personal identity
here's my deep thought for the day:
what makes us who we are? am i the same person now as i was when i was ten? will i be the same person when i'm 30? when i'm 60? why or why not?
does the physical body constitute you being the same person? basic idea of a hypothetical situation some philosopher put forth: say there are two men, john and jim. john is happily married, 45, lives in wisconsin. jim is single, 25, lives in florida. one morning they each wake up, startled to find they're not where they were when they went to sleep. jim is sleeping next to some unfamiliar woman who insists on calling him john and there's snow outside the window, while john is decidedly alone in an unfamiliar house that's clearly not in wisconsin. you get the point. freaky friday type thing. so... which man is which now? is the wisconsin man now jim? why? just because he has all the same memories and personality traits? so do memories and personality traits make us who we are? if so, what does that mean for people who get their memories wiped out by amnesia, or soldiers who went off to war and came back with completely different personalities? what about people who get alzheimers, for pete's sake? are they still the same people they were before? why? are we like rivers, always changing and different, yet the same overall?
so this line of questioning leads to the idea of a soul, right? some indefinable, yet highly personal and individual something that's inside all of us. so if there's a soul, what is it? does it manifest itself in any way that we can tell?
anyone wanna offer an easy answer to this for me?:)
what makes us who we are? am i the same person now as i was when i was ten? will i be the same person when i'm 30? when i'm 60? why or why not?
does the physical body constitute you being the same person? basic idea of a hypothetical situation some philosopher put forth: say there are two men, john and jim. john is happily married, 45, lives in wisconsin. jim is single, 25, lives in florida. one morning they each wake up, startled to find they're not where they were when they went to sleep. jim is sleeping next to some unfamiliar woman who insists on calling him john and there's snow outside the window, while john is decidedly alone in an unfamiliar house that's clearly not in wisconsin. you get the point. freaky friday type thing. so... which man is which now? is the wisconsin man now jim? why? just because he has all the same memories and personality traits? so do memories and personality traits make us who we are? if so, what does that mean for people who get their memories wiped out by amnesia, or soldiers who went off to war and came back with completely different personalities? what about people who get alzheimers, for pete's sake? are they still the same people they were before? why? are we like rivers, always changing and different, yet the same overall?
so this line of questioning leads to the idea of a soul, right? some indefinable, yet highly personal and individual something that's inside all of us. so if there's a soul, what is it? does it manifest itself in any way that we can tell?
anyone wanna offer an easy answer to this for me?:)