On The Idea of Personal Identity

Triggered by my current reading of Robert C Solomon's In The Spirit of Hegel I was prompted to think about the concept of personal identity. In philosophy, this is the answer to the question: how do I know (or what do I mean by saying) I am the same person I was a year ago? What does that idea of “same” mean?

The first point is so obvious everyone misses it. It's that there would be no point to asking how we can be thought of as being the same person we were five years ago if there wasn't a very obvious sense in which we aren't. It's because we feel we do change, that we ask how we can yet be the same.

The second point is that there are two distinct answers: one to establish liability or benefit; the other to deal with the rest of daily life. Let's do the legal one first. The law needs to be able to identify that it was you who, ten years ago, committed a murder, so that it can arrest, try and jail you now. The family solicitor needs to identify you as the proper beneficiary of the will: that you are your father's son, even though you've been out of the country for twenty years. Here we are unequivocally identified with our bodies: what gets used here is an idea of physical continuity throughout changing appearances. This isn't a complex idea, but it is difficult to propose a fraud-proof set of criteria, let alone one proof against the wilder imaginings of philosophers. However, just because we can't produce a flawless operational definition of a concept doesn't mean we don't have a workable concept. Indeed, we couldn't produce any kind of operational definition if we didn't have a working concept.
In daily life we use a different concept: one far more contextual and purposive. To say someone has changed seems to mean that what we used to know about them leads us to make inaccurate predictions of how they now react, think and behave in given situations: friends might say that you have changed, you are now much calmer, but the sales analysts of a major bookseller might see you as the crime-fiction fan you always were. At work you seem as professional and motivated as ever: only your wife sees your emotional collapse at the weekends from the strain of your pretence.

This does not mean we have many “identities”, it means that no other person sees us playing all our roles. Nor does that fact that as an uncle we are affable and competent, while as an amateur handyman we are tense and irritable, mean we harbour contradictions: it means we like being an uncle, while our lack of manual dexterity and practice means we dislike having to put up the shelves. Someone who knows us as an uncle may say “you're totally different when you have to fix the shelves” but what they mean is “you're not as affable and competent now as I've seen you with your nephews”. They aren't making deep claims about you having been taken over by a different soul, or aliens, when you have to wield an electric drill. Indeed, if they didn't think you really were the same person, there would be no point in them saying you were “totally different”.

When we ask of ourselves or other people “who are you?” we are asking many questions, but none of them particularly philosophical. We may be asking how they could behave like that, or what they want to do with their lives, or what they value most, or what they would choose to wear or where they would choose to vacation (“Who are you? Someone who spends a week on a beach? I don't think so.”)

When we say “we don't know who we are”, we're not thereby expressing any great sense of a splintered soul hidden in darkness. We're saying we're uncertain about a number of decisions that are important to us now. It makes our indecision sound much more romantic and profound, whereas to others of a more practical turn it may seem simply weak and self-indulgent.
So do we have an “identity”? We do, just as we have an “appearance”. It's our ambitions, choices, tastes, decisions, the way we talk and the words we use, the clothes we wear from role to role, our craft skills and anything else you can think of. As time goes by, some of these things will change. Let's say that if we add something new to all these items, our identity remains the same (or “grows”, if you prefer); whereas if we drop some things and take up others, it changes, but with this qualification, that as long as the great majority of our identity-items stay the same, we say we haven't changed.

This, I think, gets it about right. Children grow, adolescents “change” because they adopt and discard a lot in a short space of time, adults “don't change” because they modify themselves gradually. Adolescent change is unstable, adult change is stable. It makes our concept of “sameness” temporally local, rather than long-term, which also fits in with the our recognition that over a long time, we aren't in any sense the same people we were at eighteen. The world would be a pretty awful place if we were.

Aren't some changes more important than others? Isn't a woman who turns up asking for a divorce undergoing a greater change than one who suddenly starts listening to Monteverdi? If this is an an implicit appeal to common values (“Marriage matters, music doesn't”) then it's harmlessly undeniable. If this is pointing out that some changes are more costly or beneficial than others, while others are treated with more or less censure by family, parish, friends, employers and the bridge club, and so some are likely to have more consequence than others, this is also harmlessly undeniable. What is deniable is that the divorcee's life will necessarily change as common values and likelihoods would predict. She might weather the divorce with dignity and goodwill, but find Monteverdi tips her into the giddy world of choral singing, from which few have emerged unscathed.

So when we ask others about their ambitions, tastes, abilities, preferences and favoured ways of passing a Sunday afternoon, we are not asking profound philosophico-psychologico-moral questions but merely interviewing them to see if they are the kind of company we want to keep. We can even do that to ourselves, and confuse ourselves with the answers. I suggest that the puzzlement we may feel about our own identity is caused partly because of the distorting mirrors (cynical and manipulative “appraisals” at work, pop-culture quizzes, shallow comments from friends, answers that are polite rather than honest, barely interested parents, teacher forced to “find something positive to say”, and “feedback” given to manage rather than inform) in which we are reflected to ourselves, and partly by a mis-match between what we do in fact and what we think we should be doing. And this is how we can surprise and puzzle ourselves.

The Friends Quiz

I feel the need for something light-hearted. So here's a little quiz around the word “friends”.

1.Who are “friends of Dorothy's”?
2.What is a “friend of Bill and Bob”?
3.If a man with a vowel at the end of his surname introduces you as “a friend of mine”, what's he saying about you, who to and what status does he have?
4.If the same man introduces you as a “a friend of ours”, what status do you have?
5.In the British Foreign Office, who are “the friends”?
6.What is a “Friend of (insert name of prestigious cultural organisation here)?
7.What is the exact status of “a friend of the family”?
8.If someone tells you that he and her are “just friends”, what does this mean?
9.How many series did “Friends” go on for?
10.Why is it “friendly fire” even if someone gets killed?
11.If a restaurant is “child-friendly”, what is it telling single young adults?
12.In programming, when are two objects “friends”?

Have A Prosperous 2010

I hope this finds you well, flourishing and closer to your dreams.

There goes another decade. The best thing I can say about it is that I got the first four volumes of Proust off and finally read Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Philosophy of History and Phenomenology of Spirit. You can avoid these things and still have lived a full and happy life. Which is kinda they way I felt about 2009.

I spent the first six months thinking I'd be out of work in July when the Lloyds / HBoS reorganisation finally worked its way down to my grades. In July I went on two weeks' Jury service at Isleworth Crown Court (Guilty! Guilty! All of them!) and came back with a confirmed job. Oddly, this made me feel better than almost everyone else, as few got their first choice of role in an empty six-week "preferencing" exercise: most people are in their second or third choice or even 'huh? where was that on my list?".

I lost 10 kgs between February and about June after my doctor read me the riot act about blood sugar levels and how he would prescribe drugs that have the most appalling side-effects on your digestive system if I didn't improve. (Look up "metformin" on Wikipedia to see what I mean.) So I went home, threw away all the biscuits, chocolates, sugar, pasta and other carbs and did a low-carb, low-sugar, no-eggs, no-cakes diet. It worked. The free biennial medical I get pronounced me a walking miracle of health and fitness for a man my age (fifty-five).

My nephew is preparing to go to university to read History and is reading Cesaer, Herodotus, books on the Crusades and Machiavelli on Livy - I felt uneducated until I remembered that he doesn't know what a function field on an affine variety is. I've joined the rest of the world as the possessor of an LCD television and the house is just about finished. The quote from Wickes for re-kitting my tiny kitchen had me in howls of outraged laughter, so that project is on hold and it's the last room I have to do.

I leave you with this useful hint. To carry one mobile phone is to be a righteous citizen; carrying two means you're keeping work and personal life separate; carry three and you're a drug dealer, end of story. So ditch that third phone in the bottom of your briefcase / handbag / whatever now, or should you appear on a charge at Isleworth Crown Court, you will be sent down without the slightest hesitation by the good people of its catchment area, who appeared to me alarmingly knowledgeable about street life.

Have a prosperous 2010!

Don't Mention The Balanced Scorecard!

I have a new manager. She's a little middle-aged lady who behaves a bit mumsy and probably thinks that's a good way to approach her role. I'm not sure she's going to be able to handle the insanity that is The Bank's bureaucracy and that she's going to blame us because we can and she doesn't get what we're doing.

We had a little “team meeting” this morning. She mentioned “Balanced Scorecards” and this set me off. All my intentions of being really calm and team-player-y went out of the window.

For those lucky enough not to know what a “Balanced Scorecard” is, it's a piece of HR bureaucracy that pretends that everyone in the company has jobs where they can meet a wide range of objectives: financial, operational, customer service, team development, whatever. I have to have “Treating Customers Fairly” (or TCF) objectives – TCF is itself a piece of bureaucratic nonsense imposed on banks by the FSA, and the last thing it ensures is that you'll get a fair shake from HSBC, Barclays or anyone else. I don't deal with customers. The only people who have less customer contact than me, or less influence over customer service, are the guys in the post room. But TCF has to be on my Scorecard.

And no, the Scorecards have nothing to do with our bonuses, pay rises and appraisals. Those are set at company level and in a discussion between the department heads every six months. We are judged entirely on how well we worked and played well with others, what impression we made around the office and if we saved anyone's backside from a kicking.

Making the managers go through the Scorecard process is designed to hide that fact. Because it's a pointless exercise in form-filling, it has no credibility with anyone. Yet we all have to pretend that it does. I had one manager who treated it with the affable contempt it deserved and I produced my best fiction in return. The New Lady Manager sounds as if she's going to take it seriously. In which case, she's going to have to do a lot of pretending, and ask her team to pretend a lot as well. Which means we're all living in Denial.

Which means that for me there's some raw emotional stuff going on. The way the system works is that the managers are nice to us for the six months on a daily basis – after all, they don't want to piss us off, they're busy and they can't take the conflict generated by handling a problem as it arises. So they store up the bad stuff and dump it out every six months in our appraisals. In writing. They might even be nice in the face-to-face meeting, but on the form, out comes all the stuff they didn't have the guts to handle at the time. Sound like the kind of family where you were snarked at for not knowing what to do, but no-one ever told you? Where instead of being proper guides to how to behave and what's expected, your parents sat back and judged, treating you not like their children but like strange visitors they couldn't get rid of? That's what happens at The Bank. And Balanced Scorecards are the way that gets covered up. To go along with the process is to be forced into some kind of complicity with denial. I really don't like that. And that's where the reaction came from.

Once More on the iPhone

I realised the other day that there are two things keeping me from getting an iPhone. First is the price combined with the 18- or 24-month contracts. Second and far more important is that I didn't want to look like Sad Dad with a Young Person's Toy. iPhone usage had to pass a certain unknown but clear point where anyone could have one and not look like they were trying to look like someone who “really” used one of the things. By the time Vodafone put it on their network, that usage point will have been reached. At least in central London.

Now to the price comparison. Or rather, putting my professional hat on, the price / feature comparison. Apple are often considered “expensive” as in “you can get a laptop for £400, and a MacBook costs £800”. This is true, but irrelevant. You can't get a Dell or HP laptop with the same spec as a MacBook for £400. Try it on the Dell website and see what happens: you wind up very close to the Apple price.

The iPhone looks bloody expensive compared to a £15 pcm Nokia 6303, but it has just a few more features. Apple control the price plan so that all the operators offer the same product and it's a full-weight plan: 600 minutes, 500mb download domestic use with 100 minutes and 20mb roaming. (There is a 150 minute option, but it's there to make the 600 minute one look good – it costs all of £5 a month less.) There's a charge for the phone at the lower end of the price plans. Spreading the charge for the phone over the term of the contract, the 600 minutes x 18 month contract works out at £50 pcm, 600 x 24 at £39 pcm and the 1200 minute plans at £44 pcm for either length of contract. Ignore that £50 pcm plan: that's there to upsell you to the 24-month version, or to the 1200 minute plan. Even so... ouch! Fix “the cost” at £39 pcm over 24 months.

The comparable Vodafone plans for the comparable kit from Blackberry (Storm 2), Nokia (E72 or N97 Mini) are, including the phones, £35 for 24 months. Step down to the Blackberry Curve 8520 or take the HTC Tattoo and you're at £30 pcm. So the “iPhone Premium” is £4 a month, or £92 for the 24 month contract. That's about the price of two seats in the Stalls of a top West End show. Or look at this way: for 13p a day, you get a nice warm glow of cool every day for two years. Over having anything else.

The SIM-only 600-minute with 500 MB of Internet and webmail is £20 pcm on a 30-day contract. So the I-need-a-new-phone-that-does-e-mail-really-well-with-a-QWERTY-keyboard premium is £10 pcm, and the touchscreen-and-really-good-web-browsing premium is £15 pcm. So the choice is between an 8520 (I need Mac synching) at £30 pcm and an iPhone at £39 pcm. And if I have Berry, I still need an iPod. It's coming up replacement time for my old iPod Mini. That's about £5 a month over two years. See how the gap closes?

I wouldn't even be thinking about this, but remember The Bank has banned us from using Google Mail and the like. If I had the sort of life where I needed to deal with personal mails during the day, I would need to be spending an extra £15 - £20 a month because of it, which is a direct cost of working there. There will come a time when I will need easily managed e-mails. I'll need to send and read attachments as well. But then, I'll be looking for a new job and will easily be able to justify the cost of the mobile Internet.

Fitzrovia Connections

There are some parts of London I don't visit or pass through from one year to the next. Fitzrovia is one of these. My connection to the area is that way, way back when I was a teenager, I spent the academic year 1972-73 at the Polytechnic of Central London engineering building on Howland Street.

It's now called the University of Westminster, and I'm betting a few other things have changed, for instance, the bible for first-year electronics is no longer Electronic Devices and Circuits by Millman and Halkias. At least not the edition we used. I wasn't the happiest of bunnies while I was there, and I abandoned the course to start at Exeter University in 1973. Walking past the place Tuesday afternoon, it seemed like yesterday when I'd been there, while much of the 1980's is as far away as the Hundred Years's War. It's a quiet part of town, with lots of advertising, media, design, education and about a million small cafes and restaurants. And Fitzroy Square...

I love that Winter afternoon light. To borrow a sentiment from The Kinks, "as long as I gaze on a West End sunset / I am in paradise".  My favourite was the view over the West end from the eight floor

stacks of the Senate House library, which I used to be a Convocation Member of until I let it lapse sometime in the late 90's. When you start your life, everywhere you go is about possibilities, but lately I've been noticing that it's more about memories. Fifty-five is an odd age. They say that the brain re-arranges itself in adolescence: I wonder if that happens in whichever part of middle-age I'm in. I could be full of remorse for all the things I didn't do, but somehow, it's as if that part of my life is gone, and I'm starting a new one.

Christmas Logistics

Okay, a really short one today. It's Christmas, a time of year that always takes me by surprise because I forget that the world closes for four days in nine. The 24th is a half-day and the shops are emptying out, the 25th and 26th are closed and then the days between that and the 30th are on half-speed, with the 31st another half-day and the 1st a Bank Holiday. Only the British could decide to have a two week semi-vacation in the depth of winter - a sensible nation would do it in, oh, July. Except the sun rarely shines in July these days. I've taken the week off to use up my holidays for the year, but it doesn't feel as restful as the other weeks do, because I have all these logistics about food to cope with. Basically Wednesday is the last day we can get food before Sunday. And don't hold out too much hope that the supermarkets will have a decent stock of anything on Sunday. Monday I'm back at work but half the cafes and sandwich bars in the West End will be shut. Now I think of it, I've been doing just-in-time inventory for food way before the car industry. And Christmas plays havoc with it. Easter is just as closed, but the crowds aren't as desperate. That's what really puts me off: the sheer desperation on everyone's faces as they rush round the shops, stocking up on stuff to have a "good time". I intend watching a few choice DVD's and trying to finish Enjoy Your Symptoms.