A New Look At Personal Identity
Michael Allen Fox argues that old approaches to the problem don’t work.
You may as well attempt to pin down if “I” is more the function of genes or memes. We know of course that without the biological self there would be no psychological continuity. But where does one stop and the other begin?
Think about it like this…
You get out of bed this morning. And, you tell yourself, you’re the same person you were when you got out of bed the day before.
Or maybe not. Maybe there is something happening in your body – a cancer cell, the onset of a disease – that, sooner or later, will dramatically reconfigure how you think about yourself in the world around you.
Or maybe yesterday you made a new friend. You are meeting her today. You will embark on a relationship that has the potential to introduce any number of new factors into your life. Factors that, as well, can dramatically reconfigure how you think about yourself in the world around you.
That’s simply how it works. There is “I” in your set of circumstances here and now. And then biological and environmental changes – in increments or in a tidal wave – result in a reconstructed “I” from day to day.
Some of these factors you will be able to grasp and/or control better than others.
Or, as Lena points out to Ray in Dream Lover
“They say you replace every molecule in your body every seven years. I changed my name eight years ago. No more Thelma Sneeder. Aren’t you going to give me credit for it? Doesn’t it seem brave that I became this completely different person.”
And we know how Ray’s “I” was reconfigured after marrying Lena.
But: In what sense do we become a “different person” when all the molecules are replaced? Or, circumstantially, when we have an experience so traumatic, the way we look at the world around us seems to turn upside down?