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Single Idea 5668

[filed under theme 16. Persons / B. Nature of the Self / 7. Self and Body / a. Self needs body ]

Full Idea

I think personal identity depends on the identity of the body, and that a person's ownership of states of consciousness consists in their standing in a special causal relation to the body by which he is identified.

Gist of Idea

People own conscious states because they are causally related to the identifying body

Source

A.J. Ayer (The Concept of a Person [1963], §IV)

Book Ref

Ayer,A.J.: 'The Concept of a Person etc' [Macmillan 1973], p.116

A Reaction

I think with this is right, with the slight reservation that Ayer talks as if there were two things which have a causal relationship, implying that the link is contingent. Better to think of the whole thing as a single causal network.

The 15 ideas with the same theme [a body is necessary for a sef]:

4836 The mind only knows itself by means of ideas of the modification of the body [Spinoza]
5583 We need an account of the self based on rational principles, to avoid materialism [Kant]
20757 The powerful self behind your thoughts and feelings is your body [Nietzsche]
15583 Certainty that I will die is more basic to my existence than the Cogito [Heidegger]
23747 What is sacred is not a person, but the whole physical human being [Weil]
5324 Bodily identity and memory work together to establish personal identity [Ayer]
5668 People own conscious states because they are causally related to the identifying body [Ayer]
5173 Two experiences belong to one self if their contents belong with one body [Ayer]
5176 Empiricists can define personal identity as bodily identity, which consists of sense-contents [Ayer]
9263 A person is an entity to which we can ascribe predicates of consciousness and corporeality [Strawson,P]
5673 If we have a pain, we are strongly aware of the bodily self [Cassam]
16236 Maybe our persistence conditions concern bodies, rather than persons [Olson, by Hawley]
6669 For 'animalism', I exist before I became a person, and can continue after it, so I am not a person [Olson, by Lowe]
4936 The self is founded on bodily awareness centred in the brain stem [Edelman/Tononi]
6144 You hold a child in your arms, so it is not mental substance, or mental state, or software [Merricks]