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 and, identity, change, conscious and/or beings:
“The adolescent does not develop her identity and individuality by moving outside her family. She is not triggered by some magic unconscious dynamic whereby she rejects her family in favour of her peers or of a larger society.... She continues to develop in relation to her parents. Her mother continues to have more influence over her than either her father or her friends.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)
“Wisdom is not just knowing fundamental truths, if these are unconnected with the guidance of life or with a perspective on its meaning. If the deep truths physicists describe about the origin and functioning of the universe have little practical import and do not change our picture of the meaning of the universe and our place within it, then knowing them would not count as wisdom.”
—Robert Nozick (b. 1938)
“Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)