Using a Portkey or Floo powder to teletransport oneself does not present any particular challenges to a wizard’s persistent personal identity. For the wizard’s whole body travels through the process and he even experiences the short lapse of time between leaving one location and arriving at the other. There is continuity of both body and consciousness in the movement from one place to another. Consider when Harry travels with Ron and Hermione via a Portkey in the form of an old boot (GF, p. 73) or when Harry uses Floo powder to travel from the Weasleys’ house to Diagon Alley (CS, p. 49):
It felt as though he was being sucked down a giant drain. He seemed to be spinning very fast—the roaring in his ears was deafening—he tried to keep his eyes open but the whirl of green flames made him feel sick—something hard knocked his elbow and he tucked it in tightly, still spinning and spinning—now it felt as though cold hands were slapping his face—squinting through his glasses he saw a blurred stream of fireplaces and snatched glimpses of the room beyond—his bacon sandwiches were churning inside him—he closed his eyes again wishing it would stop… . (CS, p. 49)
Clearly, Harry’s mind and body are intact throughout this journey. Harry experiences vivid physical sensations, including the disquieting gastro-intestinal effects of spinning through hyper-space after having eaten half a dozen bacon sandwiches!
Not all forms of teletransportation, though, go as smoothly or with all of oneself intact. Apparition is a dangerous form of teletransportation, which, unlike the use of a Portkey or Floo powder, is near-instantaneous but has the potential for complication:
“It’s not easy, Apparition, and when it’s not done properly it can lead to nasty complications. This pair I’m talking about went and splinched themselves.”
Everyone around the table except Harry winced.
“Er—splinched?” said Harry.
“They left half of themselves behind,” said Mr. Weasley, now spooning large amounts of treacle onto his porridge. “So, of course, they were stuck. Couldn’t move either way. Had to wait for the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad to sort them out. Meant a fair old bit of paperwork, I can tell you, what with Muggles who spotted the body parts they’d left behind.” (GF, pp. 66-67)
It’s not evident in what way the two people in Mr. Weasley’s story were “splinched,” that is, which body parts were transported and which were left behind. So we can imagine various ways of being splinched. Say Professor McGonagall is splinched such that her head and torso are transported to the Leaky Cauldron, while the lower half of her body is left behind in the Great Hall at Hogwarts. If we asked whether Professor McGonagall is located in the Leaky Cauldron or the Great Hall, a reasonable answer would be that she is in the Leaky Cauldron. This answer makes sense, because the Leaky Cauldron is where her brain is located and the brain, as neurobiological evidence tells us, is linked somehow to a person’s consciousness.
Given such a link, an interesting problem arises when we consider a particular way in which a person could conceivably be splinched. Each human brain contains two large hemispheres known as the cerebral cortex. Neural activity in these hemispheres, joined together by a bundle of nerves called the corpus collosum, is the foundation for consciousness. Now imagine that Professor McGonagall is splinched “down the middle” such that the left half of her body (along with the left cortical hemisphere) is transported to the Leaky Cauldron, while the right half of her body (along with the right cortical hemisphere) is left in the Great Hall at Hogwarts. The cortical hemispheres are, therefore, divided along the corpus collosum. This situation is not as fictional as one might think. In fact, severing the corpus collosum is a form of treatment used to minimize epileptic seizures.
What makes this form of splinching problematic for personal identity is that, while a normally functioning cerebral cortex delegates certain psychological tasks to each hemisphere and the two communicate to each other via the corpus collosum, it’s physiologically possible for each hemisphere to take on all of a person’s conscious functioning. If your corpus collosum were severed and one of the cortical hemispheres removed from your head, you would remain a fully conscious person. Though you may be cognitively impaired in certain areas for a time, your cortex would eventually learn how to do the job that both hemispheres did previously. Say Neville Longbottom were splinched in this fashion and stayed that way for a long time because the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad found it difficult to undo this particularly nasty form of splinching. Each of Neville’s halves would have the same consciousness, the same memories of everything that happened prior to the splinching, and the same sense of self. Each half, one, say, in the Gryffindor dormitory and the other in a vault at Gringotts, would believe that he is Neville Longbottom. Which one is Neville? Is Neville identical to only one of his body’s halves? If so, which one? Perhaps Neville is dead and two new persons claiming to be him remain instead.
Neither Locke nor Hume imagined this type of situation occurring, but a more recent philosopher, Derek Parfit, did in his book Reasons and Persons:
My Division. My body is fatally injured, as are the brains of my two brothers. My brain is divided, and each half is successfully transplanted into the body of one of my brothers. Each of the resulting people believes that he is me, seems to remember living my life, has my character, and is in every other way psychologically continuous with me. And he has a body that is very like mine.121
Parfit rejects several attempts to explain the identity relationship between a person and the two persons that result from his being divided. The problem with establishing personal identity in this case is that the identity relationship is transitive, meaning that if A = B and B = C, then A = C. So, given Hume’s criterion for personal identity in terms of psychological continuity, Neville Longbottom is identical to his body’s half in the dormitory and also to his body’s half in the vault. Since identity is transitive, however, it follows that Neville’s bodily half in the dormitory must be identical with his bodily half in the vault. But this can’t be true since Neville’s halves are obviously not identical, if for no other reason than because they are in different spatial locations. Since it is clearly unacceptable to say that Neville is identical to both of his bodily halves, and there is no reason to hold that he is identical to one of them and not the other, it seems that Neville’s splinching accident must have resulted in his death and the remaining bodily halves are two new persons. This conclusion, though, raises yet another question: Where did each of these new persons come from if neither one of them is Neville? There seems to be no easy solution to this type of “split-identity” scenario.
Because the relationship of identity entails such a problematic result in this type of case, Parfit says we should put aside our concern with being identical with some future person and consider “what matters” in our personal survival. What matters, Parfit contends, is simply our being psychologically continuous with a future person:
Some people would regard division as being as bad, or nearly as bad, as ordinary death [the conclusion arrived at above concerning poor Neville]. This reaction is irrational. We ought to regard division as being about as good as ordinary survival. As I have argued, the two ‘products’ of this operation [or the splinching accident] would be two different people. Consider my relationship to each of these people. Does this relation fail to contain some vital element that is contained in ordinary survival? It seems clear that it does not. I would survive if I stood in this very same relation to only one of the resulting people [i.e., a single case of psychological continuity]… . In the case that we are now considering, my relation to each of the resulting people thus contains everything that would be needed for me to survive as that person.122
If Parfit is correct, then Neville can survive his nearly disastrous splinching accident. Though we cannot say that Neville is identical to either of his resulting halves, each has everything that is required for us to say that Neville has “survived” in both the half located in the dormitory and the half located in th
e vault. Does it matter that we are apparently left with two Nevilles now?
At this point, you may be wondering what happens when the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad puts Neville’s halves back together. On Parfit’s view, just as Neville survives as each of his halves, he continues to survive as the reconstituted singular person who has just one cerebral cortex now—the two hemispheres having been rejoined—and is thereby psychologically continuous with Neville as he existed prior to being splinched.
In the world of Harry Potter, wizards are able to do the amazing things they do, such as survive disembodiment and teletransportation by Apparating, by being persons who are defined as psychological entities. They persist by virtue of their past, present, and future selves being psychologically continuous with one another. This way of understanding the nature of persons and personal identity may be as true in the real world in which we live as it is in the fictional world created by J.K. Rowling. Perhaps we are best defined as conscious, thinking entities which consist of past and present perceptions connected by memory. If so, then we have an effective way of answering the question of whether you and I can exist without our bodies. So long as my consciousness can exist without requiring a functioning brain—a premise that is challenged by a wealth of neurobiological data linking consciousness with cerebral activity—there is no reason I can’t survive my body’s death and persist as a non-physical, conscious, thinking entity.123 Of course, this brief chapter cannot answer the question of whether or not the existence of consciousness requires a brain, nor fully consider the apparent “magic” required for a non-physical conscious mind to interact with a physical brain and body. Nevertheless, our ability to imagine persons surviving disembodiment and significant bodily changes in the world of Harry Potter gives us some insight into the possibility of these wizards’ feats in our own world.124
16
The Prophecy-Driven Life: Fate and Freedom at Hogwarts
GREGORY BASSHAM
We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.
—ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
Think how cool it would be if you had a crystal ball that—unlike Professor Trelawney’s—could infallibly predict the future. You could make a fortune betting in the Quidditch pool, know in advance all the questions that will appear on your Herbology final, and never, ever again get shot down in flames when asking that cute witch or wizard from Ravenclaw out for a date.
Some things, of course, wouldn’t be so cool about knowing the future. Like knowing exactly when you will die, and how. Imagine if you knew now, for example, that you will die in a fiery flying car crash on June 23rd, 2012. Or that your best friend will be killed by Voldemort on December 5th, 2008. That kind of knowledge would be tough to live with. In fact, if you did learn that something terrible was somehow fated to happen in the future, you would naturally wonder if there was anything you could do to prevent it.
There’s a wonderful story philosophy profs often use to get their students thinking about conundrums of fate and free will—and I don’t mean the “what will really bake your noodle” scene from The Matrix. It’s an old Arab fable retold by W. Somerset Maugham in his 1933 play Sheppey. The speaker is Death:
There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. The merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd, and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.125
The central idea here—that future events will happen no matter what anybody does to prevent them—is a view that philosophers call fatalism. According to fatalists, the future is already completely fixed and determined, freedom is an illusion, and we’re all just unwitting puppets in a play that was scripted long ago.
Fatalism can seem pretty plausible at times—like when you’re wondering whether you might be “fated” to drink that fourth shot of Ogden’s Old Firewhiskey—but it’s really quite incredible when you think about it. Think what is implied, for example, in saying that you’re destined to drink that firewhiskey no matter what anybody does. That means that if a gang of Death Eaters zapped you dead with the Avada Kedavra curse, you still (somehow) would down that fourth shot. That would be a neat trick even for a resourceful adult beverage drinker like you.
Fatalism, therefore, can be safely tossed in the dumpster. But the idea that future actions and choices are somehow already predetermined, and hence unfree, cannot be so lightly swept aside. There are three major challenges to human freedom and responsibility: the scientific challenge, the religious challenge, and the paranormal challenge. We’ll focus mainly on the paranormal challenge, because that is the one raised most clearly in the Potter books. But first let’s look briefly at the challenges to freedom posed by science and religion.
The Scientific Challenge to Freedom
Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Back in the benighted days of yore, people wearing animal skins used to squat in caves and say things like, “Yore, I wouldn’t go outside if I were you. Don’t you see that lightning? The gods must be angry with us.” They attributed all kinds of natural phenomena—rainbows, eclipses, Yore’s flatulence—to the arbitrary, mostly unpredictable will of supernatural forces. Nowadays, of course, we have science, and science has been spectacularly successful in showing that we live in an orderly, predictable universe. In fact, science has been so successful in this explanatory quest that many people now believe in causal determinism—the view that all events, including all human actions and choices, are the inevitable outcome of prior causes. If causal determinism is true, then a sufficiently powerful Intelligence who knew all the relevant facts and laws of nature, could have predicted a hundred years ago that you would be reading this sentence right now.
The catch, of course, is that causal determinism poses an obvious threat to human freedom and moral responsibility. Consider when Ginny Weasley was taken over by Voldemort in the form of Tom Riddle (CS, p. 120). Although it was her hands that wrote in blood the ominous words “The Chamber of Secrets has been opened,” she was temporarily possessed and unable to recall any of the events afterwards. Because her actions were determined by forces beyond her control, she wasn’t able to do otherwise than she did, and hence, it seems, wasn’t acting freely. But, of course, if determinism is true, none of us is truly able to act otherwise than we do. Hence the apparent conflict between determinism and free will.
Philosophers disagree whether free will is possible in a fully determined world. Hard determinists like B.F. Skinner and John Hospers say that determinism is true and that free will is impossible in such a world. Soft determinists like Jonathan Edwards, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill say that determinism is true but that we can still be free. Like Bernie Bott’s Beans, soft determinists come in different varieties but they generally say something like this: free will consists in the ability to do as you choose. If you can do as you wish, if no person, force, or thing is forcing you to do something against your will, then your act is free.
Libertarians126 like William James and C.A. Campbell are unconvinced. Like hard determinists, they think determinism and free will are incompatible. But like soft determinists, libertarians wish to affirm freedom. By “free act,” libertarians generally mean acts
that are (a) caused exclusively by the agent and (b) genuinely could have been otherwise than they were. For instance, Harry’s generous decision to give his Triwizard Tournament winnings to Fred and George Weasley was a free act according to libertarians, because it was caused solely by Harry’s choice, rather than by any past events or compelling internal or external forces, and in exactly the same circumstances Harry could have chosen to do something different than he did, like buying snazzy new Firebolts for the entire Gryffindor Quidditch team. Libertarians deny that, given a particular brain state and all the causal forces at work in the world, only one choice is ever possible. They think that, if somehow we could roll back time and find ourselves in exactly the same causal situation, a different decision could have been made.
So is free will compatible with causal determinism? If, as soft determinists claim, free will is simply the ability to do as one desires, there clearly is no incompatibility. With the exception of prison inmates and parents with small children, most people in this world are often able to do as they please, regardless of whether determinism is true. But is the soft determinist definition of “free will” correct?
Harry Potter and Philosophy Page 24
