1. December 18, 2014
Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga
The Future of Personal Identity:
A Multidisciplinary Inquiry
Melanie Swan
m@melanieswan.com

2. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
What is Personal Identity?
 Intuitively appealing views
 Persistence, continuity of memory, what it is
like to be you over time
1. Immaterial souls, pure egos (religion)
2. Psychological continuity (Locke)
 Overlapping chains of direct psychological
connections between beliefs, desires,
intentions, experiential memories, character
traits, and actions
3. Our bodies
 Brute physical relation with the environment
1

3. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Hypothesis
 If the evolutionary biological drivers that caused personal
identity to develop as a fitness adaptation were to
change, the need for personal identity too would change
and perhaps disappear
 Main evolutionary biological and cultural drivers:
 Resource acquisition, status garnering, mate selection, group
acceptance, gender roles (Hrdy)
 Absent these drivers, how would the adaptation benefit
conferred by personal identity change?
 Examples of shifts in social goals and outcomes
 Worldwide birth rate declines
 Below replacement population declines (Japan, Italy)
2

4. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Personal Identity: Multidisciplinary Question
3
Philosophy of Mind Psychology
Evolutionary Biology
Evolutionary Psychology
Philosophy of Biology
Theoretical Biology
Social Theory
Sociology
Sociobiology
Biology

5. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Philosophical Views of Personal Identity
 Traditional ‘philosophy of mind’ view
 Assumes already-existing subject
 Personal identity needed for continuity
and persistence
 Personal identity is not required for
the survival of the person, relational
experience between past/future
selves and experience is (Parfit)
 fMRI studies: We procrastinate because
we think of our future selves as strangers
 Third persons no different than politicians
or celebrities
4
http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/why-we-procrastinate citing van Gelder JL, Hershfield HE, Nordgren LF. (2013). Vividness of
the future self predicts delinquency. Psychol Sci. 24(6):974-80, and Pronin, Emily. (2008). How we see ourselves and
how we see others. Science. 320(5880):1177-80.

6. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Philosophical Views of Personal Identity
 Self is a flux of unconnected perceptions
(Hume, 1739)
 Self as a constantly re-written, re-
interpretable text, written in difference to the
local relational context (Derrida)
 Subjectivation is the important locus,
facilitated by the movement-image and the
time-image (Deleuze)
 Individuation as a dynamic world process of
which the subject is an effect not a cause;
living beings exist on a capacity spectrum
for individuation (Simondon)
5

7. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Literary View
6
Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Within a Budding Grove, Seascape, with Frieze of Girls
Philosophical Issue:
Group, Individual, Particular
Proust, Albertine, the
‘little band’ of girls at Balbec
“…when I saw the little band again on the beach, and indeed long
afterwards when I knew all the girls who composed it, I could never be
absolutely certain that any of them — even she who among them all
was most like her, the girl with the bicycle — was indeed the one that I
had seen that evening , a girl who differed hardly at all, but was still just
perceptibly different from her whom I had noticed in the procession”

8. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Biology Basics: Why do Individuals Exist?
Classical Biological View: Kin Selection
 Kin selection is the evolutionary strategy
that favors the reproductive success of an
organism's relatives, even at a cost to the
organism's own survival and reproduction
(Darwin, 1859)
 Individuals are a mechanism for kin
selection; individuals are able to identify
their relatives (kin recognition); extended
labor force (Hamilton, 1964)
 Evidence: red squirrel mothers adopted
related orphaned squirrel pups but not
unrelated orphans (2010)
7
Gorrell JC et al. (2010). Adopting kin enhances inclusive fitness in asocial red squirrels. Nature Communications 1 (22): 1.

9. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Biology: Individuals are not a Privileged Unit
 What are the appropriate units in
biology?
 Organisms do not play a privileged role
 Genes, genomes, mechanisms,
phenotypes, gene pools
 Individual is merely convenient
terminology
 Individuals are spatiotemporally localized
entities that have reasonably sharp
beginnings and endings in time
8
Hull, David (1980), "Individuality and Selection," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 11: 311-332.

10. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Biological View: Distinguishing Individuals
9
 Wasps wired to distinguish
each other’s faces
 Wasps identified colony
facial images faster and
more accurately than other
types of images (2011)
 Wasps developed better
vision to identify others’ rank
and possibly allegiance
(fighting queens within
colonies); scent only
identifies the nest mate level
MJ Sheehan, EA Tibbetts. (2011). Specialized face learning is associated with individual recognition in paper wasps.
Science 334 (6060), 1272-1275. http://www.livescience.com/17259-paper-wasps-facial-recognition.html

11. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Biological View: Dolphin ‘Identities’
 Dolphins have a unique name
in the form of a whistle
 Dolphins responded when they
heard the sound of their own
signature whistle, repeating
that whistle back in a way that
seems to say, "Yes, I'm here -
did you call me?"
 Bottlenose dolphins can follow
"recipes" in preparing mollusks,
help other species in distress,
and possibly do math
10
Friedman, W. (2013). PNAS. Jul 23, 2013. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130722-dolphins-whistle-
names-identity-animals-science/

12. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Theoretical Biological View:
Groups and Individuals
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 Theoretical biology perspective of sociality
 “He who understands the baboon would do more towards
metaphysics than Locke” (Darwin 1838)
 Evolved biological individuals (not personal identity)
 Revisionary view of individuality, adequate definition
 Kin selection is insufficient to capture what is common
to all forms of groups evolving into individuals
 A theory of evolving individuality requires a
sophisticated variety of concepts that
 advocates some form of self-organization that supplements
natural selection, and
 accounts for the most complex forms of individuality
From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality. Eds. Frédéric Bouchard and Philippe Huneman.
2013. http://www.livescience.com/17259-paper-wasps-facial-recognition.html

13. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Psychological View: Personal Identity is…
 A person's conception and expression of
self-identity including with regard to
others' individuality or group affiliations
(Wikipedia; Psychology/Sociology)
 The concept you develop about yourself
that evolves over the course of your life
(Education-Portal: Sociology)
 Self-knowledge that derives from the
individual’s unique attributes (U Twente)
 The distinct personality of an individual;
characteristics by which a person is
recognized or known (IEP)
12

14. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Psychological View: Social Identity Theory
 Multiple ‘levels of self’
 A person has not one, personal self, but
rather several selves that correspond to
widening circles of group membership
 Different social contexts may trigger an
individual to think, feel and act on basis of
his personal, family or national ‘level of
self’ (Turner et al, 1987)
 Ecological Systems Theory
(Bronfenbrenner)
 Multiple social identities
 Self-concept derived from perceived
membership in social groups (Hogg &
Vaughan, 2002)
13
http://www.utwente.nl/cw/theorieenoverzicht/theory%20clusters/interpersonal%20communication%20and%20relations/s
ocial_identity_theory/; Urie Bronfenbrenner & Ecological Systems Theory

15. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Social Theory
 Identity Politics
 Political attitudes regarding the
concerns of social groups based on
identifications such as gender, race,
ethnicity, and sexual orientation
 Anti-identity movement, text
without author
 “Do not ask who I am and do not ask
me to remain the same, leave it to our
bureaucrats and our police to see that
our papers are in order” – Foucault,
1982
14
Foucault, Michel. (1982). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Vintage Books: New York, NY. Page 17.

16. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Evolutionary Biology View
 Adaptation/fitness benefit conferred
 Co-evolution of culture and personal
identity
 Drivers of identity and social behavior:
 Resource acquisition, status garnering, mate
selection, group acceptance, gender roles
 “Apart from economic payoffs, social
status, seems to be the most important
incentive and motivating force of social
behavior” - John Harsanyi, Nobel
Laureate economist
15
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-psychology-of-social/

17. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
What about the Future?
16
Major Computing Paradigms (One per Decade)
The connected world includes Bitcoin/blockchain technology as the economic overlay to
what is increasingly becoming a seamlessly connected world of multi-device computing
including wearables, Internet-of-Things (IOT) sensors, smartphones, tablets, laptops,
Quantified Self-Tracking devices (i.e.; Fitbit), smarthome, smartcar, and smartcity.

18. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Blockchain Technology View
 Lessig: “Code is Law”
 Legal regimes: technically-binding vs. legally-binding
 Constructs of identity
 Social (forgive-forget, redemption, reinvention, memory=imperfect)
 Technological (on-demand memory of all artifacts forever)
 Fourth-person perspective: connected world’s continuous witnessing
(QS gadgetry, IRC, Facebook, Gorgon Stare)
 Identity: something intrinsic or 3rd party-bestowed?
17
Antonopoulos, AM and Ellis, C. (2014). Let’s Talk Bitcoin #160: The Philosophy of Identity.

19. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Blockchain AI
 Blockchain
 Decentralized trustless transaction
system in the form of an encrypted
permanent public ledger
 A system of checks and balances
18
Terasem Movement Digital Mindfile Services: CyBeRev, Lifenaut
 Possibility of enforcing
Friendly AI
 Digital Intelligence
 Confirm reality
environment

20. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Multidisciplinary Conclusion: Personal
Identity is Ephemeral and Constructive
 Hypothesis is supported by these four fields
 If the evolutionary biological drivers that caused personal
identity to develop as a fitness adaptation were to change, the
need for personal identity too would change/disappear
 Biology
 Individuality is not personal identity
 Psychology/Sociology
 Malleability of self
 Philosophy
 Relationality and subjectivation
 Evolutionary Biology
 Fitness adaptation
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21. December 18, 2014
Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga
THANK YOU
Personal Identity:
A Multidisciplinary Inquiry
Melanie Swan
m@melanieswan.com