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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consciousness | 7/18 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:40:02.432894+00:00 | kb-cron |
An unsolved problem in the philosophy of consciousness is how it relates to the nature of personal identity. This includes questions regarding whether someone is the "same person" from moment to moment. If that is the case, another question is what exactly the "identity carrier" is that makes a conscious being "the same" being from one moment to the next. The problem of determining personal identity also includes questions such as Benj Hellie's vertiginous question, which can be summarized as "Why am I me and not someone else?". The philosophical problems regarding the nature of personal identity have been extensively discussed by Thomas Nagel in his book The View from Nowhere. A common view of personal identity is that an individual has a continuous identity that persists from moment to moment, with an individual having a continuous identity consisting of a line segment stretching across time from birth to death. In the case of an afterlife as described in Abrahamic religions, one's personal identity is believed to stretch infinitely into the future, forming a ray or line. This notion of identity is similar to the form of dualism advocated by René Descartes. However, some philosophers argue that this common notion of personal identity is unfounded. Daniel Kolak has argued extensively against it in his book I am You. Kolak refers to the aforementioned notion of personal identity being linear as "Closed individualism". Another view of personal identity according to Kolak is "Empty individualism", in which one's personal identity only exists for a single moment of time. However, Kolak advocates for a view of personal identity called Open individualism, in which all consciousness is in reality a single being and individual personal identity in reality does not exist at all. Another philosopher who has contested the notion of personal identity is Derek Parfit. In his book Reasons and Persons, he describes a thought experiment known as the teletransportation paradox. In Buddhist philosophy, the concept of anattā refers to the idea that the self is an illusion. Other philosophers have argued that Hellie's vertiginous question has a number of philosophical implications relating to the metaphysical nature of consciousness. Christian List argues that the vertiginous question and the existence of first-personal facts is evidence against physicalism, and evidence against other third-personal metaphysical pictures, including standard versions of dualism. List also argues that the vertiginous question implies a "quadrilemma" for theories of consciousness. He claims that at most three of the following metaphysical claims can be true: 'first-person realism', 'non-solipsism', 'non-fragmentation', and 'one world'—and at least one of these four must be false. List has proposed a model he calls the "many-worlds theory of consciousness" in order to reconcile the subjective nature of consciousness without lapsing into solipsism. Vincent Conitzer argues that the nature of identity is connected to A series and B series theories of time, and that A-theory being true implies that the "I" is metaphysically distinguished from other perspectives. Other philosophical theories regarding the metaphysical nature of self are Caspar Hare's theories of perspectival realism, in which things within perceptual awareness have a defining intrinsic property that exists absolutely and not relative to anything, and egocentric presentism, in which the experiences of other individuals are not present in the way that one's current perspective is.
== Scientific study == For many decades, consciousness as a research topic was avoided by the majority of mainstream scientists, because of a general feeling that a phenomenon defined in subjective terms could not properly be studied using objective experimental methods. In 1975 George Mandler published an influential psychological study which distinguished between slow, serial, and limited conscious processes and fast, parallel and extensive unconscious ones. The Science and Religion Forum 1984 annual conference, 'From Artificial Intelligence to Human Consciousness' identified the nature of consciousness as a matter for investigation; Donald Michie was a keynote speaker. A decade later Michie presented an engineering view of consciousness in the computer science context. Starting in the 1980s, an expanding community of neuroscientists and psychologists have associated themselves with a field called Consciousness Studies, giving rise to a stream of experimental work published in books, journals such as Consciousness and Cognition, Frontiers in Consciousness Research, Psyche, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies, along with regular conferences organized by groups such as the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and the Society for Consciousness Studies. Modern medical and psychological investigations into consciousness are based on psychological experiments (including, for example, the investigation of priming effects using subliminal stimuli), and on case studies of alterations in consciousness produced by trauma, illness, or drugs. Broadly viewed, scientific approaches are based on two core concepts. The first identifies the content of consciousness with the experiences that are reported by human subjects; the second makes use of the concept of consciousness that has been developed by neurologists and other medical professionals who deal with patients whose behavior is impaired. In either case, the ultimate goals are to develop techniques for assessing consciousness objectively in humans as well as other animals, and to understand the neural and psychological mechanisms that underlie it.
=== Measurement via verbal report ===