Personal Identity And Afterlife

Have you ever asked yourself who am I? What factors of life makes you yourself? Does your life still exist after death? In the world of philosophy, personal identity can be defined as a concept that individuals develop and change over the course of their lives. It is corroborated by the flow of memories with existing memories. There are many different aspects that shape an individual identity. Those factors include personal interest, culture, family, and environmental settings. Some of these factors may have more influences than the other. Many philosophers, following Paul Edwards and John Perry, use cognizance as guidance in answering questions about personal identity. Most questions concerning personal identity are about the continuousness of a person’s conscience, but others say that our persistence is determined by brute physical facts, and psychology is irrelevant
implying that consciousness is not connected to most questions of personal identity.
Afterlife is simply the life after death. Some believe in Heaven or Hell and come believe in reincarnation. In this essay, I will address the problems of personal identity and afterlife by giving factual evidence and providing background knowledge on the different theories that surrounds personal identity and afterlife.
In order to address the problems faced by personal identity and afterlife, one must first consider the different theories, the different outcomes each has and the concepts of self and mind. These four theories are the illusion theory, body theory, soul theory, and memory theory. If asked what does it means to be a person and what does it takes for a person to be persistent, each theory have different answers. According to the illusion theory, there is no such thing that self stays consistent as time pass by. We as humans are constantly changing from one moment to the next. The body loses and gains physical matters minute by minute. Therefore, if our bodies are constantly changing it seems to be
realistic to assume that the idea of being the same person could be just an illusion and that is exactly how a person would believe in the illusion theory would answer that question. In the body theory, one says that the two person stages are only persistent and of one person if both share the same body. The body theory is considered the one theory that identify with common sense. It is the most intuitive theory of the four. Philosophers that agree with this concept agree that we deal with the same person as long as their same body exists. Although the body is numerically changing it is still the same body in a physical sense. The problem with the body theory is that if you are an naturalist then you could agree that humans live and die like any other organism, but an opposition of this theory would be, for example, if one surgically get a brain transplant. If the brain of A is transplanted into the brain of B, the new person would be a reflection of A and not B. As for the soul theory, it is similar to the body theory, but it is slightly different. The soul theory attempts to link connections to personal identity to entities. This implies that the same soul is equal to the body, so without one the other one cannot be the same person. The soul is believed to be non-physical. And so, the problem with the soul theory is epistemic because how can one tell if another one soul is apart? Does not that rise a new question of rather if one care about the soul if it does not retain any memories or personality traits like before?
The last theory is the memory theory. The memory theory looks at the psychological characteristics of a person so as far as consciousness is concerned based on this theory if the mind can extend backwards to any past experience is there not a link between the old person and new person? This suggests that if we can remember people of the past and have a conversation on things they remembered in high school then we are the same persons as we were in the past, but there is no solid solution to this theory. This concept cannot interpret real memories from fake memories.