What makes you, you · Quiz question 10/35
Total Amnesia and the Body Criterion
Every memory gone, personality totally changed, but the same body — same person? Bernard Williams's "The Self and the Future" and animalism.
After an accident, someone loses all their memories, and their personality and tastes change completely. Their body is the same.
They're still the same person as before the accident.
In his 1970 paper "The Self and the Future," Bernard Williams showed that our identity intuitions flip depending on how a story is told. Tell someone "tomorrow you'll be tortured, but first you'll lose all your memories and get someone else's" and they're still afraid. Williams suggested this may show bodily continuity matters for identity. Later, Eric Olson's The Human Animal (1997) systematized "animalism": we're essentially biological organisms, so amnesia is irrelevant to identity.
If you agreed, you think bodily or biological continuity is the criterion. On animalism, amnesia is a terrible thing that happens to the same person — not something that turns you into someone else. Law and everyday life mostly follow this standard too.
Locke-style psychological theories answer differently. Locke distinguished the "man" (the human organism) from the "person": the same organism without continuing consciousness isn't the same person. So someone with the same body but completely severed memory and personality could be the same human but a different person. Olson objects that the Lockean view runs into the "thinking animal problem" — two thinkers, an animal and a person, sitting in your chair.
You're a human organism. As long as it lives, you exist.
Key names: Eric Olson, Bernard Williams (in part), Aristotle (forerunner)A person is made of links of consciousness and memory. If those are completely cut, it's a different person.
Key names: John Locke, Derek ParfitYou're constituted by your life story. If the story restarts from scratch, in a practical sense it's someone new.
Key names: Marya Schechtman (for the opposing view, Galen Strawson's "Against Narrativity")