PERSONAL IDENTITY

From Critique of Locke and Hume on

Behalf of Common Sense,
Thomas Reid
Who are you? is an ambiguous, though substantial, question. It isnt
clear what you refers to. You might refer to your physical parts or to your
mental states. In any case, the foundations for your belief about who
you are that, whoever you are, you are the same person from day to
day is questionable. (Who, 21-22)
I. The Soul View
In ancient Greek thought, there was no philosophical problem o
personal identity, but of whether or not bodily death was the end of
man
From Platos Phaedo, Socrates argues that the fact we have
immaterial souls means that we survive our bodily deaths; and for Plato,
any extended thing, merely by virtue of its being extended, is
potentially divisible and hence, potentially corruptible. (M 144)

Socrates (469-399 BCE)
Plato (427-347 BCE)
For Lucretius, however, if any feeling remains in mind or spirit
after it has been torn from the body, that is nothing to us, who are
brought into being by wedlock or body and spirit, conjoined and
coalesced *+ and therefore, we have nothing to fear in death,
because one who no longer is cannot suffer, or differ in any way from
one who has never been born, when once this mortal life has been
usurped by death *+. (M 145)
Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus, c 95-54 BCE),
Roman philosopher (Epicurean) and poet
Context: The problem of personal identity
What we ordinarily use evidence for our personhood (e.g. our
names, ages of our bodies, photographs of younger selves as proofs
that we are the same person) are assumptions that go well beyond the
data available to experience *+ in such a way that the impermanence
of the physical [and ultimately mental] constituents of which our bodies
are composed is masked * becoming+ so familiar that eventually they
generate a feeling of obviousness *and permanence+. (Who, 15-16,
19)
- re: the difference between numerical (absolute) and qualitative
(in terms of properties / kind) identity

Unless something were to underlie such a series *of physical or mental
states] ultimately something that could sustain itself it would be
hard to explain why the series continued and *+ why episodes included
in it should be regarded as continuing the old series rather than as
beginning new ones. (Martin, Personal Identity from Plato to Parfit,
145)

II. The Intrinsic Relations View
Because Newton has demonstrated that there could be a science of
nature, there could also be a science of mind (and thereby of identity),
which is taken to be a repository of memory

in this alone consists personal identity, i.e., the sameness of a
rational being; and as far as this consciousness can be extended
backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of
that person, it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self
with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done.
(Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding)

John Locke (29 August 1632 - 28 October 1704), British Empiricist
(knowledge is constituted in the understanding which makes use of
experience-based ideas)
If we were always awake, we could be certain that we had the
same soul. But consciousness has natural gaps in it, such as periods
during which we are asleep. *+ There is no way of knowing that one
soul has not been substituted for another during this period of absence
of consciousness. Thus if having the same soul is necessary for personal
identity we could never be sure that we were the same person as the
day before. (SEP)

It is our retention of the same consciousness that makes us the same
people over time, whereby same consciousness is guaranteed by a
psychological continuity manifested in memory (hence Memory
View), which binds the earlier and the later stages of a person

Reids objections (R 126-127):
- Possibility of fission examples (two or twenty intelligent
beings may be the same person)
- The Brave Officer scenario: a person may and may not be the
same person based on what he remembers
- Circularity of the view: personal identity is confounded with
the evidence which we have of our personal identity (testimony cannot
be the cause of, or be the maker of, the thing testified)
- Consciousness, memory and every mental operation are in
constant flux, transient, and momentary

Thomas Reid (7 May [26 April )]1710 7 October 1796), British
founder of Scottish School of Common Sense (those tenets we
cannot help but believe given our human constitution)