1.2

• Discovering the nature of personal identity


  Finding out what it means to be a person
• Personal identity according to Locke

  • A thinking, intelligent being who has the abilities to reason and to reflect
  • Someone who considers itself to be the same thing in different times and different places
  • Consciousness—being aware that we are thinking—always accompanies thinking and is an essential part of the thinking process
  • Consciousness is what makes possible our belief that we are the same identity in different times and different places
• Locke makes the following points, implicitly asking the question of his readers, “Aren’t these conclusions confirmed by examining your own experiences?”
• For Locke


  The essence of the self is its conscious awareness of itself as a thinking, reasoning, reflecting identity
• Locke states that during lapses when we are not aware of our self, we can't be sure if we were the same person, substance, or soul
• Locke believes conscious awareness and memory of previous experiences are the keys to understanding the self
• John Locke: 'The Self is Consciousness'
• For Locke, personal identity and the soul or substance in which the personal identity is situated are two very different things
• Immanuel Kant: 'We Construct the Self'
• Empiricist


  View that sense experience is the primary source of all and that only a careful attention to sense experience can enable us to understand the world and achieve accurate conclusions
• A priori organizing rules

  • Precede the sensations of experience and exist independently of these sensations
  • They are already installed in our intellectual operating systems
• Immanuel Kant's view

  • All knowledge of the world begins with sensations
  • Our minds actively sort, organize, relate, and synthesize sense data into the familiar, orderly, meaningful world in which we live
• According to Kant, the self is responsible for synthesizing the discreet data of sense experience into a meaningful whole
• Organizing rules built into the architecture of our minds

  • Naturally order, categorize, organize, and synthesize sense data into the familiar fabric of our lives, bounded by space and time
• Unity of consciousness


  • The thoughts and perceptions of any given mind are bound together in a unity by being all contained in one consciousness—my consciousness
  • The self is the invisible “thread” that ties the contents of consciousness together
• Without our self to perform the synthesizing function, our experience would be unknowable, a chaotic collection of sensations without coherence or significance