∃” the“is” of existence, and “P(a)” the “is” of predication—it has been called the “Fre-ge trichotomy” by Hintikka, who after politely noting its ubiquity (Frege, Russell,Quine, Davidson, Chomsky, Lakoff) politely demonstrates that it is false (Hintikka1998a). I won’t go into details here except to say that out the window with it (Hintikka1998a) go virtually all “language of thought” type theories on the basis of which oursupposedly “common sense” intuitions about how the (Parmenidean) universe andeverything in it, up to and including ourselves, should be articulated into nice, neatFregean borders,8 have been given precedence in mainstream philosophical discourseover formal analysis and language as calculus (calculus ratiocinator) approaches thatarticulate the world and everything (including other worlds, both large and small)not with the ill-defined but “no-nonsense” denizens of ordinary language predicatedon a fundamentally materialist ontology but with well-defined albeit rather moremysterious sort of entities that live in the domain of mathematical science.9

(Witness, for instance, the Scott semantics, which altogether dispenses with the cate-gory of individuals in favor of the λ-calculus, Rantala’s theory of urn models and othersuch derivatives of game-theoretical semantics, and attempts to reassess the receivedfirst-order logic in favor of IF logic [with regard to the latter see in particular Kolak2001, Eklund and Kolak 2002].) In any case, trying to squash animalism while at thesame time leaving room for his psychological continuity view, here is what Shoemakerconcludes:

So two things, the statue and the hunk of bronze, can occupy the same place andshare the same matter and the same non-historical properties . . . The suggestion

8 Meaning, in the analysis of the semantics of natural language domain, that I think it is high time tomove away altogether from a Fregean ontology consisting, basically, of a common world articulated intoindividuals, their properties, relations and functions.9 As I’ve repeated in On Hintikka (Wadsworth 2001) and on many other occasions: nicht Frege, Frage. Theexpression is a Jaakko original.

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is that a person “is” an animal, not in the sense of being identical to one, but inthe sense of sharing its matter with one . . . On such a view it is possible for aperson to “be” one animal (human being) at one time and another animal (humanbeing) at another time. (Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984, pp. 113–11f)

Shoemaker illustrates with an example in which no transfer of any bodily organor of any physical material occurs but about which our intuitions say the personhas survived, what he calls a “brain-state transfer procedure” (“BST procedure” forshort). A person’s complete brain state—the information containing all the memories,“psychology,” etc., of the original brain—is transferred to a different brain and bodywhile the original brain and body are destroyed. Now, supposing that materialism istrue, and that the people in the imagined society know this; would it be wrong forthem to consider the BST procedure as person-preserving? Shoemaker answers no:

If they are right in thinking that the BST-procedure is person-preserving, and ifthey mean the same by “person” as we do, then it seems that we ought to regard theBST-procedure as person-preserving. (Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984, p. 109)

And what makes identity across such physical borders possible is that

the BST-procedure does not involve the transfer of any bodily organ, or of anymatter at all, from the one body to the other. All that is transferred, it is naturalto say, is “information,”. (Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984, p. 110)

Many find this aspect of the neo-Lockean view as an attractive alternative wayto restate the traditional mind/body problem using software/hardware concepts. AsE. J. Lowe has already noted,

It is to the credit of the neo-Lockean theory that, unlike the neo-Aristotelian the-ory, it is untainted by anthropocentrism (this indeed is the lesson of Locke’s storyof the rational parrot). This explains, too, why the neo-Lockean theory shouldappeal, as it clearly does, to enthusiasts for the prospects of artificial intelligence.The existence of a neo-Lockean person is popularly likened to the running of acomputer program, which is largely independent of the detailed ‘hardware’ ofthe machine on which it is run. Human brains and nervous systems provide, onthis view, highly efficient hardware (or ‘wetware’) for the ‘running’ of a person,but there is no reason in principle why the ‘program’ should not be run on analtogether different kind of machine, constructed on electronic rather than onbiological principles. This even offers human persons—albeit only in the distantfuture—the prospect of immortality by means of transfer to a solid state device(though equally it offers an embarrassment of riches in the form of simultaneoustransfer to more than one such machine). (Lowe 1996, p. 24)

The parenthetical clause alluding to fission cases also underscores another aspect ofour thesis regarding the role of intuitions. For it is in the fission examples that intu-itions seem to fly apart at the seams. But what is it that flies apart, actually? Not theintuitions themselves, surely, but, rather, the philosophical foundations upon whichthose ordinary language intuitions are predicated (notice I didn’t say derived). Beforeturning to that problem (or, on the way to it) we need to address the even more press-

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ing problem with Shoemaker’s view, to which all neo-Lockean theories are prone. Asagain E.J. Lowe so well puts it,

What is wrong with the neo-Lockean theory is that, in purporting to supply anaccount of the individuating and identity of persons it presupposes, untenably,that an account of the identity conditions of psychological modes can be pro-vided which need not rely on reference to persons. But it emerges that the identityof any psychological mode turns on the identity of the person that possesses it.What this implies is that psychological modes are essentially modes of persons. . . By psychological modes I mean . . . individual mental events, processes andstates. (It is important to emphasize that we are talking about individual entitieshere—‘tokens’ rather than ‘types’.) Paradigm examples would be: a particularbelief-state, a particular memory-state, a particular sensory experience, a partic-ular sequence of thoughts constituting a particular process of reasoning, and soon. But, to repeat, such individual mental states are necessarily states of persons:they are necessarily ‘owned’—necessarily have a subject. The necessity in ques-tion arises from the metaphysical-cum-logical truth that such individual mentalstates cannot even in principle be individuated and identified without referenceto the subject of which they are states. (Lowe 1996, p. 25)

This problem of circularity, which has been at the heart of all mainstream functionalisttheories such as Shoemaker’s that try to avoid the mind-body dichotomy (and corre-sponding dilemmas) using a middle-ground “psychological” account, is hardly new.Likewise, Lowe’s point that to talk about personal identity and escape the circularityrequires unmooring ourselves from traditional analytic anchors and unleashing our-selves into the maelstrom of the subject (consciousness) would hardly be in need ofstating were it still not so conveniently ignored by virtually all philosophers writing onthe topic of personal identity today, many of whom were but children when Strawsonfirst made it.10 The explanation for the repetition and omission in the latter case isI think due less to the subtleties in the Strawson–Lowe argument for the primacy ofthe subject than, in the first two cases, to a common failure to define consciousnessqua subject so as to differentiate the subject (consciousness) as bearer of personalidentify from its psychological (object) identifications. This is nowhere more readilyapparent than in what happens when Shoemaker tries to avoid both the circle andthe fork with his (naïve) materialist grounded, functionalist enhanced “psychologicalcontinuity” view with his “package deal” definition that tries to steer clear of the circu-larity relying on internal relations of synchronic and diachronic unity articulated usingRamsey–Lewis sentences. The technique, developed by David Lewis using (modified)Ramsey sentences to avoid circularity, is as follows. Suppose I believe that positivelycharged atoms attract negatively charged atoms and repel positively charged atoms,while negatively charged atoms attract positively charged atoms and repel negativelycharged atoms. When you ask me to define “positive charge” and “negative charge”in terms of these beliefs, it seems I can’t do it without circularity. Lewis’s solution tothis problem is to construct a Ramsey sentence wherein the terms “positive charge”

10 Strawson (1959).

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and “negative charge” are replaced with variables, turning it into an “open sentence”which can then be prefaced with existential quantifiers binding the variables, as fol-lows: “For some properties P and N , P-atoms attract N -atoms and repel P-atoms,while N -atoms attract P-atoms and repel N -atoms.” We can then define “positivecharge” as

(3) x is a positive charge= def x is the unique property P such that for some propertyN , P atoms attract N atoms and repel P atoms

(4) x is a negative charge= def x is the unique property N such that for some propertyP , N atoms attract N atoms and repel N atoms.

Since the definiendum in neither case occurs in the definiens of either definition, circu-larity is avoided. Shoemaker applies this very same Lewis–Ramsey technique to definemental terms in terms of functionalist terms (!) that avoid circularity. He realizes how-ever that if the only terms replaced by variables in the modified Ramsey sentence aremental predicates, and that because the modified Ramsey sentence speaks of men-tal states as instantiated in and cause effects in one and the same person, it will stillthereby either explicitly or implicitly yet again invoke the notion of personal iden-tity. But just as we can avoid reference to particular mental states using the modifiedRamsey sentence we can, according to Shoemaker, likewise avoid the reference topersonal identity. If we thus reformulate his theory so that reference to personal iden-tity is replaced with the relation predicate “is copersonal with,” we can then use ourmodified Ramsey sentence to replace this predicate with the relational variable “standsin R to.” The problem is: how is this variable bound? Shoemaker’s answer: by placingat the front of our modified Ramsey sentence an additional existential quantifier,

(5) “For some relation R, or for short, ‘∃R’.”

Then, representing the modified Ramsey sentence as “∃R, F , G . . . (. . .),”

(6) “x is copersonal with y′′ =def “∃!R, F , G . . . (. . . ∧ x Ry).”

But this way of trying to fix (avoid) the circularity leads straight into a fork, exem-plified nowhere more clearly than in the fission examples and Shoemaker’s responseto them. In other words, the possibility revealed by the fission examples of two entitiessatisfying the requirements of being copersonal with x at a given time render it impos-sible for the Neo-Lockean ala Shoemaker to fulfill the uniqueness clause required byall such Lewis style definitions. Shoemaker avoids circularity only at the expense ofmistaking isomorphism with identity.11

3 Does fission destroy identity, or, how can different human beingsbe the same person at the same time?

If I can exist as one and the same (metaphysical) entity, personally identical, identi-fied as different animals each of which is (constitutively) non-identical to the other,while the human beings consist in different exclusively conjoined physiological and

11 I am grateful to Troy Catterson for clarifying my point here.

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psychological bundles—consisting, for instance, at this moment, in numerically dif-ferent atoms of carbon and oxygen, numerically different sensations of pleasure andpain, numerically different thoughts, and so on—what happens when there is morethan one human being bearing this same relationship to me not over time but at atime? Shoemaker realizes that once the first question—can one person be two humanbeings—is answered in the affirmative, thereby dislodging personal from animal iden-tity, our next question must be asked and so the good philosopher asks it: what aboutties? In Shoemaker’s BST—example, as in commisurotomy examples, (Kolak andMartin 1991) we can imagine “fission” occurring; something goes wrong and insteadof only one duplicate there are two. In that case, there would be two contemporaneouslyexisting people who are alike in every respect, each with two hemispheres containingthe exact same information and with bodies that are atom-for-atom perfectly alike.

Shoemaker claims—like Parfit, Nozick, Nagel, and a host of other “psychologicalcontinuity” theorists—that the two survivors, each one of whom were it not for theexistence of the other would be the same person as the original are, because of theexistence of the other, not the same person as the original. They come to this conclu-sion on the basis of the same “transplant intuition” that guides them, on the one hand,to conclude that

(7) a person can be two different human beings

and, on the other, that

(8) a person cannot be two different human beings.

Of course what my putting it this way to bring out both the contradiction and theNecker-cube like flip-flop leaves out is obvious, but what difference does adding thephrase “over time” to (7) and “at a time” to (8) make? It makes our hunches different,no doubt, and perhaps that can even be tweaked, but what is difference that makes thedifference? If it’s just because our intuitions say the cases are different we’re out ofthe fork and right back in the circle. So is the difference metaphysical? Ontological?Epistemological? A little reflection reveals the real culprit yet again: our two differentmodes of identification (which we refine below). From the first-person point of view ofperspectival identification of A’s twin offshoots, B and of C , there is no quantifiabledifference: whether or not C exists is irrelevant to the existence of B and whether ornot B exists is irrelevant to the existence of C . Imagine, for instance, that B and C arekept apart from the moment of fission in a black room without mirrors (they do notknow what they look like, i.e., “which bodies they are in”) and are not told whetherthe other has survived or not. Will B be then in the dark there worried about whetheror not he, B, exists? No. Will he be worried about whether or not he, B, is A? Perhaps,but why? From the first person perspectival point of view the subject readily and iden-tifies himself to himself with the anything but proverbial “I am,” “I exist,” “I am I.”To him, the consciousness there in a dark room having that experience, nothing ismissing, certainly nothing existential. How then can the addition of another subject,C , in an adjoining dark room destroy B’s existence? Is that not also counter-intuitive,in fact at least as if not more so than to suppose, as I argue in my book, (Kolak 2004,see especially the chapter “Identity Borders”) that identity has in the branch-line casebeen preserved, and that what the example shows is not what cannot be conceived

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but, rather, in that very conception, reveals what prior to that example we had insuf-ficient evidence to show, namely, the possibility of one and the same person existingsimultaneously as multiple numerically distinct human beings not just over time butat the same time, over space (my nonlocality condition (Kolak 2004)). The real culprithere is not two different intuitions but the same intuition sans philosophical theory (ofconsciousness) trying to do the impossible job of double mutually conflicting identifi-cations. To give explicit example to this double bind (Necker-cube “flip flop”) effect,look at how Derek Parfit is forced to claim, on the one hand, that

In the imagined case where I divide . . . personal identity cannot take a branchingform. I and the two resulting people cannot be one and the same person. SinceI cannot be identical with two different people, and it would be arbitrary to callone of these people me, we can best describe the case by saying that neither willbe me. (Parfit 1984, p. 263)

While claiming, at the same time, that

Some people would regard division as being as bad, or nearly as bad, as ordinarydeath. This reaction is irrational. We ought to regard division as being about asgood as ordinary survival. (Parfit 1984, p. 261)

Just as on Shoemaker’s, Nozick’s, and other similar views, fission is construed aspreserving survival. How? Either because I, a person, can survive without identity or,as Parfit wants his view now in light of these sorts of criticisms to be understood, thatwhile the resulting relation “may not” be one of survival, as we “ordinarily understand”survival, it is “as good as” ordinary survival and so—although I do not survive—“whatmatters” does survive. The reason survival without identity is according to these the-orists as good as ordinary actual survival is that, in their view, even in ordinary casesof moment-to-moment existence, “personal identity is not what matters.” On somevariants, such as Nozick’s, this solution is softened with the notion that identity is anextrinsic rather than intrinsic relation and thus that, alas, you lose your identity themoment there is a tie. Other philosophers argue that survival without identity (i.e.,that identity does not matter), or that personal identity is an extrinsic, not an intrinsicrelation, is not just counter-intuitive but, in fact, absurd. Just how absurd these sorts ofcounter-absurdist proposals can get is nowhere more evident than when Nozick tellsus, of exactly the sort of case just imagined where B is A if C does not exist and C isA if B does not exist but if B and C both exist neither B nor C is A:

once we have become used to the idea that whether y at t2 is (identical with)x at t1 does not depend only upon the properties and relations of x and y, butdepends also upon whether there exists a z of a certain sort (which more closelycontinues x). (Nozick 1981)

To see just how incredibly bizarre these modifications (think epicycles) can get, sup-pose we live in the society envisioned by Shoemaker, where once a year we go in fora BST-procedure. And suppose, furthermore, that I wanted to kill you but that I ama pacifist so repulsed by the thought of violence that I come up with the followingclever scheme. I wait until you go in for your physiology-change, I bribe the corruptengineer, we make two duplicates instead of one and, presto: instead of continuing

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to exist as a BST-preserved person, either (on Nozick’s reply to Shoemkaer’s exam-ple) you cease being the person you presently are or, (on Parfit’s reply), the survivalthat before the addition of the second individual was going on continuously is nowsuddenly disrupted by the existence of the second individual; survival can go on fora little while but on Parfit’s view will end as the psychological differences increase.This seems an extremely bizarre way of killing someone or, even, a bizarre way ofending anyone’s survival; would we be willing to prosecute such acts as being murder,for instance? Or, how has even “what matters” here changed by an event that happenselsewhere? Such departures from our traditional intuitions derived from an “absolute”view of persons to a sort of “relational” view, Derek Parfit likens to the shift fromNewtonian mechanics to Einsteinian relativity:

Newton believed that any physical event had its particular Space and Time. Wenow believe that a physical event has its particular spatio-temporal position invirtue of its various relations to the other physical events that occur . . . We canclaim that a particular mental event occurs within some life in virtue of its rela-tions to the many other mental and physical events which, by being interrelated,constitute this life. (Parfit 1984, p. 252)

There is a deep irony here, one that runs far deeper than perhaps any of us have yet fullycome to realize; what, after all, is relativity theory if not physics advanced by inte-grating two otherwise incommensurate modes of identification under one general (andone special) theory? Einsteinian reference frames are, if anything, a perspectival modeof identification integrated with the public mode (via differential equations, Lorentztransformations, tensors, and so on) predicated on a general theory of individuationand identification, up to and including the identification of physical objects (in whichcross-identification depends on continuity), wherein the mathematics used for theseidentification tasks are the stability theory of differential equations. Hence the “para-doxes” of which our Newtonian (or, more precisely, Aristotelian) predicated intuitionsrun afoul.12 In mainstream philosophy no such techniques are as yet in play (whichwe shall remedy shortly). Parfit, handicapped rather than helped by the Russell/Fregetrichotomy, is thus forced to say, simply, that

I do not view a tie as like death; I am no longer there, yet it is a good enoughrealization of identity to capture my care which attaches to identity. (Parfit 1984,p. 68)

This means that some time in the future when I won’t be dead (“I do not view a tie aslike death”) I also won’t be there (I am no longer there,). But if I am not there, and I amnot dead, what state am I in (perhaps some sort of weird existential status accorded toSchrödinger’s Cat or Wigner’s Friend?) At this future time when there is a perfect tieI will not exist anywhere. This sounds to me very much like being dead. Yet I shouldaccording to both Parfit and Shoemaker care about the person similar to me just as ifhe were me, and that this somehow makes me, in some sense, not dead. Parfit goes so

12 This in fact is the basis for my crazy idea, expressed in Kolak and Symons (2004) that IF logic can beused to bridge relativity theory and quantum mechanics.

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far as to say that one way to look at this admittedly strange state of affairs would beto say that, when fission happens to you,

You will lose your identity. But there are different ways of doing this. Dying isone, dividing is another. To regard these as the same is to confuse two with zero.Double survival is not the same as ordinary survival. But this does not make itdeath. It is even less like death. (Parfit 1984, p. 262)

Can this be right? It might be. It certainly avoids one counter-intuitive result but only atthe cost of raising an even more counter-intuitive one. Let us go back to our variant ofShoemaker’s BST-example in which I have just “done away” with the original person(or ended what previous to my intervention was a case of survival with identity) bymaking two replicas instead of just one. If Shoemaker, Nozick and Parfit are right,it would be possible for someone to argue, as for instance Swinburne does, that youcould ensure your survival by killing your double, or, perhaps, that in some sense youcould even “bring yourself back,” at least in the sense of bringing back a state that is“as good as survival,” or else perhaps re-establish survival with identity; either, on onepossible reading of Nozick’s closest continuer view, you (one of the duplicates) couldbecome identical to the person who went in for the BST-procedure (a person who,until the moment you kill your double, you were no longer identical to because of thetie) or, on Parfit’s condition that identity does not matter, re-establish whatever type ofsurvival there had been before the tie and which the tie disrupted. You could achievewhichever one of these possibilities is the actual state obtained, someone might argue,by killing your double. Swinburne, for instance, writes that if a non-branching condi-tion (like Parfit’s) or a closest continuer condition (like Nozick’s) were true, then, inour split-brain operation,

The way for a man to ensure his own survival is to ensure the non-existenceof future persons too similar to himself. Suppose the mad surgeon had told P1before the operation what he was intending to do . . . P1 is unable to escapethe clutches of the mad surgeon, but is nevertheless very anxious to survive theoperation. If the empiricist theory in question is correct there is an obvious policywhich will guarantee his survival. He can bribe one of the nurses to ensure thatthe right half-brain does not survive successfully. (Shoemaker and Swinburne1984, p. 237)

It is extremely revealing to note how Shoemaker answers Swinburne’s objection.Shoemaker, like Nozick and Parfit, wants to get out of the difficulty by claiming thatthe tie case is not, let us say, as bad as death. But since Shoemaker, like Nozick, isworking with Fregean borders conscripted under the Frege trichotomy articulated ina fundamentally Fregean conception of existence and identity, he cannot go as far asto identify both persons in the tie case as being, numerically, the same person. Underboth the received logic and semantics this is utterly forbidden. However, if they arenot the same person (because of the tie), neither of them can in the received logicand semantics be properly identified as the original. This, to Shoemaker, too, seemscounter-intuitive because it would mean that, apparently, the original person, merelydue to the tie (as Parfit so well puts it: “How can a double success be a failure?”), isnow dead. So Shoemaker, like Nozick, and even more so like Parfit ends up almost

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giving up the received semantics and logic when he claims that nonetheless actualdeath has not taken place so that (using “survival” as a state that in neither literal deathnor literal survival) survival has in some (albeit non-literal) sense occurred:

What is at stake here is what it is that we really care about when we care aboutour own survival and our own future well-being. Swinburne makes the naturalassumption that when I want to survive it is essential to the satisfaction of mywant that I, the very person who is now wanting this, should exist in the future.But this can be questioned. (Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984, p. 119)

Shoemaker cannot bring himself to understand how he, the very person who wrotethat passage, could exist at more than one place at a time. But he is led by the same(unanalyzed) intuition (which we will formally ground shortly) to believe that at somefuture time when he, the very person who wrote that passage, no longer exists, therehas occurred something which pushing against the limits of ordinary language hedubs as “significant survival.” This means, either, that he can in some “significant”sense survive without being the same person he now is, or that although he cannotsurvive without being the same person he now is, there can hold between X and Y arelationship that would qualify as “survival” even though X and Y are not identical:

Consider another variant of our half-brain transplant case. Suppose that half ofmy brain and all of the rest of my body are ridden with cancer, and that my onlyhope for survival is for my healthy half-brain to be transplanted to another body.There are two transplantation procedures available. The first, which is inexpen-sive and safe (so far as the prospects of the recipient are concerned) involvesfirst transplanting the healthy hemisphere and then destroying (or allowing todie) the diseased hemisphere that remains. The other, which is expensive andrisky (the transplant may not take, or it may produce a psychologically damagedperson) involves first destroying the diseased hemisphere and then transplant-ing the other. Which shall I choose? Notice that if I choose the first procedurethere will be, for a short while, two persons psychologically continuous withthe original person (me), and therefore that on the non-branching psycholog-ical continuity theory the recipient of the healthy hemisphere cannot count asme. If I choose the second procedure, on the other hand, then at no point willthe recipient (the post- operative possessor of the healthy hemisphere) have any“competitor” for the status of being me, so it seems that he can count as me(if the transplantation takes). Should I therefore choose the expensive and riskyprocedure? This seems absurd. The thing to do is to choose the first procedure,even though (I think) it guarantees that the transplant recipient will not be me.(Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984, p. 118)

Shoemaker recognizes that it certainly does seem right to him to choose the first pro-cedure. Yet if he chooses the first procedure, according to the semantic and logicallimits imposed by Shoemaker’s own analysis, the survivor will not be Shoemaker. If hechooses the riskier second procedure, and it is successful, according to Shoemaker’sown analysis, the survivor will be Shoemaker. In the first, “less risky” operation thereis, according to Shoemaker’s own analysis, a zero percent chance that he, Shoemaker,will survive. In the second, “more risky” operation there is, according to Shoemaker’s

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own analysis, perhaps about a fifty–fifty chance that he, Shoemaker, will survive. Howcan a zero percent chance of surviving as the identical person you are be less risky thana fifty–fifty chance of surviving as the identical person you are? Here is Shoemaker’sstartling answer:

The reason is that whether the future person will be me is in a case like this ofno importance to me. (Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984, pp. 119–120)

We need not try to refute Shoemaker’s claim that the choice would be less risky,on his view, relative to preserving what (according to him) matters to you. But note,first, that Shoemaker is here quite in opposition to his own claim that issues of “whatmatters” are but a shift from the metaphysical issue (see his paper, this issue), makinguse of exactly this point of contact between values and metaphysics. Second, I don’tdisagree with Shoemaker that we could choose as he chooses. What I am claiming isthat the conclusion he and other personal identity theorists draws from this—namely,that identity does not matter—does not follow; we would choose the overlap procedurebecause we believe that we will survive and since what actually matters in survival(I claim) is identity. The alternative (mis)conception is but the latest casualty resultingfrom a tacit reliance on the Frege handicapped (from the standpoint of IF) logic andsemantics. The correct move in my view in other words is not to preserve the status quoreceived view with clever conceptual (and logical and semantic) epicycles to avoid theparadox but, rather, to use the results to form a better theory of personal identity predi-cated on what the discussion should have been (and was) from the start: consciousness,even and especially if it means moving to more formal theory that makes room enoughfor simultaneous consciousness identity simultaneously across both space and time.The standard alternative, after all, asks us to accept the possibility that a person can,in some sense, exist (in the sense that the situation is not as bad as death) at someplace (indeed, in the tie case at more than one place) without that person being there.Shoemaker’s view handicapped by the received Frege logic asks us to accept that hewill survive without continuing to exist and his way of avoiding rather than using theparadox (by dissolving personal identity, i.e., “identity is not what matters”) is at leastas strange, if not stranger, than the very “trap” he is trying to avoid, a trap into whichhe got into the first place by trying to avoid the quicksand of dealing with the problem(even impossibility) of defining consciousness within a universe of borders articulatedusing a fundamentally Fregean conception of existence, identity and reference.

The mainstream analyst who comes closest to dissolving the condition that fissiondestroys identity is Parfit, when he discusses the case where his life overlaps withthat of his Replica and claims that his relation to his Replica is as good as survivalbecause identity is not what matters. But since we ordinarily assume that identity iswhat matters,

I need not assume that my Replica on Mars is someone else . . . I can believethat I do now have another stream of consciousness, of which, in this stream,I am now unaware. And if it helps, I can take this view about my Replica. (Parfit1984, p. 288)

In other words, Parfit can regard himself and his Replica, though spatially separated(in his example, by the distance between Earth and Mars), as being the same person: if

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the Replica is not “someone else” then on this interpretation who else but Parfit couldhe be (except, possibly, no one)? Why this in his view does not make a difference oflife and death is revealed to him by what his own intuition expresses, in this crucialexample, in terms of something rarely if ever mentioned by any of these theorists, thepincipium individuationis which has yet to be explored, namely, consciousness. Parfitclaims that he, Derek Parfit, can

exist with a divided mind . . . I can say that I now have two streams of conscious-ness, one here on Earth, and another on Mars . . . It makes little difference thatmy life briefly overlaps with that of my Replica. (Parfit 1984, p. 289)

If, as Ayer once quipped, analytic philosophy at its best consists in “the bit where yousay it and the bit where you take it back,” here is Parfit at his analytic best, the bitwhere above he just said it followed by the bit where takes it back:

If the overlap was large, this would make a difference. Suppose that I am an oldman, who is about to die. I shall be outlived by someone who was once a Replicaof me. When this person started to exist forty years ago, he was psychologicallycontinuous with me as I was then. He has since lived his own life for forty years.I agree that my relation to this Replica, though better than ordinary death, is notnearly as good as ordinary survival. But this relation would be about as good ifmy Replica would be psychologically continuous with me as I was ten days orten minutes ago. (Parfit 1984, p. 289)

Nozick is forced into virtually the same verbal yoga:

If the old body plus half-brain linger on for long enough, three years say, thensurely that is the person, and the person dies when that body expires—the dupli-cate does not suddenly become the person after three years. A one-minute periodof lingering is compatible with the new body-person being the original person,a three-year period is not. (Nozick 1981, p. 44)

Nozick’s response is especially odd in relation to his own view because, if we havethe two-person case (as demarcated using Nozick’s view of how to draw boundaries),what happens when we throw into the picture Nozick’s following condition?

I suggest that there is not simply one correct measure of closeness for person.Each person’s own selection and weighting of dimensions enter into determininghis own actual identity, not merely into his view of it. Because of our differingnotions of closeness, for the same structural description of a problem case we cangive different answers about which resulting person would be us, each answercorrect. If the story were about me, then Z would be X and Y would not, whereasif it were about you, Y would be X and Z would not. Which continuer is closestto a person depends (partially) on that person’s own notion of closeness. (Nozick1981, p. 106)

For suppose it is a perfect tie and so, on Nozick’s view, neither Y nor Z is X. Sincewe then have two persons, Y and Z, and “each person’s own selection and weightingof dimensions enter into determining his own actual identity not merely into his viewof it,” suppose Y, who upon fission reads Nozick’s book and, convinced, now really

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is not identical to Z who, as it happens, upon fission reads my book and, convinced,now really is Y! From Y’s point of view, Y is not Z. From Z’s point of view, Y is Z.But suppose it is not a tie, so that Y is not the closest continuer. In that case, that Z isconvinced by my book makes no difference: Z is not Y, nor X. Y is X but not Z.

The problem is that none of these views manage to get out from under the weightof their own semantics handicapped, as I have been saying from the start, by the Fregetrichotomy and the resulting received view intuitions not suitable for developing soundphilosophical views any more than they are in scientific and mathematically basedones. And here the way out is the way in: what is needed now more than ever is whatLocke evoked from the start but then failed to define and articulate, namely, a view ofconsciousness. We need not a view without a room but a room for a view.

4 Public versus perspectival identification: toward a new theoryof self-reference

Let us first, as promised, buttress Shoemaker’s (and Locke’s) imaginary puzzle caseswith an actual example from neuropsychiatry on the basis of which I have deviseda number of thought experiments, a variation on a range of extraordinarily revealingphenomena from dissociative pathology. Here, first, is a general description of onesuch actual case:

Of particular note is the role of identification in the fashioning of a secondarypersonality. Margaret B., for example, when she was a little girl, had had a play-mate, Harriet, to whom she was devoted. When they both were 6, Harriet wassuddenly taken ill with an acute infectious disease and died in 3 days. Margaretwas deeply upset at the time and wanted to die in her friend’s place. At someundetermined time after that event, Harriet went “inside Margaret,” as Harrietreported when she held sway in consciousness, and she lived there quite happilyfor many years until Margaret “got religious” and their formerly common tastesfor entertainment and pleasure diverged. Internalizing the image of her deadfriend appeared to have protected Margaret from the despair and sorrow . . . thatemerged unspent and unabated, to be observed in all its poignant strength when,under hypnosis, the adult patient was directed to revive these memories of anevent then 30 years in the past. (Nemiah 1988, pp. 234–258)

Consider, now, my slightly different but more specific actual case.13 A set of twins,whom I will call A and B, grew up together until, at the age of seven, one of them—B—died. The resulting trauma on A produced an example of what I have termedidentification disorder syndrome (IDS), which has come into some use among neurol-ogists (see the article by Jay Lombard, this issue). When A was told that she was A,not B, she did not believe her parents nor, subsequently, her doctors who told her, quiteopenly and frankly, that she only thinks she is B for psychological reasons having todo with a combination of amnesia and guilt brought about by the death of her twin

13 It is on the basis of this actual example that I have predicated a number of “imaginary” thought experi-ments, such as some of the ones depicted in I Am You.

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sister. When a family video of the twins was played, A pointed to A on the screen andsaid, “That’s A, my sister who died.” When, again, parents and doctors insisted that Ais alive and, moreover, that A is A, she—interestingly enough—showed little specificresponse anxiety, showing more systematic anxiety about the death (as she perceivedit) of A than of assertions that A was alive, that she was A, and that it was B who haddied.

Now, when A says, pointing to herself in the video, “That is A,” she is identifyingproperly. Pointing, she says, “That’s A, who is seven, who prefers items a, b, c (toys,people, tv shows) more than d, e, f, which B prefers over a, b, c.” (The twins werefond of differentiating each other by their various likes and dislikes marked most ofall by their innocuous innocence, whereas about [what normal adults would regard as]more important things they were, in their parent’s words, “of one mind.”) After onlya relatively brief therapy A began to realize, intellectually, that she was in fact A, notB. When the family videos were now played, she once again correctly identified Aas A and B as B, and herself as A—“I am A,” she would say—although, under verymild questioning, as was suspected, she did not really fully yet feel as if she was A. Itwasn’t so much that she didn’t believe she was A; she now did. She merely admitted,under questioning, that although she now “knew” that she was A and that, probablybecause of her sadness, had only mis-identified herself initially as her dead twin, shedidn’t yet really or fully “feel herself.” A felt herself to be B, while acknowledgingto herself that she knew she “really” wasn’t. What was still missing, of course, wasthe correct mode of presentation. When A, still feeling that she is B, says (becauseintellectually I now “understands” what psychologically she still doesn’t feel), “I amA,” she is identifying herself properly to others and even to myself. But within theoverall psychology in which she subsists as the subject she is not identified as A. Itstill feels to her as if she is B, not A. She can refer to herself as A but does not havethe first-person point of view on herself as A. What really is going on here?

We’ve seen how some very fine philosophers fail to get out from under their ownexamples which, thus far, barring some extraordinary technological advances (whichare just around the corner14) have been imaginary thought experiments, the down sideof which is that, unlike in for instance physics, where say Einstein’s downright physi-cally impossible thought experiment of riding a beam of light is naturally (or I shouldsay formally) philosophically unconstrained by mathematical technique, there hasunfortunately in the mainstream philosopher’s arsenal no such tooling (or retooling)been available. Except on the formal side now the thought experiment puzzle casescan similarly function to as it were bring consciousness to light using recent revolu-tionary advances (e.g. Hintikka and Sandu 1995) in our understanding of indexicals(Hintikka calls them demonstratives) not as a special mode of reference but a specialmode of identification reinforced on the one hand by pathological examples (such asthose involving distortions of spatial perception and orientation in general, includingand especially in IDS) and, on the other, our two different modes of identification—third-person public and first-person perspectival—both of which have been working

14 The transporter is just around the corner. 3-D printers that replicate 3-D objects in a fraction of the timeit ordinarily takes to manufacture them are already on the market; the “mathematically perfect” mode is asstartling as it is, presently, expensive.

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quietly in the background throughout the puzzle cases. I follow Hintikka in callingthese two forms of identification public and perspectival, respectively, though this Ithink is not the best locution since in reality both identifications are carried out fromthe first person point of view (either by “I the subject who am the ‘outside’ observer ofA and B” or “I the subject who am the ‘inside’ observer of A and ‘outside’ observer ofB). “Public” in my book is better termed “multi-perspectival,” but this leads to furthercomplications that I won’t go into here.

Now, the indexical “I” represents, in my view, a perspectivally rather than publiclyidentified entity. Taking then Quine’s “no entity without identity” and “to be is to be avalue of a bound variable” together, allows us to then track such differences betweendifferent modes of identification that come into play crucially and are manifestedby being values of different quantifiers, which Hintikka expresses by symbolizingquantifiers that rely on perspectival identification using (Ex), (Ax) and then using thetraditional (∃x), (∀x) to signify quantifiers that rely on public identification. This helpsus to see, not just understand, from a logical point of view several important aspectsof what is going on in the twin’s case. Using Hintikka’s K -operator, we can see thereis a clear difference between A identifying A symbolized as

(9) (∃x)K A(A = x)

or, likewise,

(10) K (∃x/K )(A = x)

as opposed to

(11) (Ex)K A(A = x)

(12) K A(Ex/K A)(A = x).

(11) and (12) characterize in Hintikka’s new theory of demonstratives the perspectivalmode of identification allowing us, as Hintikka himself does on occasion, to

speak at the phenomenology of demonstratives . . . This feature of the conceptualsituation is a reflection of the structure of one’s framework of perspectival visualidentification. More specifically, it reflects the fact that the center (the origo orzero point) of this framework is always the speaker, including is or her location inspace-time. This feature of the perspectival framework is worth acknowledging,for it is sub specie logica not the only possibility. (Hintikka 1998b, p. 223)

Now, when in our twins case A says not “I am B” (identifying B as B correctly but Aas B incorrectly) but “I am I ,” or “I am me,” just as

If I refer to “myself” in a given situation, then in all the epistemic alternatives tothe given situation the reference of my word is the same perspectivally identifiedperson, even if I am suffering from amnesia and have forgotten who I am bypublic criteria of identification. (Hintikka 1998b, p. 224)

That captures precisely what is going on not just in our actual (real world) twins casebut in all the (imaginary) examples discussed thus far, from Locke’s original prince/cobbler example to Shoemaker’s BST-procedure and all their various variations. Thereis of course much more that needs to be not just said but shown, as we shall in the next

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section, about this “center” that Hintikka parenthetically denotes by “the origo or zeropoint.” It is one general weakness of his analysis of demonstratives, as is generallythe case in all logico-lingustic approaches thus far, regardless of how sophisticatedtechnically, that—precisely because they have not yet been applied to the problem ofpersonal identity—they have not yet had to integrate (or perhaps I should say distrib-ute) consciousness—the subject—into their equations and, instead, have left it to thesurface grammar of language (rather than to deeper e.g. computational, mathemati-cal, or phenomenological formal structures) to account for perspectival identification.This is a natural mistake, as subjectivity in general and the subject in particular isenabled, as it were, by the logical necessity in every human language to identify whoit is that is speaking. This can be done informally using personal pronouns, verbmodality, and so on, and yet it is so fundamentally essential that it is itself a neces-sary feature of consciousness. I have in fact argued that without the special wordsand phrases of simultaneous denotation and expression, what I have called commun-icatives (“I,” “I am,” “I am I,” and so forth (For a detailed discussion see, Kolak2004, Ch. 2)), there would be no self-consciousness for without them there would beno intuition of personal identity (more precisely defined below). This gap in Hint-ikka’s analysis is mediated by bringing into sharp focus the two different modes ofidentification, especially brining into view the depth of the perspectival mode, includ-ing its metaphysical issues cashed out, in Hintikka’s world(s) in terms of his “smallworlds” (Hintikka 1998a, b). Presently we are in a process across a series of articles(in this issue) of correcting this limitation.

With regard to our twin example, what certainly we would not want to say aboutthis actual, neurological upgrade of Locke’s imaginary prince/cobbler example andthe various related puzzle cases, is that when A correctly identifies A but misidentifiesherself as B, there is no one there inside her head. On the contrary: throughout theordeal there is someone there, an “I,” the subject in relation to which phenomena (e.g.objects) are individuated and identified in perspectival space and time (localized) fromthe first person point of view, i.e., observed, experiencing the world and being influ-enced through the (“psychological”—I here use the term in Freud’s sense) contoursof a particular personality that the subject is to herself from her own first person pointof view on herself and her world—Hintikka’s “small world”—identified as. In otherwords, the subject formerly identified (perspectivally, to herself, as) A initially (afterB’s death) behaved like and thought she was B. As the therapy progressed further,the subject formerly identified as B became identified as A (not just having the intel-lectual ability to refer to herself as A) rather suddenly (as is so often the case in theseand other, related, sorts of pathological psychological cases, there is rapid cycling,virtually instantaneous shifts). As a result, in the end, A in addition to identifyingwith A is identified as A.15 Throughout the ordeal the subject is there, situated in andamong those varying psychological borders, “correctly” identified as A (before B’sdeath), then “falsely” identified as B, and so on: when she says, “I am B,” she, thesubject, is identified as B. When she says, “I am A,” she is identified as A. But, then,

15 For a detailed discussion of my distinction between identification with and identification as, see my“Finding Our Selves: Individuation, Identification and Multiple Personal Identity Disorder,” PhilosophicalPsychology, and Ch. 6, “Psychological Borders,’ of I Am You.

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first, who is the I identified as the one self and then the other, and, second, who is theself and who is the other that I am identified as?

Before addressing either of these questions, let us first make sure we are clear whatmode of error this actually is. Identified as B, is the subject mistaken about her personalidentity? One is tempted here perhaps to answer yes; let us for a moment suppose itto be so. Is the subject then also mistaken about her existence? Well, unless we areprepared to split metaphysical hairs about the term, “existence,” if we are now for thesake of argument supposing the answer to the identity question to be yes then on theexistence question the answer clearly cannot be yes, it must be no. Being mistakenabout who I am can only reinforce the fact that I am. If, before B’s death A says:“I think I am A, therefore I am,” and after B’s death says, “I think I am B, therefore Iam,” and the intended denotation of the phrase, I am, is the proper name, then in neithercase is the statement true. Not because she is not A, but because what establishes thetruth of the statement, “I am A,” is not her thinking it. On the other hand, if the intendeddenotation of I am is in neither case the name being as it were pointed at but, rather,the I doing the as it were pointing, i.e., the intended denotation is the subject itself,the I , then in both cases the statement is true. Thus, albeit perhaps not surprisingly,we may thus think to find ourselves agog here in old Cartesian territory, stumblingacross our long banished unfamiliar familiar, the Cartesian Ego. Certainly a nothing,a nonentity, cannot be deceived about anything, least of all its own (non)existence.But how could the subject who as such cannot be mistaken about its own personalexistence be mistaken about its personal identity? Surely that is impossible! Here weare in a position to discover not only the affirmation in the act of doubting of the “exis-tence” of the doubting subject but the subject’s intuition (in the act of identification)of its own existence and identity as the identifying subject: the subject is me, I amthe subject, I am I. Here not the (false) ego of (psychological) identification but the(true) intuition of (personal) identity—consciousness, defined below in terms of thesubject-in-itself—shows itself to itself. Hintikka reveals as much by his sharp insightsregarding the Cartesian dictum,

(13) I exist.

As Hintkka notes,

We can thus see (and in what sense) the famous Cartesian insight is valid . . .

Indeed, the peculiarities of the Cartesian cogito can now be seen not to be peculiarat all, but rather examples of what is true of the logic of demonstratives in general.For one thing, (6) is analytic only as long as “I” is taken to be a demonstrative,that is, refers to a perspectivally identified entity. In brief, Descartes can hope toprove by his cogito argument (if it is an argument) only the existence of a per-spectivally identified entity. This should of course be obvious. If Descartes haduttered or written, “I think, therefore Cartesius exists,” he would have fallen flaton his face—or uttered a philosophically sophisticated joke. (Hintikka 1998b,p. 228)

Clearly, what A cannot be mistaken about in the above and other such examples ofmisidentification is the existence and identity of the subject, in the same way thatwhen I utter (13) I know with absolute certainty that I exist, I am, and that I am me,

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that I am I . Indeed, the metaphysical misidentification reveals what the psychologicalidentification conceals, namely, that the psychological objects of my psychologicallybinding identifications do not bind my personal identity.

In classical (e.g. Jungian, Freudian) terms clearly we could say, for instance, thatit is A’s “public,” “outer,” personality, or persona, that after B’s death the subject for-merly identified as A becomes (falsely) identified as B. The subject is, in that specificsense and to a certain limited degree, “possessed” by B. Or, we should say: “B”—inso far as she, qua the subject is identified as (subject to) the contours of that personal-ity—“possesses” her. “B” possesses the subject. “B” becomes her “self,” she becomes“B’s” subject. The subject cannot be identified as B’s “private,” “hidden,” or “inner”personality for the obvious reason that the-subject-identified-as-A has no direct accessto anything but her own representations as presented to and through A (disregardingthe possibility of some sort of “mystical” connection between the twins). All A knowsof B is the personality B projects to her and others. So the “other” that she after B’sdeath becomes identified as is B’s public personality, or persona, represented to herin the brain through which she, the subject identified as A, subsists as a subject, lit-erally subject to those “psychological” contours. Now, if the A public personality, orpersona, becomes the personality that she is then identified as—her primary identifi-cation—who then—or what—is the identifier? The subject who says “I am A,” then,“I am B,” the (unidentified) subject, is the identifier, yes, but I who? It cannot be her(A’s) public personality, or persona, which immediately after B’s death has, as it were,“absconded” from her psychology (taking flight [fugue] in, or being filed away into,the unconscious like a stored mask). Perhaps, then, the identifier is some aspect ofher (A’s) “private,” “hidden,” or “inner” personality. But that too is what she is iden-tified as and the personality that she is now identified as is the B-personality, not theA-personality! What, after all, does “identified as the A-personality” mean? Findingherself identified as that persona means she experiences herself (her inner states) andher world (her perceptions) from the first-person point of view of that personality; itmeans she finds herself—her behavior, her likes and dislikes, her (seeming, or appar-ent) memories, her beliefs, and so on—bordered by and exclusively conjoined ontothe complex of individuations perspectivally identified to be, and ordinarily called,“B.” When she says, “I am B,” B is her identification, her “personality (psycholog-ical, qualitative) identification.” But I who? Who is the person being thus identifiedas B? The question now is who the subject—the I , consciousness—is that is beingthus identified as the B personality? She could well answer: the subject is me, I amthe subject, I am I , that person is I, myself. And when above I said that the misidenti-fication reveals what the identification conceals I meant precisely this: her bindingidentification as A does not bind her personal identity—her existence as a person isnot closed under individuation and identification by such known borders.

What the pathology reveals, I claim, is what the (normal) psychology conceals; whatwe have here, in other words, is what we have everywhere, namely, personal (numer-ical) identity without psychological (qualitative) identity. This not only defeats, onceand for all, psychological continuity theories, but provides the philosophical groundfor the intuition of the subject-in-itself, what I call “the intuition of personal identity.”Denoted and expressed simultaneously to speaker and hearer, i.e., communicated,by two first-person indexicals conjoined by a copula, “I am I,” the intuition of the

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subject-in-itself—the intuition of personal identity—is what ordinarily we simply andnaively call “self-consciousness”. It is what guides, and grounds, our theory of con-sciousness in terms of which the best theory of personal identity is best articulated,such as the one that, if correct, I can only feign to call “my own.”

5 Consciousness defined, self-consciousness regained, intuitions grounded:I am I, the intuition of personal identity

That you are to yourself the subject—which translates albeit ungrammatically into thestatement that “you are I ”—is for me, putting it still simply albeit rather more awk-wardly, an intuition. From a sortal point of view identifications are not interpretationsbut facts, albeit special sorts of facts, the way experience can be stated in incorrigibleterms (e.g., I am being appeared to greenly). Now, in so far as this intuition as it wereof “the subject in the object” (e.g. you) informs me that you, a fellow human being,have like me an internal, subjective mental life, that you are “subjectively illuminatedfrom within” in the way ordinarily we suppose human beings, unlike rocks, amoebas,etc., are, it is the “independence” therein communicated that describes the sense inwhich to me you are to yourself once removed (phenomenologically and hermeneuti-cally distanced) from the objects in your experience, whereby the subject therein thusexclusively conjoined is apparently able to immediately control some borders directlyin experience individuated and perspectivally identified from the first person point ofview at the exclusion of others. Thus when I exclaim, as I bring my arms to my chest,“This is me” and then point to you or the chair and say “That is not me,” what I mean,without assuming any presuppositions that go beyond the character of my own expe-rience, is this: “I am apparently able to control immediately this border directly in myexperience onto which I am conjoined at the exclusion of that one.” I am drawing anostensive, perspectivally identified boundary between us based on an incontrovertiblefact about my experience, which I call “the Fact of Exclusive Conjoinment,” or FEC:

FEC: The apparent ability to control immediately certain borders directly inexperience onto which the subject is conjoined at the exclusion of others.

In other words, render your experience “non-immediate,” “indirect” “compoundedby layers of interpretation”—e.g. “thick,” in C.I. Lewis’s sense—as you like, distanc-ing thereby the subject (hermeneutically) from its objects, you cannot escape beingdrawn (phenomenologically) into your (interpreted, indirect, compiled) experience,literally, locked into the thick of it, by the Fact of Exclusive Conjoinment. For nomatter to what degree the borders in experience are “subjective” in the sense that theydepend for their particulars upon the subject (even if entirely, for their existence assuch, in say Berkeley’s, Fichte’s, Schopenhauer’s, or especially Schelling’s sense),this very dependence upon the subject is, itself, at the same time, necessarily, and toa certain but always pragmatically significant degree, dynamically independent fromthe subject, so much so that the subject is conjoined onto the former at the exclusion ofthe latter. “Thick but locked,” experience at the most basic level involves, necessarily,“independence friendly” border dynamics. The Fact of Exclusive Conjoinment thusgives rise to an equally important and equally necessary condition for the having of

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experience as we know it, namely, the intuition that the objects immediately beforeme directly in my experience—regardless of to what degree I may know, or believe,that they are mind-dependent (e.g., they are perspectival)—are subject-independent,i.e., that they are not only ontologically but phenomenologically independent of thesubject. By “subject-independent” in this case I mean to express something both neu-tral and broad, so as to give the reader sufficient philosophical latitude to see, or atleast get to, as it were, the necessary philosophical longitude. (We thus can avoid tan-gential discussions of cause and effect, agency, etc.) The border dynamics involved,for instance, regardless of what view one takes (if any) of the computational driversinvolved in the (literally) “behind-the-scenes” mental processing of experiential phe-nomena, thus require at least the appearance of subject-independence, as do colors,shapes, textures, etc. In other words, render your experience “mental,” “phenomenal,”“unreal,” “mind-dependent”—e.g. “ideal”—as you like, there is no escape from the(in some views “false,” “illusory,” “transcendentally illusory,” etc., in some views“true,” “real,” “pragmatically given,” etc., but in either case necessary for the havingof experience) intuition that what is before you is there, and is as it is, independently ofthe subject or—to put in just in the most simply vulgar terms—is real. This is nowheremore apparent then in what is, arguably, the most “unreal” sort of experience there is,namely, dreams. (For instance even the good Descartes says he almost can’t tell thedifference, and even the good Schopenhauer says the two states are, at the very least,different readings of the same book, modulo different page-turnings.)

Now, what it means, to me, to say that you, that body there, are not “dark” inside—you are not an automaton, a “zombie,” etc.— is that among the borders individuatedin my experience some, like you, are identified not as mere appearances, empty ofsubjectivity but, rather, as having within themselves the subject therein exclusivelyconjoined, etc. Which is but to say that while a border such as I encounter experi-encing for instance a tree or a cloud is as a matter of fact identified in my experienceas object (objectification of the subject) in virtue of the relevant border dynamics,a border such as I encounter experiencing for instance you is, as a matter of fact, iden-tified by me as containing within itself experience requiring within itself the subject,intuited as such in the object, also in virtue of the relevant border dynamics (seeminglypurposeful behavior, etc.).

What I call Alter Subject Identification (ASI) is thus, in affect, what can be expressedas an intuition of the subject in the object. Given our locutionary dispensations above,this means that you (that border there, the body individuated and identified as such inrelation to me, this subject of experience) are not empty but have right there (some-where) within those borders there what we call experience, consisting in phenomenaindividuated and identified in (a mutually independent subject-dependent) perspec-tival space and time (localized) from the first person point of view, i.e., “observed,’ inrelation to the reciprocally individuated and identified (localized) subject exclusivelyconjoined therein, etc. Now, in the same sense that in virtue of my (internal) rela-tion onto locks me into (my) experience, Alter Subject Identification locks me “out”of (your) experience (assuming you have any) while thereby locking you (assumingthat you are there) out of mine, in virtue of the mutually “independence friendly”relation described above, locking us as it were onto each other’s mutually inclusive“independence-friendly” exclusions.

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Thus, as we already pointed out, that you are not a zombie or a mere apparitionbut, rather, that within that object there too is the subject in relation to which objectsare individuated and identified in perspectival space and time (localized) from an alterfirst person point of view, i.e., observed, translates, albeit ungrammatically, into thestatement “you are I as I am I .” This identification is, as I say, for me, an intuitionof the subject in the object. It tells me that among the observed (individuated andidentified in relation to me, the observer) there are multiple observers, each one as itwere “fixed” (think Brouwer’s fixed point theorem) in a uniquely ostensively described(axiom separable) perspectival space characterized by its vanishing point and uniquepoint of convergence. Now, I cannot see these vanishing points but alas if I am a goodenough mathematician I can construct them and, if I am a good enough mathematicianand logician, appropriately relate the constructions with an “independence friendly”logic with (branching quantifiers) provided that my map of all maps is, as I have arguedit could be made to be, (Eklund and Kolak 2002) first-order.

Let us now thus primed address what we are presently in a rather better, perhapseven philosophically speaking privileged, position to do, as no doubt in their own waythe good René and perhaps the not so good Augustine tried to, namely, to see thatI am I —my intuition of the subject-in-itself—is also indeed an intuition, albeit of aquite different and perhaps very special, even unique, sort than is my intuition that, asabove we managed to sort of put it, you are I —my intuition of you qua subject. Thelatter, stated in terms of Alter Subject Identification, is as we just saw semanticallyequivalent to “the intuition of the subject in the object.” In other words, that to yourselfyou are the subject in relation to which objects are individuated and identified in per-spectival space and time (localized) from the first person point of view, i.e., observed,is to me an identification involving, also, an individuation, of the subject (qua manni-gfaltigkeit [manifold], the Kantian “totality of experience as it is presented in sense”)by the subject (me) in relation to which objects (you) are individuated and identified inperspectival space and time from the first person point of view, i.e., observed. Now, thekicker: in my own case that is not the case. That I am I is for me not an intuition of thesubject in the object (though very easily misinterpreted as such, due to what we definedin terms of tertiary identification as) but, rather, an intuition of the subject-in-itself,which we shall now flesh out as follows.

Consciusnessdef = the subject-in-itself in relation to which objects are individ-uated and identified in perspectival space and time from the first person pointof view, i.e., observed (“individuation” and “identification” themselves beingintuitions of objects in space and time, respectively), denoted and expressedsimultaneously by I .Self-consciousnessdef = the intuition of the subject-in-itself (resulting from thecross product of the [space-like] intuition of the subject [what we might think of,with a slight variation on the theme by Husserl, as “internal space consciousness”]and the [time-like] intuition of the subject [what we might think of, again withHusserl, as “internal time consciousness”]), denoted and expressed simulta-neously by I am I.

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Over and above the intuition of personal identity, I am I—“self-consciousness”—is theintuition of the subject-in-the-not-itself, what I call, “moral consciousness,” denotedand expressed simultaneously by I am you.

Thus when we speak of the subject-in-itself as the I of personal identity (in contrastto the ego of psychological identification), and the intuition of the subject-in-itself,the I am I, the intuition of personal identity, what we mean is consciousness (the I )and self-consciousness (the I am I), respectively. That is, besides being aware of

(i) objects in consciousness from which I am dissociated (e.g., clouds, tables, chairs,dogs—“That is not me, I am not that,”) and

(ii) states or events in consciousness that I associate (identify) with (e.g., thoughts,various beliefs, emotions, pains, pleasures—“Those are my thoughts, my emo-tions,”) and

(iii) structures in consciousness that I am identified (associated) as (e.g., the introvert,the extrovert, the private persona, the public persona, “Kolak,” “A,” “B”—“Thatis me, that is who I am, that is my Self,”)

I am also aware that

(iv) the subject of (i), (ii) and (iii) exists and I am the subject, I am I .

The intuition of personal identity is not the rational judgment, “I am so-and-so,”or the interpretation, “I am such-and-such;” rather, it is the formal (uninterpreted)intuition that I am someone, anyone at all, the subject qua subject, a “feeling of sub-jectivity,” of “I -ness,” of someoneness, the vague (but not unvivid), non-localizedawareness of “my own presence” bordered apparently within whatever psychologicalbundle I, the subject-in-itself, find myself identified as, the I of personal identity sit-uated as the fulcrum of space-like and time-like consciousness at the vantage point,the center of my world.

Unmasked (uninterpreted) from my identifications by the intentional act of, as itwere, “un-identification,” in and of itself, “unidentified (i.e., uninterpreted) identi-fied” consciousness—the “I am p1,” “I am p2,” etc., turned away from the p backin on itself—reveals itself to itself as a particular someone—this I, this subject, thissomeone—appearing always through a mask yet bound to no one in particular, theunapparently featureless form of consciousness, of subjectivity aware of its own exis-tence and identity, capable of taking on any apparent form p, of being identified asany p. This self-conscious experience of myself not as personality or “self” but asthe subject-in-itself aware of its existence and identity in space and time, respec-tively—not “I am Kolak” but “I am I ”—is me, the subject, as it were “caught” in theact of trying, without possibility of success, to become its own object of experience,like an empty mirror turned back in on itself reflecting nothing but its own reflect-ing. We could try thus to understand the intuition of personal identity (the I am I)by which the I of personal identity as such comes to know itself through the inten-tional act—paradoxically, “non-Self self-consciousness,”—in terms of a pure (i.e.,formal, uninterpreted) conscious act (perhaps in Fichte’s sense), the Wesensschauby which Max Scheler denoted the subject’s immediate grasp of its own essencesand Hermann Weyl, following Husserl (Logical Investigations and Ideas), signifiedthe self-conscious act of immediate insight. But under ordinary circumstances the

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intuition of the subject-in-itself, i.e., the intuition of personal identity, the (un)self-conscious experience denoted and expressed simultaneously by I am I, as a matterof phenomenological fact, is the subject as it were looking to itself for its intended“object,” the intuition of personal identity obscured by the intentional act (the psycho-logical object) of (“non-Self”) self-identification. Because of the virtually constantconjunction of the I (the subject qua its psychological function as identifier) with itsdesignated object of identification, primary identification (i.e., identification as), theI ’s primary phenomeno-psychological function

(14) I am (p) [e.g., I am A, I am B, I am Kolak]

is thus erroneously conceived by the subject’s effort at self-conception in terms of thesimple equation,

(15) I=a [e.g., I=A, I=Kolak, etc.]

thereby alienating consciousness, subjectivity—I , the subject-in-itself, conscious-ness—from itself: personal (numerical) identity obscured through psychological (qual-itative) identification, i.e., essential subjectivity obscured by the intuition of one’s ownexistence and identity.

Here we have arrived at that aspect of our existence that not only gives us our first-person perspectival points of view on our ourselves and our worlds but is necessaryfor the having of any such minded perspectives. It is what makes an analytic statementlike “These experiences are my experiences,” a necessary truth, and why the indexicalword “I” is indeed most aptly suited for simultaneously denoting and expressing thesubject-in-itself, the I of personal identity. It is by reference to myself as the subject-in-itself (I ) that the first person demonstrative “I” allows us to say, as we do in thevarious thought experiments involving the intuition of personal identity,

(16) that I am

(17) that I am

and

(18) that who I am is I ,

on the very grounds of being able to say that I am not my brain, I am not my body,I am not my personality, I am not (as we are about to see in more detail) even my self.What I , the subject-in-itself, am—my personal identity—is revealed in and shownin the self-reflexive expression “I am I,” but hidden (masked) in what I am identi-fied as, namely, the (psychological object of) my identification, “I am Kolak.” I, thesubject-in-itself, thereby come to intuit myself as the subject-in-itself—I am I—inthe self-reflexive act of intuition defined above as the intuition of personal identityin which I, the subject-in-itself, become, as it were, “the intended subject of experi-ence.” The brain, the body, the personality, etc., may be necessary conditions for myexistence as such (or not) but they are not sufficient for my existence the way thatconsciousness, subjectivity, the subject-in-itself, is.

The problem with our seeing this is that in our experience almost always we areidentified as someone. Our solution to this problem, as the various examples show,

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is not to achieve some super-conscious or transcendental state in which I, the sub-ject-in-itself, become as it were unidentified from my identifications (e.g., a “mysti-cal” experience), but by our various thought experiments, both actual and imaginary,regarding the true nature of personal identity that where consciousness is (or goes)there I am, personal identity resides not in the psychological identification but in thesubject-in-itself, regardless of the underlying cause. Indeed, the way I come to knowmyself as such is through the intuition of personal identity—self-consciousness, whichis but the intuition, by the subject in relation to which objects are individuated in per-spectival space and time from the first person point of view, i.e., observed, of thesubject-in-itself, resulting from the cross-product of the space-like intuition of thesubject and the time-like intuition of the subject.

Thus even when, as in our twins example, the subject experiences the world fromthe first-person point of view of the B-persona, the personality that after B’s accidentthe subject is identified as, the subject-in-itself, consciousness, is there bordered, alongwith the intuition of personal identity: the A-persona is gone but the subject-in-itself,the I of personal identity, is there; moreover, the awareness that someone present isidentified as the B-personality and that “I am that someone,” is there: “I am, I exist,I am I .” That is, even though she may be mistaken about “who I am” or sufferingfrom amnesia, that I am, namely, the intuition of the subject-in-itself—i.e., the intui-tion of personal identity, simultaneously denoted and expressed by “I am I ”—is notonly something I still do have, it is something I still do have vividly. Indeed, getting asudden bout of amnesia would heighten the experiential vividness of the intuition ofpersonal identity, and make me scream: “Who am I ?”

Thus when A says

(19) I am B,

this is formally very different from when she says

(20) I am I.

Formally, (19) can be analyzed into the following form:

(21) (∃x)((x = A) ∧ (Ey)(y = x ∧ K I (I = y))),

whereas (19) can be analyzed into:

(22) (Ex)(Ey)((x = I ) ∧ (y = I ) ∧ K I ((y = I ) ∧ (x = I )))16

So if the exclusively conjoined personality experienced by the subject “from the inside”as the identified self, then the I am I, itself the cross-product of the space-like intuitionof the subject and the time-like intuition of the subject, the intuition of there being aperson apparently bordered within that exclusively conjoined personality—the intui-tion of personal identity, whatever that ultimately is or may be from a metaphysical orontological point of view—is consciousness, subjectivity, as it were in the act simul-taneously denoting and expressing itself by “I am I .”

16 It is important to note that all of the knowledge operators in both 21 and 22 are autoepistemic operators.Thus the ‘I’ in both the index and within the scope of the operator is neither to be construed as a propername nor a variable. It is rather to be interpreted as the fixed zero point within the speaker’s perspectivalspace.

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It is precisely here that the metaphysics, philosophy, and psychology of personalidentity intersect. For it would be easy for some philosophers to try and diminish thesignificance both of the subject-in-itself—consciousness, the I of personal identity—and the intuition of the subject-in-itself—self-consciousness, the intuition of personalidentity, the I am I—on grounds that in the one or in the other or in both cases I amtalking merely about something psychological or even a psychological illusion. And itwould be easy for some psychologists to try and dismiss my analysis of personal iden-tity on grounds that I am talking merely about something metaphysical—such as, forinstance, a concept—seeking logical conditions for what is not logical but psycholog-ical. But here the metaphysical, conceptual world and the experiential, psychologicalworld intersect by both touching upon, and in turn being touched by, one and the samephenomenon, namely, the intuition of the subject-in-itself, I am I. This, the intuitionof personal identity, is the I unidentified from its identifications, self-consciousnessunmasked in the awareness of one’s own existence and identity. This phenomenon maybe no more “real” than, say, the phantom limb phenomenon, an amputee’s awarenessof his leg (which is no longer there)—a sort of “phantom identity”—and so may notbe an experience of anything real but it is, at least, nevertheless, a real experience.

The subject-in-itself is not a persona, personality, nor “self.” It is the consciousnessbehind the mask. And the intuition of the subject-in-itself—the existential experien-tial component of the conceptual personal identity equation—is what psychologicalidentification as a persona, or as a personality, itself, feels like. The persona is buta mask. The subject-in-itself—the I of personal identity—is the featureless form ofconsciousness, pure subjectivity, that lies behind the mask. The intuition of personalidentity—the I am I—is the self-consciousness that makes it—or any other mask—feelas if it (and only it) is one’s own.

Having thus (re)turned to the real subject of personal identity we have, I believe,raised the stakes significantly. For one thing, we have philosophically grounded therole, function, and nature of intuition, albeit a special variety of intuition—pivotal17

intuitions about ourselves—providing thereby a welcome rapprochement betweenmainstream and formal approaches to personal identity. It was Hintikka who firstpointed out to me that

The favorite argumentative method of persent-day analytic philosophers is toappeal to intuitions . . . usually totally without respectable theoretical founda-tion. Moreover, the best way of justifying the use of intuitions in philosophicalargumentation entails radical changes in our ways of thinking about intuitions. . . contemporary thinkers’ practice of appealing to intuitions in philosophicalargumentation is without any justification whatsoever . . . what conceivable theo-retical rationale do contemporary philosophers’ appeals to intuitions have? Theembarrassing answer is: None of the above. The vast majority of philosophi-cal writers who in these days take the name “intuition” in vain do not believein Platonic anamnesis, Aristotelian forms, Cartesian innate ideas or Kantiantranscendental deductions . . . Pending a reorientation of the use of intuitions . . .

any such use must be undertaken with caution. In view of the past misuses, it

17 Wittgenstein would perhaps want to have called them “hinge”.

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does not even strike me as far-fetched to suggest a moratorium on all unanalyzedappeals to intuition in philosophical argumentation. It is not entirely as a jokethat I suggest that the editors of all philosophy journals adopt a policy of notaccepting any paper in which intuitions are relied on without examining theirsources and their correct interpretation. (Hintikka, unpublished paper)

I suggest we can safely now lift the moratorium, and await Hintikka’s reply.Returning to the subject of personal identity via the I , consciousness, and the intu-

ition of personal identity, the I am I, self-consciousness, to a certain degree providessuch a reorientation in the subjective light of what Wittgenstein construed what hecalled the philosophical I, the metaphysical subject:

The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body, nor the humansoul with which psychology deals. The philosophical I is the metaphysical sub-ject, the boundary—nowhere in the world. (Kolak 1998, pp. 38–39)

Another philosopher who clearly saw the primacy of the subject in its proper light andits subversive power to overthrow all received views was Descartes. For among themany perceptions, thoughts, feelings, etc., experienced by his variation on the subject,there is—besides the fact of perspectivality, discussed above—what Descartes referredto as the rational intuition of his own existence, beautifully and famously described inhis most oft quoted passage:

I noticed that whilst I thus wished to think all things false, it was absolutelyessential that the ‘I’ who thought this should be somewhat, and remarking thatthis truth ‘I think, therefore I am’ was so certain and so assured that all themost extravagant suppositions brought forward by the skeptics were incapableof shaking it, I came to the conclusion that I could receive it without scruple asthe first principle of the Philosophy for which I was seeking.18

Here then is our self-conscious subject, rightful heir unapparent to the throne madevacant by the banishment of our Cartesian Ego: I , resurrected.

Perhaps I should put up a sign.

Room for a view. Multiple occupancy. Available immediately. Inquire within.Interested parties need but fill out one form:Cogito, ergo quis est?”

References

Descartes, Philosophical Works, I, 101.Eklund, M., & Kolak, D. (2002). Is Hintikka’s logic first order. Synthese, 131(3), 371–388.Hintikka, J. (2002). Comment on Eklund and Kolak. Synthese, 131(3), 389–393.Hintikka, J. (1998a). Is, semantical games, and semantical relativity. In Paradigms for language theory and

other essays (pp. 71–106). Kluwer Academic Publishers.Hintikka, J. (1998b). Perspectival identification, demonstratives and ‘small worlds’. In J. Hintikka (Ed.),

Paradigms for language theory and other essays. Kluwer.Hintikka, J. The intuitions scandal (unpublished paper).

18 Descartes, Philosophical Works, I, 101.

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Kolak, D. (1993). Finding our selves: Identification, identity and multile personality. PhilosophicalPsychology, 6, 363–386.

Kolak, D., & Martin, R. (Eds.). (1991). Self and identity. New York: Macmillan.Kolak, D. (2001). On Hintikka. Belmont: Wadsworth.Kolak, D., & Symons, J. (Eds.). (2004). Questions, quantifiers and quantum mechanics. Springer.Kolak, D. (2004). I am you: The metaphysical foundations for global ethics. Springer.Kolak, D. (1998). Wittgenstein’s tractatus. New York: McGraw Hill.Locke, J. Essay concerning human understanding.Lowe, E. J. (1996). Subjects of experience. New York: Cambridge University Press.Nemiah, J. C. (1988). Psychoneurotic disorders. In A. M. Nicholi (Ed.), The Harvard guide to psychiatry.

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Allen and Unwin, London 1937).Shoemaker, S., & Swinburne, R. (1984). Personal identity. New York: Blackwell.Shoemaker, S. (2008). Persons, animals, and identity. Synthese, doi: 10.1007/s11229-007-9253-y.Strawson, P. (1959). Individuals. London: Methuen.Unger, P. (1990). Consciousness, identity and value. New York: Oxford University Press.

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