Derek Parfit And The Non-Identity Problem

Derek Parfit, one of the most important defender of Hume, addresses the puzzle of the non-identity problem. Parfit claims that there is no self. This statement argues against the Ego Theory, which claims that beneath experience, a subject or self exists. Ego Theorists claims that the unity of a person’s whole life including life experiences is also known as the Cartesian view, which claims that each person is a “persisting purely mental thing.” Parfit uses the Split-Brain Case, which tells us something interesting about personal identity, to invalidate the Ego Theory. During the Split Brain procedure, there are neither ‘persons’ nor ‘persons’ before the brain was split. Within the experiment, the patient has control of their arms, and sees what is in half of their visual fields with only one of their hemispheres. However, when the right and left hemisphere disconnect, the patient is able to receive two different written questions targeted to the two halves of their visual field; thus, per hand, they write two different answers. In a split brain case, there are two streams of consciousness and Parfit claims that the number of persons involved is none. The scenario involves the disconnection of hemispheres in the brain. The patient is then placed in front of a screen where the left half of a screen is red and the right half is blue. When the color is shown to one hemisphere and the patient is asked, “How many colors do you see,” the patient, with both hands, will write only one color. But when colors are shown to both sides of the hemisphere, the patient with one hand writes red and the other writes blue.

There are two cases that Parfit proposes of the Split Brain Case that support the bundle theory and claims that our belief...

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...es. Therefore, the mind then mistakenly infers that this series of impressions is an individual persisting individual thing. Causation can also be explained by reusing the act of looking at a red shirt. When I look at a red shirt I know it is red based off of my earlier perceptions or impressions. I then experience the sensation of the color red, which relates to my ideas that I have of that color. And then when I look away, the memory of red still resides in my mind. In addition to causation, Hume’s also suggests propagation. Propagation is similar to regeneration where sensations occur and then memories of those sensations follow. Thus, due to causation and propagation, later stages of the mind are linked to the earlier. But since time is continuous and constantly changing, everything can change, but what stays constant is the concept of causation continuity.