by Tim Sommers

One time, this guy handed me a picture of him and said, ‘Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.’ Every picture is of you when you were younger. – Mitch Hedberg

There’s synchronic identity, what makes you, you at a particular moment in time – say, now. And there’s diachronic identity, what makes you, you over time. For example, why are you now the same person as when you were twenty-five years old or five (if you are)? These two perspectives – synchronic and diachronic – are deeply interdependent, of course, but philosophers tend to focus on diachronic identity since what is essential to you being you is, presumably, whatever it takes for you to continue to exist. Here are some theories.

You are your soul.

The trouble with this theory is not that it usually has a religious basis. That might be trouble later, but initially the trouble is that it is not very helpful. I am my soul. So, what’s my soul? Is the soul some mysterious, ghostly thing or a Platonic form or is it just whatever is essential to who I am? If the answer is that the soul is whatever is essential to who I am, this seems like just a restatement of the question.

Keep in mind, the great innovation of Christianity was not the soul, an idea that’s been around at least since Plato and Aristotle (who thought we had three souls). The Christian innovation was bodily resurrection.

You are your ego.

The ego may just be the secular soul. Descartes’ version of the ego theory, the most influential, is that a person is a persisting, purely mental, thing. But like the soul it’s hard to unpack the ego in an informative way. It is whatever unifies our consciousness. We survive as the continued existence of a particular subject of experiences, and that explains the unity of a person’s life, i.e., the fact that all the experiences in this life are had by the same person. This is circular, of course. Further, on this view, what happens if I fall into a dreamless sleep? Or get hit on the head and black out? Go in and out of a coma? Am fully anesthetized? When I wake up and start having experiences again, how do I know I am the same ego? How do I know that the ego is a persistent thing at all? Later, we will see what Hume has to say about this.

In the meantime, we are going to need a better theory of the ego or soul before either is going to be useful as a theory of personal identity. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

In 2016, here and here at 3QD, we talked about some of the inherent paradoxes in democratic voting [1]. We discussed Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, along with related results like the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem. They tell us that there is no way to convert the individual preferences of the voters into a single group preference that doesn’t also conflict with some simple, commonsense guidelines that we can all agree are reasonable. Things like “No dictators.” And “If everyone prefers Candidate X to Candidate Y, then Candidate Y never beats Candidate X.”

Certainly, voters are sometimes irrationally motivated. I know of an otherwise reasonable mathematician who asked a colleague to vote on their behalf in a departmental chair election. Above all else, this mathematician did not want Faculty Member Z to be elected department chair. They gave their colleague two lists of all the eligible faculty in the department; each list was in a very carefully chosen order. The first list was ordered by the mathematician’s actual preference for who should be elected chair. This list was to be used only if Faculty Member Z wasn’t on the ballot. The second list was ordered according to the mathematician’s best 4D chess assessment of who was most likely to beat Faculty Member Z in a head-to-head election. That list would be used if Faculty Member Z was on the ballot. In the ideal election system, there should be no need for the second list. But strategic voting is very much a thing in elections.

You might assume such paradoxes are due to the vagaries of humanity. From what I can tell, most human minds are filled with a circus of chaos monkeys that are impossible to predict. Imagine describing the here and now to a 2016 version of yourself. Read more »

Khalil Rabah. About The Museum, 2004.

Mixed media installation; wooden box, glass, 11 olive trees, text;

More here, here, and here.

by Brooks Riley

by O. Del Fabbro

If a city could be an organism, then Kherson in Eastern Ukraine would be a sick body. For eight months, between March and November 2022, Kherson was occupied by Russian forces. Kidnapping, torture, and murder – in terms of violence and cruelty, Kherson’s citizens have seen it all. Today, even though liberated, the port city on the Dnieper River and the Black Sea is still being regularly bombarded: a children’s hospital, a bus stop, a supermarket. Even though freed, how could this city ever heal?

One of Kherson’s citizens is Andryi. As soon as the Russians left, Andryi and his friends started with humanitarian work. For months the former car mechanic had no job. He rather helped others. When the pastor of his church found out about Andryi’s skills to repair roofs, he gave him some money and assignments. “My friend and I started with a house in which an old grandmother and her son lived.” Before Andryi and his friend started their work, three different groups looked at the roof but did not dare to repair it, because the Russians were only four hundred meters away, on the other side of the Dnieper River, waiting to kill humanitarian aid workers. “We decided to do it, and we did it. Praise the Lord, nothing happened.” Three days later, the roof was finished.

While repairing roofs Andryi has been exposed, both indirectly or directly, to a variety of weaponry: mortars, snipers, rockets, you name it. “When we repaired roofs, artillery fire was constantly active. Once, we saw phosphorous bombs in the near distance, then we hid in the basement.” The last roof was the scariest experience. Some of the material that Andryi and his partner use is a plain white awning, easily detectable by the Russians. Being only one kilometer away, the Russians bombarded Andryi and his friend with mortars, but luckily, they missed. “That was scary, but they did a bad job in trying to hit us.” In total, Andryi counted twenty-six explosions. “It was frequent, loud, and very close.” When talking about his war experience, Andryi has, as many Ukrainians, a dry and succinct way of expressing himself. “You realize that you can get hit, when you hear the bomb exploding.”

Friends, family, donations via social media, the pastor, and the members of his church helped to buy materials such as nails, wood and so on, but at some point, Andryi and his friend ran out of money. He then simply helped the military by using his skills as a car mechanic. He built a heavy machine gun on the back of an old Rada, or repaired the sewage system of a village in the countryside near Kherson. Read more »

At my brother Javed’s house in Karachi last night.

by Ethan Seavey 

Exile is on my mind and there’s a large full moon above my head I cannot see through the clouds. 

I am part of a family of three exiles who are doing it again, recovering after exile, and working hard to stay together. Our shared communities have dropped us for the third time and it feels like I finally recognize the pattern we’ve always fallen into :

1) Find a community that embraces us because it excludes others; and 2) get rejected when we grow to learn that we have become the others.

When I came out as gay in 2015 my family stopped going to Church, specifically the one where we had been attending weekly (with few exceptions) for somewhere around a decade.

It was a personal decision for each one of us. It was an effort to support me. It was also a social decision. While this Church was more progressive than others, it was still a Catholic Church. It seemed to me that priests were required to spend a Sunday sermon every year talking about how being gay is a sin; sometimes hiding it behind the idea that being gay was not a sin so long as you never acted on it.

Many people within that Church remained close friends. They’d ask why we’d stopped attending and I was the reason. It didn’t distance most of our friends, but I remember my younger sibling was forbidden from spending time with one of their friends outside of the friend’s home, because the friend’s mom saw me as a bad influence. Read more »