Explanation Of Personal Identity

Personal Identity Need Not An Explanation

Introduction
Personal identity seeks to investigate who you are, what you are, and to give an individual a sense of self. However, it is difficult to explain exactly what personal identity is. There are many theories and criteria that seek to pinpoint what exactly personal identity consists of, some imply that we are wholly material things; others imply that we are partly immaterial and partly material. There are some theories such as psychological continuity theory that seek to explain the self as psychological connectedness. There is also Descartes’ Cartesianism that seeks to explain the self as the soul. There is also the intuitive view that bodily identity is personal identity. Finally, there
Nancey Murphy conceives such an approach when she argues that there is no one criterion of identity. Instead, she argues that personal identity is “grounded in some combination of material, psychological, narratival, moral, and relational issues” (Cortez). While at first this may essentially seem as an all-criteria solution, Murphy’s argument would seem to be more aligned with the admission that none of these are necessary in every situation, but that some combination of them will prove to be ample in grounding identity in any particular case of personal identity. For example, a combination off all these factors may be used as criterion to assess the personal identity of person a. However, person a is afflicted with a mental illness which may affect his or her psychological continuity. Yet, person a does not cease to be person a just because one of the criterion is compromised. Mental illness is an example that shows that people are still identified as themselves by a combination of different factors but not always the same factors in each particular case. These factors may vary by person, mental illness, circumstance,
This is one of the more intuitive theories because it is usually how we re-identify others over time. This theory does not imply that one can lose a limb over time and not be the same person. It means that an individual must be the same living organism (Lacewing). However, there are always exceptions to these cases in proving personal identity. For example, if I get my brain transplanted into a different body, am I where the brain goes? Also, psychological continuity defines personal identity as mental connectedness or relying on memories to determine an individual’s identity. But, what if an individual afflicted with a mental illness has lost their memory and does not have this psychological continuity? Do they cease to be who they are because of it? The concept of personal identity is abstract and cannot be defined by the same set of criterion in every case. “There are certain conditions necessary for a person to persist, and perhaps even certain sufficient conditions, but no set of conditions individually necessary and jointly sufficient (Olson).” Lynne Rudder Baker also argues, “I doubt that there are any noncircular, informative, plausible criteria of personal identity to be stated” (Cortez). Merrick’s argument rejects the likelihood that we could develop philosophic criteria that would establish the identity of a and b in every case, that does not mean