Personal Identity and the Abyss

Thales

At the risk of falling into the ordinary language abyss, I am wondering if having “personal identity” is simply part of what it is to be human. This, despite the fact that a newborn baby human looks nothing like its later iteration as a full-grown adult. This, despite the fact that an adult human does not consist of the same cells as it did as a baby human. This, despite the fact that we can find no unchanged “essence” or “mind” or “soul” anywhere.

Because isn’t a human something which undergoes gestation and development, birth, infancy, childhood, adulthood and death? After all, each one of us experiences these processes and changes – as has all others before us. And through it all, we seem to have little or no problem identifying ourselves when looking at baby pictures and yearbook photos, matriculating through college, applying for a bank loan, receiving paychecks, having a family, etc.

In other words, isn’t being the same person throughout space and time an essential element of what it is to being a human? We have personal identity – not despite this lifetime of change – but because of it. You simply couldn’t be a person – and certainly not the same person – without undergoing these changes. Take away these changes and you take away persons and, without persons, you have no personal identity.

The so-called “problem of personal identity” reminds me of Zeno’s paradox of the arrow, which allegedly demonstrates the impossibility of motion. Zeno argues that at any one instant of time during flight, an arrow is either moving to a place other than where it is currently, or it is moving to the place where it actually is. But, he continues to argue, the arrow is unable to move to another place because no time has elapsed for it to get there; and yet, neither can the arrow move to where it is currently because it is already there. Therefore, Zeno argues, motion is impossible. But hasn’t Zeno created a straw man (arrow) here? Isn’t motion something that occurs when an object, such as an arrow, changes position over time? If you take this away – by mandating only one instant of time as Zeno does – then you take away the possibility of motion, creating a problem that was never there to begin with.

Similarly, if you argue that, “because a person at time t1 is different than at time t2, then it can not be the same person,” then you are taking away what it is to be a person – that is, something that undergoes change throughout time, from gestation to death.

Have I fallen into the abyss? If so, can someone throw in a lifeline and pull me out? And if you are able to pull me out, how will you know it’s still me?! :cool:

Shawn

↪Thales

It doesn't seem to be a question that can be answered. Personal identity is, as you say, formed through a period of time; but, has no discernable beginning or even some can say an end.

I would like to point out, that there are many discussions about socialization and individuation. Seemingly, when one goes to school, the hope is that the person grows accustomed to helping others out, as it seems an ethical standard for young people to believe in. Having said this, it seems that the abyss you speak about is relational. Having looked into it, one has to find meaning in what one sees in it or with dislike change one's self.

AmadeusD

In other words, isn’t being the same person throughout space and time an essential element of what it is to being a human? — Thales

I think we'd have to solve the fundamental problem: What does personal identity consist in?

There are various views:
The bodily continuity view (think: body=identity)
The psychological continuity view (think: memory/disposition=identity)
The further fact view (think: soul or a materialist equivalent=identity)

They all fail to describe much of anything we take to be our 'identity'. I think most people intuitively take the further fact view. But it is very, very hard to maintain outside of strictly religious, supernatural frameworks.

I'm unsure Zeno has much to say here. His paradox you've picked out takes time to be made up of indivisible points which doesn't seem to be the case at all.

There is the additional view that the above is nonsense, and we must only consider personal identity to be a set of dispositions, arbitrary or curated, in a person's behaviour. Your 'identity' could be 'demisexual aromatic nonbinary transgender neurospicy Unicornkin" in this sense though, so I think it's a cop-out to the actual problem of figuring out what makes 'me' 'me' over time.

wonderer1

This, despite the fact that an adult human does not consist of the same cells as it did as a baby human. — Thales

In the case of neurons, to the best of my knowledge, we do have a lot of cells we were born with. Certainly most of us have neurons that we have had since the age of 3 or 4 years old. Neuron based memory relies on long lived cells.

AmadeusD

↪wonderer1

And this opens up the possibility of 'consciousness surviving the body" hehehehe. Let's not though..

Vera Mont

In other words, isn’t being the same person throughout space and time an essential element of what it is to being a human? — Thales

Isn't being the same reindeer throughout space and time an essential element of what it is to be reindeer?
It's an essential part of consciousness. The only uniquely human aspect of this is talking about it.

Have I fallen into the abyss? — Thales

No, you just dug an all to familiar philosophical hole.

If so, can someone throw in a lifeline and pull me out? — Thales

Only you can do that. Hint: change your perspective.

And if you are able to pull me out, how will you know it’s still me?! — Thales

By not having questioned your identity in the first place.

180 Proof

↪Thales

"Personal identity" is an illusion (i.e. not what it seems – because biological & psychological changes are transparent to the subject) of self-continuity, or embodied cognition (primarily memory). Also, see Ship of Theseus / Neurath's Boat.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurath%27s_boat

Down The Rabbit Hole

↪Thales

I don't think there is a right or wrong answer on how to identify an inanimate object (e.g. The Ship of Theseus), let alone a conscious being.

My preferred way of identifying an object is: the object goes where the parts go. If anything is changed on Theseus's Ship, it is not the same ship. The benefit of this is when all of the parts have been replaced and all of the original parts are put back together - you have reassembled Theseus's Ship.

While I don't think the brain and the mind are the same thing (so the cells are irrelevant to your identity), "your" mind changes over time - it doesn't have the same parts - so it is not the same person.

kudos

↪Thales

I am wondering if having “personal identity” is simply part of what it is to be human. This, despite the fact that a newborn baby human looks nothing like its later iteration as a full-grown adult. This, despite the fact that an adult human does not consist of the same cells as it did as a baby human. This, despite the fact that we can find no unchanged “essence” or “mind” or “soul” anywhere.

Interestingly, the etymology of 'identity' according to Oxford is Ultimately from Latin idem (neuter) "the same". The question seems to be casting a doubt on the I=I identity. Taking the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis approach, as I am partial to, we inevitably find that:

I does equal I, I find myself in continuity and cannot escape my identity, even when others are not around.

I does not equal I, my identity depends on others for its determination.

The finitude of I becomes visible, and approaches the truth of what we began with, and we experience the circular idea and its universality.

An explanation of self that disregards its own dialectical form discards the soul and its inner life as trivial.

This, despite the fact that we can find no unchanged “essence” or “mind” or “soul” anywhere.

Most people I encounter are turned off by the power of soul, not the soul. A type of soul self-conception, which is absurd to a philosopher. In consumerist life, every action taken is poised to represent that you have no soul; doesn't that bother you just as a principle, notwithstanding your skeptical eye to its reality?

@AmadeusD I think we are all a little neurospicy.

AmadeusD

↪kudos

I think we're all a little bored and narcissistic. Some of us think /pretend that actually means something. Most of us realise it's a nothing.

As to the rest of your post, it seems to rely on Hegelian concepts that I find totally incoherent:

The finitude of I becomes visible, and approaches the truth of was what we began with, and we experience the circular idea and its universality. — kudos

This says nothing, as far as I can tell. This is just some words describing nothing anyone could put a finger on. "visible" makes no sense here, "the truth of what was" makes no sense here, "we experience the ... idea" makes no sense here, "universality" is out of hte blue.

To be sure, I think Hegel was an eloquent idiot. But that doesn't affect the lack of coherence here.

kudos

↪AmadeusD

"the truth of what was" makes no sense here

That was actually a typo, which has now been fixed. Thanks for catching that.

As to the rest of your post, it seems to rely on Hegelian concepts that I find totally incoherent

When you go to find a trajectory, you still rely on Newtonian mechanics. Is it wrong to rely on things that are sturdy and well-built?

To be sure, I think Hegel was an eloquent idiot. But that doesn't affect the lack of coherence here.

It sounds like you are embracing the inherent contradictoriness, so you have already made some coherence out of it. Why is coherence such a great thing when we are talking about coherence itself?

AmadeusD

When you go to find a trajectory, you still rely on Newtonian mechanics. Is it wrong to rely on things that are sturdy and well-built? — kudos

Not at all, but as you'll have picked up, this is not how i view Hegel :P

Your last paragraph is the same type of muddled i'm getting elsewhere, so I'm unsure how to respond. It seems like a mess of words asking senseless, redundant questions. This isn't meant to be rude - It's most to illustrate that, given my opinion of Hegelian thinking (and my position that it can be shown to be nonsensical) we're not going to get far :P

kudos

↪AmadeusD

This isn't meant to be rude - It's most to illustrate that, given my opinion of Hegelian thinking (and my position that it can be shown to be nonsensical) we're not going to get far :P

No worries, there is no rude in TPF; Only banned, apparently.

ENOAH

↪Thales

For me, if you're asking "is our identity what it is to be human," as if being human is an absolute in the universe, in and of itself, definitely, no. Because I don't think being human is an absolute in and of itself. And if it were, how could a label be its essence? What would make us human in that case would be something absolutely pre-existing in the universe, some sort of "Let us make man and woman" requiring nothing further to make us human. I hope I've expressed my thought clearly. I know how simplistic it sounds.

That leaves (perhaps, among other alternatives) is identity what it is to be human, only in the way we humans view ourselves, and identify ourselves as human (i.e. and not say, how the Universe, or a God views/identifies us). In which case identity can be what makes us human, no need to even bother making reasoned arguments to deal with opposing facts, as long as there is some consensus, because, not just identity, but so does every other "fiction" we have displaced our reality with, make us human.

Our reality is, like that of every other creature in the universe so far: i. e., there is no such reality as personal identity. It's just one of the things our mind constructs and projects into "our" "world."

If being human is an absolute, distinct from other living beings, then that's what makes us human.

If being human is a make-belief, made up and believed to matter, but really just a convenience we have adapted for our survival, then yes, identity is what makes us human, but so does commerce, and rituals, architecture and philosophy. Asking the question, is identity what makes us human, is what makes us human.

Add: or most simply put, for me, identity might be what makes us human, but we made up "human" no such identity is real.

Only we make human and not human.

I like sushi

↪Thales

Temporality is 'essentially' what we are. Our memories, although altered with time, remain for the most part intact. Our brains soak up what we experience in relation to what we have experienced.

What is special about humans compared to most other living organisms is that we can extend ourselves into an abstracted past and future sense of self. This is the experience of having an individual identity and like every human experience once we question its authenticity we always find something wanting ... this is basically what conscious experience necessarily entails.

A 'pure apodictic knowing' is to experience nothing. We are aware of what can be questioned not what cannot be questioned.

In this sense when you draw yourself away from the concept of an identity, and focus your attention elsewhere, your identity takes on something resembling a 'pure apodictic knowing' because it is no longer held up to the light of scepticism and rational analysis.

unenlightened

Have I fallen into the abyss? If so, can someone throw in a lifeline and pull me out? — Thales

Saw your first ship sink and drown from rocking of the boat
And all that could not sink or swim, were just left there to float. — Ship of Fools, Robert Hunter

And if you are able to pull me out, how will you know it’s still me? — Thales

I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together — The Beatles

If you study the weather, you quickly come across features consisting of regions of low pressure with winds circulating around them. these form spontaneously under conditions where there is a local temperature gradient such that there is a mass of hot air below cold air. Hot air is lighter and rises while cold air is heavier and falls. the 'cyclone' forms spontaneously like the whirlpool that forms in a draining sink because water is falling and air is trying to rise. When they are big, we give them names and categorise them as storm or hurricane, or twister, etc. Eventually such features run out of potential energy and lose their identity.

In order to arrive at complete contentment, restrain your ambitions.
For everything which comes into being eventually returns again to the source from which it came.
Each thing which grows and develops to the fullness of its own nature completes its course
by declining again in a manner inherently determined by its own nature.
Completing its life is as inevitable as that each thing shall have its own goal.
Each thing having its own goal is necessary to the nature of things.
He who knows that this is the ultimate nature of things is intelligent; he who does not is not.
Being intelligent, he knows that each has a nature which is able to take care of itself.
Knowing this, he is willing that each thing follow its own course.
Being willing to let each thing follow its own course, he is gracious.
Being gracious, he is like the source which graciously gives life to all.
Being like the gracious source of all, he embodies Nature's way within his own being.
And in thus embodying Nature's way within himself, he embodies its perpetually recurrent principles within himself.
And so, regardless of what happens to his body, there is something about him which goes on forever.

- Translated by Archie J. Bahm, 1958, Chapter 16 — Tao Te Ching

https://www.egreenway.com/taoism/ttclz16.htm

Fire Ologist

If you study the weather, — unenlightened

Dude, I didn’t read your post yet when I wrote the below. Sounds like a similar page out of a similar book.

The only uniquely human aspect of this is talking about it. — Vera Mont

I agree. There is a problem of identity wherever we “identify” some unified thing. The identity of a “person” (so far) seems no different than the identity of a quantum field or the continent of Europe.

A unity (like a person, or Europe) is like a hurricane. It materializes out of thin air, is always in motion and changing its shape, at its eye it looks like a calm sunny day, at its fringes it looks like a light rain, but when it’s on top of you, a distinct clear unit called Hurricane Sandy cannot be denied.

We give hurricanes personal identity just like we identify ourselves. Names to help point at moving changing growing dying objects.

And I don’t see a problem with change and motion in the mix. When we say “I am” why can’t we complete the thought with “I am becoming?” A person (like any unity) does not have to either be fixed and permanent, or not exist at all. We can still make distinctions about things that are moving and changing - we affix permanence to them to point them out in space and time, for a little while, while they are here.

Essence may be undone in the becoming (just as essences come to be for a time in the becoming), but there are still essential features that distinguish a hurricane from a person, from me to you, from a quantum field…

But I wouldn’t want to deny the abyss either. Personal identity is. But personal identity is a fleeting thing.

Only God can save us from the becoming.

↪Thales

Metaphysician Undercover

It materializes out of thin air... — Fire Ologist

Do you really think so? I don't. That's like spontaneous generation, no one believes that hokey stuff anymore.

unenlightened

Dude, I didn’t read your post yet when I wrote the below. — Fire Ologist

Great minds think alike, and fools seldom differ. A cliché in time makes Jack a dull boy.

no one believes that hokey stuff anymore. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, we know it's all the CIA making trouble and controlling our minds.

Metaphysician Undercover

↪unenlightened

Trouble! That's something which materializes out of thin air, don't blame it on the CIA.

Fire Ologist

It materializes out of thin air...
— Fire Ologist

Do you really think so? I don't. — Metaphysician Undercover

Saying it materializes out of thin air is shorthand for - who the hell knows yet.

Where precisely is the thin line between the identity we call a hurricane and the identity we call high pressure sunny - tough to tell, ever-shifting, ever coming to be and fading - but it materializes nonetheless.

Fire Ologist

↪unenlightened

"Nothing to see here. Move along..."

Thales

What I had initially thought was a nice and tidy solution to the personal identity problem has been shattered into a myriad of interesting arguments, considerations and examples – including: AmadeusD's “Unicornkin,” Vera Mont’s “reindeer,” 180 Proof’s “Neurath’s Boat,” kudos’ “Hegelian dialectic,” and unenlightened and Fire Ologists’s “weather patterns.”

. — AmadeusD

. — Vera Mont

. — 180 Proof

. — kudos

. — unenlightened

. — Fire Ologist

Consequently, I now find myself in the abyss. However, I’m going to try climbing out with another attempt. This time, my recipe will consist of a dash of Wittgenstein:

When we enter into a discussion about “personal identity” – that is, whether or not it makes sense to say that a newborn baby at time t1 and space s1 can be the same person as a full-grown adult at time t2 and space s2 – we agree on the terms we are using (e.g., “same person,” “newborn baby,” “full-grown adult,” etc.).

Call it what you like – “the rules of the game,” “inherited background,” whatever – but this agreement gives us the ability to enter into and engage in the discussion. Without this common ground, we could not even begin to have intelligible discourse. Were we not to use the same language game, we would be plunged into an infinite regress of epistemological skepticism, where even the skeptic’s arguments become absurd. It would be like two people trying to play a game of chess with one using chess rules and the other the rules of checkers. It’s a nonstarter.

So at the very least, we enter into this discussion about personal identity with an inherited background (or foundation) about what it means to be a person and, equally important, what it means to say that a person maintains his or her identity over time and space. Again, such unquestioned, inherited foundations are a necessary part of everything we talk (and argue) about intelligibly. So…

…hopefully the rope I’m using to pull myself out of the abyss won’t be used to hang me:

There can be no arguments to prove or disprove personal identity. It’s just an accepted fact or “rule” that it exists. Like G.E. Moore’s hand, the reality of personal identity is at best trivially true. To question it or wonder about it or discuss it may be interesting, but in the end, such discourse is misleading. Personal identity is a given. Otherwise, what is it that we are talking about?

kudos

↪Thales

When we enter into a discussion about “personal identity” – that is, whether or not it makes sense to say that a newborn baby at time t1 and space s1 can be the same person as a full-grown adult at time t2 and space s2 – we agree on the terms we are using (e.g., “same person,” “newborn baby,” “full-grown adult,” etc.).

If you choose to take a physics approach as above, does it make any sense to say the opposite, that T1 and S1 are in the same time and space metric as T2 and S2? Or did I open up the dialectic again, sorry I keep forgetting that it is a no-fly zone. By the way, I think it was more Fichte who presented this I=I identity question in terms of formal logic, and I am not sure if it was his exclusively either, but Hegel rounded it off nicely as well.

Vera Mont

There can be no arguments to prove or disprove personal identity. — Thales

You don't need to argue about it. You only need to experience it. And if you doubt other people's ability to identify you, try committing a crime and claiming that, since it happened last month, some other guy did it. It's not just a rule; its our modus operandi.

Paine

↪Thales

I find a difference between saying 'personal identity exists' and saying 'we experience the life of being a person.' The latter is a much simpler beginning than the former. It is not without assumptions of shared experience but negating it is not like claiming such an identity does not exist. The perspective is far from Descartes proving he exists because he thinks it. I experience myself as a person. I experience other persons as having a similar life and regarding me in the same fashion. If it is all an illusion, it is an excellent show.

We wonder, of course, what are the contours and conditions of this experience. When we do that through imagining different models, we suddenly are confronted with questions of what actually exists or not. When we divide, the job of reuniting falls upon our enterprise. That was as true for Heraclitus as it is for modern psychological models. Much else has changed. The view of the individual in isolation needs more ways of thinking to approach the simplicity we use like a familiar tool. Aristotle said the soul is like a hand, a tool of tools.

AmadeusD

It's not just a rule; its our modus operandi. — Vera Mont

I'm not sure they amount to anything different. It could be otherwise, if Parfit controlled the DOJ.

Paine

↪AmadeusD

How does the reference to the DOJ relate to this discussion?

AmadeusD

How does the reference to the DOJ relate to this discussion? — Paine

Athena was suggesting a bit of TE about how to prosecute crimes when the guy that did it at T1 isn't the same as the guy arrested at T2. I'm saying if Parfit controlled the DOJ, likely we would have to say something like "If he remembers it, cuff him. If not, we can't in good conscience nick him for it".

A weird and unsustainable system indeed, but a bit more toward what the concept of Identity is supposed to capture.

Vera Mont

I find a difference between saying 'personal identity exists' and saying 'we experience the life of being a person.' — Paine

That's because "exist" is such a difficult word to agree on. I consider something that exists to be tangible, measurable; real. Concepts do not exist - that is, they have no material reality. They are products of the imagination and of language - which means, open to a great range of interpretations.

AmadeusD

Concepts do not exist - that is, they have no material reality. — Vera Mont

Interesting. This, to me, is to say that there are things that 'exist' and 'do not exist' yet they are all extant... Can you see if you can make the language there work?

Personal Identity and the Abyss

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