Personal Identity Essay

The philosophical problem of personal identity pertains to questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being persons. There is no single question that will sum up the problem, but rather a multitude of questions that are loosely connected to each other. Within this essay, the four most prominent problems will be explained and addressed. One of the most familiar is the question of “Who am I?” This regards to what makes one a unique individual. Another familiar question is, “What is it to be a person?” This concerns the necessary criteria for something to count as a person as opposed to a non-person. There is also the problem of persistence, relating to personal identity over time. An example of this would be to glance upon an old photograph of a childhood class, point and say, “That's me.” The questions arises of, “What makes you that one instead of one of the others?” The last problem to be explained is the one of evidence. How do we find out who is who? There are two separate sources of evidence used often in philosophy: first-person memory, pertaining to one remembering an action or event and therefore being the person who did such, and physical continuity, where if the one who performed the action or witnessed the event looks like you, then it is you.
John Locke believed that the mind was a blank slate, shaped by experience, and the two sources of all our ideas were sensations and reflections. Within his theory of identity, Locke separated the idea of a substance, an organism, and a person; each determined by different criteria. The identity of a substance consists in its matter. For example: a mass of atoms is the same throughout time so long as it retains the same atoms, regardless of arrangement. He does not tie t...

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...corporating fiction into the concept of who they are. To resolve the issue of false memories occurring, there must be an alternate verification used to determine the validity of the chain of memory. Due to the need for an alternate form of verification, it is apparent that memory alone is not sufficient enough to determine personal identity. An example of this is a person who was born in 1964 who claims to remember sitting in the car behind John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated. Considering the assassination occurred in 1963, the person is either lying or experiencing a false memory.
While Locke's theory of personal identity fails in many ways, it is still significant in the fact that it was the first to separate the specific issue of personal identity from the larger topic of identity in general, as well as being the theory in which further theories built upon.