A multidisciplinary summary of personal identity, the individual, and subjectivation in the fields of biology, psychology/sociology, philosophy, evolutionary biology, and blockchain technology. In short, there are no grounds for these concepts beyond their use as convenient human constructs. Philosopher Derek Parfit vociferously contested the notion of personal identity (Reasons and Persons), claiming that "personal identity is not required for the survival of the person." Hume, Derrida, Deleuze, and Simondon agree. What is especially interesting and relevant is the status of the individual and personal identity as we progress into new eras of digital reality, and the evolutionary biological case for personal identity in humans. Personal identity may have evolved to bring adaptive fitness to humans, but there is evidence that the adaptation may no longer be serving as well, and could be different in the future per the new connected world computing paradigm and blockchain technology.

1. December 18, 2014
Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga
The Future of Personal Identity:
A Multidisciplinary Inquiry
Melanie Swan
m@melanieswan.com

2. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
What is Personal Identity?
 Intuitively appealing views
 Persistence, continuity of memory, what it is
like to be you over time
1. Immaterial souls, pure egos (religion)
2. Psychological continuity (Locke)
 Overlapping chains of direct psychological
connections between beliefs, desires,
intentions, experiential memories, character
traits, and actions
3. Our bodies
 Brute physical relation with the environment
1

3. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Hypothesis
 If the evolutionary biological drivers that caused personal
identity to develop as a fitness adaptation were to
change, the need for personal identity too would change
and perhaps disappear
 Main evolutionary biological and cultural drivers:
 Resource acquisition, status garnering, mate selection, group
acceptance, gender roles (Hrdy)
 Absent these drivers, how would the adaptation benefit
conferred by personal identity change?
 Examples of shifts in social goals and outcomes
 Worldwide birth rate declines
 Below replacement population declines (Japan, Italy)
2

4. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Personal Identity: Multidisciplinary Question
3
Philosophy of Mind Psychology
Evolutionary Biology
Evolutionary Psychology
Philosophy of Biology
Theoretical Biology
Social Theory
Sociology
Sociobiology
Biology

5. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Philosophical Views of Personal Identity
 Traditional ‘philosophy of mind’ view
 Assumes already-existing subject
 Personal identity needed for continuity
and persistence
 Personal identity is not required for
the survival of the person, relational
experience between past/future
selves and experience is (Parfit)
 fMRI studies: We procrastinate because
we think of our future selves as strangers
 Third persons no different than politicians
or celebrities
4
http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/why-we-procrastinate citing van Gelder JL, Hershfield HE, Nordgren LF. (2013). Vividness of
the future self predicts delinquency. Psychol Sci. 24(6):974-80, and Pronin, Emily. (2008). How we see ourselves and
how we see others. Science. 320(5880):1177-80.

6. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Philosophical Views of Personal Identity
 Self is a flux of unconnected perceptions
(Hume, 1739)
 Self as a constantly re-written, re-
interpretable text, written in difference to the
local relational context (Derrida)
 Subjectivation is the important locus,
facilitated by the movement-image and the
time-image (Deleuze)
 Individuation as a dynamic world process of
which the subject is an effect not a cause;
living beings exist on a capacity spectrum
for individuation (Simondon)
5

7. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Literary View
6
Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Within a Budding Grove, Seascape, with Frieze of Girls
Philosophical Issue:
Group, Individual, Particular
Proust, Albertine, the
‘little band’ of girls at Balbec
“…when I saw the little band again on the beach, and indeed long
afterwards when I knew all the girls who composed it, I could never be
absolutely certain that any of them — even she who among them all
was most like her, the girl with the bicycle — was indeed the one that I
had seen that evening , a girl who differed hardly at all, but was still just
perceptibly different from her whom I had noticed in the procession”

8. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Biology Basics: Why do Individuals Exist?
Classical Biological View: Kin Selection
 Kin selection is the evolutionary strategy
that favors the reproductive success of an
organism's relatives, even at a cost to the
organism's own survival and reproduction
(Darwin, 1859)
 Individuals are a mechanism for kin
selection; individuals are able to identify
their relatives (kin recognition); extended
labor force (Hamilton, 1964)
 Evidence: red squirrel mothers adopted
related orphaned squirrel pups but not
unrelated orphans (2010)
7
Gorrell JC et al. (2010). Adopting kin enhances inclusive fitness in asocial red squirrels. Nature Communications 1 (22): 1.

9. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Biology: Individuals are not a Privileged Unit
 What are the appropriate units in
biology?
 Organisms do not play a privileged role
 Genes, genomes, mechanisms,
phenotypes, gene pools
 Individual is merely convenient
terminology
 Individuals are spatiotemporally localized
entities that have reasonably sharp
beginnings and endings in time
8
Hull, David (1980), "Individuality and Selection," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 11: 311-332.

10. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Biological View: Distinguishing Individuals
9
 Wasps wired to distinguish
each other’s faces
 Wasps identified colony
facial images faster and
more accurately than other
types of images (2011)
 Wasps developed better
vision to identify others’ rank
and possibly allegiance
(fighting queens within
colonies); scent only
identifies the nest mate level
MJ Sheehan, EA Tibbetts. (2011). Specialized face learning is associated with individual recognition in paper wasps.
Science 334 (6060), 1272-1275. http://www.livescience.com/17259-paper-wasps-facial-recognition.html

11. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Biological View: Dolphin ‘Identities’
 Dolphins have a unique name
in the form of a whistle
 Dolphins responded when they
heard the sound of their own
signature whistle, repeating
that whistle back in a way that
seems to say, "Yes, I'm here -
did you call me?"
 Bottlenose dolphins can follow
"recipes" in preparing mollusks,
help other species in distress,
and possibly do math
10
Friedman, W. (2013). PNAS. Jul 23, 2013. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130722-dolphins-whistle-
names-identity-animals-science/

12. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Theoretical Biological View:
Groups and Individuals
11
 Theoretical biology perspective of sociality
 “He who understands the baboon would do more towards
metaphysics than Locke” (Darwin 1838)
 Evolved biological individuals (not personal identity)
 Revisionary view of individuality, adequate definition
 Kin selection is insufficient to capture what is common
to all forms of groups evolving into individuals
 A theory of evolving individuality requires a
sophisticated variety of concepts that
 advocates some form of self-organization that supplements
natural selection, and
 accounts for the most complex forms of individuality
From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality. Eds. Frédéric Bouchard and Philippe Huneman.
2013. http://www.livescience.com/17259-paper-wasps-facial-recognition.html

13. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Psychological View: Personal Identity is…
 A person's conception and expression of
self-identity including with regard to
others' individuality or group affiliations
(Wikipedia; Psychology/Sociology)
 The concept you develop about yourself
that evolves over the course of your life
(Education-Portal: Sociology)
 Self-knowledge that derives from the
individual’s unique attributes (U Twente)
 The distinct personality of an individual;
characteristics by which a person is
recognized or known (IEP)
12

14. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Psychological View: Social Identity Theory
 Multiple ‘levels of self’
 A person has not one, personal self, but
rather several selves that correspond to
widening circles of group membership
 Different social contexts may trigger an
individual to think, feel and act on basis of
his personal, family or national ‘level of
self’ (Turner et al, 1987)
 Ecological Systems Theory
(Bronfenbrenner)
 Multiple social identities
 Self-concept derived from perceived
membership in social groups (Hogg &
Vaughan, 2002)
13
http://www.utwente.nl/cw/theorieenoverzicht/theory%20clusters/interpersonal%20communication%20and%20relations/s
ocial_identity_theory/; Urie Bronfenbrenner & Ecological Systems Theory

15. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Social Theory
 Identity Politics
 Political attitudes regarding the
concerns of social groups based on
identifications such as gender, race,
ethnicity, and sexual orientation
 Anti-identity movement, text
without author
 “Do not ask who I am and do not ask
me to remain the same, leave it to our
bureaucrats and our police to see that
our papers are in order” – Foucault,
1982
14
Foucault, Michel. (1982). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Vintage Books: New York, NY. Page 17.

16. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Evolutionary Biology View
 Adaptation/fitness benefit conferred
 Co-evolution of culture and personal
identity
 Drivers of identity and social behavior:
 Resource acquisition, status garnering, mate
selection, group acceptance, gender roles
 “Apart from economic payoffs, social
status, seems to be the most important
incentive and motivating force of social
behavior” - John Harsanyi, Nobel
Laureate economist
15
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-psychology-of-social/

17. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
What about the Future?
16
Major Computing Paradigms (One per Decade)
The connected world includes Bitcoin/blockchain technology as the economic overlay to
what is increasingly becoming a seamlessly connected world of multi-device computing
including wearables, Internet-of-Things (IOT) sensors, smartphones, tablets, laptops,
Quantified Self-Tracking devices (i.e.; Fitbit), smarthome, smartcar, and smartcity.

18. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Blockchain Technology View
 Lessig: “Code is Law”
 Legal regimes: technically-binding vs. legally-binding
 Constructs of identity
 Social (forgive-forget, redemption, reinvention, memory=imperfect)
 Technological (on-demand memory of all artifacts forever)
 Fourth-person perspective: connected world’s continuous witnessing
(QS gadgetry, IRC, Facebook, Gorgon Stare)
 Identity: something intrinsic or 3rd party-bestowed?
17
Antonopoulos, AM and Ellis, C. (2014). Let’s Talk Bitcoin #160: The Philosophy of Identity.

19. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Blockchain AI
 Blockchain
 Decentralized trustless transaction
system in the form of an encrypted
permanent public ledger
 A system of checks and balances
18
Terasem Movement Digital Mindfile Services: CyBeRev, Lifenaut
 Possibility of enforcing
Friendly AI
 Digital Intelligence
 Confirm reality
environment

20. December 18, 2014
Personal Identity
Multidisciplinary Conclusion: Personal
Identity is Ephemeral and Constructive
 Hypothesis is supported by these four fields
 If the evolutionary biological drivers that caused personal
identity to develop as a fitness adaptation were to change, the
need for personal identity too would change/disappear
 Biology
 Individuality is not personal identity
 Psychology/Sociology
 Malleability of self
 Philosophy
 Relationality and subjectivation
 Evolutionary Biology
 Fitness adaptation
19

21. December 18, 2014
Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga
THANK YOU
Personal Identity:
A Multidisciplinary Inquiry
Melanie Swan
m@melanieswan.com