Some out-of-body experiences can be explained without any mention of spooky disembodiment. But others are best explained by just such a thing. In some cases, for example, the out-of-body experiencer reports seeing something far from her body during her out-of-body experience and the report is found to be correct. One woman, Maria, had a heart attack which caused her to have an out-of-body experience. She had the experience of floating out of the hospital and seeing a shoe on a window ledge of the third story. When she told the story later to a near-death-experience researcher, she provided detailed information about the shoe’s location and appearance. The researcher found the shoe just where Maria said it was and its appearance matched Maria’s detailed report.
Maybe we should be cautious about what we can conclude from near-death-experience reports. But one thing is undeniable: if out-of-body experiences are real (if they involve an actual separation of the person from the body), then humans can exist without their bodies. And if we can exist without our bodies, then we are more than just physical beings. Since the monster is human, then he’s more than physical as well. Dr. Long offers some interesting reasons for thinking that out-of-body experiences are real.
Final Thoughts
If this is right, then there’s good reason to think that the monster (and the rest of us) is not just a physical being. But some questions remain. How did the monster get a soul if he has one? It’s not like the doctor injected him with one. (“Let’s see, we’ve got the liver, the brain, the clavicle . . . we’re certainly missing something . . . Oh yes, the soul! Here we go. I’ll just put that right in.”) For that matter, how did we get a soul? What’s more, how can the physical and the nonphysical interact? How does all this fit with science?
Even if we haven’t answered all of the questions related to the nature of human beings, we’ve seen some interesting reasons for thinking that we’re made up of more than just physical parts. What does seem inescapable, though, is the realization that the we and the monster are in it together. When we reject arguments supporting his soul, like Plantinga’s, it seems we have to reject our own soul, if we accept it; it seems to act as evidence that we both have a soul. Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that we should be careful about assuming who does and doesn’t have a soul . . . even monsters . . .
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1This comes from Frank Jackson’s famous example about Mary the neurophysiologist; “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982).
2Alvin Plantinga, “Materialism and Christian Belief,” in Persons: Human and Divine (Oxford, 2007).
3Jeffrey Long, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (HarperCollins, 2011).
14
Who Is Frankenstein’s Monster?
JONATHAN LOPEZ
How do you make one man out of many?
Sometimes figuring out what makes a thing is pretty easy; for example, when we look at something like gold we know it continues to be gold just as long as it has 79 protons. When we change this property of gold, perhaps take away protons through radioactive means, we can say that the gold has ceased to exist and is now a new element.
People are a little more difficult because our crucial properties aren’t as easy to pin down so that we can definitely say we cease to be a person at some point or another. Philosophers concerned with this question are said to be preoccupied with the question of “identity” which tries to track down what essential properties are necessary for a person to persist through time. Frankenstein’s creation, though, seems to pose many problems for identity—because he was constructed of numerous dead bodies!
Two common answers in trying to nail down identity are bodily and psychological criteria. Roughly, the bodily criterion says that someone is identical with himself just as long as he inhabits the same body. This account runs into trouble when it is pointed out that the molecules that made up one’s body when they were one or two years old are entirely different molecules than the ones that constitutes a person in adulthood. You want to say you’re the same person you were when you were younger, but the bodily criterion doesn’t seem to capture this facet.
Imagine that Victor Frankenstein regularly replaced pieces of his creation with new body parts. As a part gets old or decayed, Victor simply cuts it off and replaces it with a new part. Eventually, over time, the monster would have a completely different body. We are like that on the atomic level. Over time every single atom that makes you up will eventually be exchanged with a different one . . . the same kind of atom, but a different actual atoms. So I can’t say its “this body” (this matter) that makes me, me. Because, years from now all of that matter will be different matter, just structured similarly.
These kinds of objections have motivated some philosophers to devise much more sophisticated accounts of the bodily criterion, or to support a different criterion—the psychological criterion.
The psychological criterion tells us that a person is identical to himself or herself just as long as they share the same memories. This solves some of the problems with being identical with yourself during younger instances of your life, however, there are still problems with this view. For instance, what happens if you get amnesia? Should we attend your funeral?
Victor’s Experiments
Suppose a fictional scientist is running a series of experiments; let’s call him Victor. As luck would have it, you’re the first of his subjects to show up to the experiment and as such you get some input into his experimental setup. Victor explains that he intends to remove your brain and place it into someone else’s body while simultaneously placing that other person’s brain in your body.
The day before the brain-swapping experiment Victor still needs one subject for another experiment he is planning to conduct on pain perception. The subject, Victor says, will be awarded $100,000 in compensation for participating in the experiment. The choice that Victor presents to you is . . . Which body will be subjected to the pain experiments and which gets the money, the person in body A or body B?
The A-bodied person’s brain has been put into the B-bodied person and vice versa.
Wouldn’t you pick the person in body B to receive the reward seeing as how that person is going to wake up knowing all sorts of things about your past; knowing all the same things as you used to; and having an identical personality and self-concepts in virtue of having your psychological (brain) contents? People often use the analogy of the brain being the hardware that runs the software. Taking the whole brain (hardware) or even if Victor was somehow able just to exchange your minds (software) without switching the actual brains, it seems like the important stuff is going to end up elsewhere than where it started.
Now remember the pain part of the experiment? Victor tells you that he has devised an experiment that will be testing human pain perception, in other words, torture. You of course don’t really want to feel pain and ask if there is any way to reduce it. He tells you that he can wipe your memory clean before the experiment, that way when he’s torturing you, it isn’t really “you” he is torturing. Wouldn’t you still object? And not just because you don’t want to lose your memories. You would object because even if you had amnesia, you wouldn’t want your body to be tortured. Would you?
As a last ditch effort to try to alleviate your worries Victor offers you that after the amnesia has been administered he can implant your old memories back into you. But this doesn’t really seem to get at the point that presumably someone is going to wake up and experience the pain and it’s not clear that the amnesia offered here is going to let you escape it, and just because you’ll have your memories back doesn’t seem to change the fact that you don’t want to be tortured. But then Victor points out that it’s basically the same as the first experiment where you gave a positive response.
Stepping back from these thought experiments let’s examine where we stand. In the first experiment we felt driven to identify with our memories in keeping with the psychological criterion.
In the second case, however, we tend to give a response opposite to what the psychological criterion suggests. We begin the experiment apprehensive we will be tortured even if we are given amnesia. Victor’s offer to give you amnesia doesn’t seem to abate the pain you’ll soon experience, nor does his offer to give you novel memories seem all that helpful.
The point in offering these two sets of examples is to undermine the seemingly strong impulse we feel to give a response along the lines of the psychological criterion. All we did was change the presentation of the experiment and we seem to get conflicting answers. In both cases we were facing torture with someone else’s memories, and we seem to be giving inconsistent answers. So far it’s not looking good for the psychological view. On the one hand we think of our memories as us, but on the other, we think of our bodies as us! Surely we shouldn’t let the concept of identity rest on such a flimsy feeling.
Enter the “Monster”
This is where Frankenstein really helps us analyze and evaluate the damage done to the psychological criterion by Victor’s proposed experiments. The monster in Frankenstein comes into the world with no memories and is re-animated from human remains. If we’re willing to say we persist through amnesia, in the second set of experiments, such that we’re afraid of the impending pain experiments then we would also have to say the brain placed in the monster’s skull survives having his memories wiped. As such, we would have to say that whoever inhabited the body before the monster died the first time, thus making him a corpse, is the same person as the reanimated monster.
Taking the amnesia seriously we finds ourselves in a position very similar to the monster in Frankenstein. Specifically, the absence of memories through and through makes the monster’s case of amnesia relevant to our analysis. Once we get a real appreciation of what being subjected to amnesia looks like, we’ll revisit the second set of examples to see if our answer differs.
The monster wakes up with no idea of the situation he finds himself, a serious case of amnesia. Perhaps this is not the same sense of amnesia which is usually depicted in soap operas but what I mean here is a very severe damage to his psychological contents. A person who has had amnesia induced, by whichever method, would find themselves in a very similar situation as the monster since neither has any idea what’s going on around them. It is amnesia in this sense that motivates us to say that the monster is discontinuous with whoever was in their body before, that is, he does not persist through his corpse phase. If you think you will persist through the amnesia then you need to grant that the monster has also persisted through a similar ordeal and is the same person that lived and died in the body from which the monster was made.
The most telling part of the story, for our purposes, is the dialogue that happens between Victor Frankenstein and the monster. At this point we’re told that the monster was incredibly confused on the day he came into being. The monster goes on to recount the days following his creation noting the difficulty in familiarizing himself with his senses. From this initial bit of testimony we start to appreciate how hard it can be to come into the world with no memories. The part where the monster familiarizes himself with the fire is a dramatic illustration of him learning about his senses. The monster describes being thrown into the world similar to how an infant would find himself in the world. Although there is certainly something going on inside the monster’s head, that is, he has some psychological content, it seems to be a new kind of content.
To give us an even better picture of how “new” the monster is he recounts how he has come to acquire language. The monster describes to Victor how he intently listened in on the cottagers teaching a language to one of their guests. And he starts from the very basics by mimicking the sounds made by the cottagers and eventually inferring names and meaning. Like an infant acquiring language, the monster is able to pick it up a swift and natural manner. This isn’t a person recollecting past memories, this is someone starting anew, someone thrown into the world with practically a blank slate.
Also important in the monster’s candor is his implicit revealing of where his values came from. The monster notes how he would sympathize with the cottagers, feeling depressed when they were unhappy and sharing in their joys. He paid close attention to the relationships of the family lamenting very deeply his exclusion. Among the books the monster finds in the woods, Paradise Lost influenced him deeply as he takes it to be a historical narrative about creation. Although much more could be said about the monster constructing his system of values it seems that a large part of the monster’s values are reducible to the cottagers and the books. So in building up some system of values the monster seems to enrich his psychological content that he has cultivated from scratch.
If we don’t think of the monster as a new instance of a person then the monster is literally numerous people, which just sounds strange. If we really want to hold on to a strong version of the bodily criterion, saying we are constituted by our physical parts, we would have to admit that the monster shares a history with all his body parts, including his brain. If this were the case then we wouldn’t expect the monster to exhibit behavior characteristic of someone starting from scratch, similar to an infant.
I really hope I’ve driven home the point that the monster’s testimony is of coming to terms with the world and not simply of someone coming back into being after some gap in consciousness. In other words, the body parts that the monster happens to be made of do not determine his current identity. Taking the amnesia featured in the second set of examples seriously, the monster being a prime example of such amnesia really helps bring to light that there is some discontinuity in personhood. Whoever was in the monster’s body before is not in there now and similarly whoever was in our body before the amnesia does not continue on to the pain experiments.
So What of the Monster?
After listening to the monster’s testimony, we have to conclude that the monster is in some sense a person. At this point it may be helpful to unpack and spell out what exactly is meant by the psychological criterion. Though there is no consensus on this issue a fruitful attempt of spelling out what goes into the psychological criterion is:
1.Consciousness (of objects and events external or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain
2.Reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems)
3.Self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control)
4.The capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics
5.The presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both.
Under these conditions, it seems as if we should accept the monster as a person with his own (possibly new) identity. Arguably, the monster gains consciousness from the moment Victor Frankenstein “infused a spark of life into a lifeless thing.” The monster then proceeds to develop his reasoning faculties as well as his capacity to communicate during his time with the cottagers.
Although it’s very briefly outlined, the monster definitely has self-awareness as he makes constant comparisons between what he describes as the “perfect forms” of the cottagers and his disfigured self. Now self-motivated, as defined above, might be interpreted as some degree of freewill, which is a contentious subject in philosophical circles to say the least. Without committing myself to saying whether the monster has freewill, I’ll simply say that the monster has some appreciable amount of what we can call self-motivated activity. So it looks as if the monster can be considered to have his own identity, despite the amnesia problem. As to when exactly he attained-personhood, it can only have been at some point in his hovel.
Overall, the monster’s identity seems rooted in both his psychological contents (his memories and thoughts) and his physical makeup. By now it does look as if the monster is a
new instance of a person, at least not identical to whomever owned the body parts at some previous time. The monster starts his identity in Victor’s lab and doesn’t share a history with any of his previous body parts. But at the same time I guess it’s important to recognize the role the physical body plays in the monster’s identity since it is at least necessary for him to build an identity in the first place. After all, what is Victor infusing life into if not a body, regardless of how gruesome it may be? But again, this casts the body as secondary to what is truly important to identity, as we saw how the monster came to build one for himself despite being given an improvised body, really a very crappy hardware system upon which to load a software.
While this may be all well and good for the monster does it tell us anything about what makes up our identity? While we wouldn’t expect to suffer from the same kind of amnesia discussed here there are plenty of other ways our psychological content can be damaged. Short of actual brain damage some of us might suffer a few concussions throughout our lives, perhaps be struck with dementia, or even kill a few hundred brain cells after a night of too much drinking. It just seems absurd to say I’m not going to be identical with the person who’s suffering a hangover.
Surely we need an approach that doesn’t tell us we’re different people with the most minimal of change in our psychological content. And actually this view does a good job at capturing those intuitions because it’s perfectly alright to have different psychological contents across time just as long as it’s the same prevailing stream of consciousness.
Frankenstein and Philosophy Page 16
