Consciousness and Personal Identity
February 11, 2019 § 1 Comment
A philosophical analysis of speculative fiction film Get Out
Get Out is a speculative fiction film I’m sure many of you have seen. The premise: a community of wealthy white individuals that kidnap black people, and insert their brains—and consciousnesses—into the “physically advantageous” black people’s bodies. The consciousnesses of the black people go into the “sunken place,” where they can see, hear, and experience everything that their bodies are going through, but with no real ability to take any action, except for after certain triggers. It’s quite grim. My goal for this blog post is to look at Get Outin the context of personal identity philosophy in a theoretical way, deconstructing the brain transplant aspect of the movie into a discussion of consciousness, identity, and free will.
The late British philosopher Derek Parfit specialized in personal identity, rationality, and free will; I’m particularly interested in his 1984 work Reasons and Persons, in which he explores the importance of personal identity in different contexts. Parfit proposes an experiment in which Person A’s brain is transplanted into Person B’s body, such that the resulting person has the characteristics, dispositions, and memories belonging to the Person A. In the world of philosophy, it’s more or less universally agreed upon that the resulting person is Person A, despite the outward appearance of Person B. This is largely due to the new person’s consciousness being continuous with Person A. A more complex (and yet still completely theoretical) version of this experiment is when Person A’s brain is divided into two parts—one half being transplanted into Person B, and the other half being transplanted into Person C. The post-transplant bodies of Person B and C carry the memories, experiences, and values of Person A. Can two bodies hold the identity of Person A, post-transplant?
To those readers who are skeptical of this entirely theoretical, not-realistic, and frankly absurd thought experiment, consider someone taking a math exam: the bridge between this person’s brain hemispheres is cut, and each hemisphere has a separate sphere of consciousness controlling one half of the person’s body. There are now two series of thoughts going through one brain and body; mental history can have separate streams. This example is relevant in the philosophical analysis of Get Out, as it seems that two streams of consciousnesses are housed in one, post-transplant body.
It would seem that the transplant experiments in Get Out align more closely with Parfit’s latter of the two examples, as the consciousness of the surrogate body still exists in the “sunken place,” as they are able to see, feel, and conceptualize everything that the body experiences, and the transplanted consciousness seems to be the active person that has agency to determine what the body does and how it acts. The question then arises: in Get Out, who does the identity of the post-transplant body belong to? These two consciousnesses coexist, although only one rises to the forefront at any given moment.
According to Parfit, when brains are fused into one, then the characteristics, desires, and dispositions of the two half-brains must be combined. Some traits are naturally compatible, and some are not. The compatible traits can coexist within the new person, but the incompatible traits can “cancel out.” In Get Out, both brains’ traits still exist within the new person, and sometimes they conflict. A (funny, depending on your sense of humor) example of this is when Logan (a post-transplant, black body) goes in to kiss his MUCH older wife. The dominan consciousness in his body—a very old, white man—may think this is normal, but the “sunken” consciousness—who is quite young—may have been repulsed by the age difference.
The bottom line, and answer to the personal identity question in Get Out, comes down to how one defines identity. A bodily criterion of identity, dependent only on the physical appearance of the new person, would seem to contradict an approach based on psychological continuity. If Person A and Person B are considered to have the same personal identity, they are psychologically continuous, and there is no other person that is contemporary with either and psychologically continuous with the other. If this sounds like philosophical jargon to you, then maybe you’ll take the approach that brain fusion experiments constitute death of one or both people’s identities, because the resulting person is not wholly similar to either of the original people.
Personally, I am of the stance that personal identity and the survival of one’s personal identity has degrees, depending on how many traits of both people are lost in fusion, according to the compatible/incompatible trait theory above. In Get Out, white individuals have some control over their degrees of survival, as they can attempt to pick a compatible partner with as many compatible traits as possible. In short, I think that a brain transplant in Get Out does not necessarily preserve the personal identity of the white individual—according to the philosophy set forth in Reasons and Persons—as much as the movie presents.
-AMW
Sources: Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (1984) and Jordan Peel’s Get Out (2017)
You ended the post by saying that you don’t think the individual identities of the white people in “Get Out” are entirely preserved during the transplant. Do you think identities could ever be preserved in a context such as this (assuming the technology ever exists), or do you think something of your identity is inherently lost as soon as your consciousness is removed from your original body?
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