Personal identity

Continental philosophy deals with conceptually maintaining identity when confronted by different philosophic propositions, postulates, and presuppositions about the world and its nature.

[5][6] One way to explain how persons persist over time is to say that identity consists in physical or bodily continuity.

It is thus problematic to ground the persistence of personal identity over time in the continuous existence of our bodies.

[b] This personal identity ontology assumes the relational theory[9] of life-sustaining processes instead of bodily continuity.

The teletransportation problem proposed by Derek Parfit is designed to bring out intuitions about corporeal continuity.

[10] In another concept of mind, the set of cognitive faculties[c] are considered to consist of an immaterial substance, separate from and independent of the body.

One of the aims of philosophers who work in this area is to explain how a non-material mind can influence a material body and vice versa.

The question, then, is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of an organ (the human brain) possessing electrochemical properties.

A related problem is to explain how propositional attitudes (e.g. beliefs and desires) can cause neurons of the brain to fire and muscles to contract in the correct manner.

[16] Chapter 27 of Book II of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), entitled "On Identity and Diversity", has been said to be one of the first modern conceptualizations of consciousness as the repeated self-identification of oneself.

Through this identification, moral responsibility could be attributed to the subject and punishment and guilt could be justified, as critics such as Nietzsche would point out.

It is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit; and so belong only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness, and misery.

And therefore, conformable to this, the apostle tells us, that, at the great day, when every one shall 'receive according to his doings, the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open.'

Bernard Williams presents a thought experiment appealing to the intuitions about what it is to be the same person in the future.

[h][21] Personal continuity is an important part of identity; this is the process of ensuring that the qualities of the mind, such as self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment, are consistent from one moment to the next.

It is likewise evident that as the senses, in changing their objects, are necessitated to change them regularly, and take them as they lie contiguous to each other, the imagination must by long custom acquire the same method of thinking, and run along the parts of space and time in conceiving its objects.

Hume, similar to the Buddha,[43] compares the soul to a commonwealth, which retains its identity not by virtue of some enduring core substance, but by being composed of many different, related, and yet constantly changing elements.

[j] In short, what matters for Hume is not that 'identity' exists, but the fact that the relations of causation, contiguity, and resemblances obtain among the perceptions.

Propositionally, the idea of a bundle implies the notion of bodily or psychological relations that do not in fact exist.

The reductionist theory, according to Giles, mistakenly resurrects the idea[k] of the self[45] in terms of various accounts about psychological relations.

On Giles' reading, Hume is actually a no-self theorist and it is a mistake to attribute to him a reductionist view like the bundle theory.

The Buddhist view of personal identity is also a no-self theory rather than a reductionist theory, because the Buddha rejects attempts to reconstructions in terms of consciousness, feelings, or the body in notions of an eternal/permanent, unchanging Self,[47] since our thoughts, personalities and bodies are never the same from moment to moment, as specifically explained in Śūnyatā.

But sense of self breaks down when considering some events such as memory loss,[n] dissociative identity disorder, brain damage, brainwashing, and various thought experiments.

[o] Open individualism is a term coined by Daniel Kolak that refers to the view in the philosophy of self that there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times, in the past, present and future.

Studies in xPhi have found various psychological factors predict variance even in philosophers views about personal identity.