Personal Identity and Psychological Reductionism Essay

Personal Identity and Psychological Reductionism When we tackle the question of What makes us the individual persons that we are?, one approach that we can take is to seek an answer to the question of what it is that is required for a person to continue to exist over time. If we could agree on what is required for it to be true that you continued to exist, then we would have good grounds to believe that we had discovered what makes someone the particular person they are, and by extension, what makes any person the person they are. In essence, what we are searching for are the necessary and sufficient conditions for personal identity over time. In this essay we will focus on the claim that it is in fact, only the psychological†¦show more content†¦Where Psychological Reductionists believe that Descartes went wrong was to suppose that personal identity was fixed by the substance that was doing the thinking, rather than the thoughts themselves. To illustrate this point we can look at John Lockes thought at experiment which, for many, dealt a fatal blow against the idea that the self is an immaterial substance. Lockes experiment is presented by Joseph Chandler as follows: Let anyone reflect upon himself and conclude that he has in himself an immaterial spirit, which is that which thinks in him and in the constant change of his body keeps him the same. Let him also suppose it to be the same soul that was in Nestor or Theristes at the siege of Troy, but he now having no consciousness of any of the actions of either Nestor or Theristes, does he or can he conceive of himself to be the same person with either of them? Can he be concerned in either of their actions, attribute them to himself, or think of them his own, more than the actions of any other men that ever existed? According to Chandler, in the above thought experiment we have to consider what would be the case if we had immaterial spirits, which were thought to be the basis of our personal identity. If this was so, then the kind of reincarnation described in the experiment would certainly be possible. So, according to Locke, if all this were true, itShow MoreRelatedPersonal Identity by Derek Parfit1907 Words   |  8 PagesIn his 1971 paper â€Å"Personal Identity†, Derek Parfit posits that it is possible and indeed desirable to free important questions from presuppositions about personal identity without losing all that matters. In working out how to do so, Parfit comes to the conclusion that â€Å"the question about identity has no importance† (Parfit, 1971, p. 4.2:3). In this essay, I will attempt to show that Parfit’s thesis is a valid one, with positive implications for human behaviour. 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