Some people believe that their body causes them exists. Every time I meet identical twins they seem to consider each other separate beings. DNA tests prove that identical twins have the exact same genes. The spooky thing is that identical twins actually begin as one, one egg is fertilized and then splits in two. If they have the same natural making, why don’t they feel they are each other?
Some people argue that the individual occurrences that each twin experiences causes them to separate into individual identities. If new experiences change your identity how are you still you? “I” went through major changes in live but yet the changes happened to “me”. If the twins changed identity because of their contrary experiences, why doesn’t this happen to anyone else?What makes you feel that you are you?
My self says I am I
and that is plain to see
If I were someone else
I'm sure I'd not be me.What makes you feel that you are you?
Philosophy Dictionary: soul
The immaterial ‘I’ that possesses conscious experience, controls passion, desire, and action, and maintains a perfect identity from birth (or before) to death (or after). Modern philosophy of mind has frequently been concerned with dismantling the cluster of views that make it plausible to think in terms of such a thing.
http://www.answers.com/topic/soul
The problem is that of what makes the identity of the single person at a time or through time. To take the latter first, we can each imagine ourselves as having been rather different, or as becoming rather different, as indeed we will in the normal course of life. What makes it the case that I survive a change, that it is still me at the end of it? It does not seem necessary that I should retain the body I now have, since I can imagine my brain transplanted into another body, and I can imagine another person taking over my body, as in multiple personality cases. But I can also imagine my brain changing either in its matter or its function while it goes on being me that is thinking and experiencing, perhaps less well or better than before. My psychology might change, so its continuity seems only contingently connected with my own survival. So, from the inside, there seems nothing tangible making it I myself who survives some sequence of changes. The problem of identity at a time is similar: it seems possible that more than one person (or personality) should share the same body and brain, so what makes up the unity of experience and thought that we each enjoy in normal living? The problems of personal identity were first highlighted in the modern era by Locke, who recognized that the idea that the sameness of a person might consist in the sameness of underlying mental substance, the solution proposed by Descartes, was incapable of providing any criterion for use in the ordinary empirical world, for instance in connection with the just attribution of responsibility for past action. Locke's own solution lay in the unity of consciousness, and in particular in the presence of memory of past actions; this account has been criticized as either circular, since memory presupposes identity, or insufficiently consonant with normal practice, since people forget things that they themselves did. The unity of the self failed to survive the scrutiny of Hume, whose own theory that the unity consisted in a kind of fiction (perhaps like that of a nation or a club, whose existence through time is not an all-or-nothing affair) was one of the few parts of his philosophy with which he declared himself dissatisfied. The organizing principle behind the unity of consciousness was a central element in Kant's reaction to the sensational atomism of the empiricists. Contemporary philosophy contains successors of all these attacks on the problem.
http://www.answers.com/topic/personal-id…
