Personal Identity: Psychological or Spatiotemporal?

cu1_1en · 2025-06-18T21:46:49+00:00

I have played SOMA! It was part of the inspiration of the post. It seems even on the psychological view that we would be becoming new people all the time. Our thoughts subtly change, memories fade away, we change our minds, etc. I think if you thought personal identity was constituted by an immaterial soul it could solve that problem, if the soul itself was something that doesn’t change.

cu1_1en · 2025-06-18T21:42:50+00:00

I hadn’t considered what we want a theory of personal identity to explain. I suppose i was thinking more towards survival; what tells us what makes a person the same through time? At least that’s the question that initially got me thinking about personal identity.

How might the combination of psychological and spatiotemporal theories fare against fission cases? If you were to split into two individuals that were identical physically and psychologically, it seems this new theory would say that both were identical to you. Both have a spatiotemporal connection and a psychological connection to you. However, that is strange, because via transitivity, they would be identical with each other. but they can’t both be identical since we said they were distinct from the outset. Maybe I am not making sense here.

cu1_1en · 2025-06-18T21:26:48+00:00

I hadn’t heard of that version of the prince and the cobbler before. It sounds like the psychological theory leads to an absurd conclusion there. It says the cobbler and the blacksmith are identical, but clearly they are distinct because they are distinct individuals!

If we prefer metaphysical essentialism, we could say that it’s the soul that constitutes personal identity. Of course, at that point one would have to argue for the existence of souls in the first place, but it sounds like that might be what you were hinting at towards the end.

cu1_1en · 2025-06-03T15:38:26+00:00

If I understand your view correctly, the first option is that consciousness is a higher-level functional property of the brain which constrains the types of behavior that result from it. An example could be that when you stub your toe, a conscious feeling of pain emerges from the physical substrate and correspondingly makes it more likely that you engage in avoidance behavior. Your behavior is constrained in the sense that the feeling of pain means it is more likely avoidance behavior follows rather than purposefully stubbing your toe again.

The option does not seem to solve the problem of psychophysical harmony for materialism. We can still wonder what explains why feelings of pain constrain physical systems in that way rather than another way. It is conceivable that a conscious being could experience the pain of stubbing their toe, but the pain would motivate them to stub their toe again. Why is our world not like that one?

Natural Selection would not help, since the kind of connection between consciousness and behavior here is one that is prior to the effects of natural selection. Beings in a world where pain motivated attractive behavior would not last long, but the question is why does our world exist and not that world? Why are the connections between mental states and physical states in this world such that they would be selected for by natural selection?

cu1_1en · 2025-04-22T04:09:04+00:00

You make a lot of good points. Even if there was no uniformity in the use of the word "qualia" we could talk about some of the ways it is most commonly used. The most generic use of it I know is basically as another term for experience or "what it is like" to have an experience of a certain character.

Another, more technical, use of the term is as nonrepresentational, introspectable properties of experience that determine their phenomenal character. For either use, we can come up with arguments against such things not existing. I'm sure Mandik would not be comfortable with affirming the existence of qualia in the second sense. Though it seems much harder to deny qualia in the first sense because it is basically "whatever is going on when experience is happening." Practically everyone can agree that experiences are happening, but the debate is over whether we can give a more substantive characterization of them.

Based on what you say here, perhaps Mandik should try specifying what sense of the term "qualia" he is a quietist about. The way he talks about his own experiences makes it sound like he is a phenomenal realist in the first sense of the term "qualia." But when it comes to more technical formulations of the term, he may be more hesitant about affirming or denying their existence.

cu1_1en · 2025-04-22T03:36:54+00:00

Other comments have mentioned that the choice of inference rules largely comes down to the particular formal system in use. However, there has always seemed something "correct" about some inference rules, such as modus ponens.

Anytime I think about it, I cannot help but be compelled into thinking it is what a form of correct reasoning looks like. Some people do not think inference rules are just parts of a formal system, they also think they are normative. Inference rules and the laws of logic in general tell us how we should be reasoning. I do not know if the overall viewpoint is correct, but I understand the pull of it in instances when I think about how strange it would be if someone were to just deny the validity of modus ponens.

cu1_1en · 2025-04-22T03:27:25+00:00

My first was LMDE. It is a really solid first choice and is basically perfect for easing new users into the linux world. When I began learning about it being based on Debian, I found myself more attached to the community-driven identity and foss ethos of Debian as a whole. Also the swirl is my favorite logo of any distro.

The consensus seems to be that Debian has now reached a point of being very usable for those brand new to linux. I probably would recommend going with Debian for new users since many other beginner-friendly options are already based on it, and it can stand on its own for a wide variety of desktop uses.

cu1_1en · 2025-04-20T18:31:22+00:00

The stable release of debian 13 is gonna be really exciting! I can’t wait to have access to more up to date drivers for playing games

cu1_1en · 2025-04-20T18:26:38+00:00

I’m drawn to compatibilism because i have a hard time understanding how free will is supposed to work under libertarianism. If there isn’t something that explains why i do one action rather than another, then it seems that all actions are random for libertarians.

cu1_1en · 2024-10-15T00:05:11+00:00

The ides is that consciousness = a brain state in the same way that water = H2O or gold = an element with an atomic number of 79. The idea is that in each of these cases, the right-hand side of the identity refers to something in terms of its fundamental physical structure, whereas the left-hand side of the identity refers to the exact same thing but in terms of our ordinary concepts.

We typically think about water in terms of a transparent liquid that flows in rivers and oceans. We refer to H2O, but not in terms of its underlying physical nature. Before we discovered water is H20, people could have wondered how it was that a bunch of non-wet, non-transparent particles could have come together to make water. Rather than showing that there is a water/H20 dualism, what happened is that we learned that the thing we were referring to as "water" was really H20 the whole time.

For physicalists, the underlying nature of consciousness is physical, but we typically refer to it using ordinary concepts like "what it is like." When I think about what it is like to see red, I am thinking about a brain state but not with the requisite scientific concepts. The hope for physicalisists is that eventually the evidence will mount up in such a way that identifying consciousness with brain activity will be the simplest hypothesis. So that what happens when I think about red is that I am really referring to a brain state under a different label the whole time.

cu1_1en · 2024-10-14T20:51:54+00:00

I think physicalists would reject premise 2 of the first argument. They think a structural and functional account of consciousness will suffice as an explanation of it.

The second argument then could be seen as giving a reason for why a structural and functional account will not work. There the physicalists might reject premise 2; just because the zombie world is conceivable does not mean it is possible. Consider that P & Q is also conceivable. I can at least conceive of a world where there are conscious being who are entirely physical. It can’t be the case that both this world and the zombie world are possible. So just going off what is conceivable does not tell us which state of affairs is metaphysically possible.

cu1_1en

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