Philosophy of Mind

Persistence of the Self

What makes a person the same self across change, memory, embodiment, and time?

Positions

  1. Bundle Theory

    There is no persisting self, only a bundle of ever-changing perceptions; what we call personal identity is a fiction the mind ascribes to them on the basis of resemblance and succession.

    Held by British Empiricism

  2. Psychological Continuity

    A person persists over time through overlapping chains of memory and psychological connection.

    Held by British Empiricism

Methods used to investigate this question

  • Thought Experiment

    A thought experiment constructs an imagined case and reasons through it to isolate a principle, intuition, possibility, or conceptual consequence.

    Open in Methods

Discussion

Grant that there is a self: what makes it the same self over time? Ancient soul theories locate persistence in an enduring substance; empiricist accounts in memory and psychological continuity; phenomenological accounts in the lived continuity of an embodied point of view. Each picks out a different thread as the one that must hold for a person to persist through change.

This is distinct from whether an enduring self exists at all — a prior question the map treats separately under Existence of the Self.

References