Facebook, philosophy, identity
further reflection on a conversation with Melissa Cain Travis
Homecoming is a familiar plot in movies and sit-com episodes. By that I don’t mean the story of a high school homecoming dance, and I don’t mean Odysseus’ embattled nostos. I mean a narrative based on a character returning home after so much time away.
I’m sure you’ve seen this: maybe it’s Thanksgiving, a sibling’s wedding, a family funeral that our main character must attend. The story opens on his departure from an adult life lived at blissful distance from childhood family and friends, and it builds on interactions at home with people he knew and who knew him in his life before.
We have the makings of tragedy and/or comedy here. Sometimes our main guy learns a lesson or two; sometimes he falls in love. Invariably he’s confronted with familiar realities he’d just as soon do without— which is a reason for that aforementioned distance.
No matter how the plot turns, we can all identify. The people who have known us longest don’t always know us best, but they often enough know things about us that we’ve outgrown or would just as soon forget. Sometimes these are the very things that those people remember, like to recall, like to remind us of.
Know what I mean?
I remember when Facebook had been a thing for maybe five years or so, and I saw an essay or an op-ed somewhere about a strange dissonance the platform afforded. Before Facebook, the writer said, folks pretty much lived their lives with the people they were proximal to. You may have stayed in the same town or moved miles away, but your dealings were with the people near you— and those with whom you remained in contact.
This contact required phone calls, visits, email, letters— actual snail mail!— and Christmas correspondence. And in this way, one maintained relationships over time with a certain amount of deliberate attention.
Then Facebook brought them all into one’s living room. Not just those on the Christmas card list, but everyone on Facebook— which quickly amounted to a lot of people. In the frenzy of early adoption, one requested and accepted “friends” willy-nilly: why not reconnect with such-and-so? I think he sat behind me in Algebra I!
The essay asked a simple question: are we meant to stay connected with (what feels like) everyone over all this time? Maybe it’s best if we don’t. Maybe we need a little distance sometimes— not just from the people we once knew oh so long ago, but from the person those people once knew us to be.
Maybe this kind of connection inhibits one, be it ever so subtly, from the very human process of growing up. Of growing away from our younger selves.
Because we’re not— are we?— the same person we were in Algebra I.
John Locke (1632-1704) would say we are— if we remember being in Algebra I. For him, diachronic identity (“dia” meaning across and “chronic” from chronos, meaning time) is situated in episodic memory. I remember these episodes: waiting for fifteen long minutes on a train platform when I was six; sitting three seats back in the far right row in Algebra class when I was thirteen; eating a peach at the kitchen sink ten minutes ago.
According to Locke, that consistent consciousness across these events confirms that I am the same person who did each of these things.
This insight came to us here last week through Melissa Cain Travis, a philosopher who examined some theories of identity in her essay on Severance. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Perhaps you’ll recall that Travis explained how Thomas Reid (1710-1796) found fault with Locke’s theory.
He argued that lost memories do not mean loss of identity. What if I forgot everything about Algebra I? Would I no longer be the same person who sat there? Attendance records, old seating charts, and the confirmation of some former classmates could situate me there no matter what I can’t recall.
We discussed this last week, and Travis points it out in her essay: “lost memories cannot possibly mean that personal identity doesn’t extend back to forgotten life events. To be sure, an advanced dementia patient or someone with severe, permanent amnesia is still the same person even if they’ve lost their episodic memories or even all awareness of their earlier lives.”1
This makes sense to us, right?
The church my husband and I are part of meets here. We use the space on Sundays for our community’s worship, but on weekdays the building is a center for neurodiverse people, folks with neurodegenerative disease, and the people who care for them. The professionals here educate caregivers, train volunteers, and provide people with understanding, friendship, and communal activity.
I’ll admit I know little about the brain and how it changes. What I do know I’ve learned in my role as a teacher, gaining understanding about neuroplasticity and how teaching methods and classroom environment can help students learn. But every week while at church I seem to learn something new about degenerative brain change simply by reading a placard or list of support tips tacked on the wall. And I’ve lingered over a series of photos that hangs at the back of the main hall. Each is a photo of a person or persons, paired with a brief biography. Each was impacted by a neurodegenerative disease, and each of them has now died— some in terribly tragic ways— due to that disease.
The unwritten subtext: that with understanding and some focused care, these lives would have ended differently. Gently. They’re the reason this organization came to be.
I’ll just say now for the record that I do in fact remember my Algebra I class. Our teacher was Mr. Greenway, a tall, large, and very kind man who was a huge Pitt basketball fan. He had a voice like a radio announcer, and with his excellent teaching he quickly dispelled my fears of learning Algebra.
I did indeed sit in the third seat back in the far right row. I’m the same person who sat there, but I’m not at all the same. I’ve been married for 35 years. I’ve birthed and reared three children and launched them into the world. Those facts alone have changed me significantly since my days of solving for x.
No matter how long we live, diachronically we remain the same person. At the same time, as Kierkegaard says, we’re always becoming. We don’t know what changes lie ahead for any of us, of course— which is one reason why we need philosophy and theology: they can affirm that all persons, no matter their changes, remain persons of inestimable worth.
Practice To weep unbidden, to wake at night in order to weep, to wait for the whisker on the face of the clock to twitch again, moving the dumb day forward-- is this merely practice? Some believe in heaven, some in rest. We'll float, you said. Afterward we'll float between two worlds-- five bronze beetles stacked like spoons in one peony blossom, drugged by lust: if I came back as a bird I'd remember that-- until everyone we love is safe is what you said. -- Ellen Bryant Voigt
More to come on identity: bodies and souls. And more to come on other things as well, but this is all for now.
Thanks so much for being here.
With joy,
Rebecca
https://www.equip.org/articles/persons-dont-disintegrate-apple-tvs-severance-and-the-continuity-of-identity-problem/
Thank you, Rebecca. This latest entry and your recent vid of a conversation with Prof. Travis reminded me of an unpublished poem I wrote for my wife 10 yrs ago. Within the space of a few months, we discovered both that my father had Parkinson's and that Tracey's mother had developed a type of memory loss. We were both wrestling with who we become once we lose certain memories--something I'd seen explored in plenty of sci-fi tales, but which had now become immediately real as we considered our own futures. Note the Seuss vibe in the opening 🙂.
“Memories”
A memory’s a memory no matter how small--
how wistful, or giddy, or un-com-fort-a-ble.
However unkempt, lopsided, or strange,
every thought we spawn lingers—our life helps arrange.
One may alter its color, shape, texture and size,
may bury a fact, or mix hard truth with lies.
A memory might shrink to the size of a pea,
or swallow the present and all we can see.
It cannot, however, be squashed by intent,
be flooded by tears or by fury be rent.
If one fades with disuse or is stolen by time,
its echo still bounces in step with life’s rhyme.
For life is a lane inscribed by Divine math,
and memories the stones which pebble our path.
When age finally freezes our heads in one place,
The road behind lingers . . . our children to trace.
Thank you for these meditations, Rebecca! I read along with you as you read it out loud.
My husband’s uncle and his father, Randy’s grandpa, both died of such brain diseases you mentioned. Do you remember hearing our mother regularly thank God for “a sound mind”? I am more and more thankful as I get older.
I qualify as a “senior” in some situations. I am slowly becoming an old woman… though I am not there yet. But I see the connection. Years ago, when even age 40 seemed impossible, I had the vision of a vision: a very old woman remembering her younger self; remembering herself as a little girl, running and spinning on the grass. Imagining she had a sound mind, I saw that she recognized herself in that memory; she knew she was exactly that child, one and the same person. And yet now she was very old and very far from running and spinning. And I realized that everyone with some years behind them and a sound mind can do the same, and that’s what Ecclesiastes 3:11 means. God has “set eternity in the human heart.”