I do not deal well with the likes of you.

i'm not really here

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And now, with a little luck and from this bubble of sobriety, I explain the Dharma as I understand it. This will conceivably be a long rant.

Identity criteria is an interesting thing. It goes like this. I'm looking at this pair of sunglasses here. They're cheap-ass sunglasses, by the way, though I'd like to think I make them look good. $10 at the Aotea markets, that kind of cheap. Some British guy sold them to me. Anyway, they're sunglasses. You know what sunglasses are, I know what sunglasses are. I show them to you and ask you what they are and you say, "Zoot, they're sunglasses, and you make them look good."

And you'd be right on both accounts.

Now, I pop out a lens (which is not, technically, a lens, but you know what I'm talking about). What is it now? Well, it's sunglasses sans one lens. They're still recognisable as sunglasses, only missing a lens. What next? I pop the other lens out. What is it now? Sunglasses? Broken sunglasses with no lenses, maybe. Or maybe it's now frames. Sunglass frames.

I break off an arm. They're called arms, those things, right? The things that go over your ear. I break one off. $10 down the tube. That's a week's porridge, don't forget. Anyway, what is it now? Broken sunglasses frames. ?

I can keep doing this. I can remove bits until there's just a screw. Now what is it? Sunglasses minus two lenses, two arms, the lens frames and the other screw? Or is it just a screw.

The point is, at some time it stopped being sunglasses. And the point is, at which time you stopped calling it sunglasses is more or less up to you. You set the identity criteria for the sunglasses, so you can tell me at which point what I'm showing you no longer meets that criteria.


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Now, take this attitude and apply it to a person. Here's my friend Dylan. He's a person, right? Sure. Now, I pop out one of his eyes. Yes, yes, he's screaming in pain now. Still a person? More to the point, still Dylan? Yes, you might say, he's Dylan, who is missing one eye and screaming like a girl.

I'm going to pop out the other eye, now. Still Dylan? Yeah, screaming even more, I know. He's now Dylan without two eyes? Dylan has become blind, you might say. Same Dylan, new situation.

I'm going to remove one of his arms, now, with this light sabre. Yeah, he's more or less gone into shock now. That quietened him right down. Bleeding profusely, yes. Still Dylan? Dylan minus two eyes and an arm? And quickly becoming minus blood?

Yeah, he's lost a lot of blood, now, and he's lost consciousness. Still Dylan? Still our buddy Dylan, only unconscious and missing two eyes, an arm, a whole lot of blood? (they're not really missing. the blood's on the floor and I've got his arm and eyes in this Woolworths bag.)

Okay, he's not breathing any more. Brain activity has ceased. His hair will continue to grow for a few days, and his digestive system will work through those lamb shanks he cooked up and ate earlier. Still Dylan? Only dead? Is Dylan gone?

What was our identity criteria for Dylan in the first place? Did changing his body affect those criteria? Did affecting his consciousness change the criteria? Did effecting his death make it not-Dylan-any-more?

Dylan's gone, now, we might say. Passed away. What was that essential Dylanness that's gone? Perhaps it wasn't the body I was mutilating. Perhaps it was his mind.


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Well, I need a new guinea pig/friend, so James is up. This is my other best friend James. Tall, yes. Now, James is a particular kind of person... very clever, very funny, likes Lord of the Rings, knows a lot about history and linguistics, likes chocolate, doesn't like being hit on the knee with this baseball bat.

Now, let's assume that our identity criteria for James isn't really to do with his body, but is to do with his mind. Sure, if we could remove his body without removing his mind, that would still be James, only minus a body, right? Well, you tell me.

I'm going to attach these electrodes to James' head.

Now, by the wonder of Non-ExistenTech's latest product, I'm going to do some things to James' mind. First, I'm going to remove his taste for chocolate. Still James? I ask. James, only minus a taste for chocolate? Also, now he likes being hit in the leg with this baseball bat. See? He loves it. Still James?

Can you imagine James not liking Lord of the Rings? Well, I flick this switch and voila! He hates Lord of the Rings. He think Tolkien was a talentless hack. Still James?

Now we're going to make him stupid. He can't think real fast any more, and he's not funny, and his personal hygiene sucks.

What's that? Oh, he can still remember meeting me and he remembers his childhood and remembers back when he used to like Lord of the Rings and stuff. Yeah. Right, I'm wiping his memory.

See him blink in confusion? He can't even remember his own name. Is it still him? Does James have amnesia? Or did James cease to exist when his memory did?

You tell me.


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See, obviously any identity criteria will have to be able to handle a bit of change, or the moment one tiny thing changes it's no longer James or Dylan or whoever. But the criteria can't be so flexible that they can handle any change at all, or else the whole point of identity is lost and it doesn't matter what the fuck you do, you can change James into cheese and, like, eat him and vomit him into a black hole and stuff, and then, like, make a house of cards and call it James.

The next suggestion, beyond the physical matter of the body and the mental properties of the mind, might be continuity. Sure, James used to like Lord of the Rings and now he doesn't, but there's a direct succession of small changes from that James to this one, a lineage that can be traced. This continuity could be pointed at and called James.

In this sense, a person is not a particular collection of matter or a particular set of mental properties (likes, dislikes, fears, desires, memories) but is a process of constantly changing matter and mental properties.

That's closer to our usual idea of identity. I might talk about what James did 10 years ago. 10 years ago, the cells in his body now didn't exist. 10 years ago, James was like only 23 years old or something, and had much different attitudes. But we say that the James today is the James of back then, only older, because we can point to that bit-by-bit progression from Him Then to Him Now.

However, that idea falls over when we conceive of very sudden and substantial changes. We can handle the idea of James, over the course of 10 years, slowly changing from a lovely young man to a misanthropic old pervert with a penchant for whipping the bare bottoms of teenage boys. We would say, "He has changed a lot, James has." But if he received a sudden blow to the head and overnight turned from nice to nasty and displayed a new whipping fetish, we might not be so sure. We might be inclined to think that James just wasn't there any more.


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The difference between sudden and gradual change, where do we draw the line? It doesn't matter. Draw it where you want to. The point is that the line is drawn, and it is drawn by us.

The identity criteria we set when we refer to someone (or ourselves) as a particular person are practical, but arbitrary. I might say that who I was two weeks ago is gone. I regularly say this, in fact, in order to disassociate myself from the embarrassing and despicable things I did two weeks ago. The point is it's arbitrary to do so. There is no essential "me" that continues from one moment to the next, just varying degrees of change and our option to consider that change to be the end or the continuation of an arbitrarily assigned identity.

Still, here's me, talking about it, surely. Here's me thinking about it. Here's me feeling slightly thirsty and sitting in this chair. What's "me", if not some persisting thing throughout all this change?

-wataki