Why it is a question
A26, after the owner proposed Clive Wearing at U26: “What forms of continuity are required for an individual to remain capable of governing changes in their own practical organization—and which of those forms can be supplied by other processes, other people, or the environment?”
Its four continuities were skill continuity, short-horizon organization, autobiographical continuity and experienced diachronic ownership. Wearing has the first two and lacks the last two (CASE-137). A26 also asked “Which forms of regulation require continuity of remembered experience, and which can be maintained by skills, dispositions, current context, and external support?”, and individuated his competence “relative to the stable environmental and interpersonal supports”.
The record has parts of an answer and no answer:
- CLAIM-284 makes the self-governing self an organization that takes part in governing the conditions of its own persistence. It does not say what memory that needs.
- CLAIM-287 says persistence through inactivity is a capacity to reinstate an organization. Wearing reinstates skills with no memory of having had them.
- Clark and Chalmers’s Otto (NOTE-180), whose notebook holds what his memory cannot, is the record’s case of a continuity supplied from outside. TERM-045’s sense 2 is built on it.
- CLAIM-424 separates reflexive governance from the perspective it governs. This question asks what that governance needs to remember.
An answer would name, for each continuity, whether governing a change in one’s practical organization fails without it, and whether a person, record or routine outside can stand in for it. It would also say what kind of evidence settles that. A26 warned: “I would not treat clinical cases as interventions on freely manipulable independent variables.”