Personal Identity and Survival in Philosophy

Criteria for Identity over Time

• Multiple aspects of a person, including physical body, immaterial soul, and psychological perception, are considered when determining identity.
• Materialists believe that life is composed only of physical, tangible reality, while dualists believe in a conscious awareness that is not identical to the physical body.

What Counts as Survival

• To survive, a person must be identical, not just similar, to their previous self.
• Numerical identity requires the exact same thing, not just similar objects with the same properties.
• The question of what constitutes survival is still debated, with possibilities including physical, mental, or other aspects of a person.

Dualist Perspective

• A person's centre of conscious awareness is thought to be an immaterial soul, separate from the physical body.
• This soul is believed to hold mental states, including thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and is responsible for a person's rich mental life and episodes of reasoning.
• However, it is difficult to reduce this to a physical observation in the brain.

The Problem of Souls

• A person is considered a conscious being, which is hard to reconcile with a purely physical body.
• A person is not identical to their physical body or immaterial soul, and their experiences of identity are subjective.
• The question of whether a person has the same soul over time is unknown, as souls are not physically observable.

Correlations between Bodies and Souls

• There is a correlation between a human body and a particular soul, but this correlation is not observable.
• Similar psychological states may be evidence of the same person, but not necessarily of the same soul.
• Psychology suggests that similar psychological states are correlated with the same soul, but this is not definitive.

The River Analogy

• People are constantly changing, making it difficult to define their identity.
• The river analogy suggests that similar psychological states may indicate the same person, but not necessarily the same soul.
• This raises the question of whether a person's identity is defined by their underlying substrate soul or by their multiple components.

The Unknowability of Souls

• Weirob's Moral suggests that souls are completely unobservable and unknowable.
• Direct knowledge of one's own soul is not evident, and we may not be aware of our own souls, which are separate from our body.
• The concept of a "river of souls" or "fluctuation of soul" raises questions about the nature of identity and the self.