John Locke

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The main idea that Locke wants to convey is that what makes up a person and an individual is consciousness, plus memory, which "can be extended backwards to any past action or thought" (4-5), is a part of personal identity. That does not mean that a person can remember every single little tiny detail of experience. It does mean that whoever has a personal identity can link his conscious experience to the continuity of physical experience.

Locke is trying to explain how the mind and body, or material substance, come together to make up the human experience of being, which is for Locke personal identity. He gets into the question of whether there can be two material substances in the same mental substance, only to reject it. Repeatedly he returns to the assertion that "consciousness alone unites actions (and memory and material experience) into the same person" (7). Consciousness is distinguished from thinking, but in Locke's view thinking, reflection, memory, and intelligence, which are uniquely combined in human beings as opposed to plants and animals, is impossible without consciousness, the source of (so to speak) the experience of experience.

The continuity of consciousness is unique to the individual, which means that one individual cannot inherit or otherwise share another individual's body or consciousness (nobody can be Socrates except Socrates). Nor is there one human consciousness of which all human beings parta

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far as Nagel is concerned. There remains a gap between the subjective and objective experience. Ideally, we would like to know how a mental and physical explanation is relevant to the same thing (consciousness), but the trouble is that nobody has figured out yet how objective, physical processes become or can be subjective. Even so, subjectivity is the reality and immediacy of individual experience of consciousness, including memory and the capacity for reasoned reflection. What starts with a dilemma remains a dilemma, with the subject-object relation in constant and unresolved tension. Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Thhs article is very unsettling and difficult because the writer poses a serious philosophical problem about the difficulty of identifying the nature of mind and body, using a literary device to illustrate the problem. He presents a science fiction tale that Locke might use as an example of "absurdities" in which he deliberately upsets what he himself establishes objectively about the continuity of his consciousness and physical presence. The idea of the Teletransporter uses consciousness rather than physical space to get the individual out of his futuristic "cubicle" and into a Mars vacation. The idea of the

Category: Philosophy - J