John Perry A Dialogue On Personal Identity

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

First, in “The Second Night,” Miller explains the reason why he still refuses to accept the body theory: we can decide who we are without making judgments about the body. He calls upon an everyday example to illustrate this objection: “Consider a person waking up tomorrow morning, conscious, but not yet ready to open her eyes and look around…even before opening her eyes and looking around, and in particular before looking at her body or making any judgments about it, wouldn’t she be able to say who she was?” (19). Yet another objection to the body theory arises later in the piece during “The Third Night” when Cohen addresses “anticipation.” In this discussion, he observes that people express a great deal of concern for what will happen to them in the afterlife, but they rarely carry the same level of concern for what will happen to their bodies. The only logical conclusion to derive from this observation is that what we consider to be ourselves is not our bodies. As a result, an individual’s personal identity cannot be rooted in just his or her body, unlike what body theorists would like to

The primary objection to the memory theory is illustrated by Weirob’s duplication example in “The Third Night”: “Suppose we have two bodies, A and B. My brain is put into A, a duplicate into B…both are in this state of seeming to remember…both have my character, personality, beliefs, and the like. But one is really remembering, the other is not,” (47). In this case, both Weirob A and Weirob B are psychologically continuous with the original Weirob because they share identical brains that contain identical memories. Then, by the memory theory, the duplicates should have the same identity as the original Weirob. But this would allow for three bodies to have the same identity, which cannot be the case when talking about an identity that can belong to one and only one person. Therefore, in defense of the memory theory, memory theorists like those in Perry’s work advocate for the addition of an addendum to the original theory: person A at time point A is identical to person B at time point B if and only if there is only one person at time point B who is psychologically continuous with person A. This revision eliminates the possibility of duplication examples discrediting the memory theory as a viable answer to our questions of personal