Personal Identity: An Experiential Immaterial Concept Paper Example

Personal identity as a concept occurs as the answer to some fundamental questions that arise from the conscious recognition of our existence first as individual entities and secondly as members of other bigger entities that are a result of a combination of two or more individual entities due to real or perceived commonalities. Once we are aware of our material existence, we also get the awareness of the cyclic nature of life in that it begins and ends for all living things. This awareness prompts questions like what am I? When did I begin? When will I end? What will happen to me after I die? The "I" entity is what is considered as the self-referring of the "self" or "person" that we develop as our identity. This paper purposes to posit the understanding of the self as a culmination of nothing but our perceptions as we keep experiencing our environment: physical and abstract; animate and inanimate. Arguments will mainly be drawn and developed based on David Hume's concept of personal identity as put down in "A Treatise of Human Nature." A few references for comparison, contrast, and elaboration will be made to Buddha and Descartes.

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It is important to note early enough that the use of the term "self" is not in the classical way that implies a reference to the mind/soul that is purported by Descartes's personal identity arguments in his theory of dualism (Descartes 33). Rene Descartes posited that the concept of self-revolves around the existence of the person as a combination of two entities: the body (material) and the mind/soul (immaterial). Human identity, though, effect and behavior, according to Descartes are a product of the interaction and influences of the two entities on each other. David Hume went against the thought of having the soul as the source of the identity fundamentally by denying the existence of any such thing as the soul. His idea of the thing we call the self is our constantly dynamically changing perceptions of the world we live in (Hume 241).

There is no denying that there exists an entity that is responsible for identity and the sense of self, but as Hume suggested, it lacks permanence; thus it cannot be pinpointed as the soul or an organ in the body. Those basic questions that constitute the problem of identity and the existential crisis can and often do, if not always derive their answers from the daily collection of sensory data from our environment and most importantly our interpretation of the information. It is this interpretation that constitutes our perception and therefore our understanding of both us and our environment. It is this line of argument by Hume that challenges the dualistic approach as an effort to explain and understand personal identity and the sense of self. The challenging of dualism bears with itself the trickle-down effect of questioning the fundamental grounds on which theism is built.

Theism as portrayed by most if not all religions purport to express the person as being body and soul and/or spirit. The soul and the body are understood to be in constant struggles to control decision-making and behavior. Relationship with a higher power both momentarily and eventually in the grand scheme of things when all is said and done depends on the cumulative outcome of the body-mind struggle. If one eliminates the idea the existence of a soul, then the concept of life after death loses grounds on what part of a person enters the afterlife. On the other hand, suggesting that the self cannot be part of the body or the mind makes the substance of existence, both material and spiritual, inconsequential in determining personal identity.

As suggested by David Hume, the process of introspection carefully reveals to one that the only thing that they could and are intimately aware of is a collection of perceptions (Hume 244). In essence, all that is real is what is physical. Everything else is nothing but a false illusion that the brain creates and convinces one that it exists. By this argument, the identity of a person is just as variable as that of any inhuman object (Hume 241). Evidence gives substance to claims. The idea that our identity is but a bundle of perceptions that are continuously and rapidly changing consolidates the concept of being and the knowledge of what one exists as into an evidence-based substantiated claim.

Consider the fact that we keep changing physically, psychologically and socially every day. A decade down the line, with all the changes we've amassed, we still consider the present person to be the very same person as the last person from a decade ago. This begs the question: what/how much has to change for one to consider the person as having a different identity from the past? If one takes a glass of water and freezes it, they automatically consider it as having become ice. Despite the complete change in physical state, they still know that the block of ice is the very glass of what they had from the beginning. Demonstrably, the only things in these examples that have remained constant are perceptions and ironically, changes in the state of things. This implies that identity as a concept, both self and itemized, cannot be tied to the actual existing items since their state and form lack constancy. Seeing as the perception exists as a specific bunch of interpreted sensory information, at a specific time in a specific space; then so does identity. It is for this reason that personal identity can sensibly be looked at as a culmination of these perceptions and the quick dynamic nature in which they change.

Given the massive database of information people acquire, retain and lose as they experientially navigate their world, they find a way of noticing actual existing similarities and relatedness between things and/or phenomena. It is therefore how and why when forming a thought process people segue from an idea to the next following this relatedness. This is also how original ideas are developed as well as imaginations that are seemingly unlike anything the person knows actually to exist. Since the senses keep taking in different data, creating relations makes it possible to establish what the different ever-changing sensory data have in common. Perception is thus made to operate in the very same way, and thus despite the physical changes, identity maintains its constancy. Ironically, in this particular way change defines constancy.

It is noteworthy that Hume insistently expresses that these perceptions do not in the way belong to anything in particular. In this view, David Hume's idea of identity converges with Buddha's. This point of convergence appears on the point that identity is looked at as being a collection of numerous, related yet dynamic and constantly changing elements; as opposed to being of a particular central substance (Rahula 66). The only point of divergence between Hume and Buddha on this concept is that Buddha's teachings allude to the concept of the existence of the soul that Hume terms to be an illusion. With this information, the conclusion on the concept of personal identity according to Hume is that it is characteristically defined by the related cohesive parts of one's perceptions as brought to existences by subjective life experiences.

The fact that it matters more to Hume and to this school of thought that the resemblances, relatedness, and causality obtain perceptions; than the actual existence of identity puts it under potential critical spotlights. Critically speaking, this school of thought clearly speaks of a seemingly incredibly chaotic yet still orderly process that culminates into having and maintaining personal identity. The process involves a constant and continuous collection of sensory data and having this data constantly and rapidly changing. There follows a process of processing this information with the same conditions it is collected. The information is then cross-tabulated with pre-existing data to establish the relatedness and similarities and thus a constant paradigm is created/maintained. These processes would require something that could perceive this unity of information despite the chaotic nature and the never-ending changes. The existence of this entity would portray it as being just as mysterious as the concept of identity itself. On top of that, it would imply the presence of a core substance as being the source of personal identity which is opposed to the core principle of the theory.

This critic is however misguided since it is built on the thought that the substance core is what brings together the elements of identity and makes sense of them by establishing a togetherness of related elements. One could argue that the process is reversed or rather the chronology of the thought process is inverted. It is rather the togetherness of these elements amidst and despite their dynamic and seemingly chaotic nature that gives rise to the illusion of the existence of a core substance.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the concepts of personal identity, self as well as existence are so tightly knit that it is almost impossible to discuss one extensively without mentioning the others. Philosophers from the eastern and western parts of the globe seem to have this conundrum as a common factor despite their vast differences in interests, knowledge bases and belief systems. Hume's school of thought seems to carry more water though since it refuses to allude to some unverifiable being or substance when examining the concept of personal identity as well as existence. It insists on associating it to empirical and verifiable aspects even though most cannot be measured.

Works Cited

Descartes, Rene, Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane, and George Robert Thomson

Hume, David. A treatise of human nature. Courier Corporation, 2003.

Rahula, Walpola. What the Buddha taught. Vol. 641. Grove Press, 1974.