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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The memory criterion implies that a person has never existed at any time when they were unconscious, which is absurd.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.The memory criterion holds that personal identity requires the ability to remember or quasi-remember past experiences, or to be linked to them by an overlapping chain of memories.
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    • 2.There are many times in a person's past — such as periods of dreamless sleep — that the person cannot remember or quasi-remember at all.
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    • 3.Dreamless sleep produces no memories that can form links in an overlapping chain connecting the sleeper to their waking self.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Locke's original memory criterion applies to moral personhood and accountability, not to the metaphysical continuity of biological organisms across all temporal gaps.
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    • 2.Unconscious states like dreamless sleep fall under the continuity of the living organism, not the psychological chain Locke meant to track when assigning praise, blame, and desert.
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    • 3.Conflating the criterion's intended domain (moral identity) with a broader metaphysical claim produces a reductio that Locke's framework was never designed to absorb.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Parfit's closest-continuer refinement of the memory criterion explicitly requires only that psychological continuity hold across intervals where consciousness is present, not across every moment.
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    • 2.Dreamless sleep is a recognized discontinuity of the same type as deep anesthesia, and both are bracketed by Parfit as cases where the criterion applies diachronically across waking episodes, not synchronically through each instant.
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    • 3.A criterion that tracks overlapping chains of waking psychological connections survives the unconsciousness objection because it never claimed identity requires memory of every sub-interval of a life.
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