John Locke on personal identity

1. John Locke on personal identity The Memory Theory

2. Ideas and Empiricism • Locke says that the idea is populated with ideas or representations. • However, all comes from experience • Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word: experience. • However, there are no innate ideas. • Instead, we build up our experiences from simple ideas, then complex, etc.

3. Representational Realism • Locke, thus, is a representational realist. • In other words, we can always be wrong, but the world is really there. • The understanding is not so much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things from without; would the pictures coming into the dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, that this would resemble the understanding of a man in reference to objects of sight and the ideas of them. • Locke, thus, views the mind like a kind of closed theatre, with little getting in. • Do we have any knowledge at all?

4. Identity • Locke insists that the identity of objects concerns where they are, and their matter. • And, how those parts are organized. • The same is true for animals. • In an animal the fitness of the organization, and the motion wherein life consists, begin together, the motion coming from within. • But this means, Locke says, that animals identity is where they are, and how they are organized. • But this is not personal. • So they have no personal identity.

5. Man and person • Locke distinguishes question of being a man from that of being a person. • Just as with animals, being a man is where you are. • But then, if the soul makes us who we are, this could float between bodies. • Or, they might be reincarnated.

6. personhood • What about personhood? • Locke insists that this is consciousness, extended back. • Consciousness, he says, is surveys all. • Personhood is composed by the thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places • As Locke says, we survey our series of thoughts, over time. • And, by doing, this, we distinguish our own series from that of others. • So the self is our conscious series.

7. Substance? • But are we, as Descartes says, a thinking substance? • Descartes, of course, holds that we are the same thinking substance, over time. • But as Locke says, this does not follow. • In point of fact, he will show that our being the same substance is irrelevant.

8. Locke on Forgetting • Locke was more nuanced that many give him credit for. • Are the the same thinking substance? • …this consciousness is interrupted by forgetfulness, there being no moment when we have our whole train of thoughts before us. Even our best memories lose sight of one part of our lives while viewing the other. Or, being intent on the present, we do not reflect on our past selves, and so treat them • As Locke says, we forget much, misconstrue things, and cannot survey our thoughts • But this is a problem for his theory?

9. Substance and persons • As Locke says, none of this substance talk is relevant. • Even if our substance were to change, all that matters is how our consciousness functions. • What about forgetting? • As long as any intelligent being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present action, so far it is the same personal self. • Personhood, Locke says, is preserved as long as we can repeat experiences. • So he proposes a linking function here. • If someone can link past and present together in the same series, that is the same person.

10. Consciousness Transference • But as Locke says, his theory allows for some interesting possibilities. • What about personhood transfer? • It is plain that, consciousness, as far as ever it can be extended, should be to ages past, unites existences and actions very remote in time into the same person… so whatever has the consciousness sof past and present actions is the same person. • So as long as an identity of consciousness across time, there will be just one person. • Even this possibility has many variants.

11. Consciousness break • Yet, what about the case where consciousness breaks off? • Locke insists that, even if difficult, we must give up certain assumptions about identity. • Suppose I wholly lose the memory of some parts of my life, beyond a possibility of retrieving them, so that I will never be conscious of them again, am I not the same person who did those actions, had those thoughts? • Even if we feel as though we are this person, we are not. • Locke says that we may have the same bodies, but we are different persons.

12. The case of Leonard Shelby • Leonard Shelby retains the content of his memories • But he is unable to form new memories.

13. The Case of Phineas Gage • Retains his memories • Loses how he thinks of himself, and so his emotions change.

14. Drunkards and criminals • Locke admits that we do not always know whether someone is the same person. • After all people change. • In such cases, who should we punish? • Locke says that, in such cases, we cannot know who did what, yet should pretend that we do.

15. Forensic Personhood • Personhood, Locke says, just concerns our conscious series of thoughts, memories, etc. • Yet person is a forensic term. • In particular, it is cited for the purpose of • …appropriating actions to their merit, and so belongs to intelligent agents, capable of law, happiness, and misery. • As Locke says, persons are responsible. • If any actions is entirely unrelated to our consciousness, we are not responsible.

16. Thomas Reid and the Brave Officer • As Locke says, we are identical to an earlier person if and only if we can remember being that person. • An officer, let us say, was once young man. • Identity is suppose to be transitive. • The officer can remember getting medals, but cannot remember graduating from school. • Therefore, Locke seems to say that general is same same person as the young man, but is not. • Contradiction.

17. Brave Response • As Locke says, we do not remember every prior moment, nor is that required. • Just the immediately preceding one. • And for that one, you need remember only that prior one. • And so on… • But then, personal identity is not transitive, but it is still a kind of identity, even so.