Tags / 36 quotes from 5 sources
#personal-identity
In The Name Of Love | Jacobin
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 a PhD, but one of the strongest is how pervasively the DWYL doctrine is embedded in academia. Few other professions fuse…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
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 completely different body. But if the same body is not what makes me me, then what does make me me? What is the relation…
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 identity that we ascribe to ourselves through the changes in our lives is an entirely fictitious identity. It is a kind of…
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
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 the mark on the psychic map that says You Are Here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
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 completely forgotten who I was. Once I had to get a glass of water from the kitchen and wandered, dripping wet, through the…
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 seesawing wildly between the two. One moment I was yearning passionately for God, convulsed by emotions that seemed torn…
Life review and dissociation from the self
Somehow the acid had catalyzed a process that continued without further chemical action. Gradually this ongoing life-review began to bring about an increasing sense of dissociation from the self I had so blindly identified with. My life seemed to become ever more objective…
Losing all personal identity
As the minutes went by, I found that I was losing any personal sense of identity. At first I could remember bits and pieces about my life, but it was getting more and more difficult to join them up into any coherent whole
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
The riddle of continuity in change
The central riddle I’ve set out to solve concerns the self’s continuity in change: how can we remain the same people over time, even as we change, sometimes considerably?
We are the same because we believe it
‘Physically we’re not the same, psychologically we’re not the same, genetically we’re the same but that doesn’t mean anything really; we may have certain patterns of brain organisation that predispose us temperamentally in certain ways, so we’re the same in that sense but then…
Belief in the enduring self as magical thinking
We may go through major transformations, not just brain injuries, but what psychologists call ‘emotional insult’, such as the break-up of relationships or a bereavement. ‘Are we the same people when we come through them? In some sense yes, in some sense no, but it seems we have…
Dementia as a real-life thought experiment
Kathleen Wilkes complained that the philosophy of personal identity depends far too much on fanciful thought experiments, and that this is entirely unnecessary, because real life provides all the test cases we need.1 Dementia is perhaps the cruellest and most revealing example…
Locke's memory criterion of personal identity
Similar thoughts informed one of the first modern advocates of psychological continuity as the key to personal identity, the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. Such was the emphasis he placed on memory that he has been widely attributed with holding a ‘memory…
Locke and Reid aim at the wrong target
Although Reid’s objection hits the bullseye, in an important respect both he and Locke are looking at the wrong target.
Psychological continuity as overlapping connections
modern advocates of psychological continuity as the basis for personal identity over time see memory as just one of a number of psychological connections over time that contribute to this continuity, and they see this continuity in terms of overlapping connections, not rigid…
I am my baggage
it seems to me that a consistent set of personality traits is not a person. Janet’s metaphors seem to get it exactly wrong. I am my baggage. I am the layers that have grown on the onion, not the tiny core at the middle. We are precisely all the things we’ve accrued, the…
Persons are not the same as their bodies
As he summarises it, ‘My argument has been that knowledge of what has happened to a person’s body and its parts will not necessarily give you knowledge of what has happened to the person, and so, that persons are not the same as their bodies.’
No further facts about persons
in the split-brain case, there is a truth about what has happened to the person which we cannot know on the basis of the physical facts, namely, which of them is me. This is an example of what Derek Parfit calls a ‘further fact’ view of the self.8 According to such theories…
Psychological continuity in every human society
despite the notorious confusions of westerners trying to get by in Japanese culture, neither locals nor foreigners ever have any difficulty in treating individuals as the same individuals over time, with consistent traits, beliefs and so on. If you try to really imagine a…
Locke's definition of a person
John Locke’s definition of a person as a ‘thinking intelligent being that has reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places’.
Souls preserve identity only with consciousness
Locke continues, ‘He is no more one self with either of them than if the soul or immaterial spirit that now informs him had been created, and began to exist, when it began to inform his present body.’ In itself, having the soul of someone now dead no more makes you that person…
Person is a functional category
That principle is that ‘person’ is not a biological category, but a functional one. Any creature, or even machine, that has the conscious capacities of a person is a person, irrespective of its species. That is why we recognise as people characters in science-fiction films who…
Parfit: psychological connectedness and continuity
What makes for a single person over time is therefore, in the formulation of contemporary philosopher Derek Parfit, psychological connectedness and continuity. That is why a person remains the same person, even when their bodies radically change. That is why we doubt whether…
Physical yet not essentially physical
On the one hand, I’ve been arguing that we are entirely physical, and that we have no material souls. But on the other, I insist we are not our brains or our bodies, and that our identity is defined by psychological continuity. We seem to be wholly physical yet oddly not…
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…
Two questions of personal identity
One way of looking at this is that, rather than there being one question of personal identity, there are actually (at least) two different questions. There is a logical question about the identity of objects and the existential question about what matters to us about our…
Ricoeur: selfhood is not sameness
Not all philosophers have suffered from this misapprehension, of course. The best, to my mind, are precisely those who manage both to be no less precise than necessary, but no more precise than is possible. Paul Ricoeur is a rare example of a philosopher who seems to appreciate…
The false precision of personal identity theory
The philosophy of personal identity is, unfortunately, a prime example of this. It is fatally flawed by its goal of stating the strict logical conditions for the persistence of a person over time. Because this is how the whole debate is framed, it tends to underestimate the…
Are person and self sortal concepts?
The false assumption can be put in another way. Concepts such as ‘person’ and ‘self’ are taken to be either ‘sortals’ or useless. A sortal concept is one which allows you to count the number of things to which that concept applies, and to specify the conditions for their…
Person is not a robust sortal
I’m happy to bite both Noonan’s bullets. In fact, I chew them with relish. ‘Person’ is not best thought of as a robust sortal concept and so ‘personal identity’ is strictly speaking non-existent. The idea that ‘person’ is not a sortal concept may seem bizarre. How could we…
Staying the same through steady change
We can remain the ‘same’ through great change because it is of the nature of persons that they change, and so our continued existence as the same person requires only that there is a steady enough process of change, not that we remain identical in any particular respect. It is…
We are what we do
‘We are responsible for our actions not because they are our products but because they are us, because we are what we do.’9 However, her view is not an excessively romantic one. Self-creation is not heroic but necessary. ‘Every human being must make himself into someone in…
Bundles tied tighter and looser
If that’s right, then virtually every theory of self and personal identity has inevitably gone wrong, because they have sought a description of selves which neatly fits all cases. But bundles can be tied together differently, more tightly and more loosely. This does not mean…
No memory of a previous life
Revealingly, however, there is an absence of any semblance of a personal relationship between Akong II and Akong I. Most obviously, Akong says of his previous life, ‘I don’t remember anything.’
Where reincarnation gets slippery
This is where I think the doctrine of reincarnation gets slippery. On the one hand, for it to make any sense, it clearly can’t involve the straightforward transference of one life to another body. You have a set of memories, plans, projects, friends and family. All of these…
Resurrection or replica?
A more common, and more plausible, strategy has been to accept that there will be some mixing of the basic matter out of which we are made, and to accept the consequence that God would have to use new atoms when resurrecting us. As Brown puts it, ‘our eternal existence would…