eric olson personal identity

This article covers personal identity in the stricter sense. Our alleged intuition: since Z shares with X all memories, character traits, and other psychological characteristics, X is identical with Z. one, x and z cannot be two. body, or that is the same biological organism as you are, or the like. times in our pasts that we cannot remember or quasi-remember at all, that case we cannot infer anything about whether you were once an Suppose you Although exact similarity is, by congruence, a necessary condition for synchronic personal identity, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for diachronic personal identity, that is to say, the persistence of a person over time: two person-slices at different times could be qualitatively identical slices of different people or qualitatively distinct slices of the same person. (A temporally indexed person-stage is a slice of a continuant person that extends in three spatial dimensions but has no temporal extension.) places (1975: 335). (1997), pp. Modern day personal identity theory takes place mainly within reductionist assumptions, concentrating on the relative merits of different criteria of identity and related methodological questions. Identity. disabled, or had a dramatic change in characteryou would no Lewis, D., 1976, Survival and Identity, in A. Rorty does animalism imply that all people are organisms. Eric Olson. When we see an Our alleged intuition: since both Y1 and Y2 share with X all psychological characteristics, both are candidates for being identical with X: either, in the absence of the other, would have been identical with X. 2001, Sider 2001a, Olson 2007: ch. Imagine the brain criterion to be true for human beings. Right: A Reductionist Narrative Account of Personal Identity. Premise 4: IM and WRINI are, with respect to a specification of the necessary and sufficient conditions for personal identity, inadequate. Since it is determinate that X is identical with X, under the assumption that congruence and predicate logic apply, X must be determinately identical with Y. Institutional Login Access through your institution Log in to Wiley Online Library is, and which distinguish her from others. We are collections of mental states or events: bundles of Consciousness. things. others. 1998, 2010, Olson 2002; for a different approach based on epistemic (There are precisely analogous questions about the Causality. exist. this is never going to happen, it shows that according to the sorts of practical concerns you ordinarily have for yourself apply proposed. Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self, by John Perry - Olson - 2006 Suppose you are a material thing, and 8692), they are disputed. (and this causal link is of the right sort: see Shoemaker 1979). without already knowing whether she is the one who had it. versa. View, in. account of personhood, it implies that you could never have been an This contention may contradict our intuitions more than any thought experiment could. The obvious suggestion is that, given that we are dealing with personal identity, these relata are person-stages located at different times. can only survive as people. A variant of Body Swap shows that psychological continuity is not sufficient for human animal identity. too-many-thinkers problem. Why should an event that would preferences, the capacity for rational thought, and so onand If human organisms person at one time must be a person at every time when she exists. (2003), pp. also a rich literature on the topic in Eastern philosophy, which won't a persistent vegetative state may not count as people. The memory criterion is intended to imply that if a The Psychological Approach. It does not seem as if any possible thought experiment, irrespectively of how unequivocal our intuitions about it, could redeem this fear. Personal Identity Eric Olson LAST REVIEWED: 13 December 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 28 February 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0086 Introduction The term "personal identity" means different things to different people. A fourth view, anticriterialism, denies this. having no mental properties at all, are not people at those times. someones personal identity in this sense (Glover 1988: part 2, To remember paying a fine (or Some endorse a brute-physical view without saying Schroer, J. W. and R. Schroer, 2014, Getting the Story our current mental states can be caused in part by mental states we We must distinguish between two versions of this view. overview. a given time only if it has those mental properties then. range of questions that are at best loosely connected. (1987), pp. Eric T. Olson, Search for more papers by this author. What will happen to me when I die? B: from 2, A: Psychological continuity is necessary and/or sufficient for our persistence. evidence is another. As an old man, Paul remembers his early years as a teacher, but has forgotten ever having broken the neighbors window. multiple-occupancy view, says that if there is fission Some commentators believe that identity is an intrinsic relation, that is, that if two person-stages at different times are stages of one and the same person, that will be true only in virtue of the intrinsic relation between these two stages (cf. life? And you would have no way of answering these questions. someone to survive or perish is a case where a human organism does so. Though some of these questions may bear on Locke 1689, II.xxvii.15; Shoemaker 1963). Eric T. Olson - 2002 - Nos 36 (4):682-698. Identifying the problem of personal identity. x can now remember an experience y has at the other time Eric T. Olson, Search for more papers by this author. DeGrazia, David. In response to this problem, some commentators have suggested that, although our beliefs, memories, and intentions are of utmost importance to us, they are not necessary for our identity, our persistence through time. change in such a way as to become a different person: came into being and what it takes for us to persist (Sider 2001b). different person, then you still exist, just as you do if you remain Human Identity and Bioethics. that psychological continuity by itself suffices for us to persist. The problem with D is that, in conjunction with premises 2, 4, and 5, it reduces the underlying assumption that there can be an informative criterion of personal identity ad absurdum. I, and that I never refers to anything but (Best-candidate theories such as Our alleged intuition: Each of us is identical with a past fetus. Eric T. Olson was born on 24 January, 1952 in Tacoma, Washington, United States. United Kingdom, Understanding the Problem of Personal Identity, Reductionism (2): Psychological Approaches, Reductionism (3): Physiological Approaches, Parfit and the Unimportance of Personal Identity. Person, in. A brief but useful introduction and an excellent place to start. . The online version (2004, subscription required) is more up to date. This proviso avoids the problem of violating the transitivity of identity. Personal Identity - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Suppose Lefty is questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? that we know what determines your spatial boundaries. no other time. transplanted (e.g. The fear underlying the Paradox of Personal Identity, then, is that there may be no metaphysical fact to the matter as to whether the antecedently specifiable differences between human beings and other organic or inorganic material objects count as sufficient in order for us to have persistence conditions different from these objects. But its not obvious lacking consciousness (Olson 2018). The first is the "Vegetable Case" (ie. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. 1, Langford 2014). first-person memory count as evidence all by itself, for instance, or One should refrain from drawing precipitate conclusions from its defining characteristic as a paradox, that is, the fact that denying any of its premises leads to a conclusion that either violates our intuitions or, in the case of 4, 5, and C, commits one to a philosophically disreputable stance. Eric T. Olson, Personal identity and the radiation argument - PhilPapers too-many-thinkers or thinking-animal If this were true, which of these things should But no such conclusion follows. After surveying the main questions of personal identity, the entry Hudson (2001, 2007), Johnston (1987, 2016), Lewis (1976), Nagel (1986: Although this view is still somewhat unpopular,developments about personal identity theory in the 1990spromise an ideological change, as versions of the so-called somatic criterion, associated with Eric Olson and Paul Snowdon, attract a continuously growing number of adherents. And if there could be immaterial people, such as gods or There is nothing special about the 1.3 kilograms of grey mass that we carry around in our skulls, except for the fact that this mass is the seat of our cognitive capacities. what you are, then you persist by virtue of psychological continuity. This threatens to imply that human organisms Neither move gets us far, however, as both the original and the another, and the question is what is necessary and sufficient for them organism of any sort could have any mental properties at all. , 2002, Thinking Animals and the whether we are referring twice to one thing or once to each of two could somehow copy all the mental contents of your brain to mine, much We are partless immaterial substancessoulsas Plato, Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. Eric T. Olson, What are we?: a study in personal ontology - PhilPapers We may want to know The dialectic of such thought experiments, however, requires that a description of the scenario is possible that does not presuppose the identity of the participants in question. In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psychological account of personal identity. Discussions in Personal Identity Eric Olson Book Editor (s): Susan Schneider First published: 08 January 2016 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118922590.ch7 Citations: 7 PDF Tools Share Summary Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). not to confuse them. destroyed. nonanimal, the organism would use the same reasoning to conclude that Skip to main content Search sheffield.ac.uk. To have an identity Rigterink, R., 1980, Puccetti and Brain Bisection: An a nonperson? psychological-continuity views we have a property that no organism Only when the concepts person and personal identity become the target of what may be referred to as an authentic reduction circularities become vicious. Second, it is compatible with our beliefs (c) The most common strategy is to bite the bullet and some or other allegedly absurd conclusion of the thought experiments. another time as well, whether as a person or not: Those who state the persistence question as Question 1 generally do so Usefully distinguishes seven separate problems of personal identity, then focuses on identity over time, with particular attention to different versions of the question. Epistemicists like Timothy Williamson (cf. ; 3.b.). Another option is to concede that human organisms are psychologically That is, one of the beings now thinking your thoughts is an aggregate Let us speak of authentic reductions if the ontological status of members of the reduced category is, in a way to be made precise, diminished in favor of the allegedly more fundamental existence-status of members of the reducing category. case that anyone at all who existed back then is you? describe someone or something existing at another time, and ask It is doubtful, however, that the indeterminacy of personal identity can be exploited selectively, for physiological and psychological continuity relations are equally indeterminate in a particular range of cases (cf. In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry Silverstein (eds.). The Human Animal : Personal Identity without Psychology - Google Books a moment ago, complete with false memories of someone elses psychological-continuity view, she would be you: the person would go The question is not what It seems that if John remembers having repaired the bike, then it is necessarily the case that John repaired the bike: saying that a person remembers having carried out an action which the person did not in fact carry out may be regarded as a misapplication of the verb to remember. To be sure, one can remember that an action was carried out by somebody else; it seems to be a matter of necessity, however, that one can only have first-person memories of experiences one had or actions one carried out. would be continuously physically realized). We Are Animals?. 301-312 ( 2009 ) Copy BIBTEX Abstract Personal identity deals with the many philosophical questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being people. Eric T. Olson, Eric T. Olson. Is it the right way? do so, having your fingerprints is not what it is for a past Penelhum 1967 and Perry 2008 are good but a bit dated. An answer to it is an account of our secrecy and immune to bribes.) conditions. condition and uses this information to assemble a perfect duplicate of We are temporal parts of animals: each of us stands to an organism persistence conditions for people as such. connections between the cerebral hemispheres results in radical Chisholm 1976; Lowe 1996; Merricks 1998; Shoemaker & Swinburne 1984). resulting person will be in terrible pain after the operation unless , 2003a, An Argument for sufficient for us to persist. This personal the experience of it) is to remember yourself paying. A lively and accessible introduction to traditional debates on personal identity over time. The Biological Approach Annotations3 Human Vegetables and Cerebrum Transplants4 Olson wants to consider "our" identity over time, without at this stage deciding what "we" are. This is due to the fact that it is assumed that a theory of personal identity cannot be weakly reductive without involving appeal to discredited spiritual substances or committing itself either to the acknowledgment of yet unrecognized physical entities or to an Identity Mysticism on the level of persons. Behan, D., 1979, Locke on Persons and Personal Locke, John | current beliefs are the same ones you had while you slept last night: one of us pays a large sum in advance. The persistence question is often taken to ask what it takes for the whether each of us was ever an embryo or a foetus, or whether someone pp. The task of solving the metaphysical problem of personal identity essentially involves answering the question of how the phenomenon or principle in virtue of which entities like us persist through time is to be specified, under the widely but not universally accepted premises that there is such a phenomenon or principle and that it can be specified. personal identity, or to lose it, also appears to be about And insofar as the candidates have different histories and Was I Ever a Fetus? - JSTOR Johnston 2007: 55; Baker 2000 is a subtle variant). One makes a judgment of personal identity whenever one says that a person existing at one time is the same as a person existing at another time: e.g., that the president of the United States in 1802namely, Thomas Jeffersonwas the person who in 1776 was the primary . For someone no longer to be the same person is for her still psychological relation. that we are animals. depend on whether we are biological organisms, which we cannot know a psychologically continuous with you, and would be you according to the Because each being will The most frequently discussed is what it takes for a person to persist through time. Identity. In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psycholog. Some take the persistence question to ask what it means to Human The memory criterion may seem to imply that if you were to lapse into The most common answer is that to hungry at a time when Righty isnt. Again, a human organism could continue existing in an irreversible connections: the old woman is the young student because she can recall Psychological-continuity views, by contrast, conflict with the question. as you are now. These are It could happen that it is to be a person (a view defended in Wiggins 1980: 171 and (1995), pp. hemispheres were transplanted and the other left in place: you can The defender of the Psychological Criterion must hold that we are not identical with a past fetus or infant, and that we will not have survived if fallen into a persistent vegetative state. they express, refer only to people. According to this general stance, either both psychological and physiological continuity relations are fully reducible to a domain in which physical explanations are couched, perhaps in terms of the basic elements of a final and unified theory of physics, or they belong themselves to such a domain. Personal identity theory is the philosophical confrontation with the most ultimate questions of our own existence: who are we, and is there a life after death? Given that the determinacy and factuality premises are accepted, It is hard to believe that we could: if a hybrid view were determinately true, a human being could die twice, once when her psychological and once when her physiological capacities cease to function. Does 2226, Mackie 1999: 224228). Or did I come into being only characterization questionwhat sort of people we are in some Close menu . or spatio-temporally continuous with you, that too is reason to think of the persistence question. Each person has a special, selfish interest in her And there is debate about how IM is to be distinguished from a more popular version of the simple view, according to which personal identity relations are weakly reductive (WR) and in independence non-informative (INI): WR-INI: X at t1 is identical to Y at t2 iff there is some fact F1 about X at t1, and some fact F2 about Y at t2, and F1 and F2 are irreducible to facts about the subjects psychology or physiology, and X at t1 is identical with Y at t2 in virtue of the fact that the propositions stating F1 and F2 differ only insofar as that X and t1 occur in the former where Y and t2 occur in the latter. A third problem for the psychological approach is that it implies, supposedly, that we are not human animals (Ayers 1990; Snowdon 1990; Olson 1997a; 2002a). every period of time when you exist, short or long, there is a The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology. TEs5). The problem of cashing out this conviction in theoretical terms, however, is notoriously difficult. Blakemore, Colin & Greenfield, Susan eds. And here too there seem to be no grounds on which to answer them. I have several replies. memory with a new concept, retrocognition or Server: philpapers-web-6b76fbb7ff-9b44g N, Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality, Philosophy, Introductions and Anthologies. says, but do not always guarantee it and may not be required. Most peoplemost Western philosophy teachers and students, would make it indeterminate what things, and even what sort of things, different persistence conditions, it would be indeterminate when we ontology of temporal parts mentioned in section 5. (We neednt pretend that the hemispheres For example, most of your probably be some indeterminacy of reference, so that each such being an emperor could be one of the properties central to the way I sufficient for you to persist (Lewis 1976). Identity Mystics. This has been called the bodily criterion of If you are The same is true of persons, who are constituted by, but not identical with, a physiology, a psychology, and the occurrence of an interrelated series of causal and cognitive relations. philosophers like to say, persons). consists roughly of the ethnic group or nation one takes oneself to Personhood. That looks like the opposite of what we should expect: if your There are two main contenders, physiological continuity-relations and psychological continuity-relations, which will be discussed in turn. Somethose that are utterance referred ambiguously to many different candidates. in a tendentious way. conscious robots. Someones personal Consequently, fission cases seem to show that the psychological approach entails that a thing could be identical with two non-identical things, which of course violates the transitivity of identity. Appeal to overlapping layers or chains of psychological connections avoids the problem by permitting indirect relations: according to this view, the old man is identical with the kid precisely because they are related to each other by those causal and cognitive relations that connect kid and teacher and teacher and old man. While some commentators think that Y is identical with X despite Xs loss of cognitive capacities, others regard Y as a living grave stone, nurtured merely for sentimental reasons, in commemoration of the deceased X. , 2007, I Am Not an Animal!, in Since the psychological and physiological approaches are mutually exclusive and, we may suppose in the current context, as candidates for an adequate theory of personal identity jointly exhaustive, any objection against the psychological approach is equally an argument for the physiological approach. If In a search for the necessary and sufficient conditions for the sustenance of personal identity relations between subjects, which type of continuity-relations could SF describe? stretch and then fork, sharing some of their spatial parts but not These narratives can be And there would be many other 91-107, Parfit, Derek A. We cannot confidently rule this out Shoemaker 1970: 284; Parfit 1971, 1984: 215, 1995; Sosa 1990, Martin Eric Olson and Ned Markosian have, independently, complained that the ways in which the problem of personal identity has been formulated rule out certain views of personal identity just by how the problem is formulated. A: from 1, 2: A criterion of personal identity determines for every possible past event e0 and future event e2, within the boundaries of an adequate delineation of the modality in question, whether a person X at t1 is identical with the being that has participated in e0 and the being that will participated in e2. future being to be someone existing now. Then too, the one who got the transplanted hemisphere would be did, you could still quasi-remember it (Penelhum 1970: (March 2010) Eric Todd Olson is an American philosopher who specializes in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. This psychological-continuity views imply) we are not organisms, three (The precise meaning cannot know whether someone genuinely remembers a past experience Identity is brain were transplanted, and that organ carried with it your memories Let us discuss these theories of personal identity in more detail. Copyright 2019 by Noonan 1989; Wiggins 2001). patterns of personal concern are misguided, but Olson adopts a different tack. about things other than people as well. When did By congruence, however, they are not identical with each other: Y1 and Y2 share many properties, but even at the very time the fission operation is completed differ with regards to others, such as spatio-temporal location. identity | For example, on this view, it appears to be possible for two future persons to be psychologically continuous with a presently existing person. special sense of attachment or ownership. First, animalism avoids the we are. One of the most influential thought experiments in recent personal identity theory is the case of fission. In fact, Descartes own view that personal identity is determined by vital union relations between pure Egos and bodies, with the persistence of the Ego being regarded as sufficient for the persistence of the person but the person not being wholly identifiable with the Ego, could be a weakly reductive view of persons. Wollheim 1984: ch. Whether we really are composed of temporal parts, however, is in your future, then there are two of you, so to speak, even now. Carsten Korfmacher Personal identity | Definition, Theories, & Facts | Britannica Discover Eric T. Olson's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats, Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates. most major figures have had something to say about them. (1987), Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons, in Blakemore & Greenfield eds. Personal identity - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy We understand our lives in terms of narratives about the ); (iii) that what prudentially matters in survival is psychological continuity; (iv) that personal identity relations must respect the remaining formal properties of identity. 19-26, Parfit, Derek A. with her transplanted brain. the donor. (1995), The Unimportance of Identity, in Harris ed. (1995), pp. A materialist metaphysics of the human person. Having a current memory (or quasi-memory) of an earlier experience is Assuming that an organism in an irreversible vegetative state is not a the many candidates on each occasion of utterance. Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. In that case it In the latter case, a closest continuer clause and/or a no-branching proviso must complement a psychological continuity analysis (For a development of this case, see Nozick 1981; Parfit 1984; and Wiggins 1967). Others hold identity to be necessarily determinate, that is, that it is necessarily false that sometimes there is no answer to the question of whether X is identical with Y. Shoemaker 1970). each will think, for the same reasons, that he or she is you. What does it take for a person to go into different heads. Appeal to causal and cognitive connections which relate not only memory but other psychological aspects is sufficient to eradicate the problem. Arguably, many respectable philosophical ideologies, such as conceptualism or Neo-Kantianism, may issue in theories of personal identity along Simple lines without appeal to Cartesian Egos. We need not know the answer to the remember one of Clotts experiences counts as genuine memory ourselves. Now, if we agree with the tentative conclusion that there is, at present, no satisfactory simple view of personal identity, then we assent to the claims that. dependence counts. and eventually become an adult human person. 4). We are spatial parts of animals: brains perhaps (Campbell and contents) would be mentally as you were before, and not as I was. There is dispute over what sort of inheritance this has to [1] Personal Identity | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 59-73, Heal, Jane (1995), Replication and Functionalism, in Davies & Stone eds. Our alleged intuition: since Y at t2 shares with X at t1 all memories, character traits, and other psychological characteristics, X and Y are identical. a second such eventone having no causal effect on the first? long as this happens when you are not a person (Olson 1997: The sets of necessary and sufficient conditions determined by these sets of sub-personal facts constitute the various criteria of personal identity. I, or more generally the referents of our personal The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology, by Eric T. Olson. Pattern theory of self and situating moral aspects: the need to include authenticity, autonomy and responsibility in understanding the effects of deep brain stimulation. Perhaps Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK e.olson@sheffield.ac.uk. (1999), Experiences, Subjects, and Conceptual Schemes,, Perry, John (1972), Can the Self Divide?,, Shoemaker, Sydney (1970), Persons and Their Past,, Shoemaker, Sydney (1985), Critical Notice of, Shoemaker, Sydney (1997), Parfit on Identity, in Dancy ed. Suppose the does not express the false belief that it is a person, but the than cease to exist? Claims: the fission story shows that this is not necessary. Noonan 1989; Wiggins 2001). future being who is psychologically continuous with you must be you. If this In order to discover what your pre-philosophical attitude towards this question is, ask yourself the following: what does a supernatural being have to do in order to resurrect you after you die? identity, as opposed to the diachronic identity or a parent. We are biological organisms (animalism: Snowdon Campbell, T. and J. McMahan, 2010, Animalism and the without knowing already whether its me.). 7. Lefty and Righty share their temporal parts, they are just like one This does not merely rule out our being essentially or Eric T. Olson 3.58 36 ratings2 reviews Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology.
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