In a 2022 book about the fear of death and the desire for immortality, Dean Rickles refers to a an example the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid gave to demonstrate his belief that, in Rickles’ words, “It is often difficult to speak of an enduring self even in perfectly ordinary (mortal) scenarios.” (p. 12)

Reid’s example is about an 80-year-old general who can remember being 40 but cannot remember what his life was like when he was a child. (He seems to have no memories left of his childhood.) Reidevidently argued that we would consider the 80-year-old and the 40-year-old the same person (the former being the continuation of the latter) and that we would consider the 40-year-old man who could remember details about his childhood the same person as he was when a child, but that we should not consider an 80-year-old who is unable to have any recollection of his childhood the same continuing ‘self’ as that child.

If I haven’t done justice to Reid’s argument, it is because I’m anxious to present it in a symbolic way and then to demolish it using more modern ways of thinking we now have that were not available to Reid. (And even though we have access to these ways of thinking, it’s my experience that they are not anywhere close to widely appreciated or employed in the United States.)

The symbolic form of the argument is this:

Let the 80-year-old army general be A, his 40-year-old self be B, and his childhood self be C.

Let’s use the term ‘equals’ to mean “remembers and therefore can be considered a conscious continuation of…”

Reid says we have A equals B; B equals C; A does not equal C.

Rickles calls this “an absurdity.” (p. 97, end note 6 to chapter 2).

My response:

The idea that the 80-year-old general being the same person as the 40-year-old officer he remembers being, but not the child he does not remember being (which the 40-year-old officer did remember) is only absurd if you subscribe to reductionism and classical logic. This is the question of whether one can step into the same stream twice or not, but with the memory stability of the stream being the question rather than the memory stability of the stepper. And the question is no less pointless. It appears to have a point because in classical logic, if the general equals the officer and the officer equals the boy, then the general necessarily equals the boy. However, given that our cells degrade and are ejected or lost, and that all of the molecules that make up each of our bodies are entirely overturned (at some long period or another), in the traditional view we should never be able to be ourselves.

All these problems are solved with multivalued logic and with an understanding of emergence.

First, fuzzy logic, being a type of multi-valued logic (perhaps a continuous-valued logic) has no difficulty with the boy having zero membership in the-general-ness and the officer having some intermediate membership in the-general-ness. While two membership functions at opposite ends of a continuum can have no overlap, they can each have finite overlap with some intermediate membership function (in this example, only one, which overlaps at each end with each of the membership functions at the extreme ends, but all that is not a necessary condition; merely sufficient).

This may not be an answer that is satisfactory enough. Emergence comes to the rescue.

NOTE:  The fact that we don’t know the mechanism for something does not mean that something isn’t happening. Emergence seems to a fact.

Emergence has to do with how a Gestalt is—somehow—constituted from miniscule components, not one of which has any of the high-level characteristics possessed by the Gestalt. The classic introductory examples include how ant colonies can behave in coordinated adaptive ways that no single ant (and no collection of ants on the order of only a few hundred, say) can manage. Similarly, the world’s economy, the immune systems of animals, the complex chemical interactions of many plants with their environment (soil and air, at a minimum), and the fact of human emotions and creativity are instances of complex and adaptive behaviors and capabilities emerging in ways we don’t yet understand out of the complex interactions (communication, feedback, etc.) of interconnected small components, none of which is capable of the same sophistication at any scale or to any degree.

Our neurons exchange pulse sequences of electric potential via various ions and neurotransmitters. As far as we know, there is/was no mini Tom Stoppard, Ginger Rogers, Prince, or Björk hidden in the synapses of those individuals, just as there is no homunculus at the control center of the brain that sees the colors we see and feels the emotions and sensations we experience. Pain, hunger, joy, love, fear, pleasure, colors, sounds, smells, and all other emotions and sensations are emergent experiences of the whole person, made from—but not made up of—interactions among complex human systems such as the nervous system, gut bacteria, the endocrine system, long- and short-term memory, and more, the effects of each of which are made from—but not made up of—interactions among the constituent subsystems and components. Your spinal cord is not happy, fearful, anxious, or euphoric—you, the whole emergent person, are. Likewise, what makes you you is not only your experiences between ages 35 and 95 or between 0 and 15 or any interval, no matter how wide or narrow: Even without any memories of his life before age twenty and having completely replaced every molecule in his body (more than half of which were water and bacteria anyway), the 80-year-old general is still the person who resulted from his birth, his early life, his genetics, his society, and all the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual experiences his past bodies have been through. Strictly delineating where the person-who-was-once-a-boy ends and the person-who-is-a-general begins is an unnecessary exercise imposed on us by classical logic and the battle between reductionistic and holistic modes of understanding ourselves and the world around us. Systems thinking (which includes the concept of emergence) and fuzzy logic (which admits that some categories are loose in the real world) have removed the need to waste our time fitting things (experiences, people, music, success and failure, etc.) into all-or-nothing categories, about which we can only be completely right or completely wrong.