Derek Parfit: "Personal Identity"

199: " We can, I think, describe cases in which, though we know the answer to every other question, we have no idea how to answer a question about personal identity. These cases are not covered by the criteria of personal identity that we actually use."

199: "My targets are two beliefs: one about the nature of personal identity, the other about its importance. The first is that in these cases the question about identity must have an answer. No one thinks this about, say, nations or machines. Our criteria of identity do not cover certain cases, No one thinks that in these cases the question "Is it the same nation?" or "Is this the same machine?" must have answers."

200: "The first belief ­ in the special nature of personal identity ­ has, I think, certain effects. It makes people assume that the principle of self-interest is more rationally compelling than any moral principle. And it makes them more depressed about the thought of aging and death."

200: "Against this second belief my claim will be this. Certain important questions [about survival, memory and responsibility] do presuppose a question about personal identity. But they can be freed of this presupposition. And when they are, the question about identity has no importance."

201: "What happens to me [when my brain is divided and put in two bodies (aka:"Wiggins' case)]? There seem only three possibilities: (1) I do not survive; (2) I survive as one of the two people; (3) I survive as both."

201-3: arguments suggesting that none of the three are OK if identity required for survival.

203: "The alternative, for which I shall argue, is to give up the language of identity. We can suggest that I survive as two different people without implying that I am these people."

206: "The relation of the original person to each of the resulting people contains all that interests us ­ all that matters ­ in any ordinary case of survival. This is why we need a sense in which one person can survive as two."

206: "Identity is a one-one relation. Wiggins' cases show that what matters to survival need not be one-one. Wiggins' case is, of course, unlikely to occur. The relations that matter are, in by using the language of identity. This use of language is convenient, but it can lead us astray. We may assume that what matters is identity and, hence, has the properties of identity."

206: "In the case of the property of being one-one, this mistake is not serious. For what matters is in fact one-one. But in the case of another property, the mistake is serious. Identity is all-or-nothing. Most of the relations which matter for survival are, in fact, relations of degree. If we ignore this, we shall be led into quite ill grounded attitudes and beliefs."

207: "My view is that we use the language of personal identity in order to imply such [psychological] continuity."

207: "Psychological continuity is a ground for speaking of identity when it is one-one."

207: "If psychological continuity took a one-many or branching for, we should need to

abandon the language of identity."

208: "X and Y are the same person if they are psychologically continuous and there is no person who is contemporary with either and psychologically continuous with the other."

209: "I am q-remembering an experience if (1) I have a belief about a past experience which seems to be a memory belief, (2) someone did have such an experience, (3) my belief is dependent upon this experience in the same way (whatever that is) in which a memory of that experience is dependent upon it."

210: "Memories are simply q-memories of one' own experiences."

212-3: cases of fusion

214: "Psychological connectedness" which requires direct psyhological connections, and is not transitive vs. "Psychological continuity" which requires only overlapping chains of psychological relations and thus is transitive.

214: I may turn out not to be psychologically connected to some future states with which I am psychologically continuous.

215: "ancestral self" and "descendant self" are tied to continuity and are transitive. "past self" and "future self" are tied to connectedness and are matters of degree.

216-17: Description of 'immortal' creatures who had many ancestral selves that were not past selves.

218: "On this way of thinking, the word 'I' can be used to imply the greatest degree of psychological connectedness. When the connections are reduced, when there has been any marked change of character or style of life, or any marked loss of memory, our imagined beings would say, 'it was not I who did that, but an earlier self.' They could then describe in what ways, and to what degree, they are related to this earlier self."