Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Locke on Personal Identity

What is personal identity?  Generally speaking, personal identity is what makes a person the same person throughout his or her life.

Locke provides a psychological criterion for personal identity.  Specifically, he thinks that your personal identity is constituted by your awareness of memories.  Your personal identity extends as far back as your memories go back.  Insofar as you are aware of a memory in your past, it is part of your identity.

So, If Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Governor of CA, remembers being in The Terminator, winning the Mr. Universe competition and growing up as a young boy in Thal, Graz, Austria, then he is the same person.  If, however, he does not remember being a young boy in Thal who slept in a tiny bed and used a pit toilet, then those experiences are no longer part of his personal identity.

Indeed, if we take awareness of memories to be constitutive of personal identity, then anything we forget is no longer part of our personal identity.

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