" A person has a body ". " A person is a body ". Which of
these statements more accurately expresses the truth about
personal identity?
When considering the content of the question there are two
questions which must be considered before an adequate conclusion can be
found; what really and fundamentally identifies and distinguishes persons
at a single time and what enables us to reidentify them over time? The
second question of course deals with how people change physically and
mentally over a certain period of time, including survival after physical
death. When answering these questions first we must distinguish between
body, brain, personality, mind and soul with some of these providing better
information on identity than others, and then these must be characterised
into two groups namely physical and psychological.
When determining an object or a persons identity we have to be
very careful for example when we speak of things as the same or as
different we need to be careful as to distinguish between qualitative and
numerical identity. If someone is talking about the same car, for example,
he may mean a car of the same make, colour and year of registration or he
may actually mean the very same car. The latter example is numerical or
strict identity; and this is what we are concerned with when having
discussions about personal identity. Taking this consideration into account
physical criteria seem to give more information and appear more promising
than psychological criteria at this point in helping to determine identity.
In consideration of physical identity I will assume here that a person
is fundamentally a physical and biological system. In most cases identity is
established by the relevant physical substance, either the whole body or of
some special part of it. There...
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