Identity

• Existentialism: The belief that humans have free will and can choose their own fate
• Sartre: existence preceeds essence, so there is no set path an individual has to follow, make own path.
• Existentialism states that there is no real meaning, purpose, or importance in the world (ie. the Absurd)

  • hence, no absolutes like order, fairness, justice, and rules. State of absolute freedom - which Sartre argues is more of a burned than anything
  • Could look to authorities/institutions for answers, but they're really just fake because they're like you - who do not have any answers and have to figure out for themselves how to live while being "cursed with freedom"
• Existentialism, in short, posits that if the world is going to have any of the things that we value, ie. justice and order, we're going to have to put it there ourselves, because otherwise those things wouldn't exist
• Identity: a prescribed value to something? The relation that a thing bears only to itself?

  • person ≠ human
• Indescernibility of identitcals: if any two things are identical, then they must share all the same properties. Through this, the Ship of Theseus is a new ship; if something about the object changes, it takes on a new identity
• fungibility: the property of being interchangeable with other objects of the same kind
• essential properties (core elements) and accidental properties (traits that can be taken away from object without object turning into a different thing)
• Body theory: personal identity presists over time because you remain in the same body form from birth to death
• Memory theory: identity persists over time because you retain memories of yourself at different points, and each of these memories is connected to the one before it (via chain of memory)

  • no one remembers everything; if Locke's memory theory is true, then no one becomes who they are until their first memory
• Locke: consciousness makes up a persons identity
• Hume: the idea of the self doesn't persist over time; there is no you that is the same person from life to death. "The concept of the self is just an illusion"

  • the self is just a bunch of impressions - body, mind, emotions, preferences, memories, labels, etc - imposed on us by others and ourselves
• through Hume's position, we're all just ever changing bundles of impressions that our minds are fooled into thinking of as a constant because our bodies basically look the same every day (ex. teleportation, cloning)
• psychological connectedness: every experience changes me, but parts of me survive. enough elements survive = relatively the same
• I think of Hume's theory sort of like a favorite book that you reread over and over; same book, same words, but different ideas and understandings of content every time
• consequences of no consistent ideantity is responsibilities. Degree of responsibility depends on what degree of connectedness with what incurred the responsibility