Jim1 and Jim2

An unfortunate human named Jim was the victim of an amazing mechanically complex farm equipment accident in July, which severed his body so that each half of his body was left with exactly half of all organs. Each half was thrown clear of the machine and so far apart that the different rescue parties did not realize that the other half existed and so, each half was fitted with state-of-the-art prostheses in such a way that two functional bodies lived. Each survivor professes to be Jim and has the same memories, strengths, goals, and convictions.

Derek Parfit is called in to evaluate the situation. Parfit in general does not believe in the all-or-nothing mentality when referring to personal identity, so he is not concerned with saying whether or not these two beings are each the same person as Jim. He chooses to employ two descriptive terms – psychological continuity and psychological connectedness – when discussing the status of the beings.

Psychological connectedness means there is some inheritance of memories or attitudes or personality from the former being to the later one. Psychological continuity has a weaker implication than psychological connectedness and simply entails an overlapping chain of instances of psychological connectedness. For instance – if one was using only memory as a criterion, which is not the case for Parfit but will be used here for the sake of example - if a little girl gets her doll eaten by a dog and remembers the incident years later on her 25th birthday and then when she is 75 remembers her 25th birthday but not the dog incident, it could be said that the crone is connected to the young woman but only continuous with the girl.

In the case of Jim, Parfit would say that Jim is psychologically connected to both beings, that Jim has survived in both beings, but not that the beings are the same people as Jim. Each of the survivors is a ‘later self’ of Jim. Therefore, they could each refer to Jim as an ‘earlier self’ while not needing to regard themselves as the same person, or they could even say that they are ‘more or less’ the same person as Jim without needing to be ‘more or less’ the same as each other.


However, ‘Jim1 and Jim2’ are not completely assuaged by this evaluation so they ask for another perspective. A Lockian analyst is brought in to help. She explains Locke’s perspective on personal identity. Locke draws a semantic difference between the words ‘man’ and ‘person’ that is roughly equal to the difference between the concepts ‘ physical body’ and ‘mental consciousness.’ Furthermore, with regard to personal identity what matters for Locke is simply continuity of consciousness, which can be defined as continuity of memories, personality, beliefs, and (/or) goals. Because both of the survivors are consciously continuous with Jim, the analyst concludes that they are both the same person as Jim, but not the same man as Jim. (One thing that might make Locke’s assessment easier to make is if some testimony by the former Jim’s acquaintances was given, saying that when interacting separately with the two survivors, they are both extremely convincing Jims. This sort of independent verification seems important to Locke.)

This author finds Parfit’s arguments more compelling in this situation. Perhaps this is because it seems to make more sense intuitively to say that each survivor is very definitely related strongly to Jim but not feel compelled to have to identify the survivors as either ‘the same person’ as Jim or not, since it would be illogical to say that one was the same person as Jim and the other not since they are, for all intents and purposes, related to Jim in exactly the same way; nor is it intuitively comfortable to refer to them both as the same person as Jim, since they are not the same person as each other.

Although one weakness of Parfit’s evaluation could be that one doesn’t have an answer for the question ‘Is this man/person/survivor Jim?’ this author finds it a strength for the same reason she rejects the binary zero-sum attitude of Locke, namely because the idea is overwhelmingly appealing to her intuition. Parfit himself thinks this completely unnecessary, but other people might want a definitive answer. Also, if one thinks numerical identity is intrinsically locked up in the question of personal identity, Parfit is not going to satisfy.

Later that year, in September, Jim1 and Jim2 are working on another farm and are both involved in an accident in which all the prosthetics are severed from their bodies and thrown clear. The two halves are then fused together to result in one surviving body, which claims to be Jim and has the same memories, strengths, goals, and convictions.

Again Parfit says that this being is a ‘later self’ of Jim. But while this survivor is psychologically connected to Jim1 and Jim2, he is merely psychologically continuous with Jim.

The Lockian analyst is a bit perplexed by the situation, because in July she said there were two persons who were both the same person as Jim; the survivors have since been having different experiences and are no longer consciously continuous with each other, therefore the latest survivor cannot still be Jim, because the line of continuity has been broken or at least re-fused at the end with a split in the middle.

This author cannot see a way in which the Lockian analyst could reply in this situation that the final survivor is still Jim. But then who is he? And what happened to the two survivors that were Jim? When presented with the two situations together as a whole there might be a way for the analyst to explain it in a way that fits with Locke, but when confronted with the situations separately there seems to be a major problem or at least an incongruity.

Again, Parfit seems better able to handle this situation in a consistent way. However, perhaps this is because his is a weak, rather wishy-washy view. Instead of picking one or the other, he picks neither. Is this getting around the issue, or just being smart enough to rise above the points that don’t matter?

This author thinks that Parfit is accurate in both of his assessments and that by choosing to regard two points of contention – one, that someone either must be the same person as they were before or they must not and two, that regardless of the fact of the matter where one is concerned, we have to decide on one before we can make any statements about personal identity – as irrelevant, he makes this situation more easy and more consistent to evaluate than one is able to do under the tenets held by Locke.