When we speak of personal identity we are mainly interested as philosophers in the numerical oneness of a person over time. When approaching the problem of personal identity it is essential to take cognisance of three very important cardinal laws of nature which can easily be confirmed by any physicist or cosmologist one cares to consult.

      After outlining the claims of the contending disputants to demonstrate my familiarity with such notions, I intend to show that there is one ontological problem underlying all of the argument and counter-argument concerning ‘personal identity’ – the pernicious problem of the reification of abstraction. This paper seeks to address the necessary and sufficient conditions that confirm that a given individual is and can only ever be the same person that he/she was many years ago.

The second part of the above sentence appears to be fairly straightforward and easy enough to verify empirically. Personal identity based upon individual psychical characteristics can be officially established by one’s appearance. It is often augmented and confirmed by photographs attached to such documents as passports, driving licences, student identity cards etc. People to whom we are already familiar identify us by our voice. The police by our fingerprints and DNA code and by the mass of documents that are generated by the state and other organisations such as banks, building societies, personal identity numbers and passwords.

      But what of the first part of the sentence? What about – The distinct personality of an individual regarded as a persisting entity?

      Can someone really steal our identity? No, of course they cannot; what they can steal is the documentation and data by which we are identified by those persons who do not know us as a familiar, recognisable, identifiable, historically continuous person.

      We are constantly being warned to shred bank statements and other official paperwork which contain details of our personal identity. If they are able to obtain our personal details, are they really in possession of our identity? We continue to look and talk the same and we still have the same fingerprints and DNA. We are still accepted as the person we really are by our wives or loved ones and the dog and the people next door. What is really going on? Could it be that whilst they have managed to acquire certain information that enables them to pass themselves off as us, they have left our true identity intact? They have assumed a false identity, for by identifying themselves as us they have left something which is the true essence of our identity inviolate – something which no other human being in the world could ever appropriate – something which we can refer to as ‘our personhood?’

When the Stoics referred to the bodily 'substrate', they were attributing existence to it without referring to its identifiable qualities. Hence they were describing the 'substance' or ‘ousia,’ literally 'being' or 'existence,’ or 'primary matter' considered abstractively as 'unqualified.' We can liken it to the sculptor's clay, in which first the head of Socrates is modelled, and then the clay is pounded and squashed into a ball again and remodelled as the head of Posidonius. Thus the quality which was formerly identifiable as Socrates, itself a second corporeal entity imbuing the substrate matter, has now been replaced by a new reconfiguration of the substrate, imbuing a quality now visually identifiable as Posidonius.

    Michael Rea [2] tells us in ‘The Problem of Material Constitution,’ that The Growing Argument has its origin in the fifth century B. C. in the writings of the comic playwright Epicharmus:

The Growing Argument, or 'argument about what grows' claims that a person who grows or diminishes becomes a different person. Hence the Growing Argument was invoked in connexion with the Ship of Theseus, which was said to have been preserved for centuries at Athens, during which time every timber in it rotted and was replaced.
’[3] ( Long & Sedley 2005. p. 172-173)

It seems that for those who held this view, (and not all did) personal identity was dependent upon the underlying substrate, the fleshy entablature of the body. When that was renewed, as with gradual replacement of parts of the Ship of Theseus the original identity changes with the renewal process.

What does it mean to be a certain person and how do we retain our identity if the substance of our bodies is being completely and utterly renewed every seven years?

       For John Locke personal identity consists of psychological continuity. he wrote: ‘For as far as any intelligent being can repeat an idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first and with the same consciousness it has of any present action, so far is the same personal self.’[5] (Maslin. p. 262. 2001)


     So for Locke personal identity does not depend on the persistence of a fleshly portion of matter such as the brain, the substances in which these experiences are incarnated are irrelevant to the identity. Nor does Locke place any importance on the continuance of an immaterial Cartesian soul, but, rather, in a certain kind of continuity and connectedness between a series of essences. Locke is claiming that a present person is one and the same as a past person only if the present person can remember what that past person did.

      Thomas Reid (1710-96), objected that we can forget that we did certain things, and yet this does not mean that we were not one and the same person that did them? Derek Parfit countered this criticism by introducing the notion of connectedness, whereby though we may forget the precise details of some past event, we often remember other peripheral circumstances associated to the event. We remember other people having done something. This is sometimes referred to as ‘quasi-memory.’ Our memory tends to be selective and often functions differently from person to person. Often we find that when two people give their account of a past event they both shared, each relates a different aspect of the happening which the other had completely forgotten about and vice versa.

    Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752), came up with an ingenious argument against Locke’s dependence on memory of past events – namely that Locke's account is circular. For the sentence: 'I remember teaching Florence last week,’ to make sense, the reference of the two occurrences of the pronoun ‘I’ must be to one and the same person throughout. In other words, if it really is true that I remember teaching Florence last week, then this presupposes I am one and the person who taught Florence. If it wasn't me that taught Florence, I am mistaken, and therefore I can't really be remembering after all. My numerical identity with the person who taught Florence is used as the criterion of whether or not I have a genuine memory of teaching her. It is precisely in this way that the notion of genuine memory presupposes personal identity and why memory cannot be appealed to in order to constitute personal identity. [6] (Ibid. p. 266.) Parfit responds by falling back on ‘quasi-memory.’ To quasi-remember simply means to remember an event without being identical to the person who witnessed or engaged in that event.

    We can have an apparent memory of teaching Florence, leaving open whether it really was me or someone else. Hence the identity of the person doing the quasi-remembering is not presupposed and the circularity is circumvented. Ultimately Parfit creates a system which bears a strong resemblance to Hume’s ‘bundle theory of the self,’ which establishes a theory of personal identity purely in terms of the causal relations between experiences and other psychological features in straightforward ways. Hume believed [after fruitless introspection] that there is no ‘I’, no self, no ‘subject’ of experiences themselves. The 'self’ then is no more than a
                   ‘A bundle of contiguities, and similar causal experiences’

The question for philosophy in my view therefore is not about the Lockean vagueness of: ’A certain kind of continuity and connectedness between a series of essences,’

for ‘essences’ is simply the Latin way of saying ‘isnesses.’ Philosophy’s task is to identify these phantom ‘isnesses’ if they exist, which I believe they do not.

     When I meet up again with my old sergeant major at the annual regimental reunion, I find him to be a retired, frail old Chelsea Pensioner aged eighty-seven with a wrinkled and bent body that has been completely renewed almost eight times in the intervening years as a result of the cellular ‘seven year switch.’ When, turning to a friend, I say:

On that basis, although the organic flesh and blood constituent substance of my old sergeant major has been naturally replaced and reconstituted by the process of cell death and renewal many times over the last fifty-five years, [he has also had an artificial hip-joint fitted] the peculiarly qualified entity that is the recognisable, identifiable, historically continuous person I called 'sergeant major' is the product of that process of historical continuity.

     My own view of course is that the necessary and sufficient conditions that confirm that a given individual is the same person that he/she was many years ago can be met in a number of ways. First science will confirm there is no metaphysical dichotomy between the constantly-copied and replaced body cells of the old soldier and the ‘historically continuous version’ of the be-medalled old guy enjoying a pint at the bar with me whilst he recalling the events of yesteryear in foreign climes. When the old neuron cells which constitute the encoded templates of his memory are copied and replaced via the process of natural renewal, the patterns of the neuronal matrix that map to those Egyptian memories are copied too – though like a continually replicated video, they lose the freshness and sharpness of the original exponentially with each reduplication which was precisely the point of Thomas Reid’s criticism of Locke.

     Secondly there has never ever been a case in human history where a person has ceased to be the person he or she is and become another person. People may be identified by other names, they may change their physical appearance, but Carl Gustaf Folke Hubertus and the King of Sweden remain the same person, whether he is fifteen or fifty-five. Maslin reminds us that what we are looking for is a non-circular account of personal identity framed in terms of the causal notion of quasi-remembering of one past experience causing another present experience. were this relation is couched in such a way that the identity of the person whose experiences are in question is not presupposed.

     My eliminativist statements presented above appear to incorporate these requirements and cast a light upon the anomalies in all of the systems mentioned above from those of the early Greeks, through Locke and his critics and apologists, not forgetting Maslin himself, for all of these systems of person identity are characterised by a similar error – the error of reification. Instead of asking whether the sergeant major (Egypt 1952) and the sergeant major (Reunion 2007) are one and the same person, we could instead ask whether a certain sergeant major stage A* and sergeant major stage B* are aspects of a single person in a similar way that the referee blowing his whistle to signal kick off, and the referee blowing the same whistle to signal full time are part of the same football match.

    There is a concatenation of person-stages, each link remembering events experienced by the immediately preceding link. So long as A* and B* are connected by such a chain and do not experience a broken link such as Alzheimer’s disease, , it is not necessary that B* remembers all of the events that A* himself experienced – though inevitably he remembers many.

    Some insist that genuinely remembering an event 'from the inside' is required as a necessary antecedent or precondition of the notion of personal identity. They claim that we cannot tell whether our apparent memories of attending Winston Churchill’s funeral are genuine memories, unless we first know whether or not we are identical with the person who attended Winston Churchill’s funeral. But that is a red herring, for identificationally it does not matter either way. You are either identified as the person who remembers attending Winston Churchill’s funeral, or the person who can’t remember attending Winston Churchill’s funeral – either way you are one and the same person. Personal selfsameness is an ontological given.

As for the rest of the arguments and counter arguments. The claims and counter-claims of epistemological idealists all flow from the same mistaken well-spring, and are engendered by what some call: ‘the ontological difference’ – a misconception redolent of Cartesian duality, but much more subtle and pervasive – the reification of change itself. Hence in process of singling out one human being from another, the pointing or distinguishing person [the person who identifies] transforms the complex set of identificational phenomena into a single quasi-entity labelled ‘identity,’ which is attributed to the person who is identified as a ‘property’ in a similar way that we might say that someone ‘has’ a hare-lip or a hernia.


   But the old man at the bar is stumbling a little now. He is losing his grip both on the bar-rail and on the conversational dialogue. I nudge him into a renewed recherche du temps perdu by helping him out with a little of my own causative quasi-remembering of events from our military past.