In the real life, it is hard to judge our personal identity: we are aware of who we are every second and minute, we also are able to check our appearance that we have known since we were born from looking at mirror. We know “I am myself” all the time. In John Perry’s “dialogue on personal identity and immorality”, Dave Cohen and Sam Miller visit Gretchen Weirob in the hospital because of Weirob’s injury in a motorcycle accident, they raise a discussion on personal identity. Cohen later takes up issues raised in the case where Julia’s brain is taken from her deteriorated body and placed on the healthy body of Mary whose brain has been destroyed. Therefore Mary has her own body with Julia’s memory and personality. The case proposes an argument …show more content…
Nowadays technology allows us to upload all the memory of a dead person on the computer and create a robot. But can we say the robot is a person? Or can we say the person is still alive? The robot indeed has memory, even the personality of this person before he passes on. But robots and human are different, human have flesh and blood, robots, however, are made by metal. Although it is technologically achievable that robots can react respectively toward different feelings such as pain and itch, these reactions are artificial and they are not real “feelings”, metal would not feel the same way as skin feels. Weirob also argues against Cohen’s view. She states that, the woman after surgery may have false belief, which means she actually is Mary but she thinks herself is Julia. For example, some people with mental disease may have illusion that they have other identities or even think they are other creatures, which are false belief that people may have. As an onlooker, we know the idea and concept in psychopaths’ mind are false beliefs. However as patients themselves, the “false beliefs” are their whole understanding of self and world. Therefore, the idea of mind is imperfect to define personal identity as …show more content…
In other words, the identical replica is exactly ourselves. If we imagine a person who looks exactly like ourselves introducing himself/herself in the way that we normally do, same name, same words, same gestures and same body languages, we probably will be annoyed simply because they are not us. A cloning man will never replace the original person. Each of the views above are undesirable to define personal identity. It would become more desirable if we draw a connection between body and mind, which is named brain. Brain is where thoughts and emotions form and take place, it is also the most crucial organ which controls every single muscle on human body and every bit of sensation. Therefore, we can say that brain is interactive with both body and mind. Linking back to the concept of personal identity, the idea of persons are identical with brains connect Weirob’s and Cohen’s view since the interaction between the three. Self could be defined in different ways. In John Perry’s “dialogue on personal identity and immorality”, both characters Weirob and Cohen are correct on their argument of personal identity, there are just some imperfections on each of the views. My view of “persons are identical with brains” fills the gaps of ideas of them. Brain is the junction that could bring mind and
Personal identity, in the context of philosophy, does not attempt to address clichéd, qualitative questions of what makes us us. Instead, personal identity refers to numerical identity or sameness over time. For example, identical twins appear to be exactly alike, but their qualitative likeness in appearance does not make them the same person; each twin, instead, has one and only one identity – a numerical identity. As such, philosophers studying personal identity focus on questions of what has to persist for an individual to keep his or her numerical identity over time and of what the pronoun “I” refers to when an individual uses it. Over the years, theories of personal identity have been established to answer these very questions, but the
However, I disagree with all of these views; there is a distinct self in each and every living human being. The Oxford dictionary describes the self as “a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others.” In Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist that states, “To say ‘I exist’ is just to assert the existence of a certain more or less continuous bundles of memories, perceptions, thoughts, and intentions. What makes me me and you you is our distinctive bundles” (258). What made Madison Madison was that she was a unique being with not only a unique genetic makeup, but also a unique personality and life experience; there was never anyone exactly like her and there never will
Anil Ananthaswamy describes the self as the role the brain plays in our notions of self and existence. That our sense of self is layered, pulling information from
Weirob does not accept that, she thinks that would be an extrapolation, compare to other billions observed. Here where Weirob’s argument would be objected. She does not agree that the identity can be personal, she thinks personal identity is the way other’s identify each other. She excludes the actual personal point of view. One can fool everyone and receive a facial and voice reconstruction, change mannerism to have others identify him/her as some one who is not one. This phony person will still be personally identify as him/herself, but to others he will be miss-identified. In the case of brain transplant Weirob agrees that the body with the “new” brain should have the personal identity of the “body” . She does not agrees to brain transplant procedure because of this thinking. What if we can imagine that there are parallel universe with the same Gretchen Weirob in it. Same age, same job, same body, but different memories, thoughts, and feelings. If these two can meet somehow in the same universe, according to Gretchen and everyone around, these two are two identical people, not the same person. Why can’t we apply the same principle to Miller’s example of how others perceive two Kleenex boxes to be identical. Weirob is very sensitive to the word Miller uses
The Capgras Delusion is one of the rarest and colorful syndromes in neurology. The patient fails to recognise the faces of close acquaintances and calls them as an ‘imposter’. They claim that the person ‘looks like’ or is ‘identical to’ someone they know, while continuing to believe that they are two different individuals. The delusional belief is strongest when the putative imposter is present [2]. Capgras delusion is classified as a delusional misidentification syndrome, a class of beliefs where the patients have delusional beliefs that involves misidentification of people, places or objects.
A group forms and creates an ideal identity, which implies an "other" outside of this identity. The group imposes its ideals onto “others” potentially valuable after a transformation to create a like-ness. This is achieved through changing the embodiment in the case of both Fatelessness and Freak’s characters: in Cleopatra’s new Freak-ish body and Kertesz’s bodily scars and emotional distance.
The question of personal identity is very intuitive, yet very difficult to define. Essentially, what makes you, you? John Locke was one philosopher who attempted to answer this question. He proposed a psychological theory to define personal identity. His theory does have some merit, but it is not a correct definition of personal identity, since there are some counter-examples that cannot be accounted for. My argument will prove that Locke’s theory of personal identity is false.
Monday’s reading (the first chapter of the book by Jonathan Haidt), explores a number of the themes we’ve been discussing thus far regarding personal identity, such as consciousness, the nature of mind, split brain research, etc.
“It’s a blessed thing that in every stage in every age some one has had the individuality and courage enough to stand by his own convictions.” The part of me that sums up my identity best is not the adjectives given by family, or the faults I find in myself. My identity is my desire to better myself, and my passion for children. My identity is who I want to be and what I do to accomplish my goals My identity is the feelings and emotions I pour into my journal every day, and the way I feel when I do something right. My identity is not what others thing of me or what I think of myself after a bad day. My identity is the love and confidence I have in myslef, and the beauty inside.
This paper aims to endorse physicalism over dualism by means of Smart’s concept of identity theory. Smart’s article Sensations and the Brain provides a strong argument for identity theory and accounts for many of it primary objections. Here I plan to first discuss the main arguments for physicalism over dualism, then more specific arguments for identity theory, and finish with further criticisms of identity theory.
Briefly, we can conclude by deduction that body, brain, and soul are not sufficient to explain personal identity. Personal identity and immortality will always cause questions to arise from philosophers, as well as other individuals, and although many philosophers may object and disagree, the memory criterion offers the most sufficient explanation.
In his 1971 paper “Personal Identity”, Derek Parfit posits that it is possible and indeed desirable to free important questions from presuppositions about personal identity without losing all that matter. In working out how to do so, Parfit comes to the conclusion that “the question of identity has no importance” (Parfit, 1971, p. 4.2:3). In this essay, I will attempt to show that Parfit’s thesis is a valid one, with positive implications for human behaviour. The first section of the essay will examine the thesis in further detail, and the second will assess how Parfit’s claims fare in the face of criticism. Problems of personal identity generally involve questions about what makes one the person one is and what it takes for the same person to exist at separate times (Olson, 2010).
What is personal identity? This question has been asked and debated by philosophers for centuries. The problem of personal identity is determining what conditions and qualities are necessary and sufficient for a person to exist as the same being at one time as another. Some think personal identity is physical, taking a materialistic perspective believing that bodily continuity or physicality is what makes a person a person with the view that even mental things are caused by some kind of physical occurrence. Others take a more idealist approach with the belief that mental continuity is the sole factor in establishing personal identity holding that physical things are just reflections of the mind. One more perspective on personal identity and the one I will attempt to explain and defend in this paper is that personal identity requires both physical and psychological continuity; my argument is as follows:
The concept of the term “self” is a topic that has been analyzed for many years by many people. The self is the whole part of the being that contains the person. This is a very broad topic and although the term is simple it holds a vast amount if information. One of these people is a man by the name of Sigmund Freud. In the paper “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality” written by Freud, uses the term “Psychical Personality,” to explain the human thought processes, thinking and feelings that make up concept of “the self ” part of the person’s personality (Freud, The Dissection of the Psychical Personality, 2004, p. 70). The concept of the structural model of the psyche contains the Id, Ego and Superego, as developed by Freud tries to
It is apparent that we are personified entities, but also, that we embrace “more” than just our bodies. “Human persons are physical, embodied beings and an important feature of God’s intended design for human life” (Cortez, 70). But, “human persons have an ‘inner’ dimension that is just as important as the ‘outer’ embodiment” (Cortez, 71). The “inner” element cannot be wholly explained by the “outer” embodiment, but it does give rise to inimitable facets of the human mental life such as human dignity and personal identity.