Comments on: Elan Vital

By: Sufficient Scruples » Blog Archive » Personscan: High Tech High Anxiety, Just 40 Years Away!

Wed, 10 May 2006 00:46:18 +0000

[...] Despite the seeming absurdity of hanging one person’s identity on the existence of another person, I am still inclined to assert my original analysis. (At least until I’ve had more time to think about it and figure out something that doesn’t sound quite as stupid.) As counterintuitive as it may be (and here comes yet another good reason for never trusting intuitive arguments), there is really nothing wrong with saying the identity of a person depends on contingent facts such as the existence of another person. Certain parts of one’s identity – “brother of”, “husband of”, “Prince of Wales” – depend entirely on the existence or non-existence of other people, and change as those people go into or out of existence. More to the point, our persistence-of-identity schemes – on which all personal identity arguments are based – are predicated upon a pre-supposition of non-forking identity histories: the idea that a person, once come into being, either is or isn’t one and the same person, literally, to the end of their days. For this reason we say that personal identity persists across huge, and even quite sudden, personality changes, such as due to brain injury; we even say it persists across the loss of the mental contents that define a person. We strongly resist the notion that a given person could ever become some other person, or even just plain not the same person, other than by being dead. But the possibility of bifurcating mental histories requires that we broaden our understanding of cognition-based definitions of personhood, and therefore personal identity. And the most obvious way is by the adoption of theories encompassing bifurcating personal identities. [...]

By: Kevin T. Keith

Kevin T. Keith — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:51:38 +0000

I read the same piece, and had that question in my mind as I watched the film. If the question hadn’t already been planted there, I would not have wondered about it myself – the film seemed perfectly authentic. The most poignant moments added strongly to my impression that it was real: his reaction in the hospital the morning he was found; the reactions of his friends and family; his clear confusion in the early days of his adjustment.

Somebody asked the same question in the Q&A session. The film’s director was a former close friend of the subject, and has spent the past 2 years closely associated with him (beginning about 8 months after the memory loss). He says he is perfectly satisifed Doug is not faking, and that the only people who have suggested it are those who didn’t know him – that his friends and family are all convinced of it as well.

By: Angus

Angus — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:29:29 +0000

I read a short piece on this guy in The New Yorker a week or two ago, and they mentioned that some folks think he’s faking. Just from reading his quotes in their article, I’d been wondering the same thing.

Is that question raised in the documentary? Even if not, were there any moments that made you wonder?