Identity and Change in Conscious Beings
The problem of personal identity relates to change as applied to people. The molecules that make up each individual change almost completely over a period of years. Usually, there is no trouble in saying that a little girl in 1920, for example, is the same as an old woman in 1998, even though they share a relatively small number of molecules in common. The same person is just described in two different ways, first as a little girl, and second, as an old woman. In fact, we are confident enough of our ability to reidentify people over time that we are given names that are supposed to last us from when we get them until we die many years later. The question is exactly why we call the old woman in 1998 the same person as that little girl in 1920.
However, according to quantum physics, individual molecules (and atoms, electrons, protons etc.) have no identity. For example, every electron is the same and in quantum mechanics, one can not keep track of an individual electron precisely. Therefore any electron can interchange with another one with no observable physical change of the system at all. Thus, any real object cannot remain the same, also because of movement of its physical parts (even much bigger than molecules). Similarly to Leibniz solution, in a real life, we can say the person (or any macroscopic object) is the same, because all signs refer to the person (or object) in the past, which evolved in time.
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Famous quotes containing the words identity, change, conscious and/or beings:
“Personal change, growth, development, identity formation—these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events—a job, a mate, a child—through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“... thinking consists in being conscious that one thinks.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)