To paraphrase Heraclitus:
“We step and do not step into the same river, we are and are not.”
Careful here not to mix up fundamentally different questions.
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Metaphysics. Can we still designate body x as “body x”, even ten years later during which many changes in form and replacements of substance have taken place? Is it the same being? This is the real sense of Heraclites’ famous question, can you step in the same river twice? (A: No, because the river is full of pirannhas.) Can we, anyway, speak of a person as a thing, a noun, who “is”? Do the first and second person pronouns indicate a different sort of reality (or illusion) from the third?
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Psychology. How is it that I experience myself as an “I” who continues through time? My sensations, memories, will, affects, etc. all seem to be coordinated in some way, we call this seeming coherence an ego, a self, or s subject, and it seems to be the natural result of having a properly functioning human brain. To have an ego is not a choice that we make; it is the precondition of choice. Because it is a wholly natural, universal (within the species) and non-contingent (again, given a human body), the production of the ego should be understood through the sciences. That is, it is not a cultural matter. Ethical or aesthetic considerations would not be helpful at this level. It is, too, quite different from the purely ontological question in #1.
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Ethics. What should I do with this “I” that I am? Should I suppress it? Overcome it? Gratify it? Ignore it? Fracture it? Philosophize about it?
It seems to me that these questions do not overlap.
and thinking about it some more, that list I made is far from exhaustive. It does not talk about the culture except on the level of individual choice. There are all kinds of sociological and anthropological factors in our identities which have little to do with personal choice–except in that we might choose to repudiate them.
I am with Hume on this one. I can’t seem to find the point at which we can distinguish the “I” by any unchanging, static characteristics. However, from a pragmatic perspective, I find that our experiences and genetically derived personalities make us who we are.
It really breaks down into the philosophy of the mind and how we want to define the mind. I’ve got a link to an interesting interview on the subject. I’ll post it if I can find it.
Would be much appreciated as I’m just writing an essay about Parfit’s theory of identity. I may post a cut down version of it once it’s finished (hopefully no one else from Notts uni posts here and so be able to nick my ideas 
). Maybe even post the whole thing as I need some advicee about essay style.
Sorry, couldn’t find the link but I would be very interested in reading your essay on Parfit. I’ve been reading through Reasons and Persons for the last couples of months and I’m not quite sure that I can say that I agree with him yet, but I do like where he is going with his theories. Do you agree with his pesonal identity theory? and how it relates to ethical matters?
well, i agree identity is crap. it’s ust something to seem important or try to make something meaningless appear meaningful. If you see through it, you realise identity is pure imagination. relax and float downstream isn’t dying. basically. we are all part of what is. as you mention there is indoctrination going on about that there actually is something like “autonomic humans” in our typographic culture. the fact that the eyes are so dominant in western culture is part of the narrowness that some “people” try to advertise as reality. it’s also the basis of binary happenings as bush talking about good and evil; human fantasy chopped off from reality. the only thing we know is that there is something. we didn’t give birth to ourselves. we are all interconnected. we aren’t we. we are all part of what is. identity is a construction, a polished fasade or whatever that doesn’t tell anything about reality other than the fantasy world some people live in being very unrealistic indeed. the west is all about polished fasades and trying to press a false world view upon “people”. it’s all about one-dimensionality, that “people” are in a certain way, have a predestined identity and that this world consists of autonomic “human beings” independent of each other with different “identities” and that the Western system is the right judge of how things really are. They are more relaxed other places… the controlmania of west actually can’t lead to anything else than “failure”. because what is is. everything we assign “people” and other imaginary constructions “we” have created is false and the starting-point for the controlmania through categorisation (which is necessarily always incomplete and… false) is thus “wrong” basically. so, there you are…
You mean that if you walk out of a room, and then return five minutes later, and somone says, “Oh, you are back already?” that person is talking nonsense? Wow! The things philosophy teaches you!
Identity is in constant flux… probably the only thing which means that I am still “me” is the continuity of perception through my own senses.
am I missing something here? Isn’t the obvious answer memory? This seems to be true, even when I might not be able to recall everything from my past and the choices that I have made.
That was Locke’s original suggestion (though he also believed in a sort of soull theory, but the sould was just a vessel which was filled with memories). It doesn’t quite hold up however, memory is not very reliable and highly fallible. I can’t remember what I did yesterday let alone last week. Memorable events only happen now and again. Parfit and others have taken the initial suggestion further and gone with psychological connections, which is memory as well as things like dispostions, feelings, etc. This means that if someone suffers amnesia they could still be defined as the same persons as they’ll retain the majority of other psychological connectors.
Why is a body identified as a body and not just a collection of atoms in a particular arrangement that keep being replaced by other atoms in order to keep the body (as a whole) alive? It is not the body that exists. It is the ingredients of the body that exist together at a particular point in time, in a distinguishable form that is termed a body.
How can a body who’s original cells have died and been replaced possibly be the same body? The only thing that lives on is the DNA. A body seems to merely be a living machine who’s function is to carry on its DNA indefinately through living and reproduction. The fact that it still looks the same and thinks its the same despite constant changes is to do with our senses and our thoughts. It thinks that other bodies (other people for example) are different because other bodies don’t feel the effects of its senses and thoughts and that it remains the ‘same’ body because it does feel the effects of its senses and thoughts in the same way through all this. Even though this ‘same’ body is constantly changing and exchanging its atoms that make it up with other things.
Life is severely over-rated.
Matt-
if you can’t remember what you did yesterday, why would you think it plays a part in who you are?
but thx for pointing it out that memory alone seems to be lacking something, I would then revise what I said earlier to included these various other “psychological connections.” Also, I have seen Parfit’s name mentioned on this site before, and I will try and find out about him/her on the net, but briefly could you explain (if possible) what his/her ideas on identity were?
Briefly, a person at t2 is identical with a person at t1, iff
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There is psychological continuity in the form of overlapping chains of strong psychological connectedness.
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There is no branching (for example if you get duplicated, this clause is added cause identity is (apparantly) necessarily a one-one relation (though I don’t believe Personal Identity is as I shall explain in an essay which will shortly make an appearance in the essays/theses section)).
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The continuity has the right kind of cause. (In other words someone who spontaneously appears by random occurance and claims to be Aristotle is not Aristotle, just happens to be qualitively similar, there has to be a causal relation between Aristotle at t1 and Aristotle at t2).
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Personal identity is nothing more than holding facts such as 1-3.
A brief explanation of strong psychological connection: His theory can be seen as an extension of Locke’s original one of identity being overlapping memory connections, but instead of relying just on memory connections Parfit looks at connection between all our psychological states, such as memories, beliefs, desires, dispositions, the connection between intentions and subsequent acts and so on. A connection is termed ‘strong’ if there is a significant amount of resemblance of one to the other. Thus while I have strong connection to myself a week ago, I certainly do not have the same connection to myself 10 years ago and there will only be a small amount of connection.
Parfit then goes on to argue Identity is not what matters to us:
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Identity cannot be many-one, one-many, it is logically one-one.
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In a case of fission (where we split into two people), it must either be that
(a) We survive as both, (b) we survive as one or the other, (c) we survive as neither.
(b) is stupid, for (c), how can a double success be a failure, (a) is logically incoherent, identity is a one-one relation, therefore, identity is not what matters to us, all that matters iin survival is bearing Relation R to someone(psycholgical continutiy and/or connectedness to someone).
That’s a little of a crash course. If you can get get your hands on a copy of Parfit’s Reason and Persons do so, it’s really good, though I’ve only had time to read Part III so far, which is on identity, so I don’t know if the rest is good. Skeptic, what do you think of the rest of it?
In response to your question (a good un), our personality changes as we experience events and that change is permanent even if we can’t actually remember them.
One might argue that our Freudian Id might remember it though (is it the id or the ego, argh! I might be wrong in saying id there). Depends if you buy a Freudian view though.
I know for certain that I have no identity. I play roles, that’s what society’s about, and society thus advertises the idea of identity. But I know that I’m part of something universal, stretching far beyond humanity…
What a stupid thing to say. You know you have no identity, and yet without identity the word you is meaningless, so your sentence is meaningless.
A little bit of an argument wouldn’t go amiss. This is the philosophy forum after all.
Matt-
Thx for the crash course. Well, I gather that after reading a little bit,Parfit doesn’t see “Identity” as anything other than us labeling ourselves after the fact. I don’t know if I can agree with this intuitively; but I do not have the foundation upon which to make my argument. Maybe I do hold to something similar to Freud’s notion of Ego, but I see it as more of a focus/awareness issue.
For example, have you ever had the experience of smelling something, or hearing a song that brought back memories you had not recalled for quite a long time? It might seem that these experiences were lost to you but then if they really were, how could you have recalled them? I think sometimes it just requires the right conditions to remember and we can remember many different things about the experiences we have-- like what we were doing, eating, thinking, feeling. Also sometimes we only need one of these things to help bring it back into our focus. This seems to suggest to me that there really is an “i” that understands or experiences a unity to these experiences.
Marcel Proust’s great and famous novel, “Rememberances of Things Past” begins with tasting a little French cake (madeline) when the protaganist was a child, and the rest of the long novel consists of the memories brought back by that taste. If you have not read that novel, read it.
Someone told me he connected a certain smell to playing beatles records of the old kind, because the first time he had played beatles there had been a certain smell to it. When he plays beatles CD’s this smell doesn’t appear. Does this mean that he has lost some identity?
No, he’s just one of Pavlov’s dogs.
Association.