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    The memory criterion for personal identity is circular an... — Carmelics
    Home/Personal Identity
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    The memory criterion for personal identity is circular and therefore uninformative as a sufficient condition for persistence.

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

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Reid's 'brave officer' paradox demonstrates that memory-based identity generates transitivity failures: the general remembers the flogging but not the boyhood theft the officer remembered.
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    • 2.A criterion that yields contradictions via Leibniz's Law—where A=B and B=C but A≠C—is not merely circular but logically incoherent as a sufficient condition.
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    • 3.Locke's own account cannot resolve these transitivity failures without importing a non-psychological substance to anchor identity, undermining the criterion's autonomy.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Shoemaker's causal theory attempts to escape circularity by requiring that memory traces be caused 'in the right way' by the original experience, but 'the right way' covertly reintroduces personal identity as the causal relatum.
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    • 2.Any causal-memory criterion must distinguish genuine memory from quasi-memory (Parfit's notion) by appeal to same-person causation, making the criterion ineliminably self-referential.
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    • 3.A sufficient condition that smuggles the analysandum into its analysans via causal constraints fails the non-circularity requirement that Nozick and Shoemaker themselves endorse as necessary for reductive accounts.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.To genuinely remember an experience is to remember one's own experience — memory is factive and first-personal.
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    • 2.Determining whether Blott's apparent memory of Clott's experience counts as genuine memory requires already knowing whether Blott is Clott.
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    • 3.A criterion for personal identity cannot presuppose the answer to the very question it is meant to settle.
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    Topics

    Personal Identity

    Related

    A criterion for personal identity cannot presuppose the answer to the very quest...A criterion that yields contradictions via Leibniz's Law—where A=B and B=C but A...A sufficient condition that smuggles the analysandum into its analysans via caus...Any causal-memory criterion must distinguish genuine memory from quasi-memory (P...
    +5 moreShow less
    Determining whether Blott's apparent memory of Clott's experience counts as genu...Locke's own account cannot resolve these transitivity failures without importing...Reid's 'brave officer' paradox demonstrates that memory-based identity generates...Shoemaker's causal theory attempts to escape circularity by requiring that memor...To genuinely remember an experience is to remember one's own experience — memory...

    Similar

    The memory criterion holds that personal identity requires the ability...87%The psychological continuity criterion avoids the most obvious objecti...85%Episodic memory is logically sufficient for personal identity across t...83%The conceptual and evidential ties between memory and personal identit...83%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: identity-personal
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    Second, it seems to belong to the very idea of remembering that you can remember only your own experiences. To remember paying a fine (or the experience of it) is to remember yourself paying. That makes it trivial and uninformative to say that you are the person whose experiences you can remember—that memory continuity is sufficient for us to persist. It’s uninformative because you cannot know whether someone genuinely remembers a past experience without already knowing whether she is the one wh
    Extraction notes

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

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit