Personal Identity :: essays research papers

personalizedized Identity individualized Identity can be broken down into three areas 1.) em soundbox 2.) Memoryand 3.) Soul. In John Perrys "A Dialogue on Personal Identity andImmortality" these composing aspects of personal identity are discussed atlength. In the reading and class discussions the dead body was define clearly as apart of mavins person, even so alluded to at times as a " prison" in which one cannotescape until one dies. Memory and ones Soul seemed to be lumped together manytimes, understandably so, for the two bare many things in common such as theyare intangible, cannot be completely defined as to what each exactly is (peopleremember things that did not actually excrete to them, are those still memories?do you have one soul passim your life?), and two are thought to composeones character and beliefs. This prove will deal with the two aspects of onespersonal identity which are the more or less obvious in day to day life, that of thebody a nd of soul/memory.As stated beforehand, memory and the soul bare many of the corresponding qualities.The body and soul, however, also share this trait. Perry illustrates in hisessay that the body and soul are similar because there is a "link" between oneanother, that is they both make up a person and are responsible for thequalities associated with cosmos an individual (height, weight, character, belief,etc.). Perry also comes back to challenge this using the analogy of a river.If one goes to a river, and then the next day goes back to the similar river, theperson will not say that it is a different river, although roughly all of theproperties of the river have changed (water molecules, pollution level,temperature, etc.). This is the same with a person, for we say that a person atadolescence is still the same person at adulthood, even though the the personsbeliefs, knowledge, and character may have changed over the years. Perryanswers this problem by saying that we can s till regard the person as the sameby the relative "similarity" of the person to how they were in the past, andthat "the sameness of body is a reliable sign of sameness of all of soul" .In another example, Perry differentiates between the body and the soul by sayingthat "personal identity" (referring to the soul/mind) cannot be based on bodilyidentity, for one can judge who one is without having to make any judgmentsabout the body. Perry continues to elaborated on this by saying even if he woke