 wildcat says: Personal identity is perceived as continuous through time. Yet this perception cannot be instantaneous, and must be based on memory. Given the fact that memories can be forgotten, altered or even fabricated, the question arises as to whether memories are essential for personal identity. Certainly no specific memory seems necessary for identity, but a perception of a continuity of the memory process is often believed to be. Subjective experience involves not just memory, but thoughts, desires, feelings and personality. Even when subjectivity is focused on the "outside world", this focus necessarily has a point of view. Any attempt to describe personal identity impersonally will lose an essential element. A self has both sensation and will. did you read the article?  Axons & dendrites fire chemically across a synapse. Tho the elemental makeup of our brains change and replenish constantly we as a 'self' do not stay the same either. Every firing on a synapse changes our makeup everytime. We constantly change moment by moment and we will never be the same as we once were. That constant change is what we call living. The process of living. We are who we are because we recognise the chemical patterns of our brains. We have a sense of presence because we detect and (control) the chemical changes in our brains every moment. We even have the ability to recreate specific chemical combinations that we call memories. Memories are often linked to smells. Smells are... Not sure how 'happiness' crept in here! Some linguistic analysis would be beneficial , and a start would be to think the issue through without using nouns. BTW, think the idea of a memory being some sort of fixed neural 'engram' is a bit out of date, cortical coding being just that and not the locus of some ghostly Humean impression (and of course, that aspect of memory is itself best seen as interpretative and dynamic within the complex of other cortical encodings} I read the article. It is interesting, yet it suffers from some serious flaws, particularly repeatedly confusing the ontological basis of central concepts like continuity and self identity. There is no reference to a theory of identity which renders much of what is being said about identity insubstantial as an argument. I haven't invested much thought in all the arguments presented (some of them are plainly bad philosophy such as: "This is not a materialist interpretation -- which implies that it is a spiritualist one."), but it seems that the very problrm is hopelessly malformed on the onset. I am not sure there is a problem here at all, though it seems very compelling to believe there is. I have an observation. I suffered from serious Grand Mal seizures for ten years. In the process of the brain "short-circuiting" and firing and damaging synapses and cells at random I lost many memories. This did affect my personality to the point that there were severe mood swings that I ad never suffered before and I developed social anxiety disorder when I had been very much an extrovert all my life. The memories were not "hazy" or even partially lost. They were 100% gone. Others could tell me all about a time and place and what had happened all in vain as I had no independent recollection and though I believed them, it had no effect in shaking my memories of the events as they were not th... Your brain & its neural pathways are a byproduct of your lifes experiences. Its structure is your life recorder... except for those provided by nature. Hence the nature vs. nurture debate ARC said:Are you implying that your life is a tape drive or something? I'm thinking it is like a zip file that is foldered and then zipped again and again. Memory is like a search algorythm that searches and unzips only the needed files selectively. The clip is suggesting that those zip files are copied and stored in multiple places as a backup and the backup is replaced over time. Go read "The Holographic Universe". That will kind of blow you mind. Just google it and if you think thats off the wall stuff. Go watch BBC doc on youtube "The Atom" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yih3swZqeZk |
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