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1.-Personal identity -
                              

Personal Identity

Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, material objects, or the like. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. They have been discussed since the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about them. (There is also a rich literature on the topic in Eastern philosophy, which won't be discussed; see, e.g., Jinpa 2002, and the entry mind in Indian Buddhist philosophy.)

The topic is sometimes discussed under the protean term self. ‘Self’ is sometimes synonymous with ‘person’, but often means something different: a sort of unchanging, immaterial subject of consciousness, for instance (as in the phrase ‘the myth of the self’). The term is often used without any clear meaning and shall be avoided here.

After surveying the main questions of personal identity, the entry will focus on the one that has received most attention in recent decades, namely our persistence through timemail

2.-The Problems of Personal Identity

Answer-There is no single problem of personal identity, but rather a wide range of questions that are at best loosely connected. Discussions in this area do not always make clear which one is at stake. Here are the most familiar

A.-Who am I?

Answer-


Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, material objects, or the like. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. They have been discussed since the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about them. (There is also a rich literature on the topic in Eastern philosophy, which won't be discussed; see, e.g., Jinpa 2002, and the entry mind in Indian Buddhist philosophy.)

The topic is sometimes discussed under the protean term self. ‘Self’ is sometimes synonymous with ‘person’, but often means something different: a sort of unchanging, immaterial subject of consciousness, for instance (as in the phrase ‘the myth of the self’). The term is often used without any clear meaning and shall be avoided here.

After surveying the main questions of personal identity, the entry will focus on the one that has received most attention in recent decades, namely our persistence through time.

1. The Problems of Personal Identity

There is no single problem of personal identity, but rather a wide range of questions that are at best loosely connected. Discussions in this area do not always make clear which one is at stake. Here are the most familiar:

Who am I? Outside of philosophy, ‘personal identity’ usually refers to properties to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. Someone’s personal identity in this sense consists of those properties she takes to “define her as a person” or “make her the person she is”, and which distinguish her from others. (The precise meaning of these phrases is hard to pin down.) To have an “identity crisis” is to become unsure of what one’s most characteristic properties are—of what sort of person, in some deep and fundamental sense, one is. This “personal identity” contrasts with ethnic or national identity, which consists roughly of the ethnic group or nation one takes oneself to belong to and the importance one attaches to this.

One’s personal identity in this sense is contingent and temporary: the way I define myself as a person might have been different, and can vary from one time to another. It could happen that being a philosopher and a parent belong to my identity, but not being a man and living in Yorkshire, while someone else has the same four properties but feels differently towards them, so that being a man and living in Yorkshire belong to his identity but not being a philosopher or a parent. And these attitudes are all subject to change.

Depending on how the term is defined, it may also be possible for a property to belong to someone’s “identity” without her actually having it: if I become convinced that I am Napoleon, being an emperor could be one of the properties central to the way I define myself, and thus an element of my identity, even though my belief is false.

The Who am I? question—sometimes called the characterization question (Schechtman 1996: 1)—is what determines someone’s personal identity in this sense 

B-Personhood-


Personal Identity

First published Tue Aug 20, 2002; substantive revision Fri Sep 6, 2019

Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, material objects, or the like. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. They have been discussed since the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about them. (There is also a rich literature on the topic in Eastern philosophy, which won't be discussed; see, e.g., Jinpa 2002, and the entry mind in Indian Buddhist philosophy.)

The topic is sometimes discussed under the protean term self. ‘Self’ is sometimes synonymous with ‘person’, but often means something different: a sort of unchanging, immaterial subject of consciousness, for instance (as in the phrase ‘the myth of the self’). The term is often used without any clear meaning and shall be avoided here.

After surveying the main questions of personal identity, the entry will focus on the one that has received most attention in recent decades, namely our persistence through time.

1. The Problems of Personal Identity

There is no single problem of personal identity, but rather a wide range of questions that are at best loosely connected. Discussions in this area do not always make clear which one is at stake. Here are the most familiar:

Who am I? Outside of philosophy, ‘personal identity’ usually refers to properties to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. Someone’s personal identity in this sense consists of those properties she takes to “define her as a person” or “make her the person she is”, and which distinguish her from others. (The precise meaning of these phrases is hard to pin down.) To have an “identity crisis” is to become unsure of what one’s most characteristic properties are—of what sort of person, in some deep and fundamental sense, one is. This “personal identity” contrasts with ethnic or national identity, which consists roughly of the ethnic group or nation one takes oneself to belong to and the importance one attaches to this.

One’s personal identity in this sense is contingent and temporary: the way I define myself as a person might have been different, and can vary from one time to another. It could happen that being a philosopher and a parent belong to my identity, but not being a man and living in Yorkshire, while someone else has the same four properties but feels differently towards them, so that being a man and living in Yorkshire belong to his identity but not being a philosopher or a parent. And these attitudes are all subject to change.

Depending on how the term is defined, it may also be possible for a property to belong to someone’s “identity” without her actually having it: if I become convinced that I am Napoleon, being an emperor could be one of the properties central to the way I define myself, and thus an element of my identity, even though my belief is false.

The Who am I? question—sometimes called the characterization question (Schechtman 1996: 1)—is what determines someone’s personal identity in this sense (Glover 1988: part 2, Ludwig 1997).

Personhood. What is it to be a person, as opposed to a nonperson? What have we people got that nonpeople haven’t got? More specifically, we can ask at what point in our development from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person, or what it would take for a chimpanzee or a Martian or an electronic computer to be a person, if they could ever be. An ideal account of personhood would be a definition of the word person, taking the form ‘Necessarily, x is a person at time t if and only if … x … t …’, with the blanks appropriately filled in. The most common answer is that to be a person at a time is to have certain special mental properties then (e.g. Baker 2000: ch. 3). Others propose a less direct connection between personhood and mental properties: for example that to be a person is be capable of acquiring those properties (Chisholm 1976: 136f.), or to belong to a kind whose members typically have them when healthy and mature

C-Persistence-


Personal Identity

First published Tue Aug 20, 2002; substantive revision Fri Sep 6, 2019

Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, material objects, or the like. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. They have been discussed since the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about them. (There is also a rich literature on the topic in Eastern philosophy, which won't be discussed; see, e.g., Jinpa 2002, and the entry mind in Indian Buddhist philosophy.)

The topic is sometimes discussed under the protean term self. ‘Self’ is sometimes synonymous with ‘person’, but often means something different: a sort of unchanging, immaterial subject of consciousness, for instance (as in the phrase ‘the myth of the self’). The term is often used without any clear meaning and shall be avoided here.

After surveying the main questions of personal identity, the entry will focus on the one that has received most attention in recent decades, namely our persistence through time.

1. The Problems of Personal Identity

There is no single problem of personal identity, but rather a wide range of questions that are at best loosely connected. Discussions in this area do not always make clear which one is at stake. Here are the most familiar:

Who am I? Outside of philosophy, ‘personal identity’ usually refers to properties to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. Someone’s personal identity in this sense consists of those properties she takes to “define her as a person” or “make her the person she is”, and which distinguish her from others. (The precise meaning of these phrases is hard to pin down.) To have an “identity crisis” is to become unsure of what one’s most characteristic properties are—of what sort of person, in some deep and fundamental sense, one is. This “personal identity” contrasts with ethnic or national identity, which consists roughly of the ethnic group or nation one takes oneself to belong to and the importance one attaches to this.

One’s personal identity in this sense is contingent and temporary: the way I define myself as a person might have been different, and can vary from one time to another. It could happen that being a philosopher and a parent belong to my identity, but not being a man and living in Yorkshire, while someone else has the same four properties but feels differently towards them, so that being a man and living in Yorkshire belong to his identity but not being a philosopher or a parent. And these attitudes are all subject to change.

Depending on how the term is defined, it may also be possible for a property to belong to someone’s “identity” without her actually having it: if I become convinced that I am Napoleon, being an emperor could be one of the properties central to the way I define myself, and thus an element of my identity, even though my belief is false.

The Who am I? question—sometimes called the characterization question (Schechtman 1996: 1)—is what determines someone’s personal identity in this sense (Glover 1988: part 2, Ludwig 1997).

Personhood. What is it to be a person, as opposed to a nonperson? What have we people got that nonpeople haven’t got? More specifically, we can ask at what point in our development from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person, or what it would take for a chimpanzee or a Martian or an electronic computer to be a person, if they could ever be. An ideal account of personhood would be a definition of the word person, taking the form ‘Necessarily, x is a person at time t if and only if … x … t …’, with the blanks appropriately filled in. The most common answer is that to be a person at a time is to have certain special mental properties then (e.g. Baker 2000: ch. 3). Others propose a less direct connection between personhood and mental properties: for example that to be a person is be capable of acquiring those properties (Chisholm 1976: 136f.), or to belong to a kind whose members typically have them when healthy and mature (Wiggins 1980: ch. 6).

Persistence. What does it take for a person to persist from one time to another—to continue existing rather than cease to exist? What sorts of adventures is it possible, in the broadest sense of the word ‘possible’, for you to survive, and what sort of event would necessarily bring your existence to an end? What determines which past or future being is you? Suppose you point to a child in an old class photograph and say, “That’s me.” What makes you that one, rather than one of the others? What is it about the way she relates then to you as you are now that makes her you? For that matter, what makes it the case that anyone at all who existed back then is you? This is sometimes called the question of personal identity over time. That’s because it’s about whether the earlier being and the later being are one or two—that is, whether they are numerically identical. An answer to it is an account of our persistence conditions.

Historically this question often arises out of the hope (or fear) that we might continue to exist after we die (as in Plato’s Phaedo). Whether this could happen depends on whether biological death necessarily brings one’s existence to an end. Imagine that after your death there really will be someone, in this world or the next, who resembles you in certain ways. How would that being have to relate to you as you are now in order to be you, rather than someone else? What would the Higher Powers have to do to keep you in existence after your death? Or is there anything they could do? The answer to these questions depends on the answer to the persistence question.


D.What matters in identity?


Personal Identity

First published Tue Aug 20, 2002; substantive revision Fri Sep 6, 2019

Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, material objects, or the like. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. They have been discussed since the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about them. (There is also a rich literature on the topic in Eastern philosophy, which won't be discussed; see, e.g., Jinpa 2002, and the entry mind in Indian Buddhist philosophy.)

The topic is sometimes discussed under the protean term self. ‘Self’ is sometimes synonymous with ‘person’, but often means something different: a sort of unchanging, immaterial subject of consciousness, for instance (as in the phrase ‘the myth of the self’). The term is often used without any clear meaning and shall be avoided here.

After surveying the main questions of personal identity, the entry will focus on the one that has received most attention in recent decades, namely our persistence through time.

1. The Problems of Personal Identity

There is no single problem of personal identity, but rather a wide range of questions that are at best loosely connected. Discussions in this area do not always make clear which one is at stake. Here are the most familiar:

Who am I? Outside of philosophy, ‘personal identity’ usually refers to properties to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. Someone’s personal identity in this sense consists of those properties she takes to “define her as a person” or “make her the person she is”, and which distinguish her from others. (The precise meaning of these phrases is hard to pin down.) To have an “identity crisis” is to become unsure of what one’s most characteristic properties are—of what sort of person, in some deep and fundamental sense, one is. This “personal identity” contrasts with ethnic or national identity, which consists roughly of the ethnic group or nation one takes oneself to belong to and the importance one attaches to this.

One’s personal identity in this sense is contingent and temporary: the way I define myself as a person might have been different, and can vary from one time to another. It could happen that being a philosopher and a parent belong to my identity, but not being a man and living in Yorkshire, while someone else has the same four properties but feels differently towards them, so that being a man and living in Yorkshire belong to his identity but not being a philosopher or a parent. And these attitudes are all subject to change.

Depending on how the term is defined, it may also be possible for a property to belong to someone’s “identity” without her actually having it: if I become convinced that I am Napoleon, being an emperor could be one of the properties central to the way I define myself, and thus an element of my identity, even though my belief is false.

The Who am I? question—sometimes called the characterization question (Schechtman 1996: 1)—is what determines someone’s personal identity in this sense (Glover 1988: part 2, Ludwig 1997).

Personhood. What is it to be a person, as opposed to a nonperson? What have we people got that nonpeople haven’t got? More specifically, we can ask at what point in our development from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person, or what it would take for a chimpanzee or a Martian or an electronic computer to be a person, if they could ever be. An ideal account of personhood would be a definition of the word person, taking the form ‘Necessarily, x is a person at time t if and only if … x … t …’, with the blanks appropriately filled in. The most common answer is that to be a person at a time is to have certain special mental properties then (e.g. Baker 2000: ch. 3). Others propose a less direct connection between personhood and mental properties: for example that to be a person is be capable of acquiring those properties (Chisholm 1976: 136f.), or to belong to a kind whose members typically have them when healthy and mature (Wiggins 1980: ch. 6).

Persistence. What does it take for a person to persist from one time to another—to continue existing rather than cease to exist? What sorts of adventures is it possible, in the broadest sense of the word ‘possible’, for you to survive, and what sort of event would necessarily bring your existence to an end? What determines which past or future being is you? Suppose you point to a child in an old class photograph and say, “That’s me.” What makes you that one, rather than one of the others? What is it about the way she relates then to you as you are now that makes her you? For that matter, what makes it the case that anyone at all who existed back then is you? This is sometimes called the question of personal identity over time. That’s because it’s about whether the earlier being and the later being are one or two—that is, whether they are numerically identical. An answer to it is an account of our persistence conditions.

Historically this question often arises out of the hope (or fear) that we might continue to exist after we die (as in Plato’s Phaedo). Whether this could happen depends on whether biological death necessarily brings one’s existence to an end. Imagine that after your death there really will be someone, in this world or the next, who resembles you in certain ways. How would that being have to relate to you as you are now in order to be you, rather than someone else? What would the Higher Powers have to do to keep you in existence after your death? Or is there anything they could do? The answer to these questions depends on the answer to the persistence question.

Evidence. How do we find out who is who? What evidence bears on the question of whether the person here now is the one who was here yesterday? One source of evidence is first-person memory: if you remember doing some particular action (or seem to), and someone really did do it, this supports the claim that that person is you. Another source is physical continuity: if the person who did it looks just like you, or even better if she is in some sense physically or spatio-temporally continuous with you, that too is reason to think she is you. Which of these sources is more fundamental? Does first-person memory count as evidence all by itself, for instance, or only insofar as we can check it against publicly available physical facts? What should we do when they support opposing verdicts? Suppose Charlie’s memories are erased and replaced with accurate memories (or apparent memories) of the life of someone long dead—Guy Fawkes, say (Williams 1956–7). Ought we to conclude, on the basis of memory evidence, that the resulting person is not Charlie but Guy Fawkes brought back to life, or should we instead infer on the basis of physical continuity that he is simply Charlie with different memories? What principle would answer this question?

The evidence question dominated the anglophone literature on personal identity from the 1950s to the 1970s (good examples include Shoemaker 1963, 1970 and Penelhum 1967, 1970). It is important to distinguish it from the persistence question. What it takes for you to persist through time is one thing; how we ought to evaluate the relevant evidence is another. If the criminal had fingerprints just like yours, the courts may conclude that he is you. But even if they are right to do so, having your fingerprints is not what it is for a past or future being to be you: it is neither necessary (you could survive without any fingers at all) nor sufficient (someone else could have fingerprints just like yours).

Population. If the persistence question is about which of the characters introduced at the beginning of a story have survived to become those at the end of it, we may also ask how many are on the stage at any one time. What determines how many of us there are now? If there are some seven billion people on the earth at present, what facts—biological, psychological, or what have you—make that the right number? The question is not what causes there to be a certain number of people at a given time, but what there being that number consists in. It’s like asking what sort of configuration of pieces amounts to winning a game of chess, rather than what sorts of moves typically lead to winning.

You may think the number of people at any given time (or at least the number of human people) is simply the number of human organisms there are then (ignoring any that don’t count as people). But this is disputed. Some say that cutting the main connections between the cerebral hemispheres results in radical disunity of consciousness, and that because of this, two people share a single organism (see e.g. Nagel 1971; Puccetti 1973 argues that there are two people within each normal human being; see also van Inwagen 1990: 188–212). Others say that a human being with multiple personality could literally be the home of two or more thinking beings (Wilkes 1988: 127f., Rovane 1998: 169ff.; see also Olson 2003b, Snowdon 2014: ch. 7). Still others argue that two people can share an organism in cases of conjoined twinning (Campbell and McMahan 2010; see also Olson 2014).

This is sometimes called the problem of “synchronic identity”, as opposed to the “diachronic identity” of the persistence question. These terms need careful handling, however. They are apt to give the mistaken impression that identity comes in two kinds, synchronic and diachronic. The truth is simply that there are two kinds of situations where we can ask how many people (or other things) there are: those involving just one moment and those involving several.

What am I? What sort of things, metaphysically speaking, are you and I and other human people? What are our fundamental properties, in addition to those that make us people? What, for instance, are we made of? Are we composed entirely of matter, as stones are, or are we partly or wholly immaterial? Where do our spatial boundaries lie, if we are spatially extended at all? Do we extend all the way out to our skin and no further, for instance? If so, what fixes those boundaries? Are we substances—metaphysically independent beings—or is each of us a state or aspect or activity of something else?

Here are some of the main proposed answers (Olson 2007):

  • We are biological organisms (“animalism”: Snowdon 1990, 2014, van Inwagen 1990, Olson 1997, 2003a).
  • We are material things “constituted by” organisms: a person made of the same matter as a certain animal, but they are different things because what it takes for them to persist is different (Baker 2000, Johnston 2007, Shoemaker 2011).
  • We are temporal parts of animals: each of us stands to an organism as your childhood stands to your life as a whole (Lewis 1976).
  • We are spatial parts of animals: brains perhaps (Campbell and McMahan 2010, Parfit 2012), or temporal parts of brains (Hudson 2001, 2007).
  • We are partless immaterial substances—souls—as Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz thought (see also Unger 2006: ch. 7), or compound things made up of an immaterial soul and a material body (Swinburne 1984: 21).
  • We are collections of mental states or events: “bundles of perceptions”, as Hume said (1739 [1978: 252]; see also Quinton 1962, Campbell 2006).
  • There is nothing that we are: we don’t really exist at all (Russell 1985: 50, Wittgenstein 1922: 5.631, Unger 1979, Sider 2013).

There is no consensus or even a dominant view on this question.

What matters in identity? What is the practical importance of facts about our persistence? Why does it matter? What reason have you to care whether you yourself continue to exist, rather than someone else just like you existing in your place? Imagine that surgeons are going to put your brain into my head and that neither of us has any choice about this. Suppose the resulting person will be in terrible pain after the operation unless one of us pays a large sum in advance. If we were both entirely selfish, which of us would have a reason to pay? Will the resulting person—who will presumably think he is you—be responsible for your actions or for mine? (Or both, or neither?)

The answer may seem to turn entirely on whether the resulting person would be you or I. Only I can be responsible for my actions. The fact that some person is me, by itself, gives me a reason to care about him. Each person has a special, selfish interest in her own future and no one else’s. Identity itself matters practically. But some say that I could have an entirely selfish reason to care about someone else’s future for his own sake. Perhaps what gives me a reason to care about what happens to the man people will call by my name tomorrow is not that he is me, but that he is then psychologically continuous with me as I am now (see Section 4), or because he relates to me in some other way that does not imply that we are the same person. If someone other than me were psychologically continuous tomorrow with me as I am now, he would have what matters to me and I ought to transfer my selfish concern to him. Likewise, someone else could be responsible for my actions, and not for his own. Identity itself has no practical importance. (See Shoemaker 1970: 284; Parfit 1971, 1984: 215, 1995; Sosa 1990, Martin 1998.)

That completes our survey. Though some of these questions may bear on others, they are to a large extent independent. It’s important not to confuse them.

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