Behalf of Common Sense, Thomas Reid Who are you? is an ambiguous, though substantial, question. It isnt clear what you refers to. You might refer to your physical parts or to your mental states. In any case, the foundations for your belief about who you are that, whoever you are, you are the same person from day to day is questionable. (Who, 21-22) I. The Soul View In ancient Greek thought, there was no philosophical problem o personal identity, but of whether or not bodily death was the end of man From Platos Phaedo, Socrates argues that the fact we have immaterial souls means that we survive our bodily deaths; and for Plato, any extended thing, merely by virtue of its being extended, is potentially divisible and hence, potentially corruptible. (M 144)
Socrates (469-399 BCE) Plato (427-347 BCE) For Lucretius, however, if any feeling remains in mind or spirit after it has been torn from the body, that is nothing to us, who are brought into being by wedlock or body and spirit, conjoined and coalesced *+ and therefore, we have nothing to fear in death, because one who no longer is cannot suffer, or differ in any way from one who has never been born, when once this mortal life has been usurped by death *+. (M 145) Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus, c 95-54 BCE), Roman philosopher (Epicurean) and poet Context: The problem of personal identity What we ordinarily use evidence for our personhood (e.g. our names, ages of our bodies, photographs of younger selves as proofs that we are the same person) are assumptions that go well beyond the data available to experience *+ in such a way that the impermanence of the physical [and ultimately mental] constituents of which our bodies are composed is masked * becoming+ so familiar that eventually they generate a feeling of obviousness *and permanence+. (Who, 15-16, 19) - re: the difference between numerical (absolute) and qualitative (in terms of properties / kind) identity
Unless something were to underlie such a series *of physical or mental states] ultimately something that could sustain itself it would be hard to explain why the series continued and *+ why episodes included in it should be regarded as continuing the old series rather than as beginning new ones. (Martin, Personal Identity from Plato to Parfit, 145)
II. The Intrinsic Relations View Because Newton has demonstrated that there could be a science of nature, there could also be a science of mind (and thereby of identity), which is taken to be a repository of memory
in this alone consists personal identity, i.e., the sameness of a rational being; and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person, it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done. (Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding)
John Locke (29 August 1632 - 28 October 1704), British Empiricist (knowledge is constituted in the understanding which makes use of experience-based ideas) If we were always awake, we could be certain that we had the same soul. But consciousness has natural gaps in it, such as periods during which we are asleep. *+ There is no way of knowing that one soul has not been substituted for another during this period of absence of consciousness. Thus if having the same soul is necessary for personal identity we could never be sure that we were the same person as the day before. (SEP)
It is our retention of the same consciousness that makes us the same people over time, whereby same consciousness is guaranteed by a psychological continuity manifested in memory (hence Memory View), which binds the earlier and the later stages of a person
Reids objections (R 126-127): - Possibility of fission examples (two or twenty intelligent beings may be the same person) - The Brave Officer scenario: a person may and may not be the same person based on what he remembers - Circularity of the view: personal identity is confounded with the evidence which we have of our personal identity (testimony cannot be the cause of, or be the maker of, the thing testified) - Consciousness, memory and every mental operation are in constant flux, transient, and momentary
Thomas Reid (7 May [26 April )]1710 7 October 1796), British founder of Scottish School of Common Sense (those tenets we cannot help but believe given our human constitution)