Self-Identity Problem The problem of self-identity is setting the terms for what principles govern the certainty that we can know a person is the same over time. We know nothing on an atomic level remains the same more than an instant. We also know that while changes in people can be slow, people are constantly changes on two different levels. On the first level people are changing psychologically. People learn things, they forget things and they abandon some beliefs to adopt others. Physical people are also always changed. I have heard it said that in something like seven years while you may still have the same name, none of the matter that composes your body would be the same. This is not just a problem for philosophers, as personal identity affects things like legal blame and car payments.
Interestingly enough, some philosophical worldviews do not run into this problem at all. Buddhism, for example, is not a worldview in which these problems of self-identity crop up. The reason being is they begin their worldview with the premise that there is no self; there is only the delusion of self. Buddhism has the five Scandhas, which are perception, mental structures, consciousness, emotions and psychological states that combine to give a person the false perception of the self-existing.
But a Buddhist in a Buddhist society must also have laws that punish people. So while religiously this principle that there is no self might work, civically it cannot work. If someone murders someone they cannot simply say that they did not do it because they do not exist since there is no self.
One way of seeing personal identity as consistent over time is the Spatiotemporal Continuity Theory says that spatiotemporal continuity is the essence of personal identity, not just a good practical guide. While this may be a good guideline for physical objects, there are serious limitations to it when it is applied to an individual person.
The philosopher John Locke believed that personal identity was other than spatiotemporal Continuity. He believed that psychological continuity, not physical form was water mattered for personal identity. Locke thought that personal identity followed a different kind of continuity than objects. His psychological continuity theory states that “a past person is numerically identical to the future person, if any, who has that past person’s memories, character traits, and so on—whether or not the future and past persons are spatiotemporal” (Sider, 16).
But even this is subject to a further problem, the duplication problem, in which psychological continuity is duplicated in two bodies. Or many more bodies, there is no limit to imagining how many psychologies could be multiplied.
Of course there are always changing happening to the body at different times and to different degrees. Across time the change will be greater. Some dramatic events such as amputation can lead to more abrupt changes than the passage of time.
Perhaps it is best to explain the answer by exploring the dynamics of the “Lexus Problem.” While each of these theories may have arguments against them, they both work well together to solve the “Lexus Problem.” In the Lexus problem a man, Smith, buys a car and then the next month he walks into the dealership and refuses to pay for it because he says he is not that person. The mistake in logic that Smith is making is that he is associating a change in qualities with a change in essence. There are both theories of identity at play. If a person were to have video taped Smith from the moment he bought, he would find that there is a spatiotemporal continuity between the Smith who bought the Lexus and the Smith who refuses to pay for the Lexus. There is also a psychological continuity, meaning that the psychological state of Smith at the time of purchasing the car, led to the current psychological state of Smith.
Smith is right to identify differences, but these are not essential changes. Numerically, Smith is still identical with the person who bought the car. Quantitatively, he is still having more or less the same material that he was a month ago. Psychological, he is continuous enough to have walked in and remembered that he has the memories of the person who bought the car. These memories prove psychological changes.
Perhaps the problems of self-identity stem from our worldview. People want to pinpoint what exactly a person is, and when they have ceased to be. Just as people avoid thinking about death, they perhaps tend to want to think that who they are in a given day will be who they will be in the next day. But the nature of the universe is change. Everything is in a flux, yet some objects and persons retain their identity by retaining enough of the underlying constants that are associated with the person and gives the person it’s identity. For a body it is spatiotemporal continuity that is important to retain identity over time. But for a person, it is psychological continuity that is most important.
Work Cited for Quotation:
Sider, Theodore http://tedsider.org/books/chapters_1_5.pdf
