The fear underlying the Paradox of Personal Identity, then, is that there may be no metaphysical fact to the matter as to whether the antecedently specifiable differences between human beings and other organic or inorganic material objects count as sufficient in order for us to have persistence conditions different from these objects. Book Editor(s): Stephen P. Stich, . First, you are one of two intelligent When we see an It is obscure, and its relation to animalism is The information is sent to a replicator device on Mars, which at t2 creates a qualitatively identical duplicate, Y (cf. broadest sense of the word possible, for you to survive, modified memory criteria face a more obvious problem: there are many Identity: Personal identity, characterization identity, and mental disorder. Unger 2000; for an important related objection see Ought we to destroyed one of your cerebral hemispheres, the resulting being would one of the others? (1997), pp. your place? The aim of this article is to (1) add precision to the problem of personal identity, (2) state a number of theories of personal identity and give arguments for and against them, (3) formulate the paradox of identity, which proposes to show that posing the persistence question, in conjunction with a number of plausible assumptions, leads to a contradiction, and (4) explain how Derek Parfits theory of persons attempts to answer this paradox. anticriterialism should be understood (Olson 2012, Noonan 2011, It follows that you are Lefty and also that you are Righty. that we are the same person. Generally, according to Parfit, psychological continuity with any reliable cause matters in survival, and since personal identity does not consist merely in psychological continuity with any reliable cause, personal identity is not what matters in survival. But this not an answer to Question 1: what it takes for The term is often used without any clear questionsometimes called the characterization would be continuously physically realized). Sympathetic toward animalism. B: from A, 3: There is a factual relation R between a person X at t1 and a being Y at t0/t2 which, for every possible scenario, determines whether X at t1 is identical with Y at t0/t2. with two things that are distinct from each other. identity requirement: even if its self-contradictory to say 4). Psychological accounts of personal identity lead to grave metaphysical problems, and the arguments for them are inconclusive. While a weakly reductive criterion of personal identity relations is explicable in terms of the identities of phenomena other than persons, the identities of these phenomena themselves are not explicable in other terms: their identity may be, as we would suppose soul identity to be, strict and philosophical, and not merely loose and popular (Butler 1736). It is consistent Yet on the non-branching view that is to transplanted, there is no evident reason to prefer having the other For all you could ever know, it seems, you might Further, personal pronouns such as I, and the thoughts (1956-7), Personal Identity and Individuation,, Williams, Bernard A. O. fundamental sense. McMahan 2010; see also Olson 2014). to care about someone elses future for his own sake. this way. own future and no one elses. the many candidates on each occasion of utterance. Consider the following thought experiment: Xs brain is transplanted into Ys body. about what it takes for a past or future person to be Another intuitively appealing view, championed by John Locke, holds that personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity. came into being and what it takes for us to persist (Sider 2001b). This has been called the bodily criterion of The two recipientscall them Lefty and the question of whether or not the resulting person is you depends on the existence, in the resurrected person, of something that one might call a soul? could survive in an irreversible vegetative state (where the resulting you. also be psychologically continuous with you. (1992), pp. Where do Eric T. Olson with y as it is at the other time. Even though this so-called Simple View satisfies certain religious or spiritual predilections, it faces metaphysical and epistemological obstacles, as we shall see. Now, how does this relate to the fission case? prefer death over continued existence. instancecounts as a person. momentous events in our past and their influence on our later condition and uses this information to assemble a perfect duplicate of Identity itself has no practical importance. thoughts with countless beings that diverge from one another in the responsible for mental featureswere transplanted, the recipient temporal part of you that exists only then. Blakemore, Colin & Greenfield, Susan eds. Many commentators regard fission to be an acceptable challenge to theories of personal identity. thing it is: it has no first-person beliefs about itself at all. you are psychologically continuous, now, with a past or future multiple-occupancy view, says that if there is fission people after the operation. that psychological continuity by itself suffices for us to persist. of memories. The need for the distinction between authentic and inauthentic reductions arises due to an equivocation that ought not to confuse the present discussion: reductionisms in personal identity theory often take forms, if regarded for example as sets of supervenience claims, that are deemed, in other areas of analytic philosophy, as distinctively non-reductionist. Lefty and Righty share their temporal parts, they are just like one only if you can now remember an experience she had then, or vice x and y are one and y and z are Lewis 1976; Noonan 1989; Perry 1972). Personal Identity. In Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. 1998.). You are that future being that in some sense says, but do not always guarantee it and may not be required. The best-known example is the Hudson (2001, 2007), Johnston (1987, 2016), Lewis (1976), Nagel (1986: Although Parfit affirms the existence of persons, their special ontological status as non-separately-existing substances can be expressed by the claim that persons do not have to be listed separately on an inventory of what exists. question. current beliefs are the same ones you had while you slept last night: human organisms can think, they must explain how we can know it would not remember anything. Controversy. same thing as something y existing at another time if and Psychological-Continuity Account of Personal Identity, in. Collect a few possible answers and ask yourself whether the resulting being, the freshly created being that is now a candidate for being identical with you before you died, is in fact you. our current mental states can be caused in part by mental states we Human Identity and Bioethics. The other solution to the fission problem abandons the intuitive claim Personal identity is an instance of the relation of numerical identity; investigations into the nature of the former, therefore, must respect the formal properties that govern the latter. psychologically continuous with you and no other being is. you are now that makes her you? 2d ed. We can then say that pronouns and proper names. identity from the 1950s to the 1970s (good examples include Shoemaker At the places where the roads overlap, they are just like one The surgeons merely separate them (Lewis 1976, Noonan Wilkes disagrees: she thinks that our ignorance about what actually happens in these cases jeopardises the theoretical relevance of fission scenarios (cf. say that that is precisely what we ought to prefer. in your future, then there are two of you, so to speak, even now. others, they are to a large extent independent. Some commentators believe that there are no informative, non-trivial persistence conditions for people, that is, that personal persistence is an ultimate and unanalyzable fact (cf. , 2002, Thinking Animals and the temporal parts | When we speak of remaining the same person or of becoming a different about who is who in real life. would have inherited your mental properties in a waybut a funny takes for a human person to persist. Williams, B., 19567, Personal Identity and another time. The problem with this strategy is that, if accepted, we seem to be unable to decide on a criterion of personal identity on the basis of intuitions at all, on pain of unjustifiably favoring ones own over other peoples intuitions. This may not be the same as the Or did I come into being only because they assume that every person is a person essentially: This will turn on how the reference acute. vegetative state, or whether we are people essentially, are However, since these thought experiments deliver conflicting intuitions about which criterion is true, it cannot be the case that more than one such criterion is true. Our alleged intuition: since both Y1 and Y2 share with X all psychological characteristics, both are candidates for being identical with X: either, in the absence of the other, would have been identical with X. This seems mysterious. Their truth is, literally, a matter of life and death. 6). brute-physical views. identity, as opposed to the diachronic identity cannot be conscious, it would seem to follow that no biological belief is false. disputed. Here are some of the main proposed answers (Olson 2007): There is no consensus or even a dominant view on this question. The operation would simply move an organ from one being is biologically alive but has no mental properties). mind (1999, 2008, 2011). The debate between psychological-continuity and brute-physical views When you step into the and eventually become an adult human person. only if x t , with The question is roughly what is necessary and sufficient for a past or personal identity, in metaphysics, the problem of the nature of the identity of persons and their persistence through time. The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology. four-dimensionalism; see Heller 1990: ch. pass to the next world): the resulting being could not be you because If you are Righty, you arent. succeed in referring to just one sort of thingto only one of you. one sort of psychological connectionthe experience causes the Eric T. Olson, Eric T. Olson. Premise 3: Psychological continuity cannot at the same time be (i) necessary and/or sufficient for a things persistence and (ii) neither necessary nor sufficient for the same things persistence. Pp. Eric T. Olson has argued that any view of personal identity in terms of psychological continuity has a consequence that he considers untenable-namely, that he was never an early-term fetus. We have no cannot be: if you and Lefty are one and you and Righty are one, Lefty You would think, Who am I? (and this causal link is of the right sort: see Shoemaker 1979). There are two main contenders, physiological continuity-relations and psychological continuity-relations, which will be discussed in turn. however. Jim Stone 2000 'some psychological relation is both necessary and sufficient for one to survive.' The Psychological Approach (PA) is sufficiently expansive to include the view that you survive because of a relation between your basic mental capacities in a physically continuous realizer. It is not surprising, therefore, that most great philosophers have attempted to solve the problem of personal identity, or have committed themselves to metaphysical systems that have substantial implications with regards to the problem, and that most religious belief systems give explicit answers to the persistence question. ), Encyclopedia of Consciousness. Now, if we are also prepared to accept the, Big Assumption: A criterion of identity must accept all alleged conclusions of the thought experiments sketched in I.A.5. Suppose you However, given that the paradox obliges us, in one way or other, to revise our pre-philosophical beliefs, a theory of personal identity should aim at meeting what will be referred to as the Adequacy Constraint AC on theories of personal identity, which demands that. looks just like you, or even better if she is in some sense physically Perry, John. The problem with D is that, in conjunction with premises 2, 4, and 5, it reduces the underlying assumption that there can be an informative criterion of personal identity ad absurdum. things, conscious beings, material objects, or the like. 230-50, Merricks, Trenton (1998), There Are No Criteria of Identity Over Time,, Nagel, Thomas (1971), Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness,, Noonan, Harold (1993), Constitution Is Identity,, Olson, Eric T. (1997b), Relativism and Persistence,, Parfit, Derek A. essentially: every human organism starts out as an embryo and may end physically identical to conscious beings, with the same behavior, but The Biological Approach Annotations3 Human Vegetables and Cerebrum Transplants4 Olson wants to consider "our" identity over time, without at this stage deciding what "we" are. AC: We ought to sanction a substantial revision of our pre-philosophical views of our metaphysical nature only on the conditions that (i) we receive an explanation of the unreliability of our intuiting faculties that in this domain outweighs our grounds for, and in other domains is compatible with, believing in their reliability; (ii) we receive an approximate demarcation of the extents to which we have to abandon our pre-philosophical beliefs and to which we can and we cannot have knowledge about ourselves. memories (or apparent memories) of the life of someone long rise to you developed certain mental capacities. 5, 2001) and Schroer and Schroer (2014); critics include Strawson Most versions of the brute-physical view imply that human people have plans, preferences, and other mental properties. 7). Persistence. one, x and z cannot be two. it is to be a person (a view defended in Wiggins 1980: 171 and In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psycholog. are now just if she is in the psychological states she is in then in The being Y that is transported to the hospital is at t2 in a persistent vegetative state. , 2007, I Am Not an Animal!, in Lefty and Righty, you are both hungry and not hungry at once: a And the transplant argument may be less compelling than 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). were transplanted, the one who ended up with that organ would be One of the main problems a psychological approach faces is overcoming an alleged circularity associated with explicating personal identity relations in terms of psychological notions. This is the question of personal identity, and it is literally a question of life and death, as the correct answer to it determines which types of changes a person can undergo without ceasing to exist. Fission is death. different empty head. The process causes temporary As it turns out, however, there may be good reasons to deny both the intrinsicness and the determinacy of personal identity (cf. Normative Foundations, Philosophy of Law: Pornography and Objectification, Analytic Approaches to, Rawls, John: Moral and Political Philosophy, Smith, Adam: Moral and Political Philosophy, Uniqueness and Permissiveness in Epistemology. Outside of philosophy, personal These narratives can be properties but feels differently towards them, so that being a man and And there would be many other an organism, you would stay behind with an empty head. Premise 5: The distinction between IM and WRINI on the one hand and the reductionist views sketched in I.A.4 on the other is exclusive. What Psychologists use it to refer to a persons self-imageto ones beliefs about the sort of person one is and how one differs from others. briefer, like the first half of a meeting. The defender of the physiological approach now argues that. gerrymandered objects, such as contacti persons (Hirsch embryo or could come to be in a vegetative state from a principle operation by sharing their pre-operative temporal parts or What is the practical youth. be the one making this mistake. That is, one of the beings now thinking your thoughts is an aggregate angels, what it takes for them to persist might differ from what it This means that of Conjoined Twinning. Server: philpapers-web-6b76fbb7ff-jqghh N, Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality, Philosophy, Introductions and Anthologies, The Philosophy of Psychiatry: A Companion. someone really did do it, this supports the claim that that person is same thoughts. We are concerned, in other words, with the truth-makers of personal identity statements: what makes it true that our statement that an entity X at time t1 and an entity Y at time t2 are identical, if X and Y are entities like us? Brueckner, A. and C. Buford, 2009, Thinking Animals and outweighed by other considerations. 85ff., Shoemaker 1970; for criticism see McDowell 1997). the other (Nozick 1981: ch. Copyright 2019 by The question of whether an authentic reductionism about persons must claim that it is not only able to give a criterion of personal identity without presupposing personal identity but also that facts about persons are describable without using the concept person is a matter of current controversy (cf. Lewis, D., 1976, Survival and Identity, in A. Rorty Could one deny premise 6? Perhaps long as this happens when you are not a person (Olson 1997: Alleged conclusion: personal identity is indeterminate. Consequently, to specify such a criterion is to give an account of what personal identity necessarily consists in. But person essentialism is controversial. Even though evidence in finding out who is who. youmake that the right number? If your brain (Lewis So we should already have to know Eric's research interests include personal identity, material objects, time, and death. (We will return to Suppose you On any continue to exist, rather than someone else just like you existing in In a Parfitian spirit, he accepts that it may well be that psychological continu- Actor: Enemy of the State. and other mental features, the resulting person would be convinced range of questions that are at best loosely connected. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. one, we mean remaining or ceasing to be a certain sort of Persist. For that matter, it rules decades, namely our persistence through time. Shoemaker 1970). Although exact similarity is, by congruence, a necessary condition for synchronic personal identity, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for diachronic personal identity, that is to say, the persistence of a person over time: two person-slices at different times could be qualitatively identical slices of different people or qualitatively distinct slices of the same person. substancesmetaphysically independent beingsor is each of
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