Branching Self-Consciousness

There is a certain irony in the way that Locke's conception of the person has survived the transformations it has. What he offered was the memory criterion of personal identity, and while the criterion is now widely admitted to be central to any theory of the person, it is uniformly regarded as inadequate to ground identity of the person. This is due to the well-known fact that, unlike identity, memory and its companion psychological relations do not have to be conceived as one-one relations. Or, if they do, we can conceive attitudes just like them-quasi-attitudes-which are not one-one relations. ' Examples of branching bring out well what this means. Nothing bars two future people from both quasiremembering what has happened to me. The difficulty, of course, is that they cannot both be me, any more than they can be each other. What began thus as an objection-the duplication objection-to Locke's analysis of personal identity has been appropriated by neo-Lockeans like Parfit to advantage. It is their contention that if two distinct future people were to quasi-remember what has happened to me, then (given certain other conditions that I will recount below) I would have all that matters to my survival in both. In other words, the very intuitions that led Locke to analyze personal identity in terms of psychological relations prompt Parfit and other neo-Lockeans to conclude that something as good as survival of the person is possible without identity, so long as the relevant sort of psychological connectedness (Locke's

Branching (polymer chemistry) · Consciousness · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · Chemistry · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Psychology · Theology and Philosophy of Evil

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