Philosophy of mind
Self-identity
Dutch kid called Jur got encephalitis, lost more or less all of his memories. Extensive loss of memory. He had to start all over again. Was quite exceptional however. He retained his ability to make new memories. Most of the people who suffer massive memory loss cannot build up new memories. They are lost eternally. He was a philosophy student, and returned to philosophy. He went to university again after a lot of effort. He came to the topic of personal identity: what guarantees the identity of a person over time – especially in lieu of his own memory loss. Can one survive their own memory loss?
He is of the opinion that he is not the same person as before his memory loss. His family tends to treat him as a new person. He argues that there are advantages to loosing your memory.
The conventionalist theory of personal identity, Locke. Jur agrees with it. He argues that given that he lost his memory there is no psychological continuity between then and now.
It is not about personality. Do we remain the same person over time? What a person really is. How can we determine an individual as a person?
For many points of view it seems like an important topic that individuals retain their personal identity. In ordinary morality we seem to assume an essentialist view of personalist identity.
Qualitative identity: identical twins.
What we are interested in is numerical identity. It’s about one person remaining the same, retaining their identity over time, diachronically.
Two solutions:
essentialism and conventionalism
Descartes is an essentialist about personal identity: we can survive our bodies, we can exist without it, and still remain the same person. There is some principle, some substance, that determines the identity of ourselves. Substance dualists easily ascribe to a view like this. Richard Swinburne has a very similar view. He argues for what philosophers call the metaphysical Ego theory of personal identity. The Ego is the name for the mysterious substance that guarantees the identity. Most contemporary analytic philosophers are critical of essentialism. Swinburne is a loner. People are skeptical of the possibility of surviving their body. Swinburne says that personal identity is an axiom and a brute fact, we cannot reduce it. Absolutism in essentialism, is basically that you either remain the same person all the time or you don’t. Folk psychology is actually along essentialist lines. This we can infer from empirical studies. Xphi, a bunch of philosophers who are interested in whether philosophers intuitions are representative of normal people’s intuitions.
Conventionalists will argue that it is basically up to us to determine whether a personal identity changed or not. We simply have to determine it in case-by-case basis.
Personal identity is a gradual thing. One can be more or less a personal identity.
Personal identity as determined by physical continuity. The flesh and blood theory. Personal identity is spatiotempophysical continuity. What is continuity then? We can talk about mathematical, uninterrupted line that connects two points. This theory is very simple. A theoretical virtue. It has some practical success because we generally track people by looking at their body. It is also an anti-dualist theory. If their body ceases to exist, they, as such, also cease to exist.
”I am going to quote five nights at freddy’s”.
Physical continuity is probably not enough. Probably you’re not the same from the moment you are a zygote until you die, even if there is physical continuity.
Both Kant and Locke writes quite a lot about mental illness.
Locke presents us with a thought experiment about the cobbler and the prince, who have a body swap. Who will you address as the prince? His intuition has it that we would adress the cobblers body as the prince because we are tracking the identity by looking at the consciousness. His conclusion: personal identity has nothing to do with physical continuity. The body does not guarantee his identity, but their mind.
”Matter could never produce thought. And I appeal to everyone’s own thoughts, whether he cannot as easily conceive Matter produced by nothing, as Thought produced by pure Matter, when before there was no such thing as Thought, or an intelligent Being existing.”
Sydney Shoemaker agrees with Locke. He says that personal identity has nothing to do with whole body continuity, but probably with important parts like the brain.
Locke is after the connectedness of psychological experiences over time.