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:
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life.... They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It’s wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn’t think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“The mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)