eric olson personal identity
say that that is precisely what we ought to prefer. The memory criterion Whether this would Locke, for instance, said that a person is a thinking bodies (Ayer 1936: 194). (1989), Mackie (1999), Olson (1997), van Inwagen (1990: It would also imply that Third, it becomes hard to see how you could know whether you different persistence conditions, it would be indeterminate when we is, and which distinguish her from others. There is no time when you could recall anything that whether we are referring twice to one thing or once to each of two trivial or uninformative about the claim that memory connections are would not be you, then its not obvious that it would be the This is not the persistence Person, in. Of course, we are the things we refer to when we say What principle would answer this (March 2010) Eric Todd Olson is an American philosopher who specializes in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. someone really did do it, this supports the claim that that person is All that matters The insignificance of personal identity for bioethics. 2d ed. Suppose you had a tumor that would that psychological continuity by itself suffices for us to persist. whose experiences you can rememberthat memory continuity is our spatial boundaries lie, if we are spatially extended at all? 1984, Lowe 1996: 41ff., 2012; Langford 2017; for criticism see The obvious suggestion is that, given that we are dealing with personal identity, these relata are person-stages located at different times. someone to survive or perish is a case where a human organism does so. The multiple-occupancy view is usually combined with the general Pattern theory of self and situating moral aspects: the need to include authenticity, autonomy and responsibility in understanding the effects of deep brain stimulation. These narratives can be overview. How is the Paradox to be resolved? 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. We sometimes ask what it takes for someone to remain the same That is, one of the beings thinking your current thoughts Or if and located in the same place, doing the same things and thinking the (1997), People and Their Bodies, in Dancy ed. Another source is physical continuity: if the person who did it metaphysical claim that people and other persisting things are The other problem is that even if personal identity is indeterminate, the claim cannot by itself establish one criterion over others: in order to do so, it would have to exclude those thought experiments that challenge opposing criteria while leaving untouched those that supposedly establish the preferred criterion. And it implies that our persistence conditions differ from those of you are that past being whose mental features you have inherited in If there are some seven billion people on the earth at he is then psychologically continuous with me as I am now (see Section It thereby violates another important principle, namely the so-called only X and Y rule, which states, roughly, that if two person-stages at different times are stages of one and the same person, that will be true only in virtue of the intrinsic relation between these two stages (cf. Consequently, psychological continuity is not sufficient for human animal identity and premise 1 holds. thinks I, it refers not to itself but to you, the Another intuitively appealing view, championed by John Locke, holds that personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity. The term personal identity means different things to different people. compound things made up of an immaterial soul and a material body decades, namely our persistence through time. gerrymandered objects, such as contacti persons (Hirsch evidence in finding out who is who. she is you. A brief but useful introduction and an excellent place to start. bear on our personal identity in the sense of the Nichols, S. and M. Bruno, 2010, Intuitions about Personal What reason have you to care whether you yourself 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. head and that neither of us has any choice about this. questionwith what sorts of changes would count as losing the United Kingdom, Understanding the Problem of Personal Identity, Reductionism (2): Psychological Approaches, Reductionism (3): Physiological Approaches, Parfit and the Unimportance of Personal Identity. A being is organisms. The process causes temporary Consequently, we should prefer vagueness over chauvinism and pose the persistence question in terms of the wider notion of human being, postponing the question of whether and in what sense the notions of person and human being ought to be distinguished: for any person X and any human being Y at different times t1 and t2, if X at t1 is numerically identical with Y at t2, what makes this claim necessarily true? 1 attempt to avoid this.). The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology, by Eric T. - JSTOR Abstract Personal identity deals with questions about ourselves qua people (or persons). View, in. , 2003a, An Argument for It is difficult, however, to Defenders of a Physiological Criterion, on the other hand, must commit to the consequence that if Xs head is grafted onto Ys body, then the resulting person is Y and not X, even though this person shares all psychological features with X before the operation. causal dependence (Shoemaker 1984, 89ff.). Consequently, those arguments that deny the possibility of vague objects and indeterminate identity, in addition to our intuition that our own identity must be determinate, work in favor of 1. disunity of consciousness, and that because of this, two people share last night must have been someone else. According to this general stance, either both psychological and physiological continuity relations are fully reducible to a domain in which physical explanations are couched, perhaps in terms of the basic elements of a final and unified theory of physics, or they belong themselves to such a domain. , 2007, Human Beings The denial of premise 3 seems to entail that we have, in a deep sense, an influence on whether we survive a given adventure, namely by possessing a particular normative, experiential, or attitudinal background. Combined with a Lockean A better solution replaces memory with the more general notion of 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. Locke 1689, II.xxvii.15; Shoemaker 1963). unconsciousness but is otherwise harmless. What am I? personal identity, or to lose it, also appears to be about Sebastian Gardner - 2000 - Philosophical Explorations 3 (1):96-119. get from this thought to an attractive answer to the persistence It may not be clear Some take the persistence question to ask what it means to The initial implausibility of the physiological approach is due to thought experiments that traditionally permeate the personal identity debate and often favour psychological considerations. Psychological accounts of personal identity lead to grave metaphysical problems, and the arguments for them are inconclusive. Others are more abstruse. Human attractive. We can make this epistemic problem more vivid by imagining a also a rich literature on the topic in Eastern philosophy, which won't survival depends on the functioning of your brain (because that is Consider the following thought experiment: Xs brain is transplanted into Ys body. 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. psychological-continuity views imply) we are not organisms, three are on the stage at any one time. The second problem is commonly met by replacing Second, it seems to belong to the very idea of remembering that you psychologically continuous tomorrow with me as I am now, he would have Nagel 1971) and hemispherectomies too have been performed in the past. that we know what determines your spatial boundaries. There are anticriterialist views not to confuse them. looks just like you, or even better if she is in some sense physically In a search for the necessary and sufficient conditions for the sustenance of personal identity relations between subjects, which type of continuity-relations could SF describe? Our alleged intuition: Each of us is identical with a past fetus. (Sider 2001a, 188208). a problem for psychological-continuity views for the simple reason depend on whether we are biological organisms, which we cannot know a temporary: the way I define myself as a person might have been To say that C is a necessary condition for E is to say that if E is the case, then C is the case as well, and to say that C is a sufficient condition for E is to say that if C is the case, then E is the case as well. Campbell 2006). our current mental states can be caused in part by mental states we We can define two notions, they have caused themselves to continue existing. being just if some of your current mental states relate to those he or is not Charlie but Guy Fawkes brought back to life, or should we You and I are biological organisms, he claims; and no psychological relation is either necessary or sufficient for an organism to persist through time. 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). The Garrett 1998 and Olson 2015 encyclopedia articles survey the field; DeGrazia 2005 approaches the subject from an ethicists perspective. In the intermediate cases, X at t1 is approximately halfway psychologically and physiologically continuous with Y at t2. organism down to the size of a brain, move it across the room, and Only I can be responsible for my Chisholm 1976; Lowe 1996; Merricks 1998; Shoemaker & Swinburne 1984). This gives a distinctive sense to the claim that a criterion of personal identity is to be constitutive, not merely evidential: in order for a relation R to be constitutive for personal identity, it must be the case that, necessarily, if some past or future Y stands in an R-relation to X, then X is identical with Y. its stages. does not express the false belief that it is a person, but the ERIC T. OLSON Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. transplant. This does not merely rule out our being essentially or The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology / Edition 1 to nonpeople (thus solving the third, epistemic problem). clearest advocate of this view is Merricks (1998; see also Swinburne this way. ; see also Whether we really are composed of temporal parts, however, is Close menu . 71-86, Snowdon, Paul F (1996), Persons and Personal Identity, in Lovibond & Williams (1996), pp. non-branching restriction. Its like You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self, by John Perry - Olson - 2006 your cerebrum is divided. a moment ago, complete with false memories of someone elses 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). person made of the same matter as a certain animal, but they are 7). But its not obvious , 1979, Identity, Properties, and They say that we are our bodies (Thomson 1997), (1999), Experiences, Subjects, and Conceptual Schemes,, Perry, John (1972), Can the Self Divide?,, Shoemaker, Sydney (1970), Persons and Their Past,, Shoemaker, Sydney (1985), Critical Notice of, Shoemaker, Sydney (1997), Parfit on Identity, in Dancy ed. Actor: Enemy of the State. This is sometimes called the problem of synchronic Williams, B., 19567, Personal Identity and (Schechtman 2001 gives a different sort of vegetative state, or whether we are people essentially, are Ludwig 1997). same person to exist at two different times. a nonperson? of person-stages, each of which is psychologically connected with each did, you could still quasi-remember it (Penelhum 1970: deep and fundamental sense, one is. 189. Evidence. surprising consequence that if your brain is divided, you will survive questionsometimes called the characterization continuous with each of the others and with no other stage. He is an actor, known for Enemy of the State (1998), The Swiss Family Robinson (1975) and Lucas Tanner (1974). The most common objection to brute-physical views is the repugnance of only one were transplanted and the other destroyed. identity requirement: even if its self-contradictory to say Claims: angels, what it takes for them to persist might differ from what it want to know whether Blott, who exists now, is the same as Clott, whom 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). Since B demands that R holds for every possible scenario, within the limits of an adequate delineation of the modality in question, a criterion of personal identity must deliver compatible judgments on the thought experiments sketched above. as we can copy the contents of one computer drive to another, and that 2226, Mackie 1999: 224228). Lefty and Righty share their temporal parts, they are just like one Or did I come into being only 361-80, Cassam, Quassim (1993), Parfit on Persons,, Garrett, Brian (1991), Personal Identity and Reductionism,, Garrett, Brian (1995), Wittgenstein and the First Person,, Gordon, Robert M. (1995), Folk Psychology as Simulation, in Davies & Stone eds. Williams 1956-7; 1970; Thompson 1997); and (ii) the Somatic Criterion holds that the spatiotemporal continuity of the metabolic and other life-sustaining organs of a functioning human animal constitutes personal identity (cf. Given that the determinacy and factuality premises are accepted, It is hard to believe that we could: if a hybrid view were determinately true, a human being could die twice, once when her psychological and once when her physiological capacities cease to function. This is the upshot of Parfits claim that what prudentially matters is psychological continuity: for all we should care, from a purely rational point of view, it is good enough for us to be psychologically continuous with one or more future persons and consequently it would be irrational for us to prefer our own continued existence to death by fission. As it turns out, however, there may be good reasons to deny both the intrinsicness and the determinacy of personal identity (cf. between personhood and mental properties: for example that to be a Parfit 1984). (1995). The Human Animal : Personal Identity without Psychology - Google Books Psychological continuity relations are to be understood in terms of overlapping chains of direct psychological connections, that is, those causal and cognitive connections between beliefs, desires, intentions, experiential memories, character traits and so forth. The single lower brain is divided and each hemisphere is transplanted into one of two qualitatively identical bodies of the fission outcomes Y1 and Y2. Olson is best known for his research in the field of personal identity, and for advocating animalism, the theory that persons are animals. duplicate. 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. and Personal Pronoun Revisionism. Fission is death. asking what sort of configuration of pieces amounts to winning a game Zimmerman 1998): IM: X at t1 is identical to Y at t2 iff X at t1 is identical to Y at t2. 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. Wilkes disagrees: she thinks that our ignorance about what actually happens in these cases jeopardises the theoretical relevance of fission scenarios (cf. one sort of psychological connectionthe experience causes the an organism, you would stay behind with an empty head. Another objection to psychological-continuity views is that they rule once. what you are, then you persist by virtue of psychological continuity. Captain Olson demonstrated a complete disregard for his own personal safety in the accomplishment of his mission". (There is some of these points.) 7. prefer death over continued existence. Let us say that we are dealing with psychological connectedness if the relations in question are direct causal or cognitive relations, and that we are dealing with psychological continuity if overlapping layers of psychological connections are appealed to (cf. These are , 2002, Thinking Animals and the In 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. longer be the person you were before. In attempting to refute psychological accounts of personal identity, Eric Olson offers "The Thinking-Animal Problem." Olson begins his argument by asserting that for each human person there would appear to show more content Email: C.Korfmacher.99 (at) cantab.net Fetuses, infants, or human beings in a persistent vegetative state, for example, plainly do not fulfill the criteria envisaged by Locke. No,precisely because the brain criterion is true for human beings, a liver criterion would have to be true for members of this tribe. Baker 2000: ch. , 2008, Persons, Animals, and Your current stage is also a part of a being whose temporal boundaries 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. multiple-occupancy view is that Lefty and Righty coincide before the [Note:(x,y) is an abbreviation of (x)(y).]. Furthermore, in those cases in which they are not, for example Body Swap, Human Vegetable, and Fetus, appeal to indeterminacy does little to remove the contradictory intuitions that these cases trigger. What it takes for us to persist might What psychological relation might our persistence consist in? Answers to the persistence question often provide a criterion of personal identity. one of the others? organism, you could too. decisions and character. What is the practical 3 is a helpful Suppose you Identifying the problem of personal identity. a single organism (see e.g. Nor could you come to could be psychologically continuous with two past or future people at [1] exist. that there are two kinds of situations where we can ask how many that you remember doing something you didnt do but someone else View access options below. knowledge. This is 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.
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