Past Event

Speaker : Andrew Brook

  Title: Tracking Persons

Abstract:

The topic of conscious personhood over time has not received a lot of attention in recent work on consciousness and persons, despite the considerable interest that philosopher/psychologists have taken in it over the past three centuries. Tracking persons, that is, determining that a person now is or is not a specific earlier person, is usually a matter of following the history of a current conscious persons back in time to determine if the history ends up or does not end up at the given earlier person of interest. The lack of attention to this activity is not because it is not important.

It is extremely widespread and important in our way of life. Nor is it because the techniques that we use are unproblematic. To the contrary, the main techniques, behavioural expression of memories, facial resemblance, and, in more rigorous cases, fingerprints and DNA, are all in one way or another deeply problematic. So it would be a good idea to figure out what we are tracking when we track a person back in time, i.e., what it is to persist as the same person over time, and to assess how well our current practices do so. As part of doing so, we will examine some puzzling cases.