From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Aug 18 2001 - 11:47:59 MDT
Damien writes
> >Still... I am me.
>
> Yes, but *who else could you be*?
>
> This is something like the obverse of asking `who would I have been if my
> parents had been different people than they were?' Well, obviously, *you*
> wouldn't have been there to ask the question. But *someone* would have
> been. And whoever asks any self-reflexive question sees the answer they're
> looking for in the mirror, even though what they see is reversed and coming
> from the wrong direction.
I think that it sometimes happens that the answer is "I'm not me
anymore!". I believe that this was an actual Arnold Schwartzenegger
quote in "Total Recall", where the possibility was raised that a
number of false memories had been implanted.
I'm happy when I can recall an incident from high school and then
reflect, "yes, that was me all right", and disappointed when I
recall an incident from too many years ago and have to say, "I'm
not really the same person anymore". Amnesiacs can determine from
purely objective data that their identities have changed.
So Loree's statement is indeed quite meaningful. Moreover, some
people could undergo changes as severe as sex-change, and truly
feel that they *weren't* the same person any longer (although I
have no evidence to back that guess up). The whole question of
personal identity is highly (though not entirely IMO) value
laden, and one could imagine someone who lived only for climbing
mountains exclaiming after becoming a quadriplegic "My life is
over".
Lee
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