Damascene Philosophy

QuestionsIX

Are you your memories?

John Locke argued that you extend exactly as far back as you can remember. The idea is powerful, and it has holes you could drive a carriage through.

Reading time
4 min
Difficulty
Intermediate
Branch
Identity
First posed
John Locke, 1694; criticised by Joseph Butler, 1736, and Thomas Reid, 1785

The question

In the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke added a chapter that founded the modern debate about the self. He distinguished three things: a man (a living human body), a substance (whatever the mind is made of), and a person. A person, he said, is 'a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.'

What makes a person the same over time, Locke argued, is not sameness of body or of soul-stuff, but sameness of consciousness, which in practice means memory. You are the person who did whatever you can remember doing, from the inside. Your identity reaches exactly as far back as your consciousness does.

The view has a striking consequence. If your soul once animated someone in ancient Troy but you have no memory of it, you are not that person, whatever the metaphysics of souls. And if someone else woke up remembering your life as their own, they might have a better claim to be you than your own body does.

“Personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness.”

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694)

Why it matters

Locke was explicit that 'person' is a forensic term: it is about responsibility. On his view, punishing someone for an act they cannot remember at all is punishing a different person. That conclusion still bites in debates about amnesia and criminal responsibility.

The memory theory also underlies how most people instinctively think about mind uploading, body-swap stories and life after death. If memory carries identity, a perfect copy of your memories would carry you.

Key terms

  • Personal identityWhat makes a person at one time the same person as someone at another time.
  • Psychological continuityOverlapping chains of memories, intentions, beliefs and character linking a person at different times. Many theories of personal identity are built on it.
  • Quasi-memoryA memory-like state of seeming to remember an experience, without the requirement that it was your own experience. Introduced to avoid circularity in memory theories of personal identity.
  • TransitivityA relation is transitive if, whenever A stands in it to B and B to C, A stands in it to C. Identity is transitive; similarity is not.
  • Forensic personLocke's description of 'person' as a forensic term, a legal and moral notion concerned with responsibility, reward and punishment, rather than a biological one.

The positions

Position I

Memory makes the person

You are identical with any past person whose experiences you can remember from the inside.

Position II

Overlapping memory chains

You need not remember your whole past directly. It is enough to be linked to it by a chain of overlapping memories.

Position III

Memory is evidence, not essence

Memory is how we usually know who someone is. It is not what their identity consists in.

Arguments and objections

Memory makes the person

Best argument
It explains why the prince-and-cobbler swap seems to move the prince: his memories go with his mind. It explains why we feel that a person with total, permanent amnesia has in some sense ended. And it makes identity something we have direct access to, rather than a hidden fact about soul-stuff that we could never check.
Strongest objection
Joseph Butler's circularity objection: genuine memory already presupposes identity. To remember doing something is to remember yourself doing it. So memory cannot be what makes someone the same person; it assumes the sameness instead of explaining it.
The reply
Sydney Shoemaker and Derek Parfit introduced quasi-memory: a memory-like state caused in the right way by a past experience, without assuming that the experience was the rememberer's own. Identity can then be defined in terms of quasi-memory without circularity.

Overlapping memory chains

Best argument
This repairs Thomas Reid's objection, in which an old general remembers being a young officer, who remembered being a flogged boy, though the general has forgotten the flogging. Strict memory would make the general the officer but not the boy, which breaks the transitivity of identity. Chains restore it: the general is linked to the boy through the officer.
Strongest objection
Chains can still branch or fuse. If two people's memories were merged into one, or one person's memories copied into two, the chain theory gives answers that identity cannot accept.

Memory is evidence, not essence

Best argument
Butler and Reid argued that identity is simple and basic, belonging to a persisting self or soul, and memory is merely one way of tracking it. Animalists give the same structure a biological basis: you are a living organism, and memories are typically good evidence of which organism you are.
Strongest objection
If identity is a further fact over and above memory and psychology, it seems unknowable and, worse, unimportant. Why care whether the same soul persists if all your memories and character could be stripped away?

Who argued what

  • Memory makes the person John Locke, Sydney Shoemaker
  • Overlapping memory chains Derek Parfit, Anthony Quinton
  • Memory is evidence, not essence Joseph Butler, Thomas Reid, Eric Olson

Variations

The amnesiac defendant

A man commits a crime, then suffers complete and permanent amnesia. On Locke's view, the person on trial did not commit the crime, though the same man did. Courts generally disagree. Should they?

False memories

Research by Elizabeth Loftus and others has shown that people can come to vividly 'remember' events that never happened. If memory constitutes identity, what does a false memory make you?

Go deeper

Locke's 'forensic' person

Locke wrote that 'person' is 'a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit'. He meant that the concept exists to track who should be praised, blamed, rewarded and punished. Read this way, his theory is partly a proposal about how we ought to think about responsibility, not only a discovery about metaphysics.

Related ideas

Question

Are you the same person you were at eight?

Almost every cell, belief and memory has changed. Something makes that child you. The question is what.

Question

Is the self an illusion?

Look inward for the one who is looking, and you find thoughts, feelings and sensations. You never seem to find the looker.

Thought experiment

Would you step into the teleporter?

It scans you, destroys your body, and builds a perfect copy on Mars a moment later. The copy wakes up remembering stepping in. Did you travel, or did you die?

Thought experiment

Could you upload your mind?

If every connection in your brain were scanned and run on a computer, would the program be you, a copy of you, or no one at all?

Thought experiment

The Ship of Theseus

Replace a ship's planks one at a time until none of the originals remain. Is it the same ship? And if someone builds a second ship from the old planks, which one is the original?

Further reading and sources

Open questions

  • If you lost every memory but kept your personality, would you still be you?
  • Is it fair to punish someone for an act they genuinely cannot remember?
  • Could two people both truly remember being the same earlier person?

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