[ExI] essentialism and/or continuity

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Tue May 25 07:50:17 UTC 2010


On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 6:25 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24 May 2010 20:58, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 24 May 2010 10:01, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Your body (including your brain) is made up of different matter
>>> compared to a few months ago, but you still feel you are the same
>>> person. The soul has magically flitted from one body to another.
>>
>> To play the devil's advocate, everybody would feel he or she is the
>> "same person" absolutely in any circumstance.
>
> Not under any circumstances. I don't feel I am the same person as you,
> but I feel that I am the same person as my self of a year ago. I also
> would not feel I was the same person as an exact copy in the room with
> me, and I would not feel I was the same person as my self of a year
> ago if I could go back in time and meet him. It's difficult to come up
> with a consistent philosophical account of selves.

### Yay, we got ourselves a bona fide identity thread, for the first
time this year it seems!

Indeed, there seem to be no limit on the number of various ways to
identify self - the Fregoli syndrome and its myriad versions (e.g. see
here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1188301/?tool=pmcentrez&page=1)
 are just a sampling of what the self-identification circuitry in the
parietal, frontal and temporal cortices can mis-identify. It's no
surprise, since the circuits are an evolutionary kludge - and of
course, there are no "objective" standards of self vs. non-self, aside
from perhaps the notion that certain ways of constructing
self-identity are deleterious for the survival of the brain doing the
construction, so they tend to be uncommon.

Rafal



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