What makes you, you · Quiz question 30/35
Was I Ever a Fetus? (The Fetus Problem)
As a newborn you had none of your memories or personality. Was that baby really you? Eric Olson's "Was I Ever a Fetus?" and the trouble for psychological theories.
When you were a newborn, you had none of your current memories, personality or thoughts.
That baby was still me.
Eric Olson raised it in his 1997 paper "Was I Ever a Fetus?" as a criticism of psychological continuity theories. On those theories, anything not psychologically continuous with you isn't you. An early fetus has no mental states at all, so it wasn't you. Since most people believe "that was me in my mother's womb," Olson took this as a major weakness of the psychological view.
If you agreed, you share an animalist intuition: you're a human organism, that organism has existed since some point after conception, so the newborn and the fetus were you. The intuition is strong enough that psychological theorists have to answer it.
They do so by distinguishing senses of "was." Constitution theorists like Lynne Rudder Baker say a person is constituted by an organism, and you're linked to the baby by sharing that organism. Jeff McMahan's "embodied mind" view says you begin to exist when the brain develops the capacity for consciousness. This debate ties directly into questions in abortion and bioethics about when moral status begins.
You're a human organism. When the organism was a fetus, you were a fetus.
Key names: Eric Olson, Aristotle (forerunner)You exist once there's a brain capable of consciousness. An early fetus isn't you, but a newborn can be.
Key names: Jeff McMahanA being with no psychological link to you isn't strictly you — it was the organism that constitutes you.
Key names: John Locke, Lynne Rudder Baker, Derek Parfit