Michele Pasin / Quotes

Not identity but what matters

As with the ship of Theseus, the important question is not about identity but about what matters. The same is true when we talk about people in the late stages of dementia. Are they they same persons we knew before the disease took its hold? In some ways yes, in some ways no. It depends. To expect the logic of identity to yield a clear answer is foolish.

Saved 23 April 2015

#personal-identity #dementia #identity

Academia and the doctrine of doing what you love

There are many factors that keep PhDs providing such high-skilled labor for such extremely low wages, including path dependency and the sunk costs of earning…

In The Name Of Love | Jacobin #labor #factors #personal-identity #workers #conditions

Ego loss in the bath

Ego loss crept upon me without my even noticing. Several times, half-submerged amid mounds of foam sparkling like a Christmas tree, I realized I had…

The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) #ego #personal-identity #psychedelics #self

Hijacked by a seventeenth-century Protestant

Exactly what had happened I couldn’t remember. One moment I had been my habitual agnostic self, the next I was a Christian fundamentalist—and the trip saw me…

The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) #psychedelics #religion #God #personal-identity

Hume finds no experience of the self

Hume made devastating criticisms of the Cartesian account of the self and personal identity. There is no experience of the self, according to Hume; and the…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #self #personal-identity #illusion

Identity as coordinates on a map of relationships

Whatever the reason, I felt dishearteningly alone in the city. I’d lost Prabaker and Abdullah, my closest friends, in the same week, and with them I’d lost…

Shantaram (gregory David Roberts) #friends #violence #personal-identity

Is my body essential to my identity

But is this body really essential to my identity? It seems at least possible to imagine that I might, like Gregor Samsa in the story by Kafka, wake up in a…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #personal-identity #self #soul #dualism