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Meredith Michaels -- "Persons, Brains, and Bodies"

Meredith Michaels believes that theories such as Locke's ignore the importance that our BODIES have for our identity. While not going so far as to claim that the body alone determines identity, Michaels does think that it is at least as important as one's memory.

HISTORICAL ASIDE: The devaluation of the body (in its relation to identity) has a long history in the West. Ancient Greek philosophers (especially Plato) emphasized that inferiority of the physical to the mental. Christianity (influenced by Greek metaphysics) extended this, identifying many bodily needs and desires as sinful or evil. It is not surprising, then, that most modern Western accounts of personal identity focus on areas other than the physical.

The Wanda-Schwanda story is an attempt to (1) isolate different elements of one's physical being to see which seems to be most important to our sense of ourselves, and (2) test the memory theory of identity (i.e. Locke's view). Is this new entity (your brain in Wanda's body) you, is it Wanda or is it neither (or both)?

The Lockean circle (described on p. 30) is a standard criticism of Locke's view. In essence, the claim is that memory cannot be the criterion for personal identity because memory pre-supposes the existence of personal identity. Here it is in more detail:

Locke believes that consciousness (which includes both awareness of oneself and the memory of one's past experiences) constitutes one's identity.

1. So the claim "Smith is the same person who did or witnessed X" (where X is some action or event) will be true if and only if Smith has the memory of either doing or witnessing X.

2. How can we tell if one's memory is genuine? The most logical criterion is this: for a memory to be genuine, the person having the memory must be the same person as the one who had the initial experience which the memory is about.

3. But look closely at the preceding statement; if the only way a memory can be genuine is if the person having the memory actually had the experience in question, then it looks like we are pre-supposing the existence of the person in order to check the validity of the memory. (Put differently, to see if the memory is valid, we need to know if there is a person who had that experience; if so, then we can check to see if the person having the memory is the same as the one who had the experience). That's a problem, because our whole point in checking the validity of the memory is to verify the identity of the person in question. If at some point in this process we end up pre-supposing what we are trying to demonstrate, that's an example of circular reasoning , and is logically invalid.

So how does this apply to the Schwanda/Wanda case? Simple: if Schwanda (your body + Wanda's brain) is having only Wanda memories, then according to Locke she is Wanda if these memories are genuine. To determine if they are genuine, we need to know if the person having these memories really had the experiences she is remembering. But that's just the question we're trying to answer...we want to know who is the person who is having these memories -- is it Schwanda, Wanda, or you? So Locke's memory criterion won't help us here.

Michaels then turns to a reconsideration of Aristotle's Body theory of identity, which states that personal identity = bodily identity. (If I possess Mark Hébert's body, then I'm Mark Hébert, pure and simple).