personhood.
25 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-130 v2 | Floridi — The Informational Nature of Personal Identity | Floridi deflates the diachronic question of personal identity, holding that sameness is always relative to a purpose-fixed level of abstraction and that metaphysical versions of the question “do not deserve to be taken seriously” (p. 554). He puts the synchronic question first: what binds a self’s information into a unity. His answer is an admittedly “figurative” 3C model in which the self is the last of three successive encapsulations, corporeal (bonded by chemical bonds), cognitive (bonded by mutual information) and conscious (bonded by semantics, and so dependent on a community). He then reads ICTs as “egopoietic” technologies because they act on all three membranes. | Read |
| NOTE-166 v2 | Personal Identity and Ethics (SEP) | A survey, arguing no thesis of its own, of how three contested questions bear on ethics: which account of persistence is true (unique psychological continuity, Shoemaker and Parfit; or biological continuity and animalism, Olson and DeGrazia), whether identity or the psychological relations (continuity and/or connectedness) is what matters (Parfit’s fission case), and whether metaphysics constrains ethics or the reverse. It traces these through prudential concern, responsibility, abortion (Marquis), death and brain-death criteria, dementia and advance directives (Dworkin vs Jaworska on Margo), and the separateness of persons (Rawls, Parfit, Nozick, Taurek, Sidgwick, Brink). Its main recurring finding is that the relation that fixes persistence and the relation that matters ethically keep coming apart. It concludes that all three questions remain open. | Read |
| NOTE-268 | Identification and Identity | Velleman targets Frankfurt’s later conception of autonomy. On that conception, a person acts autonomously only when his volitions derive from “the essential character of his will”, and that essence consists of volitional necessities that are also the conditions of his personal identity. Velleman argues against it on three grounds. Such an essence would ground authenticity, not autonomy (the Winnicottian False Self is inauthentic but over-controlled). Frankfurt offers no argument or example that motivational change ends a person. And the ideal of wholeheartedness, which cures ambivalence by extruding a desire from the self, is a defensive fantasy: Freud’s Rat Man was made ill by just such a separation, and identifying with part of oneself in the ordinary, imaginative sense is Sartrean bad faith. He replaces “the self” with an aspectual reading of “self” as a marker of reflexivity. On that reading autonomy is behaviour motivated partly by the understanding, the part of us “with which we cannot help identifying”, without its being our identity (pp. 357–360). | Read |
| NOTE-338 | Where Am I? | A first-person story with an argument inside. With his brain in a vat in Houston radio-linked to his body under Tulsa, the narrator tests three answers to “where am I?”: where the body is, where the brain is, where the point of view is. He favours the third and finds it unclear. A computer duplicate of his brain can take over his body with no detectable difference, and when duplicate and brain drift out of step there are two persons in one body. Intuition pumps, no thesis defended to the end. | Read |
| NOTE-373 | Survival and Identity | What matters in survival is the R-relation (mental continuity and connectedness among person-stages), and it is also identity, because persons are maximal R-interrelated aggregates of stages and so the relation of being stages of one person is the R-relation. Fission and fusion become persons sharing stages, counted by tensed identity; the long-lived Methuselah is a continuum of overlapping persons; degrees come from supervaluation over cut-offs. Against Perry’s lifetimes, two persons, not three, take part in a fission. | Read |
| NOTE-374 | Personal Identity | A survey of the persistence debate with an animalist’s emphasis. It separates seven questions, argues that the persistence question concerns numerical identity and must not presuppose person essentialism, and sets out psychological-continuity, brute-physical and anticriterialist answers. Fission and the too-many-thinkers objection are the two arguments that do the work. It avoids the word “self”. One in-text citation (Olson and Witt 2020) has no matching bibliography entry. | Read |
| NOTE-378 | Personal Identity | Wiggins’s division case shows that what matters in survival need not be one-one, so it is not identity; fusion and imagined beings that divide show it comes in degrees. Q-memory and q-intention describe the relations without presupposing identity. Continuity (transitive) is distinguished from connectedness (degree), and successive selves are proposed in place of one underlying person. The principle of self-interest then has no independent force. §I is argued; the priority of connectedness is asserted; §VI is a sketch. | Read |
| NOTE-382 | Shanahan — Simulacra as Conscious Exotica | A Wittgensteinian treatment: consciousness talk is anchored in what is public, so an exotic entity is a candidate only if we could engineer an encounter with it in a shared world. Disembodied chat agents are not candidates; virtually embodied ones could be. On the self: no “self worth preserving” without body, history and autobiographical memory, and no “person behind the mask” for a role player, whose identity is a shifting distribution of roles. Argued by method and scenario; nothing is measured. | Read |
| NOTE-385 | Of Identity and Diversity | Identity is relative to the idea the name stands for: same mass, same life (oak, horse, man), same consciousness (person). A person is a thinking being that “can consider itself as itself”, and personal identity reaches as far back as consciousness can be extended, independent of substance. Man and person come apart (prince and cobbler; day-man and night-man), and “person” is “a forensic term” grounding reward and punishment. Argued from cases and intuitions; “the same consciousness” is never defined. | Read |
| NOTE-386 | Of Personal Identity | No impression of a self is constant, so there is no idea of one; introspection finds only perceptions, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. Its ascribed identity is a fiction of the imagination, like that of ships, churches and plants, produced by resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it; hard cases are “grammatical”. The Appendix confesses that two principles, the distinctness of perceptions and the imperceptibility of real connexions, leave the unity of the mind unexplained. | Read |
| NOTE-387 | The Self and the Future | A body-exchange experiment told twice. Third-personally, with selfish choices before and reactions after, it supports “changing bodies”. First-personally, as torture preceded by amnesia, character change and implanted memories, fear remains rational at every step, and the step that completes the exchange alters only what happens to someone else. Conceptual undecidability and conventional decision leave the subject unable to expect anything. A “rather shaky” lean toward the bodily answer, as a risk. | Read |
| NOTE-452 | The Intimate Contest for Self-Command | Schelling’s essay proposes “egonomics”, the art of managing oneself. Its core claim is that many self-control tactics are the tactics for managing another person, applied to a “sometime self” who will be in command later. It gives a taxonomy of habits by time profile, onset time, warning time, cost, visibility, damage function and self-aggravation. It refuses a general answer to which self is authentic. It estimates the stakes at “on the order of a trillion dollars” for the current population. | Read |
| NOTE-455 | The Normative Constitution of Agency | Korsgaard asks whether agency is natural (a movement caused by the right mental state) or normatively constituted (a movement backed by an agent whose unity is achieved by following norms). Ordinary attribution of action implies activity and identity. Self-constitution explains both: the categorical and hypothetical imperatives give action the form of self-determined efficacy, and the maxims chosen under them constitute practical identity. Reflective self-consciousness breaks given unity and sets the task of rebuilding it, so unity of agency is “an achievement, not a given”. | Read |
| NOTE-464 | A Planning Agent’s Self-Governance over Time | Bratman’s model of a planning agent’s self-governance over time. It needs (1) planned temporally extended activity with a time-frame to “plan’s end”, (2) synchronic self-governance along the way, (3) cross-temporal links of intention that are intrapersonal analogues of shared intention, so the agent acts “together” with herself, and (4) “diachronicalized” standpoints holding a conditional, reflexive end of diachronic self-governance. The model makes some willpower and resistance to shuffling self-governed and excludes the toxin case. Argued by cases, not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-465 | The Sources of Normativity | Korsgaard’s Tanner Lectures. The normative question (what justifies morality’s claims on us) is not answered by voluntarism, substantive realism or reflective endorsement alone. Reflective consciousness forces us to act on reasons, and so to identify with a law: a “practical identity”, the description under which we value ourselves. Obligation is the reflective rejection of a threat to that identity. Valuing any identity commits us to valuing humanity, reasons are public, and animals’ pain can obligate us. Argued, but “sketchy” by its own account. | Read |
| NOTE-470 | “First we invented stories, then they changed us”: The Evolution of Narrative Identity | McAdams’s review essay on narrative identity: “the internalized and evolving story a person invents to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”. Storytelling is placed in human evolution as a tool for simulating social life and binding groups. The self is layered as actor, then agent, then author, with the life story arriving in adolescence on the back of autobiographical memory, theory of mind and autobiographical reasoning. Story features predict well-being and generativity. Culture supplies master narratives. Claims are cited, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-545 | Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person | Persons differ from other creatures in the structure of the will: they have second-order volitions, desires that a given desire be the one that moves them to act, and wantons do not. Forming one is identifying with a desire. Freedom of the will is having the will one wants, and a decisive identification ends the series of higher orders “without cutting it off arbitrarily” (p. 16). Responsibility needs neither a free will nor alternatives: the willing addict acts of his own free will. The view is neutral on determinism, and on how the will came to be (n. 10). | Read |
| NOTE-568 | The Corporation as a Moral Person | A moral person is a non-eliminable subject of accountability, and that requires intentional agency. A corporation’s Internal Decision (CID) Structure, an organizational chart plus recognition rules embedded in corporate policy, licenses redescribing members’ acts as corporate acts done for corporate reasons. Corporations therefore differ in kind from mobs and can be full moral persons. That intentional agency suffices for moral personhood is asserted here and argued elsewhere. | Read |
| NOTE-996 | Nichols & Bruno — Intuitions about personal identity | Survey studies of Arizona undergraduates on Williams’s personal-identity cases. A transplant case makes memory look necessary for being “still Jim”; a stripped-down Pain case has about 70% say “you will feel the pain” after distinctive mental states are wiped; neither depends on first- or third-person telling, so Williams’s explanation by person fails here. Abstract questions and a forced choice favour psychology (over 80%; 64%, p = 0.053). The authors weigh intuitions by robustness and conclude for a psychological criterion conditionally. The results describe a concept under framing; they do not show what persistence is, and the Pain item may test bare sentience, not identity. | Read |
| NOTE-1014 | Boyle — The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood | A law professor’s essay on the line between persons and things, run across four cases: AI, corporations, nonhuman animals and transgenic entities. Personhood is pressed on two tracks, empathy-driven moral reasoning and efficiency-driven legal engineering, and the corporate history shows the second track working without a theory. Boyle predicts some intermediate legal status for AI, argues that capacity-based criteria cannot escape a species-bound standpoint, and ends on a hybrid of species membership as of right plus capacity. It argues and predicts; it does not measure. | Read |
| NOTE-1257 | Surviving Death, Again | Johnston withdraws Surviving Death’s account of survival. There, he recalls, the resurrection hope failed and the substitute was living on “in the onward rush of humankind”, on the view that we are higher-order things whose deepest future-directed attitudes fix which embodiments are ours. Now he holds that every reductionist account of personal identity breeds “fellow travelers” with moral status and conflicting interests: personites, R-variants, overlapping “Theons” and modal variants. To avoid them, he holds, we must be essentially embodied wills whose present bodies are not essential, so re-embodiment after death is possible. He argues that emergent substance dualism is a “fig leaf” for divine creation, and gives non-reductive relations of subserving, implementing and interdependence between mental and neural events. | Read |
| NOTE-1259 | Future self-continuity: how conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice | A review, mostly of the author’s own work. Following Parfit, people who feel less connected to their future self treat it like a stranger and save less for it. Similarity to one’s self in ten years, chosen as overlapping circles adapted from Aron’s scale, predicted patient choices and assets; a future self represented neurally like another person predicted steeper discounting (r = .47); seeing one’s age-progressed face raised saving; respect for the elderly tracked and raised saving. Directly reported liking and caring for the future self did not predict choice, but were near ceiling. The future self may extend, at life’s end, to one’s offspring. | Read |
| NOTE-1263 | Future People, the Non-Identity Problem, and Person-Affecting Principles | Most of our choices change who will exist, so a policy that makes later lives much worse may be worse for no one who ever lives. Narrow person-affecting principles then imply that such a policy, or ending human history by having no children, is not wrong. Parfit rejects them, and retracts his own 1984 appeal to an impersonal principle. Being caused to exist with a life worth living is an intrinsic “existential benefit”. On the Wide Principle an outcome is worse if it benefits people less, which solves the non-identity problem in person-affecting terms and keeps “better than” transitive. A Wide Dual Principle, counting benefits to each and benefits to all, does not imply the Repugnant Conclusion. We may favour present people in what we do, but if every generation does, “we and our successors might together wreck the Earth”. | Read |
| NOTE-1294 | Death | The SEP survey of death. Life is the capacity of an object’s parts to control what composes it; death is the loss of that capacity. Epicurus’s case that death is nothing to us needs intrinsic hedonism and a narrow view of extrinsic harm. Without them, death can harm by depriving one of goods one would have had. When it harms is disputed. On Pitcher’s priorism a death, or a posthumous event, can thwart desires one has while alive, and so harm one then, without backward causation. Critics answer that desires one no longer has cannot be thwarted. Luper argues that immortality need not be tedious, and that giving up desires death could thwart would cost as much as it saves. | Read |
| NOTE-1497 | Metzinger — M-Autonomy | M-autonomy is the capacity for second-order mental action, centred on veto. What mind-wandering loses is not the ability but its representation in the self-model, the “epistemic agent model”, and an ability can be deliberately exercised only when it is so represented. The return of control is represented as self-caused even when an unconscious event caused it. The paper repeats the 2013 estimate of two thirds, which its own minutes do not give. | Read |