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Nature Of Personal Identity

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• Personal identity is the nature, characteristics, behaviour, emotions of a person. I strongly believe that personal identity is unique nature of a person which do not change through his lifetime. Physical features of person which can change in due time like bodily growth, hair style, body size etc but the mental thought process such as ideology, personality traits, behavioural aspects like courage, guts, self-esteem, beliefs, conviction, nature and emotional, intellectual and spiritual characteristics. There is a standard assumption in society about personal identity is our physical body even though there will change in our physical features from time to time like body size, hair style etc. Philosophers Plato and Descartes said that personal …show more content…

When you eventually regain consciousness, you feel that your bodies are exchanged rather than your brains are swapped, now would you still be you? Yes, this concludes that wherever your brain goes your personal identity follows. Will you be still you according to your family members? No, they won’t accept you because your physical features are changed. Now let us consider a hypothetical situation where the doctor without any physical transplantation swapped your brains data, which consists your personality, memories, experiences, now would you be still you? Yes. [2] There is an argument among philosophers that a person at a time A is same as at time B because their personal identity is same as they are spatiotemporally continuous (continuous in space and time) and others argue that it is because of psychologically continuous. (mental states of person at time B are derived from mental states at time A). [6] Lets us consider one more situation that if you donate your half of the brain to other brain less person, after regaining consciousness both of you are psychologically continuous with same mental behaviour and experiences but representing different physical bodies. Does both of you has the same personal …show more content…

Yes, it satisfies but will the society accept that personal identity remains the same? Absolutely no. Therefore, there is something which is seems more closely to personal identity, perhaps it may be our brain or soul. If it is brain, then which part of brain is responsible for the personal identity, let us consider a situation where a small injury has happened to brain which part stores the information of language or something like solving maths, because of this he lost the memory of talking Hindi or solving maths, will he be still he? Yes sure. Let us consider about the non-technical capabilities such as remembering about your college days, friends, family relatives etc will you be still you if you lost all the information in the brain? Yes, because whatever is remaining, that is your character, way of responding to situations remains same, you can say in some fundamental way that your personal identity remains same. So, in the survival of memory I could forget everything and that could still be me. “This proves us that personal identity is not the bodily survival, it is something that, if I put in others body or in a jar it could be still me.”

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It wouldn’t be correct to say that if Mary’s body had the original brain the she is Julia, but if Mary’s body had the duplicate then it’s not Julia. The problem is the body wouldn’t be able to tell which brain it had so picking one brain over the other would be wrong so in the end Mary is the one that survives and not Julia. Miller counters back on Weirob saying that personal identity allows one to know who they really are without having to look at their own bodies. Thus placing Julia’s brain inside Mary’s body it can tell it is Julia not by looking at her body because her body says otherwise but by the fact that it remembers being Julia, and has all of Julia’s memories, beliefs and ideas. Miller continues on with the fact that memories and personal psychological traits that a person has is what makes one unique not their body.

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The previously mentioned transformed part humans called abhumans by Hurley (cf. 190), and the Double can also fall into this category. The Double holds up a mirror to oneself and exposes the degenerative tendencies already present in oneself. At the same time, the double illustrates the unsettling thought that identity is multifaceted and fluid. The integrity and stability of the human subject is challenged. (cf. Byron138, cf.

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Someone 's identity defines who they are. There are no two identities that are the same. , Everyone is unique in different ways. Finding oneself may take time and might not be exactly what you are expecting. In the novel “Milkweed” by Jerry Spinelli, the protagonist Jack assumes many identities but ultimately does not know who he is.

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Every type of person struggles with a thing we call, identity. Personal identity come from multiple factors from our race to our own personal beliefs. Some people say we have the choice to choose our own identity, but is that always true? No, in fact other people can affect how we look and essentially identity our self’s. In the article called.

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Part of who we are is our memories of people, places and experiences. But when we lose our most important memories do we lose who we are? " But The Program steals our memories. They reset our emotions so that we're brand-new, never having been hurt or heartbroken. But who are we without our pasts?"

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Whether it be in the workplace or walking down the street there is always going to be more pressure and judgment being focused on women than men. Why is this? Gender plays a big role on the reflection of our identities to society. We have been brought to believe that there are certain ways men and women should and should not act, dress and talk. These social norms do not just apply to what is acceptable in regards to public safety but rather, it is used as a way to control and evaluate behavior.

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Where does our personal identity come from? Each individual has its own characteristic, which shapes person identity. The characteristic of person creates its own unique identity. Identity is base on person past, present and future. There are many articles, which talk about identity, and many researchers have their own unique thoughts.

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The argument of whether or not a human has a soul has been argued throughout centuries. Derek Parfit discusses two separate theories of personal identity, Ego Theory and Bundle Theory. The argument of which present a more accurate account of personhood is very hard to determine. The Ego Theory has some flaws such the soul is separate from the body and is a immaterialist object within us. Bundle Theory is reinforced and proven by the split-brain case, however it can lead to the argument that there is no self.

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Derek Parfit is a British philosopher who specialises in problems of personal identity and he proposes that we separate the notions of identity and survival. He is one of the most prominent philosophers in the struggle to define the self. Parfit’s 1971 essay “Personal Identity” targets two common beliefs which are central to the earliest conversations about personal identity. The first belief is about the nature of personal identity; all questions regarding this must have an answer. Between now and any future time, it is either the case that “I shall exist or I shall not”.

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Identity is a distinctive identifier of who we are as individuals. People must learn how to construct their own identities through the actions and choices they make. Sometimes when people are influenced by society or the world around them, their own sense of identity can become unfavorably distorted. As such, it is important for people to stay loyal to themselves in order to cultivate and maintain that strong sense of identity.

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Identity is something people tend to think of as consistent, however that is far from the case. The Oxford English dictionary states that the definition of identity is “ The characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is.” The allegorical novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding tackles the issue of identity while following young boys from the ages twelve and down as they struggle with remembering their identities when trapped on a deserted island. Identity is affected by the influence of society and how individuals influence society based on their identities. By looking at Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and Sigmund Freud 's philosophical ideas, it becomes clear that identity is affected by society through peer pressure and social normalities.

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He provides criteria of personal identity through time that consist of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the survival of persons. He considered personal identity to be based on consciousness (memory and experience) and not on the physical matter of the body. He argued that many people hastily identify the physical brain with consciousness. The body and the brain are physical objects; therefore, it is subject to change whilst consciousness consistently remains the same. Consequently, personal identity is not located in the brain, but in consciousness.

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Identity is who someone is as a person. People have different views of what identity is and what can be done to find it. Identity can be your actions and thoughts. It’s what makes someone unique and different from anyone else. The Bible has its own view of identity as well.

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Identity is social construct that many have mistaken for something an individual is born with. There are many aspects of identity that one can inherit like genes that can drive a certain type of character and certain aspects of identity a person can adopt and build for themselves. However the most part of one’s identity is consistent of what the person wants and adopts for themselves and what the society/the people around him/her choose to give him/her. Identity is a said to not remain unchanged once established.

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There are other movements, beside physical body movement, allowed by our brain of which individuals are not conscious, or at least not fully conscious; namely, the action of remembering and forgetting. According to Pierre Nora memory “remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting” (8) process which he claims to be “unconscious”. It is given to this dialectic, as Jan Assmann mentions in his essay Collective Memory and Cultural Identity that ““the survival of the type” in the sense of a cultural pseudo-species is a function of the cultural memory…” (126), which means: first, that the identity of a place is not inherited through genes; and second, that it depends on individuals’ conscious effort to maintain it. Individual memory or communicative memory as Assmann calls it “does not extent more than eighty to (at the very most) hundred years…”

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