i need some help to expand my essay. i am having trouble identifying a problem with lockes proposal that says having the same soul means you are dealing with the same person, and you know you are dealing with the same soul because its the same soul.
But you can easily just say something contradictory to that by stating that how would you know if you are dealing with the same soul if you can never really see the soul.

How can i make the proposal Locke makes better by modifying it? i need some help strengthening how being the same person means being the same soul.

what can i fix to make it possible?

it is in the book p3rsonal identity and immortality. a man named sam is trying to show his friend that is dying that there is a possibility of you surviving your death.

the passage is a bit lengthy,
it has to deal with personal identity.


Person A and Person B are numerically identical iff A and B have the same soul.


To clarify, Both person A and B are the same people just at different times.

EDIT: John Perry!!! not John Locke.

i am going to reference to a different webpage so you can get a better understanding of what i am talking about.

V83.0010 Central Problems in Philosophy

If the criterion for "same person" is, "same soul", but if there is no criterion for, "same soul", then, of course, the "same soul" criterion is useless. What else would you like to ask about that?

i just somehow have to make the proposal stronger in order to not be faced with the objection given by gretchen. or find a weakness in gretchens objection


Proposal #1: A is the same person as B iff A and B have the same soul.

Objection: you can never see the soul, so you never know if you are dealing with the same soul from one time to another.

Tracyfan_1,

I am assuming that the question that you are asking is coming from Essay Concerning Human Understanding, specifically on Locke's conception of identity and consciousness in Book II. If not, I don't know what text you are trying to extrapolate this information from, so please post the text and preferably the citation numbers. But to sum up what you are asking, you want to find a problematic instance in identity and consciousness.

To Locke, personal identity is neither immaterial nor material substance. Simply, when Locke differentiates two possible substances, a substance in itself or a particular substance, he does not categorize the personal identity in that way. Instead, personal identity lay in the realm of consciousness (specifically, look to chapter xxvii, Book II, Essay) Locke is breaking with the norm here, which is that the sameness of person is inextricably connected with the sameness of substance. Locke in fact thinks that the sameness of a person had absolutely nothing to do with the sameness of the substance, except for the fact that they both have the sameness in consciousness. Consciousness for Locke is essentially "the perception of what passes in a man's own mind." So now we get into a very abstract and potentially complex series of examples that will elaborate on your question. This is how I have understood the argument, so please bear with it.

The self as Locke describes it (xxvii, Book II, essay) is a cognizant being with the aptitude for reason and reflection (from book 1) and understands the fundamental substantial qualities of itself. A self is also aware of itself in one place and another, both times linked with its own consciousness. I want to explain this with this two dimensional analogy.

Picture yourself in a green park. At one end of the park there is a solitary bench. At the other end, there is another bench but it is shaded by a great oak tree. You start off at the solitary bench. Take a snapshot of that image, but as a snap shot, record that you are Person 1 at Time 1 (i.e. P1,T1) now move across the park to the bench shaded by the great oak tree. Take a second snap shot and record Person 2 at Time 2 (i.e. P2,T2). Are you the same person? Locke would say that: (P1,T1<--(s)-->P2,T2)<--(iff)--> (P2--(c)-->P1). You at the time of the first snapshot (P1,T1) are the same as you at the second snapshot (P2,T2) if an only if You at the time of the second snapshot were conscious of all things done from the moment of the first snap shot.

But doesn't this seem unreasonable though. It would require that the person at the instance proceeding the former remember everything about what had happened to them. Obviously, something has to give. Locke would however make the point that it is not so much memory but the capacity to memorize that is involved in being conscious.

So?like the mayor of Queensborough example, though I could theoretically have the soul of Napoleon within me, it is only in the respect that if I have the any consciousness of what Napoleon did (fight at Waterloo, ect.) I am not Napoleon. In a way, Locke is just setting down the criteria that having the same soul cannot be necessarily of sufficiently known in respect to the identity of a person.

So in response to your question, "having the same soul means you are dealing with the same person, and you know you are dealing with the same soul because it's the same soul" can be answered like this. In the case of the park and bench example, the memories or cognizant features of simply being conscious during the episode entail that you are at points one and two the same person because you are conscious of it. In that respect as well, within the context of the park and bench example, I am dealing with the same soul because I am inextricably linked in the form of my memories of the past version of P1. This is actually the segway into Locke's bundle theory of the self. If that is what you are trying to get at, there is certainly more to it.

If you mean by "making the proposal stronger" that you have to give a way of deciding whether A and B have to same soul in order to decide whether A and B are the same person, I don't see how to do this. Of course, visibility is not the only way of doing this, but I don't know of any other way. Do you? But, as I said, if there is no way of deciding whether A and B are the same person, other than deciding whether A and B have the same soul, and if there is no way of deciding whether A and B have the same soul, then, of course, you are stuck, since the same soul criterion is useless.

i agree that you cannot use the same body same soul theory but the objective is to try to improve this theory. I am heading in the direction of how people act is how you identify if you are dealing with the same person, but this proposal sounds similar to the psychological proposal made later by sam.

Locke's proposal was the criterion of memory. But that has its problems too. How do you tell you are remembering correctly? It seems to me that X and Y are one and the same person only if X and Y are spatio-temporally continuous with each other.

I think it was Hume, not Locke, who held "the bundle theory" of the self.

I just do not see how your explanation in the final paragraph show how we can know it is the same soul. Doesn't, you know you are the same person "because you are conscious of it" just mean, you know you are the same person because you know you are the same person. And that is not very helpful.

but the only thing i need to do is try to change or at least bring some hope to the proposal by providing my own theory that would bring some hope to the proof that same body=same soul.

Don't you mean, same body=same person? The soul is what is sometimes called, "an intermediate variable", and can be dropped, since you are going to use "same soul" as a criterion for same body anyway. So, why not eliminate the middle-man?

well other than sameness of psychological characteristics, what else can i do? because the soul theory can easily be disproved because you can never get into the soul.

im trying to develop a response in which i bring in the possibility of there being life after death, but i cant really develop any responses because almost all the ones im trying to develop are similar to the ones given by sam later in the story.

what can be a proposal i can make that can bring in the possibility of you surving your death?