A New Look At Personal Identity
Michael Allen Fox argues that old approaches to the problem don’t work.
So, these are facts that can be ascertained regarding the various parts of us that regenerate over the years. But it’s not like the fact of this has much of an impact on how we see ourselves. The fact that our bones and blood and organs etc., are reconstructed autonomically over time has little or no impact on how we react to, among other things, the behaviors of others given our moral and political prejudices.
No, instead, that part is reflected in the physiology of the brain. And here…
Except that we know full well how injuries and diseases and the effects of ageing can have a truly profound impact on how we see both ourselves and the world around us. All of those chemical and neurological interactions that we have little or no control over at all.
Of course sooner or later genes give way to memes here. To our ever evolving and changing “sense of reality” given new experiences and access to new information and ideas. And here the social, political and economic permutations that any one particular individual might come to embody are truly vast and varied. Is it any wonder then that the objectivists are driven to invent Gods and philosophical contraptions and political dogmas and assessments of nature able to wade though all of this profoundly problematic variability and pin down the one true set of rational and virtuous behaviors.
Their own.