hi, i’m new here.
I’m currently in a Intro Philosophy class and we are covering the The Problem of Personal Identity. Most of it i get, but John Locke, well… his English is hard to understand. So for those of you who understand Lockes work, or even the Problem of Personal Identity , i give you the following question to read:
The Soul is often considered to be the bearer of the states of consciousness essential for being a person. But Locke sees a problem with the Same Soul Criterion, because what basis is there to believe that the states of consciousness of the previously embodied person aren’t carried along with the soul after the death of the body? How does Locke distinguish between what it means to be “the same substance” over time and what it means to be “the same person” over time? What does Locke think personal identity consists in?
i know that Locke claims Memory to identify individuals. but what do you think?
i’m not really looking to hear your argument for or against Locke, here, …just speak as it were John Locke’s view.
Locke put identity down to memory (as far as I recall him), but it’s really a problematic point of view. If you have an accident which causes you to lose your memory, are you really not the same person? Locke seems to be forced to say you are not. This is fine if you’re comfortable denying any real sort of consciousness – consciousness which is a different from just that which it is conscious of. If you want to say that a conscious being is more than a present lump of experiences (and the memories contained within that) then this does not suffice, however.
Personally, I think continuity over time (as Ashen) suggests better captures how we think of our personal identity. (I don’t, however, remember Locke proposing that. Doesn’t really matter who did or didn’t propose it, though.) Under such a theory, your identity is a four dimensional “worm”. Imagine that you leave a trail behind at every moment in your life. Plotted in four dimensions, your life is a continuous shape – you don’t jump over anything in space or time.
The four dimensional worm view has some implications for teleportation. Current methods of quantum telportation essentially destroy the original object with the process of the distruction causing a new copy to be created in another location. If you telport a human in that way, the four dimensional graph of their life would have a gap in it. If consciousness if four dimensional continuity, then we’d have to say it’s a new person and the old person is dead. On the other hand, if we use another theory like Locke’s memory suggestion then the original person is still alive and nobody has been killed.
Also note that a theory of personal identity ought to tie in to your theory of identity in general. Personal identity is just a special case of how we decide when an object is no longer the same object.