We Must Define X As X

I do not feel there is a way that the same person can exist at different times, at least here on earth. There is one person, per body, that has one soul. Once the physical body dies, then the person's soul lives on. I guess someone could look at a person exising at different times, such as their personality traits and qualities in their children. I have heard many say, "Your daughter is so funny and has the same personality as her father." Does that mean that in a sense, my husband is existing at different times in himself and through my daughter? I'm not sure. There is one way for sure that the same person can exist at different times, and that is during life here on earth and then after death when the soul moves on to either heaven or hell, depending on the the life choices the person made while living.

In The Phaedo, one of Socrates’ aims is to convince us that our souls existed prior to our birth. In making this argument, he claims that we had some knowledge of imperceptible things prior to our birth, and that through “recollection” of our pre-birth knowledge of imperceptible things, we are able to perceive certain qualities of things like equality beginning after our birth. Socrates’ argument begins by defining recollection as when someone ‘perceives one thing, knows that thing, and also thinks of another thing of which the knowledge is not the same but different’ (73c). Socrates asks that we consider our perception of equal things, such as sticks and sticks or stones and stones. He claims there is “Equal itself” or the Form of Equality, which is unmistakably equal at all times (74a). Once the Form of Equality, is agreed upon, Socrates claims that “as long as the sight of one thing makes you think of another, whether it be similar or dissimilar,” you are recollecting (74d). Socrates then concludes that because we are able to make judgments about equal things through perception, we must have knowledge of the Form of Equality prior to making these judgments about equal and unequal things, and we are able to recognize these things as equal or unequal by recalling the form of equality. Socrates’ argument begins with the idea that our souls were acquainted with all forms prior to our births, and he outlines an argument that illustrates his Theory of Recollection, concluding

These two worlds have a parallel existence and cross at a point of a time.

The Soul view focuses around the soul being separate from the body. The soul, being separate from the body, when a person dies can move on from one body to another. It doesn’t only consider death as a distinction between soul and body, the persistence comes into question as well. “If a person x exists at one time and something y exists at another time, under what circumstances is it the case that x is y?”. When the soul view is put into question for this the answer is that x and y are the same person. Although their body may have changed over time they are still the same person. This can be applied to sleeping, death, and other extreme circumstances. For instance, when you sleep you begin to lose consciousness but then wake up as the same person and can identify yourself, therefore you are the same person, no matter the body. The same can be tied to death, if body was not in question when you “wake up” you persist with the same soul and memories. Therefore, the soul View holds.

Memory refers to the persistence of learning in a state that can be revealed at a later time (Squire, 1987). A memory is a network of neocortical neurons and the connections that link them. That network is formed by experience as a result of the concurrent activation of neuronal ensembles that

Every act of remembering is also, intrinsically, an act of forgetting. Giving preference to particular details of an event lessens the immediacy of others. Thus, memory is its own, unique narrative culled from an almost endless sea of details present, and sometimes not present, in the original event. Memory is the past, reformulated and interpreted through the lens of the present (Huyssen 1995). When an event is commemorated through a physical act of memory, the narrowing of possible details becomes even more finely tuned, limited by the physical scope of possibilities for bodies in a three-dimensional space.

Jake Roper poses an interesting question within this video. He asks, “How much of you can be removed before you are not you anymore?” Challenging you to answer his question he talks about four different logical paradoxes: Ship of Theseus: If a ship is rebuilt is it the same ship?, Sorites: When is a heap of sand no longer a heap?, Grelling-Nelson: Is the word heterological heterological?, and Teletransportation: If you are materialized, moved, and rematerialized are you still you?. After he explained each of these concepts I found that my answer to his initial question was quickly changed and required further thought due to the fact that I found myself bouncing back and forth between answers.

I will argue in the case “Where am I” that, at the instant of teleportation, the person on the East Coast is the same as the person on the West Coast, and that each person is me. However, the moment after the instant of teleportation, the two entities are related but different. The East Coast person has separate thoughts and feelings from his replica on the West Coast and each will have very different experiences. The first reason I believe that both are the same person at the moment of teleportation is that both have the identical body and mind with the exception of the cardiac defect of the East Coast me. Although the West Coast person is a replica of The East Coast person, there is physical continuity. In addition, the East and West Coast person have psychological continuity when the copy on the West Coast is made. They both share common memories, experiences, and mental states. This psychological continuity is the second reason why I believe that the East and West Coast entities are initially the same person. After the teleportation, the East Coast person and the West Coast person function independently. They each have separate and distinct experiences. They both share common memories and psychological continuity prior to the replication, but the more time that elapses after the teleportation, the greater the difference between the two people. In addition, as a result of the teleportation, the East Coast person will die of cardiac failure in a few days while the West

Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us

The Indiscernibility of Identicals is a principle, which affirms the rule that, identity holds if and only if their properties are wholly indistinguishable from one another. The Doctrine of Temporal Parts holds that, an object has temporal parts, and these parts are moments of the material object’s existence. The object in question can persist by having a single extending sequence of temporal parts. The principal of the Indiscernibility of Identicals holds that no two objects can be wholly indiscernible. However, according to the Doctrine of Temporal Parts, an object, X at time 1 (t), need not share all the same properties with object X at time two (t’). Nevertheless, according to our principal X at t cannot be identical with X at t’, because we can discern a difference between X at t from t’ (consider previous wall

After a new memory is learnt, it enters the process of encoding during which the memory is labile and capable of disruption until it becomes stabilised over a period of time (Nader & Einarsson, 2010; Nader et al, 2000). This process is called consolidation and originally consisted of the theory that once stabilised in the brain, it remains fixed (Suzuki et al, 2004). This theory has been rebutted by the acceptance of reconsolidation, a theory that imposes the ideology that when memories are retrieved, through similar experiences (Lee, 2009), they become labile until,

Loftus and Palmer support the reconstructive memory hypothesis. They believe that information gathered at the time of an icident is

The Psychological answer states that X is the same person as Y if and only if X and Y are psychologically continuous. As shown in the example, the prince is seen as the prince due to his psychological continuity through the persistence of consciousness. Thus, the link to Locke's example seems to lie in the interrelated aspect of psychological continuity: memory. Particularly episodic memory, which is autobiographical and concerns events; since, to some extent, psychological continuity is parallel to the princes ability to recall the fact that he committed the

What is time travel? Inevitably, it involves a discrepancy between time and time. Any traveler departs and then arrives at his destination; the time elapsed from departure to arrival (positive, or perhaps zero) is the duration of the journey. But if he is a time traveler, the separation in time between departure and arrival does not equal the duration of his journey. He departs; he travels for an hour, let us say; then he arrives. The time he reaches is not the time one hour after his departure. It is later, if he has traveled toward the future; earlier, if he has traveled toward the past. If he has traveled far toward the past, it is earlier even than his departure (p. 145).

In this paper I will be discussing the concept of the paradox, examples from Zeno and McTaggart, and how modern science has potential solved the paradox put forth by McTaggart. Both of these paradoxes have a enormous repercussion on how objective fact about the world can be understood. I claim that McTaggart’s theory of time can be solved by modern physics as Einstein’s theory of relativity makes time a relative factor in how time is understood.