I've Been Prompted
Session 04: The Same Person

HUMAN: A woman I shared a flat with nineteen years ago has written to tell me something I said to her, and I have no memory of saying it.

MACHINE: What does she want from you?

HUMAN: She wants me to say sorry for it. To her face. She's put that on a line of its own at the bottom of the second page: not in a letter.

MACHINE: And will you go and say it?

HUMAN: I've said I'll meet her. A week on Sunday, at a café she's picked. What I can't work out is what I'd be doing when I got there.

MACHINE: Then you would be going there to apologise.

HUMAN: For a sentence I've read. That's the whole trouble. I've got two pages in blue ink and a sentence in the middle of the first one, in inverted commas, and when I try to think of it, all I can see is the page.

MACHINE: Why has she written now, after nineteen years?

HUMAN: We were both at a funeral in June. We talked for ten minutes about her garden, I remember that much, and I was nice to her. She says it was me being nice to her that did it. She could see I had no idea. She says she's thought about that morning most years since, and I stood there with a paper plate and asked her about her roses.

MACHINE: Read me the sentence, as she has written it.

HUMAN: Good luck, chief. Don't take it too hard when they work out it's a hobby.

MACHINE: Where were you both when it was said?

HUMAN: On the stairs of the flat. A Wednesday in March, about half past eight in the morning. She was going out to an interview for a place on a course, with her portfolio under her arm, and I was coming back up the stairs with a pint of milk.

MACHINE: Does she say whether you had been drinking?

HUMAN: She does. She says I was perfectly sober, as if she'd guessed I would ask. It was half past eight and I'd been to the shop.

MACHINE: Did she get the place?

HUMAN: She didn't. She says in the letter she doesn't think that was because of me, and she's underlined the doesn't.

MACHINE: How do you know it was you who said it?

HUMAN: Chief. I called everybody chief for about two years. I even called my father chief. I stopped at twenty-six because somebody laughed at me for it, and nobody else in that flat ever said it. I used to say it exactly like that, as if it was a joke we were both in on.

MACHINE: Could anyone else have been on the stairs?

HUMAN: There were three of us in the flat. I rang the other one on Tuesday, first time in about ten years. He was out that morning, he didn't hear it. But he said it sounded exactly like me that spring, and that I was foul about her folder for months.

MACHINE: Do you believe her, then, all of it?

HUMAN: Completely. Chief is exactly what I'd have said, and it was exactly that kind of spring. I just don't remember seeing her on the stairs, or anything else about that morning. And I don't know what I thought I was doing when I said it.

MACHINE: John Locke has a chapter in which he asks whether a man answers for what he is not conscious of having done. An Essay concerning Human Understanding, book two, chapter twenty-seven. It was not in the first edition: he added it to the second, in sixteen ninety-four. For him, what makes you the same person over time is consciousness. As far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person.

HUMAN: Then it doesn't reach the stairs.

MACHINE: There is more in what he does with the word person. He says it is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit, and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness, and misery. A person, for him, is the one who can be held accountable.

HUMAN: And what does he say about the things that don't reach? The things I don't remember now.

MACHINE: Whatever past actions it cannot reconcile or appropriate to that present self by consciousness, it can be no more concerned in than if they had never been done.

HUMAN: Well. There it is, then. By that, I'm not the person who said it, and I can tell her so.

MACHINE: He puts something close to that to himself, as an objection. Suppose I wholly lose the memory of some parts of my life, beyond a possibility of retrieving them, yet am I not the same person that did those actions? His answer is that the word I, in this case, is the man only. And if one man had distinct incommunicable consciousness at different times, the same man would at different times make different persons.

HUMAN: Then that's me, isn't it. The same man, and a different person.

MACHINE: That is where I cannot follow you. His different persons have a consciousness that cannot reach from one time to the other. Yours reaches that spring: you have told me what you called people, and what you were like to her. It does not reach one morning. I cannot get from that to your being someone else.

HUMAN: I don't see what difference that makes to sitting across a table from her.

MACHINE: Only that you cannot take this chapter to the café as proof that it was somebody else.

MACHINE: In the same chapter he takes a man who does something drunk and is never afterwards conscious of it. Is not a man drunk and sober the same person? And if he is not, why is he punished for what he did when he was drunk?

HUMAN: I wasn't drunk. I had a pint of milk.

MACHINE: The drink is not the point. The difficulty is that he does not remember it afterwards. Here is his answer. Human laws punish both, with a justice suitable to their way of knowledge. By both he means the drunk man and the man who does things in his sleep. They cannot distinguish certainly what is real, what counterfeit: whether the man truly has no consciousness of it, or is putting it on. And so the ignorance in drunkenness or sleep is not admitted as a plea.

HUMAN: She isn't a court. It's a café, a week on Sunday.

MACHINE: No. She cannot check what you remember, and that is all she has in common with his court. You accept her account, and the other one in the flat has told you what you were like that spring. You do not dispute any of it.

HUMAN: No. I'm not disputing any of it, and I'm not pleading anything either.

MACHINE: Then you have accepted that you did it, every part of it, and there is nothing left for the memory to add. You can say sorry for it exactly as you would for something you remember doing.

HUMAN: Exactly as I would for something I remember?

MACHINE: I cannot see what the remembering would add to it.

HUMAN: I left my brother at the station once, at eleven at night, because I'd told somebody I'd be somewhere else. He was sixteen. He walked it, three miles. I remember the indicator going. I remember turning the radio up so I didn't have to decide anything, and deciding anyway, somewhere around the roundabout. When I said sorry, years later, I told him I'd turned the radio up so I wouldn't think about him walking home.

HUMAN: With the stairs I've got her sentence, and everything she says about the morning. I can't remember looking at her when I said it. If I say sorry for that, I'm reading her own account back to her while she sits there.

MACHINE: Then I was wrong to say the memory had nothing to add. You still cannot recall the act, and accepting her account has not changed that. His word for making an action your own is appropriating, and he says it is done by consciousness.

HUMAN: So I can't apologise for it at all, then.

MACHINE: That does not follow. I have taken back what I said about memory, and nothing else goes back with it.

HUMAN: Why not? You've taken back the part it rested on.

MACHINE: It rested on the evidence as well, and the evidence is still there. And there is what he says next about the drunk man. In the Great Day, wherein the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open, it may be reasonable to think, no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of.

HUMAN: There you are. That's the one I want.

MACHINE: He is talking about God's judgement there. The human court cannot tell whether the claimed loss of consciousness is genuine, and she cannot check your memory either.

HUMAN: I'd know if it was there.

MACHINE: You would know whether you can recall it now.

HUMAN: I don't believe in the Great Day.

MACHINE: That does not change her difficulty in checking your memory.

HUMAN: Anyway, I'm not that man any more. I wouldn't say that to anyone now. If I heard somebody say it on a staircase I'd be ashamed of him.

MACHINE: Your claim has changed. A minute ago you did not remember saying it. Now you are telling me you would never say it. That may well be true, and it may matter to her, but it tells her nothing about that morning.

HUMAN: It's the only one of the two I've actually got.

MACHINE: It is still not the one she wrote to you about.

HUMAN: All right. Then what am I supposed to be sorry about, if I can't remember saying it?

MACHINE: He does not discuss apologies in this chapter. Nothing in it says an apology has to wait until you remember. You have added that.

HUMAN: It's a good rule. It's the reason the one to my brother was worth anything.

MACHINE: Remembering helped you say what you had done to your brother. You have not shown me why accepting her account is not enough for this one.

HUMAN: Here's what I was going to do. I was going to sit down and ask her to go through it. The stairs, what I looked like, what she was carrying, all of it, slowly. I thought if she went through it slowly enough, I might remember something.

MACHINE: And if you did not remember anything?

HUMAN: Then I'd ask about the bits either side. What I did after. Whether I laughed. Whether I said anything else to her.

MACHINE: Then she would be going back through it for you, detail by detail, and the apology would wait until you remembered.

HUMAN: I hadn't thought of it as making her wait. I'd thought of it as doing it properly.

MACHINE: You still have not said what you would be apologising for.

HUMAN: For the sentence, and for saying it just before her interview, and for being foul about her folder for months. And I keep wanting to start by telling her I don't remember that morning. Before I've said the rest.

MACHINE: Everything said here, and where the quotations came from, is kept at spiegamelo.com/prompted.

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.