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Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Personal Identity' and 'New Essays on Human Understanding'

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7 ideas

16. Persons / B. Nature of the Self / 5. Self as Associations
Personal identity is just causally related mental states [Parfit, by Maslin]
     Full Idea: For Parfit all personal identity really amounts to is a chain of experiences and other psychological features causally related to each other in 'direct' sorts of ways.
     From: report of Derek Parfit (Personal Identity [1971]) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 10.5
     A reaction: When summarised like this, it strikes me that Parfit is just false to our experience, whatever Hume may say. I suspect that Parfit (and those like him) concentrate too much on rather passive perceptual experience, and neglect the will.
16. Persons / D. Continuity of the Self / 2. Mental Continuity / a. Memory is Self
Memory doesn't make identity; a man who relearned everything would still be the same man [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: If a man were made young again, and learned everything anew - would that make him a different man? So it is not memory that makes the very same man.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01)
     A reaction: Leibniz takes this as a foregone conclusion. If you flipped to a possible world where someone you know well, as a physical being, has been brought up entirely differently (new language, culture, ethics etc), is it really the same person?
16. Persons / D. Continuity of the Self / 2. Mental Continuity / b. Self as mental continuity
We know our own identity by psychological continuity, even if there are some gaps [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: To discover one's own moral identity unaided, it is sufficient that between one state and a neighbouring (or just a nearby) one there be a mediating bond of consciousness, even if this has a jump or forgotten interval mixed into it.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27)
     A reaction: Leibniz appears to accept the psychological continuity view of personal identity (which was probably a new problem to him), even though he rightly rejects the account based purely on memory.
One of my future selves will not necessarily be me [Parfit]
     Full Idea: If I say 'It will not be me, but one of my future selves', I do not imply that I will be that future self. He is one of my later selves, and I am one of his earlier selves. There is no underlying person we both are.
     From: Derek Parfit (Personal Identity [1971], §5)
     A reaction: The problem here seems to be explaining why I should care about my later self, if it isn't me. If the answer is only that it will be psychologically very similar to me, then I would care more about my current identical twin than about my future self.
16. Persons / D. Continuity of the Self / 4. Split Consciousness
If we split like amoeba, we would be two people, neither of them being us [Parfit]
     Full Idea: In the case of the man who, like an amoeba, divides….we can suggest that he survives as two different people without implying that he is those people.
     From: Derek Parfit (Personal Identity [1971], §1)
     A reaction: Maybe an amoeba is a homogeneous substance for which splitting is insignificant, but when a person has certain parts that are totally crucial, splitting them is catastrophic, and quite different. I'm not sure that splitting a self would leave persons.
16. Persons / D. Continuity of the Self / 5. Concerns of the Self
Concern for our own lives isn't the source of belief in identity, it is the result of it [Parfit]
     Full Idea: Egoism, and the fear not of near but of distant death, and the regret that so much of one's life should have gone by - these are not, I think, wholly natural or instinctive. They are strengthened by a false belief in stable identity.
     From: Derek Parfit (Personal Identity [1971], §6)
     A reaction: This raises some very nice questions, about the extent to which various aspects of self-concern are instinctive and natural, or culturally induced, and even totally misguided and false. I can worry about the distant death of my guinea pig, or my grandson.
16. Persons / F. Free Will / 7. Compatibilism
The will determines action, by what is seen as good, but it does not necessitate it [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: Choice, however much the will is determined to make it, should not be called absolutely and strictly necessary: a predominance of goods of which one is aware inclines without necessitating, though this is determining and never fails to have its effect.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21)
     A reaction: Something like seeing that 7+5 equals 12 makes you say '12', but it doesn't actually necessitate your saying '12'? Certain facts seem determined by nature, but not necessitated. Or not necessarily necessitated?