1. What is Personal Identity?

2. What makes you distinctly you and not someone else?
We looked briefly at this question in the other section, in the framework of human nature –we asked the question what distinguishes us from other animals
Now we will look specifically at what separates us and distinguishes us from each other

3. Crash Course –identity and batman

4. The philosophical problems with the idea of personal identity are as follows
In our physical body, our thoughts, our psychological makeup, and our experiences are constantly changing, growing, and adapting –are we the same person from one day to the next? One year to the next? One decade to the next?
If yes, what is it exactly that makes you the same person?
If not, are you a series of persons or of versions of yourself?
Are you as different today from your 5-year old self as you are different from your best friend?

5. Philosophy’s response –three general viewpoints
Your identity as a person depends on your physical body and brain remaining the same over time
Your identity as a person depends on your memories and thoughts
Your identity as a person depends on your soul

6. David Hume ( )
Argued there is no such thing as a “unified and substantial self that remains the same over time.”
He described the body as a “loosely-knit and ever changing ‘bundle of perceptions.’”
The bundle does not have a centre or a single thread that holds it all together.
He wrote that the perceptions that make up the self ‘succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual state of flux and movement.’

7. Crash Course