Personal Identity

wow fascinating subject

I think I agree with the objection...I am a different self to the one i was yesterday and will be a different self tomorrow...perhaps because as you say my conscious experience will be different. I can definitely say with no uncertainty that I am a different person, and my experience of self is completely different, to 10 years ago because the lessons I have learned from experience during that time have not only changed my views of the world and how I interact, but also how I essentially am. I would imagine this process of growth and change takes place gradually, slowly, with occasional spurts of self-realisation and personal development.

I have never held morals up against my personal identity before buts its an interesting exercise. I find myself sure that my own morals come from my own experiences, but i'm also aware there are morals I have that have been there for as long as I can remember and cannot say whether I was taught them, or they are just a natural opinion. Which raises an interesting question for me....are morals something that need to be taught or are they something we all have? Do we all have our own moral centre that is individual and hence connected to our personal identity? Perhaps this is the same as your question?

As I said, you can take this conversation in many directions. The primary issue I bring up is the trouble of personal identity and moral responsibility; if the notion of a consistent self is illusory, can we still have moral responsibility?

Of course, to answer this, we can bring up a great many other concerns. One particularly interesting issue is the one you bring up:



As far as I can tell, the answer is that morals are both taught and individual in that our experiences are individual. It seems clear that we are morally influenced by instruction, by our parents and family, religious affiliation, peers, ect. But I also think that the experiences unique to our perspective must at least potentially play a role; I recall the story of how the Buddha first encountered suffering. However unstable our memory may be, there is no reason to reject that memory does have influence over us.
As for the relation of our morals and personal identity, I do think our sense of self is very much comprised of our moral standards and reflexes. Of course, if these moral directions change over time, and they seem to, how can we blame someone, who now has a different moral response, for something he has done in the past?

The existence and continuity of the self, and its relationship to moral responsibility are profoundly interesting questions.

Descartes was first to raise this question. He did it as part of his programme to put all knowledge on a basis of absolute certainty by systematically doubting everything it is possible to doubt so that he could be certain at least of what remained. In the end, the only thing he found it impossible to doubt was his own existence, with his conclusion "I think therfore I am." So Descartes' position is that you must exist in order to ask the question. This does seem initially convincing but it has been objected that Descartes has concluded too much: when he thinks, all he is logically entitled to conclude is that there is thinking going on. To attribute it to a self is to assume what he started out to prove.

The same criticism was taken up by Hume. It is worth quoting his conclusion:
"When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold or light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist."

Anyone can repeat Hume's procedure. If you try to introspect you will find that you are always aware of some particular thought, feeling or image. It is impossible to be conscious of the actual observing self.

Hume therefore concluded that the self is not a single entity but a bundle of thoughts, feelings and perceptions. This conclusion is similar to the Buddhist position that the individual person is a combination of several distinct factors. Buddhist writing illustrates this by an analogy with a cart, which is composed of several constituent parts. The cart is simply the sum of its constituent parts.

It does not follow from this that the self or the cart are any kind of illusion. The parts of the cart do exist. The whole cart is simply these parts viewed in a certain way. The only mistake would be to assume that there is something else which is added (eg "spiritually") to the components of the cart or the self in order to make the whole.

Leaving Hume and Buddhism behind for my own thoughts, it seems to me that there is something else added to the components of the cart to enable us to regard it as a whole single thing rather than just its components. What is added is our background awareness of the function of the cart. Our knowledge of what the cart is for enables us to overlook its constituents and regard it as a single entity.

Applying this approach to the self, I should then ask: What is the function of the self? There is no single answer to that question but it appears to me that an important factor in the emergence of our sense of self is precisely our developing awareness of personal responsibility. Moral rules, at least at the foundation stage of our acquisition of a sense of morality, are attributed to us by others - initially by parents or comparable adults and later by the peer group. The continuing self can be regarded as the social assumption of continuing responsibility for our actions which we initially learn from others and then identify with. By this reasoning, the self is (to a large extent) moral responsibility which is attributed to us by others which we subsequently adopt.

Peter

peter,

:)Is not the self, life itself, which when after its birth aquires its sense of indentity from the context/s of its environment/s as it moves through these and the stages of it's own life. I think of identity as a certain amount of the outside world held in some kind of mental embrace, not unlike the boundries that define a given property. The boundries of both are imaginary, and so too are the contents.

:)Hume's idea of bundles works too, in neuroscience I doubt that any sense of the self will be found in one given area or even a couple, perhaps it will be found in part that the body contributes here. Interesting topic at any rate. In reality I think there is no identity to the self, which the following quote states, "The Self In One Is The Self In All." Upanishads There must be something a priori which assume the phyical world thus identity as its object, the mutualism/interdependance between subject and object kind of guarantees this does it not?

I hate to state the obvious, but there is a limit to ones being, and no limit to ones identity. It is possible every American felt injured and offended by the Pearl Harbor attack, or 911. If not so with that later attack it is because america has become less homogenous in being and feeling. Our selves are as large as those we identify with. If at first it is mother and families, it is still a sense, of identity, that can be draped around the whole of humanity, if given the right encouragement. So I say ethics and morals are based upon a feeling, and emotional connectedness with people, first with ones own, and then to ones society, nation, and humanity. Just as we cannot bear to see our own injured we can not bear to injure. It is because no healthy person injures himself, and identity causes us to feel the injury to others that we witness. So, even while no person can speak for any but himself, or give testimony to other than his own condition we can still feel as human beings for all of humanity without any violation of our sense of self.

Fido,

:)Excellent, yes the bases of all compassion is identification with, or an expanded concept of self. Just as identification is bases of all compassion, so too, compassion is the bases of all morality, the operant figure, the self. I believe there is a limitation to consciousness, which might be the reason man has established the concept of borders, but you are right in theory the physical world in its entirety is potentially the object of any subject and thus, if it is not his identity, it is his potential identity.

Too many people are beginning to understand what I am saying. There must be something wrong with me.

The self is a complex thing to decipher because I believe our identity is never fixed but it changes.

We become self when we form an alienating identification with the external objects thus making it possible to differentiate self from Other.

When that doesnt happen and we identify with the specular image outside our sense of self depends on the other, when anything happens to that image we identify with the result is psychosis. (Questioning our reality, it leaves a whole that we would not be able to put to words i.e symbolize)