Identity 1: What matters in Identity?

What is the practical importance of facts about our identity and persistence?

Why should we care about it?

Why does it matter?

Imagine that surgeons are going to put your brain into my head, and that neither of us has any choice about this. Will the resulting person—who will presumably think he is you—be responsible for my actions, or for yours? (Or both? Or neither?)

Suppose he will be in terrible pain after the operation unless one of us pays a large sum in advance. If we were both entirely selfish, which of us would have a reason to pay?

Identity 2: How could I have been?

How different could I have been from the way I actually am?

Which of my properties do I have essentially, and which only accidentally or contingently?

Could I, for instance, have had different parents?

Frank Sinatra and Doris Day might have had children together. Could I have been one of them?

Or could they only have had children other than me?

Could I have died in the womb before ever becoming conscious?

Identity 3 : What am I?

What sort of things, metaphysically speaking, are you and I and other human people?

What is our basic metaphysical nature?

For instance, what are we made of?

Are we made up entirely of matter, just as stones are, or partly or wholly of something else?

If we are made of matter, what matter is it? (Just the matter that makes up our bodies, or might we be larger or smaller than our bodies?)

Where, in other words, do our spatial boundaries lie?

More fundamentally, what fixes those boundaries?

Are we substances—metaphysically independent beings—or is each of us a state or an aspect of something else, or perhaps some sort of process or event?

Identity 4 : Population

If we think of the Persistence Question as asking which of the characters introduced at the beginning of a story have survived to become the ones at the end of it, we can also ask how many are on the stage at any one time.

What determines how many of us there are now?

If there are some six billion people on the earth at present, what facts—biological, psychological, or what have you—make that the right number?

Identity 5 : Evidence

How do we find out who is who?

What evidence bears on the question of whether the person here now is the one who was here yesterday?

What ought we to do when different kinds of evidence support opposing verdicts?

One source of evidence is first-person memory: if you remember doing something, or at least seem to remember, it was probably you who did it. Another source is physical continuity: if the person who did it looks just like you, or even better if she is in some sense physically or spatio-temporally continuous with you, that is reason to think she is you. Which of these sources is more fundamental?

Does first-person memory count as evidence all by itself, for instance, or only insofar as we can check it against publicly available physical evidence?

Identity - 6 : Persistence

What does it take for a person to persist from one time to another—that is, for the same person to exist at different times?

What sorts of adventures could you possibly survive, in the broadest sense of the word 'possible'?

What sort of event would necessarily bring your existence to an end?

What determines which past or future being is you?

Suppose you point to a child in an old class photograph and say, “That's me.”

What makes you that one, rather than one of the others?

What is it about the way she relates then to you as you are now that makes her you?

For that matter, what makes it the case that anyone at all who existed back then is you?

Identity - 7 : Personhood

What is it to be a person?

What is necessary, and what suffices, for something to count as a person, as opposed to a non-person?

What have people got that non-people haven't got?

Identity - 8: Who am I?

We often speak of one's “personal identity” as what makes one the person one is.

Your identity in this sense consists roughly of what makes you unique as an individual and different from others.

Or it is the way you see or define yourself, or the network of values and convictions that structure your life?

Comments please.

Identity

Your brain is transplanted into someone else's body. Where would 'you' end up - and why?

What is essential as far as being 'you' is concerned?



Does physical resurrection require that we have immaterial souls?

If we produced an atom-for-atom duplicate of you would it 'be' you?