Personal Identity: Crash Course Philosophy #19

Personal identity is the essential property that makes you, you.

This theory suggests that you retain your identity because you remain in the same body from birth to death.

•But our bodies replenish and remodel itselves throughout the entire course of our lives.

According to JOHN LOCKE the thing that makes you YOU is the non-physical stuff– your consciousness.

•If personal identity requires a memory, then none of us became who we are until our first memory. Which means we all lost at least a couple of years at the beginning.

Personal identity persists over time because you retain memories of yourself at different points, and each of those memories is connected to one before it.

•If you can remember back to your first day of kindergarten, you maintain a memory link to that person.