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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
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    Topics
    42
    Personal identity over time consists in psychological con... — Carmelics
    Home/Personal Identity
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Personal identity over time consists in psychological continuity — being that future or past being from whom one inherits, or to whom one bequeaths, mental features such as beliefs, memories, preferences, and rational capacities.

    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.A future being is the same person as a present person if that future being inherits its mental features (beliefs, memories, preferences, rational capacities) from the present person.
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    • 2.A past being is the same person as a present person if the present person has inherited its mental features from that past being.
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    • 3.This inheritance relation is what constitutes personal persistence over time.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Memory and psychological continuity can be preserved through fission, producing two equally valid successors, yet identity is not a one-to-many relation.
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    • 2.If psychological continuity were sufficient for personal identity, both post-fission branches would be identical to the original, making them identical to each other — a contradiction.
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    • 3.Therefore psychological continuity is at best necessary but not sufficient for personal identity, undermining the constitutive claim.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Locke's own memory criterion entails that a person who cannot remember committing a past act is not the same person who committed it, violating the transitivity of identity.
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    • 2.Reid's brave officer paradox demonstrates this: if the general cannot remember the flogged boy, yet the officer did remember him, identity becomes non-transitive under the psychological account.
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    • 3.A relation that fails transitivity cannot constitute numerical identity, which is by definition transitive, so psychological continuity must be tracking something other than strict identity.
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    Topics

    Personal Identity

    Key Terms

    Mental features(examples include beliefs, memories, preferences, and rational capacities)
    The parts of your mind that make you who you are, such as what you remember, what you believe, what you care about, and how you think and reason.
    Rational capacities(one of the mental features that connects you to your past and future self)
    Your ability to think logically, reason through problems, understand arguments, and make decisions based on evidence and logic.
    personal identity(Philosophy of personal identity)
    The relation of sameness holding between a person existing at one time and something existing at another time, analyzed here in terms of psychological continuity
    psychological continuity(Philosophy of personal identity)
    A relation holding between a person at one time and a being at a later time when the later being inherits the memories, intentions, beliefs, and psychological states of the earlier person.

    Related

    A future being is the same person as a present person if that future being inher...A past being is the same person as a present person if the present person has in...A relation that fails transitivity cannot constitute numerical identity, which i...If psychological continuity were sufficient for personal identity, both post-fis...
    +5 moreShow less
    Locke's own memory criterion entails that a person who cannot remember committin...Memory and psychological continuity can be preserved through fission, producing ...

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: identity-personal
    View source passageHide passage
    Four main sorts of answers to the persistence question have been proposed. The most popular are psychological-continuity views. They say that our persistence consists in some psychological relation. You are that future being that in some sense inherits its mental features from you—beliefs, memories, preferences, the capacity for rational thought, and so on—and you are that past being whose mental features you have inherited in this way. There is dispute over what sort of inheritance this has to
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Reid's brave officer paradox demonstrates this: if the general cannot remember t...
    Therefore psychological continuity is at best necessary but not sufficient for p...
    This inheritance relation is what constitutes personal persistence over time.

    Similar

    Personal identity over time is constituted by psychological continuity...94%Under Parfit's Moderate Claim, psychological continuity matters as muc...89%If psychological continuity is the basis of personal identity (Parfit'...86%The psychological-continuity view implies that any future being psycho...85%
    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit