Mark Johnston

“Surviving Death”

Chapter 4, pp. 270 - 297

 The Radical Reversal (pp. 270-274)
A characteristic of a fully fledged person:
• his/her anticipatable future interests figure among the default starting points in
his present practical reasoning.
• he/she must have some conception of personal identity over time, which
determines what futures, and what future interests, could turn out to be his as
opposed to someone else's.
How does a person then learn the appropriate extent of this future-directed
concern?

We naturally and obviously are animals of a certain species.

None of the three communities has a concept of personal identity that exactly
coincides with the life of a human animal:
• The Hibernators find many persons within the life of a single human animal;
• the Human Beings suppose that anyone of them could in principle outlive his
"animal" at least if his head or brain is kept alive and functioning;
• Teletransporters bundle together many human animals into the life of a single
 Acculturation and internalisation of narratives of personal
identity: the narrative of personal identity as an unquestioned
frame.

“Instead it seems that a person learns the appropriate extent of his

future-directed concern by being brought up within an unquestioned
(even if not fully determinate) narrative of personal identity, a frame
taken for granted by the community in which he comes to self-
awareness. The narrative of personal identity will not so much be a
story we tell our children but an unquestioned frame that shapes and
bounds the stories we tell our children, even the transgressive stories
in which people turn into frogs and snakes and dragons.” (p. 271)

The narratives of personal identity cause developing persons to do

something that itself settles their actual and possible extent over time.
Thanks to the framing narrative we acquire some basic future-
oriented disposition that helps fix the kind of future we can have. As
the details of this disposition vary, there will be different kinds of
available futures determined.

Radical reversal defined: personal identity as response-dependent

“For it amounts to the view that personal identity, far from being an
independent justifier of certain future-oriented dispositions,
something that requires and justifies those dispositions, is in a
particular way “response-dependent,” that is, partly determined by
certain dispositions a person has at a particular time. This is nothing
less than a radical reversal of the natural, and to that extent intuitive,
order of justification and explanation.” (p.272)

Radical inversion provides an evenhanded treatment three

communities.
Claim of response-dependence
The Error Theory
“The colors, or more exactly the properties of having this or that
shade as your surface, volume, or radiant color.” (p.272)

The naive view of color perception:

• The colors present as qualities that pervade surfaces, volumes, and
certain kinds of light.
• In the case of surface color X, being X is most naturally
understood as having the quality X spread out over your surface.
• The colors present like very thin paints, and your surface gets to be
colored by having one of these paints cover your surface.
Non-simple view of colour:
“However, we seem pressed to give up this simple view of color
properties thanks to another central condition on the property of
being cherry red and the like. Being cherry red is a visible property,
which entails that it must enter differentially into the causal
explanation of our visual experience; something's being cherry red
must causally explain its standardly appearing so.”

The crucial distinction between the quality and the property

(Footnote 17, p. 273):
“Almost all work on the philosophy of color, my own early work
included, ignores the crucial distinction between cherry red and being
cherry red, i.e., between the quality that is the shade or color and the
i

property that having that shade as your surface, volume or radiant

is

color. ”
 Dispositions produce experiences

“What really seems explanatory are the dispositions of surfaces to

produce experiences as of cherry red, dispositions had by surfaces
thanks to their micro-physical and hence light-reflective properties.
A surface has the property of being cherry red if and only if and
because it has the disposition to look red to standard perceivers under
standard conditions.” (p. 273)

Simple view vs. response-dependent reversal

“On the simple view, our responses-our visual experiences as of the
color properties of things-are to be judged correct or incorrect
because of how things independently are with respect to color. On the
response-dependent reversal there is no such independent criterion of
correctness or incorrectness of our responses. Rather, it is our
responses that determine how things are with respect to the colors
that we see.” (p. 273)
 Colour vision is species relative: there is no correct vision of
colour
毛嬙麗姬，人之所美也。魚見之深入，鳥見之高飛，麋鹿見之
決驟。四者孰知天下之正色哉？《莊子。齊物論》
“There is no room for the thought that it is the human beings and
not, say, the birds who are getting on to the real color properties had
by things.”
by the same token
Narratives of personal identity are community relative
“Whereas the naive intuitive view is that the holding of the relation of
personal identity independently justifies certain future-directed
dispositions, the radical reversal will have it that, within certain
limits, those dispositions make it the case that one or another
restriction of identity counts as personal identity for a given
community! ” (p. 274)
 The Identity Determining Disposition (pp. 274 - 278)

“The identity-determining disposition is obviously not a disposition to desire that

one will survive certain events, for such desires are not self-validating. They are
not satisfied just thanks to the fact that one has them. And it is not a disposition
to believe that one will survive certain events, for such beliefs are not self-
validating; they are not made true just thanks to the fact that one has them.”
“The only kind of disposition that seems even to be a candidate for the status of
an identity-determining disposition is a disposition to somehow deeply and
consistently identify with some future person.”
“Given the radical reversal it will be hard to see how persons who are very far
from being fully fledged in the sense introduced earlier could have fully
determinate futures. Perhaps there is a metaphysical truth in the claim that we
have to treat young children as if they were already Human Beings in order to
get them to be Human Beings.” (p. 274)
 The radical inversion - fundamental attitudes determine facts of
personal identity

“For what we are being asked to contemplate as a result of the radical inversion
is that certain fundamental attitudes we took to be required by the facts of
personal identity are, in reality, part of what determine those facts.” (p. 275.)

The constraints of the the relevant disposition:

1. Practical absorption of future interests. (Identification with the future person)
The disposition to identify in the relevant sense is a disposition to do.
The disposition to absorb the anticipatable legitimate interests of a future person into your present practical outlook.

2. Coordination of the disposition. (Cultivation of the disposition)

The disposition has to be wedded to that person whenever and wherever you take that person to exist.
Then the requirement of coordination has it that the original person now has the disposition to identify in the relevant
sense with C only if he is also now disposed to practically absorb the future interests of C at all times at which he takes C
to exist.
Spurts of altruism vs. consistent altruism
3. Non-mediation of the disposition. (Neutrality of emotional attachment to the
future person)
It is important that the disposition be in a certain way unmediated, that it not depend for its felt intelligibility on an
antecedent liking or admiration of the future person in question, still less on the holding of some special intimate relation
like parenthood.

4. The disposition is not necessarily bounded by individual personality. (The

subsequent change of individual personality)
Disposition is not essentially dependent on that person's continuing to exemplify your present individual personality.

5. Only persons have interests in the relevant sense.

Only persons, that is, reflective intelligent beings that can consider themselves as themselves at various times and places,
have interests.

6. Masking does not defeat the disposition. (Temporary existential suppression

of the disposition)
Dispositions can be masked, and when they are masked they are not lost; their manifestations are suppressed by other
factors.
Many cases of depression, self-loathing, and recklessness will be cases where the disposition to absorb future interests is
masked. Imprudence does not eliminate one's future; it is invariably a masker of an underlying disposition to take that
future into account.
7. A failure in the disposition need not eliminate ones future.The disposition "makes for"
identity, but a subsequent failure in the disposition, a subsequent unfortunate failure to be disposed to absorb the future
interests of a given person, is not enough to guarantee non-identity between the unfortunate and the person in question.

8. “Making for identity” is not making identity happen.

Identity does not hang about waiting to see what two things it will be caused to hold among.
Identity, the relation between a thing and itself, never holds between any two things and never holds temporarily or
accidentally.
The disposition does not affect the holding of the relation of identity; it determines what kind of thing, with what
temporal extent, counts as the person in question.
It selects a more specific relation to be the implementation of the relation of personal identity.

“I am attempting to characterize a certain dispositional structure that is

ordinarily secured by the conviction that one is capable of having a certain
sort of future, and then invert its ordinary role, so that it is instead understood
as the thing that determines or selects the kind of future in question. As
evidenced in the case of the color properties, this is the characteristic kind of
move behind revisionary discoveries of response-dependence.” (p. 278)
 The Solution to Our Problem (pp. 278 - 280 )

Puzzlement:
“What makes it the case that each one of us finds a human being at the relevant
center?
How is it possible to provide an evenhanded treatment of the Human Beings, the
Hibernators, and the Teletransporters without lapsing into an incoherent
relativism about personal identity?”

The key to the solution is this:

“ As the radical reversal implies, different patterns in dispositions to identify, that
is, to absorb future anticipatable interests, select different relations as the relevant
implementations of the relation of personal identity.” (p. 279)
“On the view being proposed, it is not that the facts of personal identity
independently justify our dispositions to identify. Rather, those dispositions to
identify help constitute the relevant facts of personal identity, which in turn
justify those concerns and expectations. This is the radical reversal that comes
with the explanatory hypothesis that personal identity is a response-dependent
matter. ” (pp. 279 - 280)

Appearances strike back and illusions never leave entirely

“Given what was emphasized in lecture two, namely the apparently centered
structure of presence, it is profoundly difficult to maintain a vivid sense that we
are, as I like to put it, "ontological trash;' that we are nowhere near being primary
phenomena, that we are not superlative selves whose natures provide
independent justifiers for self-concern. These claims are not going to be
intuitive. They are forced on us byargu- ment. For a moment one's sense of being
a primary phenomenon can be stunned by argument. But soon, it will return.” (p.
280)
Non-intuitive character of personal identity as response-dependent
“That personal identity is response-dependent is not presented as an initial
intuitive reaction. It arises only in the wake of what philosophers call an “error
theory” about the self. That is, it emerges as an option only after the discovery
that we made in lectures two and three, namely that our subjective life is based
around an illusion. ”
 A False Sense of Our Essence & Refiguring One’s Basic
Dispositions (pp. 280 - 283)

“Each human animal is also a person, a reflective self-conscious being who

must embody his or her identity in one or another concrete way. At the deepest
level, this involves the organization of his or her future- directed concerns. How
that stands at a time determines what kind of person is available to the reflective
self-conscious being that has so organized its future-directed concern, and this
determines what kind of events the reflective conscious being will survive.” (p.
280)

What is the essence of a person? One essence, different ways of

implementation.
Refiguring one's identity-determining dispositions:
can one speak of certain kind of self-cultivation, or techniques of self in the
Foucauldian concept of techniques de soi (from the Greek epimeleia heautou
and the Latin cura sui ). Would one also be tempted to include the 修身、修
道、修心 ?
Teletransportation boot camp for Human Beings
“I believe that there is only one adequate way of extending our thought that
personal identity is partly response-dependent to this kind of case. And it implies
that our Human Being would not be suffering a delusion if the boot camp had
worked on him in the intended way. ” (p. 282)

“An assumption of temporal invariance: If some time is such that your

coordinated and unmediated dispositions at that time determine what you will
survive, then there is nothing special about that time. It is the dispositions that
are doing the work, and if they change in certain ways, then what you can
survive may well change.” (p. 283)
“What we have discovered is that we are in a certain way like the tribe of always
young humans who supposed that old age is not available to them thanks to the
metaphysics of the situation, thanks, that is, to their supposed essence. Like
them, our identities are more flexible than we have taken them to be. The tribe
treated a lifelong phase as if it were fixed by their essence. We Human Beings
have been doing the same thing. We are both victims of a false sense of
necessity.” (p. 283)
Persons are Protean (pp. 283 - 286)
Πρωτεύς
 Protean:
ever-changing, variable, changeable, mutable, fluid, wavering, vacillating,
versatile, flexible and adaptable.
“If refiguring our identity-determining dispositions can open us up to, or close us
off from, certain forms of survival, then there is a sense in which our natures are
Protean.”
“As with Proteus, who could assume the forms of a lion, a leopard, a serpent, or
a pig, our essence could allow changes in our for of embodiment” (p. 283)
This is because:
If the there are no independent justifiers of our self-directed concerns, then:
• The concrete embodiment of our identities as persons is in a certain way up to
us to fill out;
• what we can survive, and the resultant facts of personal identity, are in a
certain way response-dependent.
 The invariant part of our natures as persons:
the thesis that persons are Protean

“A person considered at some time t is (at t) capable of surviving a later event e

if that event is not at odds with the person's identity-determining dispositions at
t. That will be so if there would be a person around after the event e whose
anticipatable interests are such that the person at t is appropriately disposed to
incorporate them into his practical outlook at t. (Note that this condition is only
intended as a sufficient condition. The appropriate disposition is the one
characterized earlier. For example, it must be unmediated and coordinated.)” (p.
284)
“If we could refigure our identity-determining dispositions then what we are (in
the relevant sense) capable of surviving would change. If and when a person
refigures his dispositions, something only apparently essential changes, and
something really essential remains true of him; he remains the sort of thing that
is capable of surviving some event if that event is not at odds with his identity-
determining dispositions.”
“What makes it the case that a given relation is the implementation of the
relation of personal identity for the members of a given community is just that
the members of the community standardly organize their identity-determining
dispositions around that relation. ”
“Nonetheless, the fact that we are Protean, namely that the terms of our survival
depend in this way on our dispositions, is an independent and essential fact about
our natures as persons. Strictly speaking, it is the implementation of personal
identity that is a response-dependent matter, which can vary blamelessly across
communities. Personal identity, the identity over time of the Protean beings we
in fact are, is a response-independent matter. ”
“As reflective beings, who can identify ourselves as ourselves at various times
and places, we must also have some concrete ways of embodying our identity,
that is, some concrete way of organizing our fundamental future-oriented
dispositions. We cannot be simply Protean; we also need some specific way of
embodying that Protean nature by way of some specific identity-determining
dispositions.”
 Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman?
“Being a human being is a phase we could potentially grow out of.”
“Now we see why it is that we seem to find a particular sort of person at the
center (if I am right about us, a human being). The relation around which we
have been organizing our specific identity-determining dispositions is identity
restricted to the kind human being. This is no surprise, since we were all brought
up within the narrative of the human being, and this shaped our fundamental
dispositions. What is a surprise is that the kind human being is not a substance
kind, not a kind that unites its members by way of a shared essence. We have
discovered that it is a phase kind, one we could in principle migrate out of, if we
were to radically re figure our basic dispositions.” (p. 285)
“What fundamentally occupies centers, and so what certain uses of “I” pick out,
are Protean persons. A human being gets to be there at a center because of the
identity-determining dispositions of the Protean person that is there.” (p. 286)
“Whether there is any psycho- logically available way of implementing personal
identity that would be better than our present way of doing so, stretched as it is
over the lives of human beings. Existing as just a human being, surviving only
what a human being would survive, is that the best way for essentially Protean
beings to organize their identity-determining dispositions? ”
 Another Route to the Conclusion (pp. 286 - 289)
Premise:
“The respective claims of the Human Beings and the Teletransporters to be
tracing persons will remain rationally tenable, even under ideal epistemic
conditions.” (p. 286)

Three possibilities stemming out of the premise:

1. Personal identity is an investigation-transcendent matter: we can never find
out what we are, what our conditions of persistence are.
2. Both of the respective claims are correct thanks to the fact that both the
Human Beings and the Teletransporters have organized their dispositions around
an admissible implementation of the relation of personal identity.
3. Conceptual indeterminacy: the concept of personal identity is not fully
determinate, that is, it does not determine every event involving a person as
either definitely a case of that person continuing to exist or definitely a case of
that person ceasing to be.
Is the Persistence of Personalities Response Dependent? (pp. 289
- 291)
The burden of the last two lectures: a strongly revisionary metaphysics of selves and persons -
there are none of the first worth caring about and that the second have a Protean essence:
“That our true essence is Protean, that the correctness of a way of implementing our Protean
natures is a response-dependent matter, is tenable only in the wake of a diagnosis of profound
error in our ordinary ways of thinking about self identity and personal identity. There is no way
that nature or supernature can conform itself to provide for some independent justifier that would
make one way of implementing personal identity the correct way. And there is no sense to be
made of persisting selves, which might privilege one or another candidate to be the personal
identity, say, by persisting as long and only as long as that relation holds. That was the burden of
the last two lectures.” (p. 289)
An Individual Personality
“An individual personality can be thought of as a dynamic aspect of a person, one that persists as
long as the person is able to sustain a distinctive style of agency over time, a style of agency that
requires the holding of certain psychological continuities and connections, and partly enforces
them by way of ongoing commitments to distinctive projects, policies, and relationships.”
The Neo-Lockean necessary condition on identity, the condition of significant psychological
interconnectedness, is better suited to individual personalities rather than persons. (p. 290)
Is the Persistence of Personalities Response Dependent? (pp. 289
- 291)
Individual personality is not response-dependent?:
“Be that as it may, for we are not going to rest much on an appeal to our
intuitions about personal identity in an imaginary case. Nevertheless, as such
cases bring out, the holding of the psychological connections that make for the
persistence of the same individual personality is an objective psychological
matter. It is not a response-dependent matter, one to be determined by our
dispositions to identify with later phases of some individual personality” (p. 290)

Individual personality is partly response-dependent?

“Still, this is enough to show how the response-dependence of the correctness of
a way of implementing personal identity will make the persistence of an
individual personality partly a response-dependent matter. For a given individual
personality survives only if a given person survives, and the survival of a person
is, we have argued, partly a response-dependent matter. ” (p. 291)
 The Other World as an Ethical Epiphenomenon (p. 291 - 293)

Methodological naturalism:
“I believe that the right starting point in the foundation of ethics and the philosophy of religion is
this: Is it possible to ransom any of the genuinely salvific ideas of the major religions from their
supernaturalist captivity, and what price do we have to pay for the ransom?” (p. 291)
Supernaturalism defunct?:
“But if I am right that personal identity, and to that extent individual personality, are partly
response-dependent then it is possible that when it comes to surviving death, supernaturalism is
even more irrelevant than has ever been supposed” (p. 292)
Soul’s inconsistency with agape; Supernaturalism as distracting moral epiphenimenon
“Configuring the relevant dispositions so as to especially identify with the spiritualized individual
who inherits my soul would actually be inconsistent with the central salvific idea of Christianity,
namely the idea of agape, the very form of love are commanded to adopt.
Given the response-dependent element in personal identity, living out the ideal of agape would
make us live on in the onward rush of humankind and not (or not especially) in the supernatural
spaces of heaven, even if such spaces existed and were inhabited by inheritors of our souls.
Even if supernaturalism about death, say the existence of soul-inheritors in an afterlife, were
literally true, this would be morally and religiously speaking a kind of distracting, if not irritating,
epiphenomenon. Our morally urgent postmortem future would remain here on earth in the
onward rush of humankind. ” (p. 293)
A Summary and a Bridge to the Last Lecture (pp. 293 - 296)
 The Life to Come (pp. 296 - 297)
Supernaturalism is a non-starter?:
“After all, the strongest thing that an intellectually responsible person can say
against this refuge is that the massive preponderance of the de- tailed empirical
evidence is against it. That may seem to leave room for faith that the Pauline
stance may still be sustainable, and that (contrary to what Paul himself seemed to
think) its promise will be made true thanks to the existence of souls that can
survive death” (p. 297)
“Thanks to the nature of personal identity and the character of agape, the life to
come is more complicated than is usually imagined. There is more-much more-
to assimilate about your postmortem future. You could not at your death deserve
heaven without also remaining here on earth, multiply embodied in the onward
rush of mankind.” (p. 297)