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.

Explore the philosophical concepts of personal identity and survival over time. Delve into discussions on materialism, dualism, and what defines survival in terms of human existence.