This is my philosophy essay that i've been working on for the past month. It deals with problems of personal identity, consciousness and the soul.
Comments and fedback plz!
Here is the original question:
Essay Question: Write on one of the soul, memory, or physical (brain) criteria for personal identity. Examine all of the arguments about the criterion you choose that we have discussed. In the end, do you think it gets us a reason to believe in the possibility of an afterlife? Do you think that, questions of afterlife aside, it is an acceptable criterion for personal identity in this life? If you answer ‘no’ to these questions, do you think either of the other criteria works? Why or why not? Make sure to give the arguments for the view you advocate, and be sure to respond to the arguments against your view. [Readings: Section One of the Coursebook.]
Philosophy essay, draft 5.
In this essay I shall discuss the problem of personal identity, addressing in particular the personal problem of identifying oneself, instead of the more social problem of identifying others. I will also be discussing whether or not an afterlife is possible with the various criteria that I evaluate. So therefore, this essay will deal more with the ideas on problems of self and consciousness such as “Do you really know that you are the same person you were 10 years ago?”, rather than social dilemmas such as “how would you put blame on somebody who committed a crime 60 years ago, but has changed a lot since?”
In the first section, I will introduce three possible criteria that attempt to solve the problem of personal identity; the memory, body and the soul criteria. I will look at these in terms of the problem of personal identity of the self, while ignoring the implications it might have for identifying others in difficult social situations. I will also conclude that the first two criteria do not offer the possibility of life after death.
In the second section, I will propose a possible definition for the soul, one that resembles Cartesian Dualism, and show how it avoids the problems of the other two criteria, while also being concordant with traditional theological concepts of the soul.
In the third section, I will discuss some of the implications for accepting this definition of the soul, and the other possibilities that this definition produces.
Finally, I will conclude that this proposal is an inadequate one, and doesn’t satisfactorily solve the problem of personal identity; nor does it offer a substantial hope for the notion of afterlife. I will also conclude that there is some hope of a desirable afterlife, however insubstantial this hope may be.
The body criterion is perhaps the most commonly used criterion for assessing whether a particular person is the same person as he was before. This takes the form:
‘Person X at one point in time is the same person as person Y at another point in time, iff Y’s body is identical to X’s.’
By identical, it means that Y’s body must be the exact same one as X’s body, with no discontinuous gaps in space or time during which the body doesn’t exist or exists in a completely separate location. For instance, a clone, while having all the physical and mental characteristics of the original, isn’t identical, because he inhabits a separate location in space.
For ordinary situations, this criterion is perfectly sufficient. People rarely, if ever, leave their body while retaining their consciousness. However, this criterion does suffer from the problems of replacement and duplication. Since so much of your body is being lost and replaced all the time, through bodily functions and cell replication , the notion that one’s body will be identical to one’s own 3 months later is a flawed one.
The other problem this criterion faces is that of duplication. Let’s say you were somehow split down the middle (without dying), and each half was regenerated into a complete new person. One must ask, which body would your consciousness reside in? According to the body criterion, it could either be both, or none, which is an unacceptable conclusion.
I have shown that the body criterion fails as soon as it is introduced to some difficult cases. I shall now evaluate the memory criterion, which works on a somewhat different idea. A major flaw of the body criterion is that it’s usually the brain, not the body that defines who the person is. This is because the brain is less prone to change than the body, and any changes in the brain can result in a change of personality, as we’ll see later. The memory criterion attempts to solve these problems, by stating that your identity is dependant on memories. The memory criterion goes as follows:
“Person X at one point in time is the same as person Y at another point in time iff X has the same memories as Y.”
This criterion is more accurate than the first one, in that unlike various and arbitrary parts of the body, your memories do form an important part of who you are, because they dictate who you were. Even so, this criterion has some glaring problems. First of all, the memory is subject to change, just like every other part of the body. As one learns and gets older, he is continually adding new memories on the old. Also, conditions like amnesia and dementia can remove memories, or create false ones. If we are to accept this version of the memory criterion, we must also accept that over time, our identity will change. This is a perfectly acceptable social idea, because people’s personalities do change over time, but the criterion itself seems to imply that your personal identity can change in such a way, that it would no longer make sense to anticipate the experiences of your future self, because by then, who you are as a person will have changed.
This criterion, like the body criterion, also suffers from the problem of duplication. If you are split down the middle, and each missing half is regenerated to be an exact copy of the other half, both copies will retain the exact same memory. According to the memory criterion, if you have the same memory as the other copy, then you must have the same identity as the other person. Again, as a social concept, this is perfectly acceptable, because both people are going to have the same personality and are going to act in the same way, so they can be treated effectively as the same person. But again, this criterion doesn’t identify which person will retain his own consciousness, if any. If you were split in half in this way, which body could you anticipate having the experiences of? The memory criterion cannot conclusively answer this question.
One other issue with both the memory and body criteria is that they don’t allow the prospect of an afterlife, of your identity surviving the death or destruction of your body. Since in these cases, your identity is defined in terms of elements of your body, when the body is destroyed, so is the identity.
The body and memory criteria approach the problem of personal identity from a very scientific angle. I have shown that both of these criteria do not work in all situations. The soul criterion is quite different, in that it attempts to resolve the issue from a completely different angle, which I will now discuss. The soul criterion states that:
“Person X at one point in time, is identical to person Y at another point in time, iff Y has the same soul as X.”
Immediately, this definition encounters a problem. What is the soul exactly? And how can we detect it? The soul is a concept that is familiar in many human societies, yet when asked for a proper description, most people are at a loss to describe it.
Instead of arguing to this problem directly, I shall propose a possible definition of what the soul might be, and discuss these points in terms of this definition. The definition I will now give is similar to that of Cartesian Dualism, and involves the problem of consciousness, which is a problem very similar in nature to that of personal identity. I will begin by outlining the problem of consciousness and how this proposal solves it.
Consciousness is an old philosophical problem. On a large objective scale, it seems to make sense why human beings possess consciousness, because after all, consciousness and self awareness seem to be integral features of any race that is able to shape its environment to its needs. The problem comes at the smaller scales. Why is it that I in particular possess consciousness itself? Why is it that I am conscious in this particular body and brain and not any others? Such problems are next to impossible to solve in scientific terms.
I propose then, that your soul is in fact your consciousness. Essentially this means that your soul is basically your ‘window’ through which you inhabit a body and experience the physical world. A soul grants consciousness to any body, and in a particular example, if your soul inhabits, say, a frog, then you are that frog, and it would make sense to anticipate the experiences of this frog as you would your own.
I’m also defining the soul as an intangible entity that cannot be detected or measured in the physical world. This is where my proposal becomes similar to the ideology of Cartesian Dualism. The soul is an intangible entity that inhabits a physical brain. Since all memories and experiences are stored in the brain itself, and not in the soul, the soul cannot hold any information on a person after they have died.
This definition offers hope towards the notion of an afterlife, because the idea is concordant with those of established religions, such as Christianity or Buddhism. For example, reincarnation could be viewed as an intangible soul inhabiting a body and moving to another when the old one dies. This feature is important if we are to consider the possibilities of afterlife through the soul criterion.
More importantly, this definition successfully avoids the problems that the other criteria suffer from. For instance, in both the body and memory criteria, deterioration and fission/regeneration present a large problem. These problems are easily solved using the soul criterion with my definition of the soul. Firstly, in the problem of body deterioration, the soul will be present in the body regardless of how the body changes, and thus, it will be your consciousness constantly inhabiting that same deteriorating body. Secondly, in a situation where the brain and body are split and subsequently regenerated, the soul must reside in one body or the other. Even though it is arbitrary which one the soul can reside in, the soul must reside in only one.
It seems that this definition is a plausible one, because it addresses the issues of identity that other criteria cannot solve, and it is also compatible with various traditional religions. However there are a few glaring problems with this definition, which I will now outline.
First of all, since the soul is intangible and doesn’t exist in the physical world, there is absolutely no way one could detect the presence of a soul. We just simply do not and will not have that capability. Furthermore, not only can’t we directly detect the presence of a soul, we also cannot detect any perceived effect a soul might have on its surroundings. A person operating without a soul will be for all intents and purposes just a complex machine, being completely indistinguishable from anyone else, except with no one ‘experiencing’ its life, so to speak.
Because we are unable to detect the presence of a soul, it’s entirely possible that the soul does not exist, or that it does exist in a myriad of other ways. Assuming that souls do in fact exist in the sense of my definition, the only soul one can conclusively detect is one’s own. This fact is often credited to being the only fact that one can know without doubt. Put in the words of Descartes, “I think, therefore I am”, which basically means by simply asking the question to yourself, you can conclude the answer, because if your consciousness didn’t exist, you wouldn’t be able to question its existence.
Since your own soul is the only thing you can conclusively detect, the existence of all other souls remains a mystery. For instance, you could be the only soul in existence, and everyone else is just an automaton. There is no way to prove or disprove this theory. Another, perhaps even more bizarre theory is that you have a large number of souls passing through your body at any point. Your soul could be just passing through this particular body as you read this sentence. Since memories are stored in the body, you will have memories of being conscious, and memories of yourself questioning the nature of this consciousness. But these memories might have been experienced by a different, previous soul. Since the present is an infinitely thin slice of time between the past and future, the soul that is currently inside your body may only be there for a very short moment, yet you’ll never be able to detect its arrival and departure.
The implications of this are bad, not only for personal identity, but also for the notion of an afterlife. Let’s look at the ‘river of souls’ situation again. Because any one soul cannot be tied to any one particular person, the concept of using a soul to identify a person becomes completely useless. One would have to revert to looking for a physical, scientific explanation of consciousness, which as I have already pointed out, is a difficult thing to do. Because of this, the Soul Criterion along with my definition of the soul is inadequate for solving the problem of personal identity.
The ‘River of souls’ situation also presents a problem for the notion of an afterlife, as an eternity of inhabiting people for short moments of time isn’t going to be very meaningful by human standards. When humans wish for afterlife, they don’t wish for an afterlife without meaning, they wish for one where they can continue to have the capacity for rational thought and the ability to watch over future generations. If some of the possibilities that my definition of the soul produces are actually true, then this sort of afterlife isn’t possible.
Since there are a large number of possibilities that this definition of the soul creates, and very few of them correspond to what we want from an afterlife, the possibility of an afterlife as we want it, is very slim indeed.
However, this isn’t to say it is nonexistent. There will always exist the slight possibility that the soul exists and behaves in the way that is favourable to religion and general human desire.
In conclusion, the three criteria for personal identity are unable to satisfactorily solve the problem of personal identity. The body and memory criteria work fine for identifying other people in ordinary social situations, but are unable to properly identify which person carries your consciousness in situations where duplication of the body and mind are involved. The soul criterion, with my definition of the soul, fails for a completely different reason. Even though it is able to solve the problems that the other criteria cannot, the definition itself leads to some bizarre possibilities of how the soul might behave. As such, it leads to an unacceptable answer, both for the problem of personal identity, and for the notion of afterlife. One last detail about the soul criterion, however, is that it doesn’t rule out completely the possibility of a desirable afterlife. Even though such an afterlife isn’t at all probable, it is at least possible, and that’s all that is required for belief.
Bibliography.
Churchland, P. ‘The Ontological Problem’, PHIL 105 Course Book 2005, (Wellington, Victoria University, 2005), pp 99-106
Descartes, R. ‘Human Minds and Animal Machines’, PHIL 105 Course book 2005, (Wellington, Victoria University, 2005), pp 84-88
Parfit, D. ‘Personal Identity’, PHIL 105 Course book 2005, (Wellington, Victoria University, 2005), pp 20-44
Perry, J. ‘A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality’, PHIL 105 Course book 2005, (Wellington, Victoria University, 2005), pp 10-19
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_%28philosophy_of_mind%29
Comments and fedback plz!
Here is the original question:
Essay Question: Write on one of the soul, memory, or physical (brain) criteria for personal identity. Examine all of the arguments about the criterion you choose that we have discussed. In the end, do you think it gets us a reason to believe in the possibility of an afterlife? Do you think that, questions of afterlife aside, it is an acceptable criterion for personal identity in this life? If you answer ‘no’ to these questions, do you think either of the other criteria works? Why or why not? Make sure to give the arguments for the view you advocate, and be sure to respond to the arguments against your view. [Readings: Section One of the Coursebook.]
Philosophy essay, draft 5.
In this essay I shall discuss the problem of personal identity, addressing in particular the personal problem of identifying oneself, instead of the more social problem of identifying others. I will also be discussing whether or not an afterlife is possible with the various criteria that I evaluate. So therefore, this essay will deal more with the ideas on problems of self and consciousness such as “Do you really know that you are the same person you were 10 years ago?”, rather than social dilemmas such as “how would you put blame on somebody who committed a crime 60 years ago, but has changed a lot since?”
In the first section, I will introduce three possible criteria that attempt to solve the problem of personal identity; the memory, body and the soul criteria. I will look at these in terms of the problem of personal identity of the self, while ignoring the implications it might have for identifying others in difficult social situations. I will also conclude that the first two criteria do not offer the possibility of life after death.
In the second section, I will propose a possible definition for the soul, one that resembles Cartesian Dualism, and show how it avoids the problems of the other two criteria, while also being concordant with traditional theological concepts of the soul.
In the third section, I will discuss some of the implications for accepting this definition of the soul, and the other possibilities that this definition produces.
Finally, I will conclude that this proposal is an inadequate one, and doesn’t satisfactorily solve the problem of personal identity; nor does it offer a substantial hope for the notion of afterlife. I will also conclude that there is some hope of a desirable afterlife, however insubstantial this hope may be.
The body criterion is perhaps the most commonly used criterion for assessing whether a particular person is the same person as he was before. This takes the form:
‘Person X at one point in time is the same person as person Y at another point in time, iff Y’s body is identical to X’s.’
By identical, it means that Y’s body must be the exact same one as X’s body, with no discontinuous gaps in space or time during which the body doesn’t exist or exists in a completely separate location. For instance, a clone, while having all the physical and mental characteristics of the original, isn’t identical, because he inhabits a separate location in space.
For ordinary situations, this criterion is perfectly sufficient. People rarely, if ever, leave their body while retaining their consciousness. However, this criterion does suffer from the problems of replacement and duplication. Since so much of your body is being lost and replaced all the time, through bodily functions and cell replication , the notion that one’s body will be identical to one’s own 3 months later is a flawed one.
The other problem this criterion faces is that of duplication. Let’s say you were somehow split down the middle (without dying), and each half was regenerated into a complete new person. One must ask, which body would your consciousness reside in? According to the body criterion, it could either be both, or none, which is an unacceptable conclusion.
I have shown that the body criterion fails as soon as it is introduced to some difficult cases. I shall now evaluate the memory criterion, which works on a somewhat different idea. A major flaw of the body criterion is that it’s usually the brain, not the body that defines who the person is. This is because the brain is less prone to change than the body, and any changes in the brain can result in a change of personality, as we’ll see later. The memory criterion attempts to solve these problems, by stating that your identity is dependant on memories. The memory criterion goes as follows:
“Person X at one point in time is the same as person Y at another point in time iff X has the same memories as Y.”
This criterion is more accurate than the first one, in that unlike various and arbitrary parts of the body, your memories do form an important part of who you are, because they dictate who you were. Even so, this criterion has some glaring problems. First of all, the memory is subject to change, just like every other part of the body. As one learns and gets older, he is continually adding new memories on the old. Also, conditions like amnesia and dementia can remove memories, or create false ones. If we are to accept this version of the memory criterion, we must also accept that over time, our identity will change. This is a perfectly acceptable social idea, because people’s personalities do change over time, but the criterion itself seems to imply that your personal identity can change in such a way, that it would no longer make sense to anticipate the experiences of your future self, because by then, who you are as a person will have changed.
This criterion, like the body criterion, also suffers from the problem of duplication. If you are split down the middle, and each missing half is regenerated to be an exact copy of the other half, both copies will retain the exact same memory. According to the memory criterion, if you have the same memory as the other copy, then you must have the same identity as the other person. Again, as a social concept, this is perfectly acceptable, because both people are going to have the same personality and are going to act in the same way, so they can be treated effectively as the same person. But again, this criterion doesn’t identify which person will retain his own consciousness, if any. If you were split in half in this way, which body could you anticipate having the experiences of? The memory criterion cannot conclusively answer this question.
One other issue with both the memory and body criteria is that they don’t allow the prospect of an afterlife, of your identity surviving the death or destruction of your body. Since in these cases, your identity is defined in terms of elements of your body, when the body is destroyed, so is the identity.
The body and memory criteria approach the problem of personal identity from a very scientific angle. I have shown that both of these criteria do not work in all situations. The soul criterion is quite different, in that it attempts to resolve the issue from a completely different angle, which I will now discuss. The soul criterion states that:
“Person X at one point in time, is identical to person Y at another point in time, iff Y has the same soul as X.”
Immediately, this definition encounters a problem. What is the soul exactly? And how can we detect it? The soul is a concept that is familiar in many human societies, yet when asked for a proper description, most people are at a loss to describe it.
Instead of arguing to this problem directly, I shall propose a possible definition of what the soul might be, and discuss these points in terms of this definition. The definition I will now give is similar to that of Cartesian Dualism, and involves the problem of consciousness, which is a problem very similar in nature to that of personal identity. I will begin by outlining the problem of consciousness and how this proposal solves it.
Consciousness is an old philosophical problem. On a large objective scale, it seems to make sense why human beings possess consciousness, because after all, consciousness and self awareness seem to be integral features of any race that is able to shape its environment to its needs. The problem comes at the smaller scales. Why is it that I in particular possess consciousness itself? Why is it that I am conscious in this particular body and brain and not any others? Such problems are next to impossible to solve in scientific terms.
I propose then, that your soul is in fact your consciousness. Essentially this means that your soul is basically your ‘window’ through which you inhabit a body and experience the physical world. A soul grants consciousness to any body, and in a particular example, if your soul inhabits, say, a frog, then you are that frog, and it would make sense to anticipate the experiences of this frog as you would your own.
I’m also defining the soul as an intangible entity that cannot be detected or measured in the physical world. This is where my proposal becomes similar to the ideology of Cartesian Dualism. The soul is an intangible entity that inhabits a physical brain. Since all memories and experiences are stored in the brain itself, and not in the soul, the soul cannot hold any information on a person after they have died.
This definition offers hope towards the notion of an afterlife, because the idea is concordant with those of established religions, such as Christianity or Buddhism. For example, reincarnation could be viewed as an intangible soul inhabiting a body and moving to another when the old one dies. This feature is important if we are to consider the possibilities of afterlife through the soul criterion.
More importantly, this definition successfully avoids the problems that the other criteria suffer from. For instance, in both the body and memory criteria, deterioration and fission/regeneration present a large problem. These problems are easily solved using the soul criterion with my definition of the soul. Firstly, in the problem of body deterioration, the soul will be present in the body regardless of how the body changes, and thus, it will be your consciousness constantly inhabiting that same deteriorating body. Secondly, in a situation where the brain and body are split and subsequently regenerated, the soul must reside in one body or the other. Even though it is arbitrary which one the soul can reside in, the soul must reside in only one.
It seems that this definition is a plausible one, because it addresses the issues of identity that other criteria cannot solve, and it is also compatible with various traditional religions. However there are a few glaring problems with this definition, which I will now outline.
First of all, since the soul is intangible and doesn’t exist in the physical world, there is absolutely no way one could detect the presence of a soul. We just simply do not and will not have that capability. Furthermore, not only can’t we directly detect the presence of a soul, we also cannot detect any perceived effect a soul might have on its surroundings. A person operating without a soul will be for all intents and purposes just a complex machine, being completely indistinguishable from anyone else, except with no one ‘experiencing’ its life, so to speak.
Because we are unable to detect the presence of a soul, it’s entirely possible that the soul does not exist, or that it does exist in a myriad of other ways. Assuming that souls do in fact exist in the sense of my definition, the only soul one can conclusively detect is one’s own. This fact is often credited to being the only fact that one can know without doubt. Put in the words of Descartes, “I think, therefore I am”, which basically means by simply asking the question to yourself, you can conclude the answer, because if your consciousness didn’t exist, you wouldn’t be able to question its existence.
Since your own soul is the only thing you can conclusively detect, the existence of all other souls remains a mystery. For instance, you could be the only soul in existence, and everyone else is just an automaton. There is no way to prove or disprove this theory. Another, perhaps even more bizarre theory is that you have a large number of souls passing through your body at any point. Your soul could be just passing through this particular body as you read this sentence. Since memories are stored in the body, you will have memories of being conscious, and memories of yourself questioning the nature of this consciousness. But these memories might have been experienced by a different, previous soul. Since the present is an infinitely thin slice of time between the past and future, the soul that is currently inside your body may only be there for a very short moment, yet you’ll never be able to detect its arrival and departure.
The implications of this are bad, not only for personal identity, but also for the notion of an afterlife. Let’s look at the ‘river of souls’ situation again. Because any one soul cannot be tied to any one particular person, the concept of using a soul to identify a person becomes completely useless. One would have to revert to looking for a physical, scientific explanation of consciousness, which as I have already pointed out, is a difficult thing to do. Because of this, the Soul Criterion along with my definition of the soul is inadequate for solving the problem of personal identity.
The ‘River of souls’ situation also presents a problem for the notion of an afterlife, as an eternity of inhabiting people for short moments of time isn’t going to be very meaningful by human standards. When humans wish for afterlife, they don’t wish for an afterlife without meaning, they wish for one where they can continue to have the capacity for rational thought and the ability to watch over future generations. If some of the possibilities that my definition of the soul produces are actually true, then this sort of afterlife isn’t possible.
Since there are a large number of possibilities that this definition of the soul creates, and very few of them correspond to what we want from an afterlife, the possibility of an afterlife as we want it, is very slim indeed.
However, this isn’t to say it is nonexistent. There will always exist the slight possibility that the soul exists and behaves in the way that is favourable to religion and general human desire.
In conclusion, the three criteria for personal identity are unable to satisfactorily solve the problem of personal identity. The body and memory criteria work fine for identifying other people in ordinary social situations, but are unable to properly identify which person carries your consciousness in situations where duplication of the body and mind are involved. The soul criterion, with my definition of the soul, fails for a completely different reason. Even though it is able to solve the problems that the other criteria cannot, the definition itself leads to some bizarre possibilities of how the soul might behave. As such, it leads to an unacceptable answer, both for the problem of personal identity, and for the notion of afterlife. One last detail about the soul criterion, however, is that it doesn’t rule out completely the possibility of a desirable afterlife. Even though such an afterlife isn’t at all probable, it is at least possible, and that’s all that is required for belief.
Bibliography.
Churchland, P. ‘The Ontological Problem’, PHIL 105 Course Book 2005, (Wellington, Victoria University, 2005), pp 99-106
Descartes, R. ‘Human Minds and Animal Machines’, PHIL 105 Course book 2005, (Wellington, Victoria University, 2005), pp 84-88
Parfit, D. ‘Personal Identity’, PHIL 105 Course book 2005, (Wellington, Victoria University, 2005), pp 20-44
Perry, J. ‘A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality’, PHIL 105 Course book 2005, (Wellington, Victoria University, 2005), pp 10-19
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_%28philosophy_of_mind%29
