Personal Identity Reflection Paper

Personal identity is it obvious, or is it an obvious problem? How do I know that my teacher is the same person today as she was last class? This question applies to every person you know, your mother, father, friends, teachers, etc. There are three different views we can look at to help us understand how we may grasp the idea of someone’s personal identity. These views consist of the bodily, psychological, and immaterial soul view. We will try to find out if it is possible for a person to survive after the death of their body. By survival, I mean being the same person who remembers their past and anticipates their future experience. We will explore the differences between the three views and some of the features that make one view stand above …show more content…
An immaterial soul cannot be seen or touched, but it can smell and touch (Perry, 315). In this view, once your worldly body has died, your soul moves on to a different place. In this place you will still be the same person you were before, because your soul is the same. This view is highly appealing to people who believe in an afterlife, because they expect that they are the same person once they have died. They expect to see people and friends who have passed away before them. If they were not the same person once they got to this afterlife, how would anyone be able to find them? The idea behind same body, same soul helps ground the immaterial view to future anticipations of experience for people. Same body, same soul is the concept that your soul will stay the same as long as you have the same body. The last view we will look at is the psychological view of personal identity. The psychological view suggests that as long as you have very similar psychological states over time, then you are the same person over time. Your psychological states are not identical, because minute by minute you gain new memories that alter your psychology by fractions of a degree. As long as your personal self remembers who it was prior to each change, then you will still be the same person regardless of the differences between the two separate psychological personal …show more content…
To find the proper method for actual memory we have to make sure that we do not end up in a circular argument. We could say that the formula for actual memory is, seeming to remember plus the person remembering is actually you. The problem with this formula is we would end up in a circular argument, due to the fact that we are originally trying to find out how to define personal identity. No one has been able to figure this out yet, meaning we can’t use the criteria of: the person remembering is