What makes a person at one time the same person at a later time, and is memory the answer?
personal identity over time, Locke's memory or consciousness criterion, and its leading objections
A VCE Philosophy Unit 3 answer on personal identity over time. Sets out the body, soul and memory criteria, reconstructs Locke's consciousness theory of personhood, presents Reid's brave officer and the circularity objection, and reaches a judgement.
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What this dot point is asking
VCAA wants you to state the problem of personal identity over time, lay out the candidate criteria (sameness of body, sameness of soul, sameness of consciousness or memory), reconstruct Locke's memory criterion as an argument, and evaluate it against the classic objections. The high-band answer does not merely list theories. It fixes the question precisely, shows why bodily and soul criteria struggle, presents Locke premise by premise, then names which objection hits which premise and weighs the result.
The problem and the candidate criteria
The question is about numerical identity, not qualitative similarity. A person changes cells, beliefs and character across a lifetime, yet we say it is the same person. What relation makes this true? Three classic answers compete.
The bodily criterion says you are the same person if you have the same living body or brain. It fits ordinary practice but struggles with body-swap cases and with the intuition that what matters is the mind, not the flesh.
The soul criterion says identity consists in sameness of an immaterial soul. Locke objects that we have no access to soul substance: if my soul were swapped overnight while my consciousness continued unbroken, nothing in my experience would change, so soul-sameness cannot be what we care about.
The psychological criterion, which Locke pioneers, locates identity in continuity of consciousness rather than in any substance.
Locke's memory or consciousness theory
John Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, distinguishes the human being (a biological organism), the substance (body or soul), and the person (a thinking, self-conscious being that can consider itself as itself across time). Personhood is a forensic concept, tied to responsibility and reward.
Reconstructed:
- A person is a thinking intelligent being that can consider itself as the same thinking thing in different times and places.
- It does this by consciousness, which always accompanies thinking, including memory of past experiences.
- Personal identity therefore extends backwards exactly as far as present consciousness can be extended to a past action.
- So I am the same person as whoever past actions I can remember performing, regardless of any change in body or soul substance.
This is why, for Locke, the prince whose consciousness enters the cobbler's body is the same person as the prince, though the same human as the cobbler. Identity follows consciousness, not the underlying substance.
The objections
Reid's brave officer (the transitivity problem)
Thomas Reid presses the decisive structural objection. Suppose a boy is flogged for robbing an orchard; as a young officer he storms a fort and at that moment remembers the flogging; as an old general he remembers storming the fort but has forgotten the flogging. By Locke's criterion the officer is the boy (he remembers the flogging) and the general is the officer (he remembers the fort), but the general is not the boy (he cannot remember the flogging). Yet identity is transitive: if A is B and B is C, then A is C. So Locke's criterion delivers a contradiction. Memory connections are not transitive, but identity must be.
Butler's circularity objection
Joseph Butler argues that memory cannot constitute personal identity because genuine memory presupposes it. To remember doing something just is to be aware that I, the very same person, did it. So we cannot explain what makes me the same person in terms of memory, because memory smuggles in the identity it was meant to analyse. The account is circular.
The false memory and gap problems
Locke also seems committed to saying that if I sincerely seem to remember an act I never did, I am responsible for it, and that during dreamless sleep, when consciousness lapses, the person ceases to exist. Both consequences are hard to accept.
Evaluation
The objections are serious but not equally fatal. The transitivity problem is repaired by replacing direct memory with overlapping chains of psychological connection: the general is connected to the boy by a continuous chain even without a direct memory, restoring transitivity. The circularity problem is met by appealing to quasi-memory, an experience just like a memory but which does not by definition entail that the rememberer is the original agent. With quasi-memory, the criterion no longer presupposes identity.
Against the bodily and soul rivals, Locke's deepest insight survives: what we care about in survival is the continuation of our mental life, not the persistence of any lump of matter or undetectable soul. That is why the prince and cobbler case pulls so strongly.
Judgement: Locke's bare memory theory fails as stated because of transitivity and circularity, but the underlying psychological criterion is the most promising approach once memory is generalised to overlapping continuity. The substance theories are weaker: the soul criterion is unverifiable and the bodily criterion misidentifies what matters. Locke is wrong in the detail and right in the strategy.
Exam-style practice questions
Practice questions written in the style of VCAA exam questions on this dot point, with worked answer explainers. The year tag is the paper they imitate, not the source.
2021 VCAA2 marksOutline Locke's thought experiment of the prince and the cobbler.Show worked answer →
Two marks for an accurate outline that draws out the point about identity.
Locke asks us to imagine that the consciousness of a prince, carrying all his princely memories and thoughts, comes to inhabit the body of a cobbler, while the cobbler's own consciousness departs. Locke says everyone would agree that the resulting person is the prince, even though he has the cobbler's body.
The point is that personal identity follows consciousness (memory), not the body or the substance. Because the prince's consciousness has moved, the person has moved with it. One mark for the set-up of the swap, one for the moral that sameness of person tracks sameness of consciousness rather than sameness of body.
2019 VCAA2 marksExplain the problem with Locke's theory of personal identity, which Michaels refers to as the 'Lockean circle'.Show worked answer →
Two marks for stating the circularity objection clearly.
Locke analyses personal identity in terms of memory: a later person is the same as an earlier person if the later one remembers the earlier one's experiences. The Lockean circle is that this account presupposes what it is meant to explain. To distinguish a genuine memory from a mere apparent memory (a delusion), we must say that a genuine memory is one of an experience the person actually had. But "the person actually had it" already assumes a fact about personal identity.
So memory cannot non-circularly define personal identity, because genuine (as opposed to merely seeming) memory already builds in the identity of the person whose experience it was. Full marks make explicit that real memory presupposes identity, so identity cannot be defined by memory.
2019 VCAA3 marksWhy does Locke's account of personal identity provide a basis for personal responsibility, whereas Hume's does not? Use an example to support your response.Show worked answer →
Three marks: contrast the two views and illustrate with an example.
Locke (responsibility secured). For Locke the person is a forensic concept: you are the same person as the past agent just in case your consciousness extends back to that act. Because identity tracks consciousness, it is just to hold you responsible for exactly those past acts you can own as yours. Example: a thief who genuinely remembers committing the theft is the same person who did it, so punishment is deserved; if all memory connection were truly absent, Locke says it would be unjust to punish.
Hume (responsibility undermined). Hume holds there is no persisting self, only a bundle of perceptions linked by resemblance and causation into a "fictitious" identity. If there is no genuinely identical subject persisting from the act to the punishment, there is no real person who both did the deed and is now answerable for it, so the basis for desert dissolves. Full marks contrast Locke's identity-grounded responsibility with Hume's loss of a persisting bearer, supported by an example.