Personal Identity

Dr. Satish Kumar Tiwari

SoPC, SMVD University, Katra, J&K
Personal Identity

What does being the person that you are, from one
day to the next, necessarily consist in?
This is the question of personal identity?
who are /am we or I?
In distinguishing changes in a person that constitute
survival from those changes in a person that constitute
death, a criterion of personal identity through time is
given.
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Personal Identity
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Personal Identity
There three types of opinions –
1. Persons are immaterial souls. Plato & Descartes
2. Personal identity is a matter of psychological
continuity. John Locke
3. Personal identity is that we are our bodies.
Personal Identity
The Soul Criterion
One very common way that people attempt to say
what makes them who they are is to refer to a soul,
their soul.
“Soul” is used metaphorically.
There are four distinct senses of “soul” with legitimate
historical lineage.
1. soul = mind
2. soul = ghost
3. soul = vitalist force
4. soul = supernatural stuff
Personal Identity
The Soul Criterion
Objections
1. The identification objection by simply claiming that a soul is
whatever has characteristics.
All we need to do is find some entity that is unchanging,
eternal, immaterial, and somehow uniquely related to you.
Then we’ll declare that we’ve located your soul.
Q: What is the answer to the problem of personal identity?
A: Souls!
Q: What are souls?
A: They are whatever solves the problem of personal identity.
Such reasoning is circular and unhelpful.
Personal Identity
The Soul Criterion
2. Are you your soul? That is, are you identical to your soul,
so that you = some particular soul?
There are only two answers: yes and no.
If no: If your soul is not you, then what is its relationship to
you?
Two possibilities come immediately to mind.
One is that your soul is solely part of you.
This seems to be the Catholic view, according to which
persons are made of two parts: body and soul.
Another idea is that your soul is a possession of yours, the
sort of thing that you might sell, trade, lease, or lend.
Personal Identity
The Soul Criterion
if your soul is a part of you or a possession or yours, its
reputed immortality doesn’t provide for your survival.
If you are an organ donor, then many of your parts
might survive your death.
Thus if you’re not identical to a soul, and your soul is
just a part or possession or yours, then we still don’t
have a solution to the personal identity problem.
We want to know what you are, not what one of your
parts is, or about the things you own.
Personal Identity
The Soul Criterion
 If yes: How do you recognize people that you know? How do you
recognize your friends, parents, professors?
 The answer seems obvious: you identify them by how they look, how
they act, what they say and do.
 You can recognize someone by their voice over the phone, or at a
distance by the way they walk or the clothes they wear.
 In sum, you recognize others by observing (seeing, hearing, etc.) their
physical properties (appearance, behavior, etc.).
 Now, we are presently supposing that persons are souls.
 You are a soul, your friends are souls.
 Souls aren’t physical, though, they are supernatural, incorporeal sorts
of things.
 So how can you recognize your own friends?
Personal Identity
The Soul Criterion
3. Are there souls in the sense of minds?
If yes: there are souls, since there are minds.
However, if souls are just minds, then the soul criterion is no
more than a disguised version of a psychological view.
It is not an independent solution to the personal identity
problem.
4. Are there movie ghost-type souls?
since movie ghosts are physical, it is an empirical question to be
answered by science.
Yet if there really are movie-style ghosts, then the soul criterion
is just a roundabout way of giving a physicalist solution to
personal identity.
Personal Identity
The Soul Criterion
Are there souls in the sense of vitalist forces?
Vitalism is firmly discredited and recognized as no more
than a blind alley in the history of ideas.
5. Are there supernatural souls?
The hypothesis of supernatural souls does face the
challenges of explaining what they are and coming up
with evidence to believe in them.
Even if there are supernatural souls, though, their
existence does not seem to help with the puzzle of
personal identity because of the identification problem
discussed above.
Personal Identity
The Physicalist Criterion
We’re just like everything else in the universe:
concrete physical objects, made up of smaller parts,
and held together by natural forces.
We’re each members of Homo sapiens, a primate
species noted for large brains and unusual intelligence.
We’re animals—human animals—made out of flesh
and blood and bone.
Human beings may be special, but we’re not so unique
that we’re not even members of the natural world.