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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that 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.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 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 for 2 of 2
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    • 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 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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