Personal_Identity.ppt

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THE PROBLEM
OF
PERSONAL IDENTITY

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There is no single problem of personal identity,
but rather a wide range of loosely connected
questions.
Who am I?
What is it to be a person?
What does it take for a person to persist from
one time to another—that is, for the same person
to exist at different times?

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Prof. Rajakishore Nath, Department of Humanities & Social Science, IIT Bombay
How do we find out who is who?
What determines how many of us there are
now?
What am I?
How could I have been?
What matters in identity?

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Who am I?
Your identity in this sense consists roughly of
what makes you unique as an individual and
different from others.
It is also a property that you may have only
temporarily: you could swap your current
individual identity for a new one, or perhaps
even get by without any.

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Personhood
What is it to be a person?
What is necessary, and what suffices, for
something to count as a person, as opposed
to a non-person?
What have people got that non-people
haven't got?

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Persistence
What does it take for a person to persist from
one time to another—that is, for the same
person to exist at different times?
What sorts of adventures could you possibly
survive, in the broadest sense of the word
‘possible’, and what sort of event would
necessarily bring your existence to an end?
What determines which past or future being
is you?

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Evidence
How do we find out who is who?
What evidence bears on the question of
whether the person here now is the one who
was here yesterday?
What ought we to do when different kinds
of evidence support opposing verdicts?

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Population
What determines how many of us there are
now?
If there are some seven billion people on the
earth at present, what facts—biological,
psychological, or what have you—make that the
right number?
 The question is not what causes there to be a
certain number of people at a given time, but
what there being that number consists in.

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Synchronic identity (synchronic situations
involving just one moment)
Diachronic identity (diachronic ones involving
a stretch of time)

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What am I?
What sort of things, metaphysically speaking,
are you and I and other human people?
 What is our basic metaphysical nature?

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For example, what are we made of?
Are we made up entirely of matter, as stones
are, or partly or wholly of something else?
 If we are made of matter, what matter is it?

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How could I have been?
 How different could I have been from the
way I actually am?
Which of my properties do I have essentially,
and which only accidentally or contingently?
Could I, for instance, have had different
parents?

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What matters in identity?
What is the practical importance of facts about our
identity and persistence?
Why should we care about it?
Why does it matter?

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Understanding the Persistence
Question
The question is what is necessary and sufficient
for a past or future being to be you.
The Persistence Question asks what determines
the answer to such questions, or makes possible
answers true or false.
The question is about numerical identity and
qualitative identity

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The confusion of qualitative with numerical
identity is one source of misunderstanding
about the Persistence Question.
The question of what it takes for someone to
remain the same person is not the Persistence
Question.
It is not even a question about numerical
identity.

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Persistence Question
Under what possible circumstances is a
person existing at one time identical with a
person existing at another time?

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Under what possible circumstances is a person
who exists at one time identical with something
that exists at another time?

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Personal Identity Through Time
Persistence Question fall into one of three
categories.
•The Psychological Approaches
•Somatic Approaches
• Anticriteria Approaches

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The Psychological approach, according to
which some psychological relation is necessary
and sufficient for one to persist through time.
Somatic approach advocates that physical
continuity is primary for personal identity
through time.
Anticriteria approach denies this. This
approach says that mental and physical
continuity are evidence for identity, but do not
always guarantee it, and may not be required.

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A NON-MATERIALISTIC VIEW OF PERSON
What is a person?
What is its nature?
It was Descartes who has proposed a theory of
mind and person according to which a person is
not just a material body, but also a thinking self.
For him, a person is a self, a self-conscious mind
which thinks, feels, desires and so on.

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What is a Person?
The English word ‘person’ is alleged to have
been derived from the Latin 'persona', which
was the mask worn by actors in dramatic
performances.
In common usage ‘person’ refers to any
human being.

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Strawson defines ‘person’ as
“a type of entity such that both predicates
ascribing states of consciousness and
predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics,
a physical situation, etc., are equally
applicable to a single individual of that single
type.”
Strawson, P. F. Individuals, 1963

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Williams claim is that bodily continuity is a
necessary condition for personal identity,
because according to Williams, it is body
which identify the persons, but not the mind,
and there is no mind at all, therefore, bodily
criterion identify the persons.

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Persons necessarily have two dimensions, a
physical and a mental dimension.
Persons thus have a dual nature.
Now, we have to look at the relation
between the knowledge a person has of
himself and the knowledge that others have
of him.

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Firstly, if the unity of a person is necessarily
connected with the continuance of his body through
time, then it is impossible for a person to survive the
death of his body.
Secondly, if bodily identity is a necessary criterion of
personal identity, then it could not be shown that
some non-physical characteristics of a person
continues after his bodily death.
Finally, if the fundamental criterion of identity were
memory, it would follow that a person might be known
to have survived death because he continued to have
memories in his disembodied state.

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The most important fact about the person is
the self. The self is sometimes used to mean
the whole series of a person’s inner mental
states and sometimes the spiritual substance
to which they belong.
The self does not refer to the body but to the
mental history of the person. This made the
unity problem seem intractable, when the
mental images, feelings, and the like, are
contrasted with the temporal persistence.

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The mind or person is something non-spatial.
After death, the body only remains. This
concept of the body becomes gruesomely
explicit when we refer to it as 'the remains'.
It is this conception of the body, which
comes closest to that found in the person
theory. In this theory we find that the body is
not a person, nor is it a part of a person. It is
the person, insofar as he is thought of as the
subject of bodily attributes. But it becomes a
reality at death. We call it a corpse.

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Person, Mind and Consciousness
what is this consciousness which a person certainly
has, but rocks and other animate beings do not have?
G.E. Moore writes, “The moment we try to fix our
attention upon consciousness and to see what
distinctly it is, it seems to vanish: it seems as if we had
before us as mere emptiness when we try to
introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the
blue; the other element is as if it were diaphanous.”
Moore, G. E., Philosophical Studies, 1965.

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Person is being minded have the capacity of doing
the mental activities. Such activities include thinking,
willing, feeling, understanding, speaking,
communicating, and above all, remembering the past.
Mental activities are such that they presupposes that
there is a thinker who is capable of these activities.
The thinker is here a subject or ‘I’ who is or has the
capacity of consciousness. Wherever we will find the
concept of ‘I’, we will find the existence of
consciousness because it is person who stands for the
concept of ‘I’, have consciousness.
Pradhan, R. C., Persons as Minded Beings: Towards a Metaphysics of Persons, (JICPR), 1998.

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According to Strawson, there are two kinds of
predicates.
Person: P-Predicates
Matter: M-Predicates

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There is an interconnection between person, mind,
and consciousness.
Empirically, there is distinction among them.
But transcendentally, they point in the same
direction.
It is right to say that a person is a mental being, and
the essence of mind is consciousness.
Therefore, the concept of the mind, the person, and
the consciousness go together.
Thus consciousness is related to mind, which also
belongs to a person.

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The Dual Nature of Person
Strawson says,
“the concept of a person is to be understood
as the concept of type of entity such that
both predicates ascribing corporeal
characteristics, a physical situation and
consciousness are equally applicable to an
individual entities of that type.”
Strawson, P. F. Individuals, 1963.

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Strawson has pointed out that their co-
applicability to the same person substance.
The M-predicates cannot be ascribable
independently because of that prohibits them
from being ascribable to the conscious beings,
like M-predicates, the P-predicates cannot be
ascribed to the material bodies.
The above argument shows that Strawson
accepting person as non-material and non-
dual without rejecting Cartesian dualism.

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Persons are primary,
Whereas mind and body are secondary.

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Persons as Individuals
Locke: The concept of person is forensic
concept.
Strawson: The concept of person is primitive
concept.

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For Strawson, a person’s body occupies an
important position in the person’s experience
so that he could answer to the following
questions satisfactorily:
(a) Why are one’s states of consciousness
ascribed to anything at all?
(b) Why are they ascribed to the same thing as
certain corporeal characteristics?

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Strawson says,
“What I mean by the concept of a person is
the concept of a type of entity such that both
predicates ascribing states of consciousness
and predicates ascribing corporeal
characteristics, a physical situation & c. are
equally applicable to a single type.”

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Strawson replies,
“… that a necessary condition of states of
consciousness being ascribed at all is that
they should be ascribed to the very same
things as certain corporeal characteristics, a
certain physical situation and c. That is to say,
states of consciousness could not be ascribed
at all, where as they were ascribed to
persons, in the sense I have claimed for this
world.”

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According to Strawson, “A person is not an
embodied ego, but an ego might be a
disembodied person, retaining the logical
benefit of individuality from having been a
person.”

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The first kind of predicates consist of those
that are also properly applied to material
bodies to which we do not ascribe states of
consciousness, which Strawson calls M-
predicates.
The second type consists of those predicates
such as ‘thinking hard’, ‘belief in God’, etc.,
which Strawson calls P-predicates.

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Strawson says,
“… the concept of a person is to be understood
as the concept of a type of entity such that both
predicates ascribing states of consciousness and
predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics, a
physical situation and c. are equally applicable
to an individual entity of that type.”

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Strawson says that “ … though not all P-
predicates are what we should call ‘predicates
ascribing states of consciousness’ (e.g. ‘going
for a walk’ is not), they may be said to have
this in common, that they imply the
possession of consciousness on the part of
that to which they are ascribed.”

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How can one ascribe to oneself, not on the
basis of observation, the very same thing that
others may have, on the basis of observation,
reason of a logically adequate kind for
ascribing one, which might be phrased?
How are P-predicates possible?
How is the concept of a person possible?

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Strawson says that these two questions are
replacing those two earlier questions, that
are, why are one’s states of consciousness
ascribed to anything at all? And why are they
ascribed to the same thing as certain
corporeal characteristics?
The answer to these two questions are
inherited in the primitiveness of the concept
of person, this is because the uniqueness
character of P-predicates.

Personal_Identity.ppt

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