Accordingly, all that is needed for an individual to possess and maintain his personal identity are certain mental capacitates for having conscious experiences, the examples of thoughts and sensation are given, and the ability to perform intentional actions. It this portion of the theory, a departure from the traditional Aristotelian view of substances is made. The original viewpoint of Aristotelian forms can apply only to inanimate objects, which have no personal identity, in this dualist theory, if the arguments illustrating that two people can be the same person, even if the is no continuity between the physical matter of each body are correct. Consequently, for two substances to be considered the same, in this reformed view, they …show more content…
must have the same form and have continuity of the stuff, as Swinburne describes it, which they are made of. This stuff is not restricted to being only matter as well (Swinburne, 1984). Then, if a person is made of both matter and immaterial stuff, it is the latter that is important for continuity and the persistence of personal identity. Only the continuity of matter would represent the biological viewpoint. Further, because there is a logical possibility of continuity of personal identity, the dualist would state that it follows from this that a person is more than their physical and matter made parts, their body. And so, a person’s consciousness is to be analyzed as an immaterial part of him. However, this being a dualist theory, the body of a person cannot be considered an irrelevant part, or no part at all, of him. But still corresponding to the claims made earlier in this argument, the body is a part of a person; yet, it is only contingently and possibly temporally part of the person. The body is not an essential part of the individual’s identity, although it is associated with the self. The last portion of this argument to be reviewed is whether or not a person, their identity, can be considered to continue to exist if the individual does not put into action the necessary capacities, conscious existence, thought, sensation, etc. The conclusion drawn from the dualist perspective is that the person can be considered to continue to exist (Swinburne, 1984). The unconscious person is still considered to persist through time as the same person, explained by the psychological approach as well, and upon coming back to consciousness and exercising the necessary faculties, he still maintains the same identity. Moving now to the materialist account, and for the sake of time we will not review the objections and revisions posed to the memory theory and personal identity as psychological continuity from this perspective, the concept of functionalism is presented as an approach suitable for materialism to explain personal identity. This account presents that every state of mine is a functional state, meaning that it is a state that is definable by its relations, sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and other functional states. Also, a certain mental state is differentiated from other mental states and seen as a unique and particular mental state by its place in a causal network of states. In the brain, these functional roles in the networks of causal relations are executed by, if materialism is true, neurophysiological states, making this processed purely physical. Nonetheless, it is remarked that these states can be realized in a non-physical way as well, and therefore, a dualist may agree with the approach of functional characterizations without succumbing to materialism (Shoemaker, 1984). This approach deals with personal identity by claiming that “it is of the essence of a mental state to be caused in certain ways, and to produce, in conjunction with other mental states, certain effects” behavioral or others. However, it must be noted that the conjunction of these states must be of the same person in order to produce the effects that it does (Shoemaker, 1984). With this view questions of the nature of mental states and how different mental states are causally connected, so that they may belong to the same person, are very closely related. Furthermore, implications of this approach involve the synchronicity of the unity of minds. The example of a rainy day is given; when an individual holds the belief that it is raining and also the desire to keep himself dry, then these mental states will lead to the effect of him taking an umbrella outside. When the belief belongs to one individual and the desire to another, typically no joint effects will be produced directly. But in the case that an effect is produced, the functionalism approach would denote that the beliefs and desires were copersonal. Additionally, because the functional nature of mental states determines the conditions of their diachronic and synchronic unity, it can also be acknowledged that minds can compartmentalize. Shoemaker describes this as containing “subsystems of beliefs, desires, and values which are internally coherent but do not cohere well with one another” (Shoemaker, 1984). It is at this point that the relevant information has been brought together to be able to acknowledge the difficulties and possibilities for explaining multiple identities, or personalities, in one person, and how these identities can operate separately inside one body without being considered just part of the host, or different facets of one identity. The dualist theory and the materialist’s account of functionalism revealed the best arguments for understanding personal identity, and so these arguments can be revised to incorporate an understanding of one body possessing multiple identities.
Correspondingly, the functionalism approach to personal identity will be understood from the dualist perspective in our case. Though, as previously explained this view is acceptable as a materialist theory, I believe that not having a strictly physical understanding to this approach is more beneficial as even the biological explanation in the field of neuroscience does not fully explain the occurrence of dissociative identity …show more content…
disorder. As shown above, it is not logically necessary, or a necessity of natural laws, that it is essential for a person, referring to his identity and its continuity, to have a body.
If this is the case, then we can also bring to mind the idea that if having a body is not necessary for personal identity then perhaps multiple identities could produce effects from the same body, in a sense that is supported by functionalism. We will continue this train of though momentarily. It is also noted in the dualist point of view that in the absence of bodily and brain continuity, such as having no memory of an event the individual was a part of, personal identity is not held. This contributes to the explanation of multiple identities as it provides an argument as to why the different personalities can be considered distinct from the host and from each other. As reported, in many cases of dissociative identity disorder the host experiences lost time, when one of the alternates may be in control. Thus, without this continuity the host cannot be considered identical with the alternate and so they are two, or more, distinct
identities. Also important for the case of multiple identities effecting one body is the argument that all a person needs to be a person are mental capacities that allow him to have conscious experiences and to perform intentional actions. These mental capacities are considered to be the immaterial “stuff” that continuity is dependent on for the persistence of personality. Each alternate meets this criterion and accordingly can persist through time along with the host. Moreover, as reviewed above, a person can exist and persist if they do not exercise these mental capacities. So this carries over to the case of one body having multiple identities. While each is unconscious or dormant while another is controlling the host they are still assumed to be the same as they were when they resurface, just like an individual with only one identity recovering from being knocked out. Likewise, when integrating the functionalism account compartmentalization can be revisited as a potential explanation for the cause of dissociative identity disorder. As explained in the opening of this essay this disorder in many cases is cause by the occurrence of traumatic events to an individual. Compartmentalizing and dissociating from the event will cause the different identities to behave in the different ways in which they do. Such as one can create subsystems of beliefs that do not correspond to other subsystems but do have internal coherence, one can compartmentalize to such an extent that these subsystems can produce distinct identities. Shoemaker (1984) explains that if compartmentalization were enacted to this extent it would be impossible that the mental states from different compartments could jointly produce effects that the different compartments rationalized. Thus, dual or multiple identities can develop and can be seen through this explanation. Finally, integration is discussed as the opposite of compartmentalization, and also as a therapeutic option for treatment of dissociative identity disorder. This treatment encompasses attempts to merge the personalities back into one by integrating their differences and allowing the host to maintain functionality most often (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). This is the philosophical explanation given by Shoemaker (1984) as well, “a mind is integrated to the extent that the different mental states in it form a consistent set of beliefs and a coherent set of values, and… that what the person does can be seen as rational in the light of all of his beliefs and values.” In conclusion, though dissociative identity disorder still remains a highly scrutinized psychological abnormality, its existence can be argued for on purely philosophical grounds by modifying theories arguing for the existence and persistence of singular personal identity that are held and accepted by many already.
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.
This paper aims to endorse physicalism over dualism by means of Smart’s concept of identity theory. Smart’s article Sensations and the Brain provides a strong argument for identity theory and accounts for many of it primary objections. Here I plan to first discuss the main arguments for physicalism over dualism, then more specific arguments for identity theory, and finish with further criticisms of identity theory.
Personal identity, in the context of philosophy, does not attempt to address clichéd, qualitative questions of what makes us us. Instead, personal identity refers to numerical identity or sameness over time. For example, identical twins appear to be exactly alike, but their qualitative likeness in appearance does not make them the same person; each twin, instead, has one and only one identity – a numerical identity. As such, philosophers studying personal identity focus on questions of what has to persist for an individual to keep his or her numerical identity over time and of what the pronoun “I” refers to when an individual uses it. Over the years, theories of personal identity have been established to answer these very questions, but the
Fodor begins his article on the mind-body problem with a review of the current theories of dualism and materialism. According to dualism, the mind and body are two separate entities with the body being physical and the mind being nonphysical. If this is the case, though, then there can be no interaction between the two. The mind could not influence anything physical without violating the laws of physics. The materialist theory, on the other hand, states that the mind is not distinct from the physical. In fact, supporters of the materialist theory believe that behavior does not have mental causes. When the materialist theory is split into logical behaviorism and the central-state identity theory, the foundation of functionalism begins to form. Logical behaviorism states that every mental feeling has the same meaning as an if-then statement. For example, instead of saying "Dr. Lux is hungry," one would say "If there was a quart of macadamia brittle nut in the freezer, Dr. Lux would eat it." The central-state identity theory states that a certain mental state equals a certain neurophysiological state. The theory works in a way similar to Berkeley’s representation of objects. Both mental states and objects are a certain collection of perceptions that together identify the particular state or object.
This paper will discuss the dualism’s Divisibility Argument. This argument relies on Leibniz’s Law and uses a different property to prove the distinctness of brain states of mental states. Mary, who is a materialist, presents several objections to that argument. Her main objection corresponds to the first/third-person approach. She believes that Dave presents that argument only from the first-person approach, which is introspection, and totally disregards the third-person approach, which is observation of another mind. Mary’s objections will follow by the Dave’s response on them from the dualist’s point of view.
In the book Sybil, written by Flora Rheta Schreiber discuss the life story of Sybil Isabel Dorsett, who has developed 16 distinct personalities because of her childhood abuse. Sybil story became one of the most severe cases ever recorded with multiple personalities. Which is currently called Dissociative Identity Disorder in the current DSM-V. “Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is a severe condition in which two or more distinct identities, or personality states, are present in—and alternately take control of—an individual. The person also experiences memory loss that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness” (Psychology Today, 2008, para 1). Sybil’s distinct sense of selves helped protect her from the trauma she experienced as a child.
Identity, an ambiguous idea, plays an important part in today’s world. To me identity can be defined as who a person is or what differentiates one person from another. Identity would be a person’s name, age, height, ethnicity, personality, and more. A quote by Anne Sexton states “It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was”(Anne Sexton). This quote helps me define identity because I believe it is saying that identity is what people are remembered by. When some people think of identity, words such as, uniqueness, distinctiveness, or individuality may come to mind. However, I disagree with this because when I think of identity I think of mimicry, self-consciousness, or opinions.
What is personal identity? This question has been asked and debated by philosophers for centuries. The problem of personal identity is determining what conditions and qualities are necessary and sufficient for a person to exist as the same being at one time as another. Some think personal identity is physical, taking a materialistic perspective believing that bodily continuity or physicality is what makes a person a person with the view that even mental things are caused by some kind of physical occurrence. Others take a more idealist approach with the belief that mental continuity is the sole factor in establishing personal identity holding that physical things are just reflections of the mind. One more perspective on personal identity and the one I will attempt to explain and defend in this paper is that personal identity requires both physical and psychological continuity; my argument is as follows:
Every since Plato introduced the idea of dualism thousands of years ago meta-physicians have been faced with the mind-body problem. Even so Plato idea of dualism did not become a major issue of debate in the philosophical world until the seventeenth century when French philosopher Rene Descartes publicized his ideas concerning the mental and physical world. During this paper, I will analyze the issue of individuation and identity in Descartes’ philosophical view of the mind-body dualism. I will first start by explaining the structure of Cartesian dualism. I will also analyze the challenges of individuation and identity as they interact with Descartes. With a bit of luck, subsequently breaking down Descartes’ reasoning and later on offering my response, I can present wit a high degree of confidence that the problems of individuation and identity offer a hindrance to the Cartesians’ principle of mind-body dualism. I give a critical analysis of these two problems, I will first explain the basis of Descartes’ philosophical views.
...of the body, and no problem arises of how soul and body can be united into a substantial whole: ‘there is no need to investigate whether the soul and the body are one, any more than the wax and the shape, or in general the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter; for while “one” and “being” are said in many ways, the primary [sense] is actuality’ (De anima 2.1, 12B6–9).Many twentieth-century philosophers have been looking for just such a via media between materialism and dualism, at least for the case of the human mind; and much scholarly attention has gone into asking whether Aristotle’s view can be aligned with one of the modern alternatives, or whether it offers something preferable to any of the modern alternatives, or whether it is so bound up with a falsified Aristotelian science that it must regretfully be dismissed as no longer a live option.
My topic of choice for this research paper is Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID. This appellation is rather new; therefore, most are more familiar with the disorder's older, less technical name: Multiple Personality Disorder or MPD. When first presented with the task of selecting a topic on which to center this paper, I immediately dismissed Dissociative Identity Disorder (which for the sake of brevity will be referred to as DID for the remainder of this paper) as a viable topic due to the sheer scope of the disorder. However after an exhaustive examination of other prospective topics, I found myself back at my original choice. There are several reasons why I chose DID. The foremost of which is the widespread fascination of this disorder by many different types of people; most of whom otherwise have no interest in psychology or its associated fields. One would be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t been captivated at one time or another by the extraordinary, all too well known symptoms of this disorder. This fascination… dare I say ‘allure’ to this disorder is exemplified by the myriad of motion pictures that have been produced based on cases, real or fictitious, of DID. Another reason for my choice is what I feel is the insufficiency of effective treatments for DID. Despite what is known about this disorder, (which is relatively a lot) there are only two chief treatments for DID; the first and most prevalent is psychotherapy; also known as ”talk therapy”, the second is medication. The third and final reason for my choice is my own enchantment with DID. I must admit that ever since I read about Sue Tinker, a woman who was diagnosed with over 200 different personalities. In writing this paper I hope to discover more about this disorder and perhaps be able to identify a few areas that I feel might require more research on the part of psychologists specializing in DID.
The problem of personal identity is difficult to solve, especially since there is ambiguity in the terms. Identity may mean the same person or how one sees oneself. Anyhow, philosophers wish to assess this issue and find a suitable explanation, one motivation being responsibility. Humans will hold others responsible for acts such as murder, theft, and fraud. However, the person who will face the consequences must be the one who truly committed the wrongful act. A second motivation is interest in the future. An individual may become concerned or excited for an event that will occur in the future. Surely, these emotions entail that they will be the same person once that event occurs. The last motivation for resolving personal identity is immortality; basically, what will connect a person to whatever lives on after their physical death. Something can be identical in two ways: quantitatively or qualitatively. To be quantitatively identical is to be numerically identical, and to be qualitatively identical is to share exact qualities. There are two criterions on which personal identity is based, but the most important is the metaphysical criterion, which attempts to explain “being” or existence, without the necessity of physical evidence ...
The quest to find one’s identity and have a sense of individuality is rampant in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The humanistic urge to have purpose is embodied in the characters of Kathy, Tommy and Ruth very differently. They each know that their life’s purpose is to donate until “completion,” yet on the way there they explore themselves and find out there is more to each of them than their vital organs, even if that is how society has labeled them.
The argument of Personal Identity goes at the two most common views that are perceived to be the foreground for majority of early conversations of personal identity. The first view is the view that all everything that’s ever been asked about personal identity must have an absolute conclusion. It is known fact by all that at some point in the future we will either exist here on planet earth, or not exist at all. Questions concerning personal identity are definitely yes or no. The 2nd view is that there are things concerning personal identity that are of importance to us, these issues pertain to those of “survival, memory, and responsibility” as Parfit briefly describes. This doesn’t suffice though, until the problem of personal identity is answered. In order to decide whether or not I continue on after death or if I am accountable for a future act, it has to be possible for me to answer whether or not I am the same person or not. Parfit argues in his reading that these views are incorrect. He conducts, sort of, a sequence of clever thinking tests, specifically regarding “fission and fusion”, the goal of which was to state the fact that survival is neither “one-one or all-or-nothing”, and that consequently survival isn’t essentially related to the entire identity aspect of it all. Say Parfit is actually correct, then the main ideas we've developed regarding our common sense interpretation of personal identity would be false and we’d need a different way of thinking of the topic. To convince people that identity doesn’t matter, Parfit depends on Wiggins’ case of “fission”. Parfit also asks the reader to picture a scenario where a normal man’s brain is cut into halves ...
Dissociative Identity Disorder (commonly know as Multiple Personality Disorder) is one of the most unexplored disorders and most debated psychiatric disorder. Through this essay you will become more knowledgeable about what the disorder really is; what qualifies you as having this disorder, what are the prognosis to DID, and what are risks for having this disorder? You will also learn about the treatment for Dissociative Identity Disorder; what kind of therapy do they need or the medicine they should have to help control the disorder. At the end of this paper you will then learn about current research and what the future holds for Dissociative Identity Disorder.