Who am I? Questions of Personal Identity
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Who are you? There are many ways of answering this question, and this discussion will be a broad overview of various questions related to personal identity. The discussion will focus on two different senses of identity: The psychological continuity of your conscious experience (persistence question) and the continuity and personality of the person you think you are (the personality question). Join the Syracuse Philosophy Meetup as we delve into interesting thought experiments and deeper questions about who we are.
Some questions we'll discuss include:
(The Persistence Question)
- How is a younger or older version of yourself related to you? Is it still you? Are you a completely different person? Or to take it to a further extreme, is the person you were one second ago you?
- If someone were to incinerate you and immediately recreate a perfect replica of you, would that still be you?
- How does memory play into these questions?
(The Personality Question)
- How do you define yourself? By what you do, what you think, or perhaps what group you part of?
- Does your personal identity stand on its own or is it fundamentally tied in with social relations through group association or comparison?
- Would your concept of your self disappear if you lived entirely alone?
I don't have a focused reading for this one, but the following Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article is a good start for the psychological continuity question: