This page is meant to summarize the notions, theories, and arguments discussed in the personal identity part of the class. To prepare for the final exam, be sure you know what each of the following mean, and what bearing they have on the issues we discussed in class.
Personal Identity
- qualitative identity/perfect duplicates (at a given moment)
- intrinsic vs extrinsic/relational properties (again)
- numerical identity/being one and the same thing, how this is compatible with changing one’s qualities
- essential vs “accidental” properties
- the difference between intrinsic properties, essential properties, and properties that are important/valuable
- Ship of Theseus
- conventionalism about personal identity
- brain transplant vs “information transplant”
- fission-type vs offshoot-type vs “optimal” teletransportation
- what is a person-stage? (comparison of stages in a person’s life to innings in a baseball game)
- “genuine memory presupposes identity”, the circularity objection to Proposal #4
- quasi-memory vs memory
- psychological continuity
- direct psychological connections vs chains of psychological connections
- fission, fusion
- what does it mean for a relation to be transitive?
- what does it mean for a relation to “allow branching”?
- the “psychological continuity + no competitors” view of personal identity (Proposal #6)
- “Identity should be an intrinsic matter, that is, intrinsic facts should settle how many people there are. It shouldn’t depend on extrinsic facts (what happens ‘outside the warehouse’)!”
- the “same body” or “bodily continuity” view of personal identity
- the “same soul” or “soul theory” of personal identity
- the “epistemic objections” to various proposals about personal identity
- different interpretations of the claim “what you don’t know can’t hurt you” (we discussed some interpretations that were obviously false, some that were obviously true, some where there could be reasonable dispute)
- to what extent does the choice of whether to be a dualist, or a materialist, commit one to any of the specific views of personal identity we discussed?