Nathaniel Kan Philosophy 265 Ehring Microessay

In "Personal Identity and Time Travel," Douglas Ehring proposes a simple thought

experiment: Ronald Reagan's brain is copied into two new brain/body pairs, just as the original

dies. These two new people (Reagan-B and Reagan-C) have the memories and personality of the

original. These two people are now not causally tied, which would lead us to intuit that they are

two separate individuals. Ehring proposes, however, that they are actually one person.

The fact that Reagan-B and -C have separate consciousnesses and physical locations

poses no problem. Ehring offers the example of the time traveler, Jones, who travels back 30

years to talk to his earlier self. The older Jones-34 talks to the younger Jones-4, and Ehring

proposes that this is a conversation being carried out by only a single person, as there is no place

along the continuity of person-stages of Jones where we might distinguish two separate people.

Thus there is no problem for an individual to possess separate consciousnesses and have multiple

physical locations.

Another possible problem is that the two Reagans seem to be physical-causal

independent, i.e. in a normal person, physical events that happen to earlier stages affect his later

stages, but if something happens to Reagan-C, this does not affect Reagan-B, and the opposite.

To this Ehring offers a counter example: a human brain is created which has memory and pre-

cognition. This brain is divided (essentially making two people) and each is put into a body. One

of these people, Person-B, travels back in time and dies. But Person-C, through a combination of

pre-cognition and memory, will have knowledge of all of Person-B's experiences. Thus they may

be said to be the same person, even though they are physical-causal independent.

The last problem that Ehring overcomes is that of memory. The Reagans are memory

independent: Reagan-B, at a time after his creation, will not stand in the "ancestral" to Reagan-C.

But Ehring gives the example of an old man who does not remember all the days of his younger

self. This is still one person. Ehring proposes that a sequences of person stages is one person if it

contains or could contain a memory contained in the next, or contains or could contain an

experience that the next stage contains as a memory. By this definition, Reagan-C and Reagan-B

are one person. For these reasons, Ehring believes that Reagan-C and Reagan-B are one person.