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See the attached .htm file or read the less
nicely formatted in-line text below. All
handouts are also posted on the PHL
202 Theories of Reality page which can
be found by going to my homepage:

http://teach.lanecc.edu/borrowdalej/

Personal Identity

Personal identity is what makes you you.
Theories of personal identity try to answer
the question, "What is a person?" and
"What makes a person the same person
over time?

Views of personal identity can be broken
into Realist and Anti-Realist camps. The
Realist camps believe that there really is
such a thing a person, that persons exist.
The Anti-Realist camp says that there
really is no such thing as a person, that
persons do not really exist, but that what
we call a person is merely a collection of
ever-changing perceptions or states of
consciousness which are related to one
another certain ways. The Anti-Realist
view is held by Eastern Philosophy,
including such thinkers as Kornfield and
Ram Dass (The Nature of
Selflessness/Buddhist Concept of Self),
as well as empiricist David Hume and his
modern-day decendents known as
logical positivists.

There are two main realist views, the
Bodily Continuity View and the
Psychological Continuity View. The Bodily
Continuity View says that person means
body and the criteria for being the same
person is simply being the same
biological entity. An argument for this view
is that this is how we identify persons in
everyday life. If I'm looking for John, I don't
look for his memories or personality, I
look for his physical body. That's
because, this view would say, they are
one in the same.

However, there are some problems with
the Bodily Continuity View:

(1) People lose or gain body fat, lose
limbs in accidents, etc. but still seem to
be the same person. The Bodily
Continuity defender might say that as
long as the same basic structure or
genetic code is there, it is the same
person. A biological organism can
change, grow, be injured, etc. but still be
considered the same organism.

(2) Someone in a coma has the same
body but is either a different person or, in
the case of a coma, perhaps a
non-person.

(3) Locke's Body-Switch Example: Locke
proposes a thought experiment involving
a prince and a pauper. Suppose one day
a prince wakes up and remembers
nothing of his life as a prince but has
memories of being a peasant boy.
Suppose also that on the same day a
pauper wakes up having no memories of
having been a peasant boy, but does
have memories of being a prince. If both
are questioned and have the particular
memories, knowledge and skills
associated with the other, as well as
perhaps some personality traits (we
might suppose the prince is spoiled and
arrogant or that the pauper is
ill-mannered or quick-tempered), we
would eventually conclude that the two
had switched bodies. The problem is that
if the Bodily Continuity View is correct, we
shouldn't even be able to imagine the
idea of a body-switch. It says that "same
person" means "same body." If this is the
case, one couldn't even make sense out
of the idea of a person "switching bodies"
because there would be nothing beyond
the bodies to do the switching. If personal
identity consisted in bodily continuity,
such a story would be meaningless. But,
says Locke, since the concept is
conceivable and we can imagine
evidence which would convince us it is
true (whether it has ever or could actually
happen is irrelevant), person and body
must mean and refer to different things.

(4) The Bodily Continuity View seems to
confuse how we identify a person with
what a person is. How I locate John may
be by finding John's body, but this doesn't
mean that John is identical with his body.
Perhaps I look for John's body because I
know that John's mind or soul is always
within it. Furthermore, it may be that
John's mind or soul itself is not
identifiable except through the way it
makes his body behave. But if I want
John's opinion on some philosophical
issue or to ask him to repeat a joke he
told at the water cooler last week, I don't
want John's body, I want John, John
being a psyhological, not a physical entity.
John's body might be able to help me
move a heavy desk (under John's
direction, of course) but it doesn't have
opinions or know jokes.

Locke suggests a Psychological
Continuity View of personal identity. A
person is a consciousness and being the
same person over time is having a
continuity of consciousness, including
memories, personality traits, beliefs,
attitudes, likes and dislikes and so on.
These can and do of course change over
time, but as long as the changes are
gradual and small, we are the same
person. What about amnesia? Well,
amnesia is rarely total and permanent,
but even in those cases, Locke could say
that if the person's personality traits were
still present, that might be enough to
make them the same person. What if
they had none of their former personality
traits or had opposite traits? Then we
would have to say that in Locke's view we
had a different person. But doesn't this
accord with our intuitions? If someone
looked like a close friend but didn't apear
to recognize you and had could
remember none of the things you did
together and had a totally different
temperment and personality, would you
really want to say she was the same
person? If that person was not a blank
slate, but had different memories (My
name is Bill, not John. And I'm a
bricklayer, not a philsopher!) and
personaity, wouldnt you say that they were
a different person?

David Hume has an Anti-Realist position
on personal identity. He says that what
we call a "person" or "self" is really just "a
bundle of perceptions" related in certain
ways.

The philosopher Immanual Kant
disagreed with Hume. He argued that the
way perception, memory and judgment all
work together demonstrate that a real self
must exist. If there were not a real self,
people wouldn't be able to learn from
experience or form habits, attitudes,
beliefs, points of view, etc. Hume has no
explanation for these more stable
phenonena we associate with being a
person. It's hard to see how a "bundle of
perceptions", a group of loosely
associated states of consciousness,
could do anything, let alone aquire lasting
knowledge, theorize, or have character or
personality traits.

ŠJeffrey Borrowdale
All rights reserved

Prof. Borrowdale
borrowdalej@lanecc.edu