Death, nothingness, and subjectivity

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 1994 by Thomas W. Clark

In proposing this, I don't mean to suggest that there exist some supernatural, death-defying connections between consciousnesses which could somehow preserve elements of memory or personality. This is not at all what I have in mind, since material evidence suggests that everything a person consists of--a living body, awareness, personality, memories, preferences, expectations, and the rest--is erased at death. Personal subjective continuity as I defined it above requires that experiences be those of a particular person; hence, this sort of continuity is bounded by death. So when I say that you should look forward at death to the "subjective sense of always having been present," I am speaking rather loosely, for it is not you--not this set of personal characteristics--that will experience "being present." Rather, it will be another set of characteristics (in fact, countless sets) with the capacity, perhaps, for completely different sorts of experience. But despite these (perhaps radical) differences, it will share the qualitatively very same sense of always having been here and, like you, will never experience its cessation.

Transformation and Generic Subjectivity

To help make this shared, continuing sense of "always having been present" more concrete, I want to embark on a thought experiment of the Rip Van Winkle variety. So imagine, in the perhaps not so distant future, that we develop the technology to reliably stop and then restart biological processes. One could, if one wished, be put "on hold" for an indefinite period and then be "started up" again. (Some trusting and perhaps naive people have already had their brains or entire bodies frozen in the expectation of just such technology. In essence, one is put to sleep and then awakened after however many years with memories and personality intact.

From the point of view of the subject, such a suspension of consciousness would seem no different from a normal night's sleep or, for that matter, an afternoon nap. The length of the unconscious interval--minutes, years, or centuries--makes no difference. There is simply the last experience before being suspended and then the first experience upon reactivation, with no experienced gap or interval of nothingness in between. In principle, a subject could lie dormant for millions of years, to awaken with no sense of time having passed except, of course, the clues given by the changed circumstances experienced upon regaining consciousness. Personal subjective continuity would have been preserved across the eons.

Next, suppose that during the unconscious period (the length of which is unimportant for the point I'm about to make) changes in memories or personality, or both, take place, either deliberately or through some inadvertent process of degradation. I go to sleep as TC and wake up as TC/mod. (Readers are encouraged to substitute their own initials in what follows. If the changes aren't too radical, then I (and others) will be able to reidentify myself as TC, albeit a modified version, whose differences from the original I might or might not be able to pinpoint myself. ("Funny, I don't remember ever having liked calf s liver before. Was I always this grumpy? I wonder if this suspension technique really worked as well as they claimed Assuming this sort of reidentification is possible, personal subjective continuity is still preserved across the unconscious interval. There would be no subjective gap or pause between the last experience of TC and the first experience of TC/mod. For TC/mod, TC was never not here. There is simply one block of experience, the context of which suffered an abrupt but manageable alteration when TC woke up as TC/mod.