Persistence Through Time

 

In virtue of what do material objects persist through time? This is not a difficult question to answer: the particles composing the object must persist through time (enough of them anyway) and they must stay spatially related to each other in the same way over time (to a sufficient degree). If you destroy all the particles, or disperse them to the wind, then the object ceases to exist. Normally objects cease to exist because of the latter circumstance not the former, since particles are pretty much indestructible: the object disintegrates and its erstwhile particles scatter abroad. This answer is not the same as the following answer: the successive stages of the object are similar and there is a causal connection between these stages. That answer says nothing about particles and their spatial relations. And it is vulnerable to counterexamples that don’t affect the first answer: what if all the particles are destroyed and a new set put in their stead—isn’t that a numerically distinct object that is just like the previous object? It doesn’t matter if the former state of the object causes the latter—we still have a numerically distinct (but qualitatively identical) object. There would be an appearance of identity over time, but the facts would belie the appearance. God (or an evil demon) could be doing this all the time, thus producing an illusion of persistence. Nor is similarity a necessary condition, since objects change a lot. You might say that the positions of the particles also change a lot over time, but we need not insist on exact preservation of position, so long as the particles don’t separate entirely and head off in different directions.[1] The basic point is that the particles need to maintain a certain spatial cohesion. That, at any rate, is the rough idea of what the persistence of material objects consists in: particles sticking together. This is how we think of the persistence of such objects over time.

            But when it comes to persons or selves or subjects or egos or souls this paradigm breaks down. For we cannot identify the particles that compose selves and we have no idea of their spatial relations. We can do this for the bodies of selves, so we know what we are talking about with respect to these entities; but the self isn’t the body, so we can’t just borrow its persistence conditions. The brain too persists in virtue of particle cohesion, but we have no idea what this could mean for the self: what are its particles and what kind of cohesion? The self isn’t a congeries of material particles (or immaterial ones). Its relation to the body and brain is unclear, so we can’t transfer an explanation of persistence from one to the other. The mind-body problem thus affects the problem of personal identity over time. Lacking this resource, people are apt to settle for the kind of theory I just rejected: personal persistence consists in qualitative similarity with (or without) causal connection. But this is intuitively too weak, and arguably also too strong. More important, it is the wrong kind of theory. It leads to notoriously problematic cases such as teletransportation: is the person who appears from nowhere on a distant planet really the person who entered the transportation booth or just someone very similar? If we could say that the particles of the person (not the body!) had all been destroyed or dispersed, then we could assert that the original person no longer exists (though a twin has appeared far away from where he or she was last seen); but that is precisely what we are not allowed to say, because we have no notion of what such particles (small parts) might be, or how they must be related over time. The paradigm of material object persistence doesn’t carry over and we have nothing to put in its place, so we are left fumbling in the dark. The mystery of the self (closely connected to the mystery of consciousness) prevents us from answering the persistence question in the standard way, and no other way suggests itself. In brief: personal persistence is a mystery. This is why we find ourselves so puzzled about whether we do persist over time, as we don’t find ourselves similarly puzzled for the case of material objects. It is the same table over time, because the parcel of particles has persisted, but am I the same person as yesterday? Am I perhaps just a duplicate self that appeared this morning when I woke up? There seems nothing to ground my identity over time. Maybe something does ground it, objectively speaking, but I am ignorant about what it is. The persistence of the conscious self is as mysterious as the consciousness that defines it, not surprisingly. Not that there is nothingmysterious about material object persistence, but personal persistence introduces another layer of mystery—it doesn’t conform to the relatively easy case of rocks and tables. Some sort of personal atomism would restore the parallel, but that seems like a remote dream in our current state of knowledge.[2]

 

[1] We should allow for the case of organic entities that replace their particles every few years, but here we still have particle composition and particle position. It’s not like simply annihilating the particles and replacing them with a new particle configuration in the same place at some later time. Also, it is not at all clear that organic entities are really material objects given that their identity conditions are independent of the material objects that compose them (they are not aggregates of particles). They are closer to form than matter.

[2] I am thinking of Derek Parfit’s work here, but others have had similar ideas. What I say here also applies to survival without identity—we don’t know what it is for the self to survive. It can’t be the aggregate of particles that forms part of the brain because the self can’t be analyzed that way. At most this is a correlate of personal survival.

 

 

Music and Language

 

The analogies and connections between music and language are striking. This is most apparent in the case of song, but it applies quite generally. Music is made up of notes, phrases, bars, tunes, riffs, verses, movements, symphonies, operas, albums, etc. It has compositional structure. It proceeds from a finite base and generates a potential infinity of combinations. There are introductions and conclusions. Speech has melodic properties, pitch variation, pauses and crescendos. Music comprises rhythm as well as melody, some of it predominantly rhythmic. Poetry forms an intermediate link between the two. We use the vocal apparatus for both. We hear tunes in our head as well as words. Arrangements of words can suggest melodies to us, carrying a kind of latent melodic structure. Children learn music and language at roughly the same time, and have an innate aptitude for both. Both involve the internalization of rules and patterns (scales and grammar). There is a sensitive period for language learning and probably also for musical learning. We tend to be wedded to the forms of our own language and also to the musical forms to which we were early exposed. Language and music are universal to the human species and contain universal properties, though culture clothes each differently. They both have a social dimension and are used communicatively. No other species possesses both aptitudes, though there may be glimmers of them in other species. Both require a process of segmentation to divide up the incoming auditory stimulus into discrete units of sound. They clearly interact all the time, song being the obvious point of intersection. It would be wrong to identify them or claim some kind of priority of one over the other, but they coexist in mutually supportive ways. Songwriters make a profession of fusing them, and the brains of listeners respond to the fusion. Each has production and reception aspects: we make music and listen to it, as we produce utterances and comprehend them. Each admits of a competence-performance distinction. There is an abstract underlying structure to both as well as a sensorimotor expression: we hum and whistle tunes while tacitly cognizing and computing musical forms, and we utter words while unconsciously processing syntax. There are hidden dimensions as well as conscious manifestations. The major scale is not English grammar, but the two function similarly. Notes are discrete entities arranged into rule-governed patterns, as words are discrete entities arranged into grammatical sentences. Both can be said to express emotions and to be about something.

            Given these points of analogy and overlap, it might be useful to apply them to two well-known theories of language—those of Chomsky and Wittgenstein. Can Chomsky’s theoretical apparatus be applied to music, and can Wittgenstein’s characteristic ideas be similarly applied? I will be brief about both questions. I have already mentioned innateness, universality, sensitive periods, and competence and performance with respect to music; and the application of these notions to musical ability is obviously plausible, if not platitudinous. Less obvious is the question of cognitive architecture: what comparisons can be made at this level? I would emphasize the distinction between underlying competence and sensorimotor vehicle: linguistic competence is generally expressed in vocal speech, but this is not essential, as witness sign language.[1] Is something similar true of musical ability? Isn’t it always tied to the auditory and vocal? Yes, but this does not appear to be a necessary truth: we can imagine beings that possess our musical competence but lack our auditory faculties. That is, the abstract mathematics of music, involving pitch variation and rhythm, might be grasped by them but expressed via a different sense, say vision. They might see musical forms—melodies in the shape of patterns of light. No doubt their aesthetic experience would be very different from ours, but their brains could be performing the same abstract computations as ours as they process the visual input. For them musical form would be expressed in the way dance expresses musical form for us. If dance is music made visual, then their light shows would also be music made visual. They might even enjoy visual muzak. The point is that deep cognitive competence is separate from sensorimotor expression in both cases. Some aspects of what we call music derive from the abstract structure and some from the contingent sensorimotor system—just as Chomsky suggests that the same is true for language and vocal speech. Second, music is hierarchical: it consists of strings of notes that break down according to hierarchical principles. One musical phrase may be composed of other phrases that together form a structured whole. There are recurrent elements and backward-looking resolutions. There are “meaningless” combinations of notes just arbitrarily strung together. Chomsky talks about the Merge operation that generates new wholes recursively: the operation joins one linguistic unit with another, which can then combine with other units, and so on up.[2] And the same thing is true of musical forms: one note gets Merged with another, thus forming a new unit that can be Merged with another. Musical compositions are formed by a process of something like recursive combination. The mind has to grasp this structure in order to comprehend the musical piece. For example, we must keep track of the root note in order to appreciate a “return to the root”, and the “blue” note is defined by its place in a series of notes. We can break a symphony down into movements, themes, phrases, and individual notes—and similarly for a song composed of verses and chorus. So musical and linguistic comprehension involve a similar (but not identical) set of cognitive capacities, in particular an appreciation of hierarchical structure. Tree diagrams capture this structure in both cases, as they do for other hierarchical systems.

We can thus envisage a cognitive science of music similar to a cognitive science of language. Many of the same basic ideas will apply; the Chomskian apparatus will be applicable to both. There is an innate competence genetically represented, a natural and predetermined learning period, an outer expression and an inner architecture, an abstract structure capable of multiple sensorimotor externalizations, a computational procedure that generates infinitely many combinations from a finite base of primitive units, and a sharp competence-performance distinction. If we imagine an alternative intellectual history in which these ideas first gained a foothold in the study of music, then we can picture a theorist urging a similar approach in the study of language as against entrenched empiricist-behaviorist assumptions. As it is, we have Chomsky’s basic approach developed for the case of language first and then extended in the direction of music (or so I am suggesting). In my alternative history Chomsky’s counterpart writes books called Musical Structures, Music and Mind, and Aspects of the Theory of Music. He revolutionizes the field of musicology, construed as the study of musical psychology. It’s not all Markov processes, conditioned responses, blank slates, and Verbal Behavior (Chomsky’s counterpart writes a review of a book entitled Musical Behavior by the well-known Harvard psychologist B.F. Skynner).

            In the case of Wittgenstein we can imagine a similar possible world in which his counterpart, call him Wettgenstein, recapitulates the actual man’s history but in the field of music. In this imaginary world the philosophy of music is regarded as the central area of philosophy (they have a very musical culture) not the philosophy of language. Wettgenstein’s first work Tractatus Mathematico-Musicus is concerned with this subject and advances a highly abstract theory of the nature of music. It begins with the resounding words, “The world of music is a totality of tunes, not of notes”. He goes on to assert that tunes are complexes of simple notes. Auditory sequences mirror these complexes construed as objective features of the universe (“the music of the spheres”). A note is not a readily perceptible sound but a metaphysical posit. An auditory experience of music pictures these Platonic-Pythagorean entities by means of lines of projection. This is the hidden essence of musical form as we experience it. The mathematical properties of music are stressed. Heard music is held not to be capable of expressing the pictorial relation between itself and musical reality—this can only be shown by music. Music is really an abstract calculus tenuously related to what we actually hear. There is such a thing as an ideal musical notation capturing the form of the musical facts. Music is something sublime and otherworldly. So said Wettgenstein’s Tractatus, albeit obscurely. But in his later period he revised this theory of music: in his posthumous work Musical Investigations he rejected his earlier theory and replaced it with a new set of ideas (he was wary of calling this a theory). Here he spoke of musical games, musical practices and customs, music as use, of our musical form of life, of the rules of music, of the music of other tribes, of the concept of music as a family resemblance concept, and allied ideas. He repudiated his earlier static pictorial theory and replaced it with a dynamic behavior-centered theory. He compared his new theory with an already existing theory of language that mobilized the same set of ideas: for it was accepted by everyone that language functioned in the way Wettgenstein now claimed that music does. For instance, everyone believed that the concept of language is a family resemblance concept, so Wettgenstein could call on this acceptance to motivate his new theory of music–that there is no one thing in common to everything we call music just a series of overlaps and surface similarities in the heterogeneous musical family. There is nothing hidden to music—no deep structure—just a human social practice. It has a purpose, a role in our lives, but it isn’t any kind of sublime supernatural abstract structure. True, music can sometimes bewitch us as to its nature, but if we study it in its context of use we can see that there is nothing “queer” going on. Music is like language: a motley collection of old and new games with no underlying essence. It is a mistake to criticize one sort of music for not resembling another sort. Music is like a city composed of old and new buildings—just like language. There is nothing sacrosanct about the major scale! Other cultures use other musical scales and are none the worse off for it. Music is part of our natural history, like eating, drinking, etc. So the later Wettgenstein contended (still obscurely however).

            The actual Wittgenstein, despite being highly musical himself, says little about music in his Philosophical Investigations, preferring to draw his analogies from games; but we can envisage him invoking music in order to make his points about language. For music does appear to fit many of his suggestions: there are a great many types of music, music is woven into our daily lives, it is an activity that occurs over time, it is rule-governed, and it doesn’t lend itself to abstract theory. A theory (“description”) of music is really an anthropological exercise not a mathematical one—as Wittgenstein claimed for language. I am not saying Wittgenstein is right to see things this way, only that it would be natural for him to include music in his thinking; it could be used to support many of his contentions about language. In fact at one point he does bring in music to explain a point about meaning: in section 184 of the Investigations he discusses remembering a tune and asks, “What was it like to suddenly know it?” He says it can’t be that the tune occurred to the person “in its entirety at that moment!” Yet it must have been present in some sense—but in what sense, he asks. This is a version of a general problem he discusses particularly in relation to meaning: how I can know at a particular moment the meaning of a word if the meaning is the temporally extended use. He is raising a question in the philosophical psychology of music to illuminate a question about language and meaning. My point is that he could have invoked music in other contexts to advance his contentions—e.g. to explain his idea that language is a family resemblance concept, or to explore the concept of rule following. In fact it has been cogently argued that game is not a family resemblance concept, since it can be precisely defined; but no such thing has ever been done for the concept music.[3] On the face of it, Wittgenstein’s general theoretical apparatus applies quite naturally to music, so it would have been a good model to use to develop such a view of language. No one would think that a Tractatus-like view of music was correct (pace early Wettgenstein)!

            Music is not central to philosophy and psychology as they are currently practiced (it is consigned to aesthetics), but it has some promise of providing a useful area of comparison to other cases (as well as being interesting in its own right). It fits well with the perspectives developed by both Chomsky and Wittgenstein (different as they are). This is why it is helpful to consider what intellectual history would look like if music not language were the central focus of inquiry in both fields. As things stand we can only note the parallels and wonder how the subject would look if pushed further. I don’t see much prospect of a fundamental unification, but heuristically the comparison has its virtues.[4]                      

 

[1] See Berwick and Chomsky, Why Only Us (2016), p.74f.

[2] See Chomsky, What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2016), chapter 1.

[3] See Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper (1978), for a definition of games.

[4] We can imagine a book written by a Kripke counterpart about Wettgenstein’s Musical Investigations that claims to find a skeptical paradox at the heart of it about musical rule following. How do we know that a musician is following the major scale, say, given that his behavior so far is compatible with using some deviant scale in the future?

Identity of Selves

 

It is plausibly urged that there can be no identity without identity conditions (“criteria”): for example, material objects are identical in virtue of being spatiotemporally coincident, or sets are identical if and only if they share their members. Likewise, we could say that distinctness requires conditions (“criteria”) of distinctness: no two things can be distinct without this distinctness consisting in something, such as difference of spatial location or diversity of set membership. Distinct things must be distinguished by something, in virtue of something, as a consequence of something; they can’t be just barely distinct, primitively so, inexplicably so. This principle meets with no ready counterexample: material objects are distinguished by their location, sets by their members, events by their causes and effects, numbers by their position in an arithmetical series, hairstyles by their shape, and so on. But what about selves—what distinguishes them from each other? What does the (alleged) fact of distinctness consist in here?[1] We normally think we are distinct selves from other people (as we say), but what kind of fact is that: can it be seen and heard, can it be detected, can it be conceived? It is easy to appreciate that it can’t be spatial location, because selves don’t have (definite) spatial location (save derivatively on bodies); and if they did it need not coincide with the location of the body or brain (there could be several selves in one body or brain and a single self spread across several bodies). It is not even clear that selves could not all occupy a single location. Nor do selves have the identity and distinctness conditions of sets or numbers or hairstyles. They need their own sui generis identity and distinctness conditions. We can’t say they are distinguished by overall mental state (including character and personality), because distinct selves can have identical overall mental state and because mental state changes over time (and across possible worlds). Intuitively, the self (ego, subject, soul, “I”) is a transcendent entity not reducible to any other category of thing with its distinctive identity and distinctness conditions. It is a kind of vanishing point, a pure locus of awareness, an indefinable something, not even in the world. This entity is not distinguished from others of its kind by anything perceptible, or even thinkable. It is thus a prime candidate for the null identity condition: selves are distinct from each other just in virtue of being selves—primitively, inexplicably. They may indeed be the only entities in reality with this property—the bare-distinctness property. My self differs from your self just in virtue of being a distinct self; nothing further can be said. That would certainly be surprising and anomalous, but (it may be claimed) it just has to be accepted: when I look at another person I must say to myself, “That self is not identical to this self (me), but I have no idea what makes them non-identical”.[2]

            But there is an alternative to this unsatisfactory conclusion, namely that selves are not distinct. We don’t even know what it would be for selves to be distinct. We talk this way, but we don’t know what it means. Rather, what it is to be a self is to be the only self, as a matter of conceptual necessity: for there is no coherent concept of self non-identity. We know what bodily non-identity is, or brain non-identity, or overall mental state non-identity: but we don’t know what it is for selves to be non-identical. There is simply no fact that could constitute such distinctness. No fact that we can produce adds up to the alleged fact of self-distinctness. The only proper conclusion then is that there are no such facts, and hence no such thing as a plurality of selves. Compare God: suppose someone maintains that God could have a twin or a very similar God-like brother. Theological scruples aside the problem with this suggestion is that there is nothing for such a distinction between gods to consist in, since God does not exist in time and space (or is arranged in a certain position in a series of gods). Any being like God would have to be God, because the grounds of possible distinctness don’t exist where God exists. Nor has anyone ever supposed otherwise (the Greek gods existed here on earth): God isn’t a spatial being so his distinctness from other gods couldn’t consist in a difference of spatial location. It is the same with the self: spatial separation can’t be the ground of self-distinctness (this is most obvious when we consider dualism). The difference is that we can perceive the bodies of human selves but we can’t perceive God’s body (he doesn’t have one), so we easily slide into self-pluralism for human selves but not for the divine self. But human selves don’t admit of plurality either since they have no conditions of identity and distinctness.[3] It is impossible for selves to be distinct—there can be no such fact. The single human (and animal) self has many different states of which particular creatures may be conscious, but these states have but one subject, which participates in the life of each creature. Believers in metempsychosis think that a single self can exist in different animal bodies over time, so that each animal shares a single self; the same thing could be held about the selves (sic) that exist simultaneously in human and animal bodies—there is just one despite an appearance of multiplicity. The various animal forms mask the identity of the reincarnated subject for believers in metempsychosis; according to self-monism, the diversity of bodies masks the underlying identity of conscious subject. And this means the necessary identity of conscious subjects, since selves constitutionally have no identity and distinctness conditions—they must therefore be all one. Appearances must be illusory; or else there are no such actual appearances, just a metaphysical prejudice. If you ask the man or woman in the street whether he or she is identical self-wise with other people, you are not likely to get a firm reply. True, people distinguish themselves from each other according to material-object and individual-organism criteria, but do they consciously think that their innermost self is ontologically distinct from other such selves? Maybe they could quickly be brought round to the self-monism doctrine (apparently it is widespread in the East). After all, the principle that difference requires differentiation has the look of self-evidence; and no one thinks it’s easy to say what a self is, or where one begins and ends. At any rate, it would be too strong to say that a belief in a plurality of selves arises simply from the operation of the senses like other illusions: it really doesn’t look to me as if I am not the same self as you (contrast the lines in the Muller-Lyer illusion). Perhaps we can be said to have discovered by philosophical argument that all selves are one and the same, but this may just be a piece of knowledge added to a previous agnosticism or simple lack of interest, not a revision of what the senses tell us about the self. Admittedly, according to self-monism it is true that we marry ourselves, love and hate ourselves, compete with ourselves, help ourselves out, or harm ourselves; but we need not regard ourselves as otherwise identical, because the same self can have a different body, personality, and lifespan. Your spouse may indeed share your self but not your body and your body’s history—these are distinct from yours. The self is a pretty rarified and obscure thing, so it won’t matter much practically whether other people share yours or not—though the felt gulf between oneself and others (human and animal) may well strike us as less wide and sharp under the new dispensation. We make errors of identity all the time (as Frege reminded us): this one is just more metaphysical than most, and therefore less practically important. Depending on temperament, it may gladden the heart or wound one’s pride (the prince is the same self as the pauper, the judge and criminal likewise). I myself welcome a deeper kinship with animal selves, while finding my identity with other human selves mildly disagreeable, but that’s just me. What is most startling perhaps is that this state of affairs could not be otherwise: it is built into the nature of selves that there can only be one of them, simply because there is nothing (no fact) for the distinctness of selves to consist in. I really don’t know what it would be to be someone other than me.

[1] I put it this way to remind the reader of the Kripke-Wittgenstein discussion of meaning. Kripke asks what fact could constitute meaning and comes up with nothing; similarly we can ask what fact constitutes the distinctness of selves and we come up with nothing. Therefore, it may seem, meaning doesn’t exist and selves don’t either; but we can save meaning and the self by adopting a radical revision in how we think of them, as will become apparent. We avoid a “skeptical paradox” by rethinking our habitual conception of the things in question. In both cases, we give up the picture of the isolated particular.

[2] This would be like adopting an irreducibility view of meaning in the face of the Kripke-Wittgenstein challenge: it is just a brute fact that one self is numerically distinct from another, as it is a brute fact that “+” means addition. That kind of response may have some plausibility for meaning, but for the self is runs hard up against the principle that there can be no distinctness without distinctness conditions (which holds for even the simplest kinds of entity such as elementary particles). Not for nothing has the self been deemed peerlessly problematic. We don’t even know how to count them! It’s a lot simpler to think there is just the one.

[3] The closest analogy I can find is universals: what makes one universal distinct from another? Not spatial location obviously, and not position in a series, or membership, or shape: but we can say that universals differ when they admit of different instantiations—or else they would indeed collapse into each other. The self seems unique in its lack of differentiating conditions. Solipsism turns out to be true, but not in the way it was originally intended. (Another option, of course, is that selves don’t exist at all.)