A Diary Entry called "A Concatenation of Cataclysms"

A Concatenation of Cataclysms

Yesterday I had mild, sporadic tinnitus in my blocked, hearing-impaired right ear, which was kind of annoying and made me slightly anxious that some permanent damage might be being inflicted. That night when I went to bed, I had a clogged nose and my ear was still blocked and squealing quietly. Since my sinusitis and shitty ears were starting to really agitate me, I decided I would do something about it: I hence started blowing snot out of my right nostril like nobody's business in a (probably) quixotic attempt to clear out my sinuses and thereby unblock my right ear. I was holding my nostril open with my left index finger and blowing furiously, depositing the sticky snot on my sheets (why not?). Eventually, after maybe half an hour, it did seem like I had unblocked my ear somewhat, but then, maybe as a result of this, that ear started to hurt like hell. The pain was very intense. I couldn't rest on that ear because it was so sore. It kind of felt like all the nerves were exposed to the air or something. It was a really terrific ache. I tried to rest with only my left ear on the pillow to get to sleep, but I am used to constantly changing sides when I sleep and the forced stasis was putting me off my routine. Consequently, more than two hours passed with me unable to get any shut-eye. Finally, at 12:20pm, I decided to temporarily give up on the possibility of sleeping and instead go searching in the kitchen for some kind of painkiller to allay the ache. There I found some Panadol and took two tablets. I don't know if the Panadol worked, but I do know I got to sleep about ten minutes after I returned to bed post-pills and in the morning the ache was gone. 

My ear was still blocked, though, and the hearing was still impaired. Oh, and the mild, sporadic tinnitus was still there. 

I spent this morning mostly doing my French essay (as well as watching the last few episodes of Season Cinco of T & E Awesome Show Great Job! and various other things that I often do on Saturdays (eating cereal, doing ablutions, drinking coffee that my dad made and eating the pastry that he had bought that morning, as he often does on Saturdays or Sundays, staring out the window in the study, going on Facebook for no reason, etc)) and my ear didn't improve. As soon as I had gotten up, my dad had recommended that I phone up the Fox Valley Medical Centre about my ear and book an appointment at 8 O'clock on the dot so I could get in early. I did in fact carry out this recommendation, phoning them up at precisely 8am (according to my mum's laptop, which was sitting on the bench open), but the call went straight to their answering machine because, as the recorded message informed me, they are not open on Saturdays. I should have known this, of course, considering that the Fox Valley Medical Centre is a part of the Sydney Adventist Hospital (or “San”), which is a Seventh Day Adventist-run institution, and Seventh Day Adventists are those whackos who observe the sabbath on a Saturday for fuck knows why and are also vegetarians, I think (I am fairly sure of the latter fact because I used to always go to the San Carols by Candlelight and always get the Nachos they sold and they were always made with kidney beans instead of mince and I think my mum explained to me why when I asked once). Anyway, after the Fox Valley Medical Centre plan fell through, I had only one other medical option: the place at Hornsby. However, even though I wasn’t aware that that practice doesn’t take bookings until about 11:30am of this morning, when my mum told me, I didn't want to phone up or go there because I couldn't be fucked and because I found it slightly daunting (I am lazy and very shy). 

My parents went out at around 12, I think (I don't know where and I didn't ask). At that point, I knew I had about an hour and a half till I had to leave for my soccer game (which was at 3pm at St Johns Oval), and I resolved that I would try to finish my French essay before I left. I slowly worked my way through the essay, and had just reached the end of my third body paragraph at 1:12, I think it was, when I suddenly realised that I had to start getting ready for my soccer game. For the next 18 minutes, I frantically ran around the house gathering underpants and my soccer gear, and then some shinpads, and then a water bottle, and my wallet, and the car key. And then I was ready. I slipped into my Vans for driving, and – with a water bottle, wallet and pair of car keys in hand – I walked out of the door, then locked the door, then got into the car. Thereupon, I realised I ought to check that the game I thought was on was in fact the one on, not last week's game, and that I had got the time and ground right. Therefore, cursing and self-castigating like an old trooper, I went back towards the door, unlocked it, ran to my dad's (/the family's) Mac, frenetically clicked on the mouse, found that he had turned the computer off (as per usual, ever since he was told by some imbecile that leaving the previous one on too long was one of the reasons for its failure), and then ran upstairs towards the study and my laptop. I flipped up my bad boy's recently flipped-down lid, rapidly entered the password (making sure I pressed the dodgy keys very hard and verifying that they registered as black dots on the screen), and then, once logged in, clicked on the fortunately still open Hotmail tab, found the relevant Email, saw that the date was correct and that I had got the time and ground right. I thus ran back to the car, hopped in, and began the slow and torturous process of manoeuvring the Alfa – with its tiny fucking turning circle – out of the top part of the driveway, where there were numerous obstacles, including the Subaru, parked right next to it. Eventually, I completed this and, after bumping my way over a felled, gibbous branch of one of those weird Palm trees that our neighbours on the left planted, I was off. On my way, from misery to happiness today. Listening to Tchaikovsky with one ear. And so forth. 

All was fairly pleasant and uneventful until I emerged from the Lane Cove Tunnel and was cruising along the M1 towards the city, whereupon I suddenly had the most harrowing revelation: I DIDN’T PACK MY SOCCER BOOTS IN THE CAR. 'Shit', I thought, 'Just my fucking luck'. You see, this stuff seems to happen to me all the fucking time. I am really no good at being an adult. Almost every time I have gone to a soccer training or game, I have managed to fuck up in one way or another. I am also chronically absentminded, and this is confirmed to me every time I have to take multiple things to some event. God knows how many times over my entire school career I forgot some important item and then either had to tell my dad to turn around the car when we were already half-way to the station, or get my mum to move heaven and earth for it to be delivered to me when I was already at school. Jesus. And my dad has even tried to teach my how not to forget to take  things. This is what made my forgetting of my soccer boots even more ignominiously improbable: I was even cognisant of his main prescription, that I should make a list of the stuff I needed in my head, when I was gathering my soccer stuff! Yes, that's right, and I still didn't put the boots in the car! No wonder I couldn't help thinking (and only half-facetiously) that, after all the bad luck that seemed to plague me last year, God actually hated me, and was smiting me once again. Either that, or I had a problem.

I quickly considered not turning back and instead hedging my bets that someone would have a second pair of boots. But I reasoned that even if Olly did bring two of his many pairs of boots, they probably wouldn't fit, and despite the tremendous hassle it would be heading back to Wahroonga, it was probably the only sensible option. Given that I was on the M1, however, doing a U-turn was out of the question. And so, with a mind now flooded with adrenaline, anger, frustration and various other, more complex emotions, I knew I had to recalibrate my route fast. And so I did. I decided to take the North Sydney exit, and thus headed into the furthest left lane in anticipation of the exit. The clock was ticking, the petrol gauge was looking more ominous, everything was bad.

Seeing as everything was bad, I decided to try to think of ways of thinking that might console me. I proposed that the farce I was currently embroiled in was perhaps ‘character-building’, finding the cliche grimly funny in the situation. ‘It is the kind of thing that will make me who I am, who I am tomorrow will be a legacy of this debacle,’ I said to myself, in a fine example of gallows humour. Naturally, the logical part of me rejected these sentiments soon after they came to me, and wondered aloud to myself what "character-building" even meant. Nevertheless, my mind didn't produce many more interesting thoughts than that (except the brief fancy that we probably live in a deterministic universe and I therefore had no choice in the matter, which I also dismissed). And yet, I still tried to console myself. I reasoned that it was perhaps better that I wouldn't have to start the game, given that I was ill and probably incapacitated in some way, and was probably lacking my normal stamina. I also recognised that I probably wouldn't be vituperated by coach for my lateness considering that I would be able to excuse myself (and he probably wouldn't get angry even if I couldn't). These thoughts were slightly consoling, even though the idea that I had wasted half an hour of driving and therefore petrol for nothing, and would waste another half hour going back home in dense traffic, before heading all the way back out again, was incalculably exasperating. 

Anyhow, I eventually made it back to Wahroonga a little after 2:30, according to the Alfa clock. Once at 23 Strone Ave, I parked the car in the middle of the driveway, yanked up the handbrake, turned the car off, sprinted towards the front door, unlocked it, ran inside the house, picked up my boots, locked the door, then ran back towards the car, threw the boots in, hopped in the driver's seat and began the long manoeuvre out (I thought where I had parked would help me get out but I was mistaken). Eventually, I was out of the driveway and back on the road, ready for a frustrating journey back to the city, with a clock ticking towards 3 and a petrol gauge looking worse and worse.

It was 10 past 3 on the Alfa clock when I finally reached Sydney Uni. I pulled up alongside the St Johns gate, which I immediately saw was locked, and then looked at the field: to my horror, no one was there. The nets weren't on the goals, and the place was deserted. Completely empty. And about 50 metres away from me, I saw a sign: "Oval closed".

'You are actually kidding me, God,' I thought. I haven't bothered to charge my phone for the last week or so, so maybe I would have known about the closure if I had been a normal person, but this fact didn't in any way alleviate the almost cataclysmic misfortune I felt. Fortunately, I was able to control my emotions, for the most part. I decided that the worst moment had been the one where I realised I had forgotten my boots, and that it was definitely good in some sense that I didn't have to force my infirm body through any great strain. I was disturbed by the thought that my team might be playing elsewhere, but I resolved to banish that from my mind. Nevertheless, one terrible thought did persist: all the driving had been for nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the stress, all the preparation, all the time, all the petrol, it had all been totally pointless.

Even this was surmountable, though, because I did have one idea for how to make the journey not completely otiose: I would get some petrol and a packet of chips from the servo twenty metres up the road. That way, I could at least feel that my massive, arduous trip could almost have been a normal journey to the servo, for a fill-up and a snack. It was not true, but the fantasy did console me, somehow. And the drive back was actually quite nice, complemented nicely by the Red Rock Deli Honey Soy Chicken chips and some soothing music. 

But I still have a fucked right ear.     

An Essay called "An Essay about 'Identity'" (that is highly derivative of Wittgenstein) (that is really, really atrocious and I now disown)

An Essay about ‘Personal Identity’

                                

In this essay, I shall respond to the question, ‘What is personal identity?’ Given there is little point in shrinking from my initially odd-seeming answer to this question, I will state it clearly and explicitly right now, before we progress any further: we already know what identity is.

It is my contention that the meaning of this word we call identity is not mysterious, because all there really is to the word identity is how it is used. We certainly know what it means in conversation. We do not question it or begin to dissect it when it arises in everyday speech; we parse it and we respond to it exactly as we would respond to any other word. I believe that is all there is to identity, because all identity is is a word. I believe we are misguided in looking for an essence of identity, or in trying to penetrate the ‘concept’ in a philosophical manner.

Since I am sure this strange and prickly idea will have already offended you, I shall start the process of persuasion very slowly. First, I would like to invite you to examine these examples of common sentences in which the word appears:

1.) “He’s changed so much since he got Alzheimer’s, he’s lost his identity.”

2.) “I have a dual-identity: one by night, one by day.”          

3.) “I feel like my identity has changed so much over the years.”

4.) “One’s genes determine one’s identity to a large extent.”

5.) “Her identity hasn’t changed at all, she’s the same as she was twenty years ago.”

6.) “We know the identity of the terrorists.”

7.) “What is our national identity?”

It is true that the word “identity” does seem to be quite straightforward semantically and easy to define with only two main senses. Oxford Online’s primary definitions, for example – 1.) “The fact of being who or what a person or thing is” and 2.) “The characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is” – seem adequate descriptions of the word. Certainly, all of the uses of the word in the exemplary sentences above could be seen to conform to one of the two definitions, or perhaps a subtle synthesis of the both. Nevertheless, if you examine these sentences above a little more closely you can see that they each imply subtly different things about what identity actually is, or the “concept of identity”. In sentences 1 and 2, one’s identity is implied to be discrete, unique, identifiable, and can be transformed into a different but equally discrete, unique, identifiable identity (can be “lost” or replaced with another). By contrast, in 3, the implication appears to be that identity is not so absolute, and can be subject to gradual change. However, there is still a sense in 3 of one’s identity being unique and identifiable (“my identity”).

In 4, “one’s identity” is clearly shorthand for “one’s identity over one’s lifetime”. We do not parse this sentence as implying that we are all exactly the same over our lifetime because nobody could possibly think that. Instead, we immediately understand the word “identity” here as referring to our identity at all times of our life. To use the word in the manner of sentences 1 and 2, we might say that it is referring to one’s identities. But the point is that the speaker of 4 does not have to use the plural form to be understood in that way. In 5, we might say that the sense of the word, taken broadly, is the same as all of the other sentences and that there is thus nothing new to be gleaned from it. Yet it is certainly of note that this sentence preserves the notion that one’s identity can remain the same over many years. This suggests that the concept of identity can be fixed. In 6, yet more different things are implied of the concept of identity. Here, we can say that the concept of identity probably amounts to nothing more than one’s name, one’s age, one’s sex and various other basic, impersonal details. Again, we likely don’t even think of the word in that way when we hear 6; we know immediately what is meant by identity. In 7, the concept of identity is implied to be a fixed and static one, and one that can also be applied to a nation rather than just a person. How exactly you might unpack what someone is talking about when they use a phrase like “national identity” is unclear, but it obviously again implies different things about the concept of identity. While identity is again about characteristics, this time they are the characteristics of a nation, which are surely utterly different kinds of things.

Clearly there is a huge divergence in what these deployments of the word identity suggest about this ‘concept of identity’. Intuitively, it seems that we are confused about what the word actually means! And what a philosopher wants to do in this situation is try to resolve the confusion by shining the light of reason onto the word, by constructing theories that aim to reach the best compromise between logic and our intuitions about the concept.

Yet here’s where we run up against our first problem with this theoretical attitude: to embark upon such a mission of illumination, one must presuppose that there is some kind of abstract essence to the word identity. But what if there isn’t? What if there is only the use of the word?  If so, what are you really doing when you carry out a philosophical investigation of this sort? You are trying to penetrate a word that has no centre. It is no surprise that this leads to extraordinary conclusions, and to grand, irreconcilable disputes, and to the genesis of ever more subtle and interesting theories. There is simply no limit to the explication, elaboration and disputation of a concept that does not exist.

I know this is a fairly grandiose and shocking hypothesis, and I expect that I will have drawn only a reaction of hostility. But be patient, for there is much more justification to come.

Let us first start with a very basic argument.

Identity is not a physical substance, like, say, water. A more obvious and truistic sentence has nary been written, but I believe philosophers do not actually acknowledge the truth of it: indeed, I would go so far as to say that the treatment of intangible concepts like physical ones has been a scourge on philosophy since time immemorial. In order to illustrate this even bolder claim, I will begin by supporting my claim that identity and water are very dissimilar.

First, we need to ask a simple question: can we conceive of a world that is just like ours barring the fact that everyone in this imaginary world uses the word “water” to refer to water as we know it in the sciences (H₂0), but also to refer to what we, in our world, know as salt-water, mud and clouds? Clearly, there are facts about H₂0, salt-water, mud and clouds that unite them (their shared primary ingredient of H₂0 being perhaps the most fundamental), just as you might say that there are facts about the different ways we use the word identity that unite them (the Oxford definitions apply to all my 7 cases). Moreover, you might say that we do already have, in our own language, nouns that refer to a whole host of loosely connected physical things, in the same way that water in this other world refers to a whole host of loosely connected physical things. The nouns “game”, “computer”, “tree” and “tool” might be seen as examples of this. Very few properties unite all the senses of these words, and, in the case of game, arguably none. So I think we can conceive of a world where everyone used water to refer to all these disparate physical things – in fact quite easily.

However, given these different physical things (scientifically defined water, and the other water-containing things) are clearly both quantitively and qualitatively very different things, and even two mud puddles or two clouds can be very quantitatively and qualitatively different, we can assume that we would, in this other world, realise that the word water can refer to utterly disparate things. This is because physical things are quite easily deconstructable, they are very easily reduced to properties of an ever diminishing magnitude, and we do have a technical or scientific vocabulary that permits us to describe these properties. We have basic concepts like size and texture, then slightly more specific ones like chemical state and temperature, and then ever more complex and microscopic properties like chemical composition and atomic structure.

But identity is not a physical thing. It is intangible. It has no size, texture, chemical state, temperature, chemical composition or atomic structure. In fact, it has no properties save linguistic ones. So why should we assume that it has an essence?

I expect that the hostility has probably not died down. This is understandable; the idea I’m proposing is, after all, a very uncomfortable one, and it goes against so much of what we are taught and even where language itself leads us, by giving words like identity precisely the same grammatical properties as words like water. I know that numerous objections will have arisen by now.

We know that intangible things are not the same as tangible things; that is a complete truism, as you said yourself. But surely that means your conclusions are far too grand. Just because people imply different things about identity when they speak doesn’t mean that there isn’t actually a truth of the matter as to the question of what identity is, in a philosophical sense. It is our job as philosophers to figure out if there is such an essence – that’s what we’re doing. We all understand when we use the word identity in a philosophical context that we are talking about something vague, but we are trying to clarify it, make some sense of it, give it a coherence and a consistency. That’s the whole point.

But what I want to ask is a question that may seem totally banal and insignificant, but which I think speaks to the heart of what I’m saying:

What do we actually mean by identity when we ask what identity is?

I believe a philosopher ought to be able to answer this before he begins, but no philosopher ever does! He treats identity kind of as if it were a physical substance, believing that investigation can help uncover a deeper truth about it. But what reason does he have to assume this? What grounds?

It’s easy for you to say all of this in the abstract, but surely philosophers have more sophisticated ways of looking at questions like “What is identity?” than you’re giving them credit for. They’re not just pursuing a nebulous essence when they pose such questions, but looking at the solid heart of the concept of identity. And modern philosophers would surely not just attack the basic question uncritically; they would ask more specific questions first, like ‘Which way of conceiving of the word identity makes most sense?’

This last part is absolutely true. Since it is their remit and duty, since it is in their job description, philosophers think hard about the concept of identity. They don’t examine in any detail how people use the word, but instead adopt the theoretical attitude: they immediately try to formulate cogent theories to try to explain the concept in a way that best fits both with logic and our intuitions. Philosopher A says, “The physical continuity theory of identity is the best one we have for explaining the concept. It is plausible and it is neat. It means we can say that a human being has the same identity as he had yesterday because he is composed of the same matter.”

For a while this theory seems adequate, but eventually new scientific discoveries about cells (how they are constantly replicating and dying) leads Philosopher B to suddenly realise that this theory is hopelessly inept. He says, “The psychological continuity theory of identity is far superior. It means we can say that a human being has the same identity as she had yesterday because he has the same psychology.”

Much bickering between the two camps ensues for many years. Eventually, Philosopher C strides imperiously onto the scene and says, “No, no, no, the concept of identity is not nearly so simple. There are so many problems with both those theories. They both preclude our most strongly held intuitions, because we don’t see our identity as evolving constantly and almost all of us believe we are the same person that we were when a child. No, we must instead look to my new notion of continuity connected by an ancestral rather than strict continuity, and we must stop the bickering and instead acknowledge that both the physical and the psychological are important. This new synthesised theory of mine is the most plausible at all. Now we can make sense of our intuitions: we don’t have to say we have changed identity when we grow up because both the stuff we are made of and our psychological makeup do have their root, their ancestry, in the way we were yesterday, and five years ago, and ten years ago, and when we were a foetus.”

The majority of philosophers think this theory a great leap forward, and the focal point of the philosophical debate about the concept of identity is, for many years following, just around the various permutations of the synthesised theory. Philosopher D says psychological continuity is more important than physical, using a thought experiment involving a computer to illustrate his point, while Philosopher E retorts that physical continuity is more important, using our intuitive beliefs about senile relatives to make hers.

Finally, Philosopher F (who is actually a real guy called Derek Parfit) comes along and throws a spanner in the works. “No, you guys,” he says, “Imagine if you were in Star Trek and the teletransporter malfunctioned and you were actually replicated instead of transported. Surely, we can’t say that that replica would be you, despite being physically and psychologically identical. Therefore, we must conclude that we have no identity whatsoever, that the concept is an illusion.” Many philosophers really like this idea and it becomes, for a while, the most popular of them all. Nevertheless, the debate rages on.

I admit that it’s very nice for philosophers to try to tie up loose ends in this way, to resolve our understanding of words like identity so that they’re neat, logically consistent, compatible with our intuitions and all the rest, but why should we take any of their claims about the nature of identity as anything more than prescriptions? This is how we should think of identity, they say, and we supposedly bow down before them and chant their conclusions to ourselves over and over again, while whacking our foreheads with their weighty gospels and wearing dark cloaks.[1] No, I refuse to submit, to succumb, to acquiesce. And why should I?

Let us look at our common sentences once more. Now that the philosophers have given us this new vocabulary of ‘continuity theories’, we are perhaps better placed to dissect the differences in what the sentences imply about the concept of identity. Now we can say that 1 and 2 imply that some kind of mental continuity theory is correct. We can say that 3 perhaps implies that some kind of mixture of the two is right. That 4 probably implies that some kind of mixture of the two is right again. That 5, well, that’s a bit ambiguous – has she aged physically? That 6 implies that neither theory is correct, but just that each person has a single fixed identity given presumably by their name, D.O.B, address etc.  And that 7, well it’s not about human identity at all (which the philosophers concentrated on when asking the question ‘What is identity?’ for no obvious reason).

As I demonstrated before, if you try to unpack the concept lying behind the deployment of this word in these various sentences, you just go insane. Obviously, we, as human beings, don’t have a fixed concept of identity, and yet we understand what people are talking about when they use it! What weird creatures we are! How completely irrational!

Well, maybe it’s completely irrational, but other words are like this too. Most interestingly, other words that philosophers like asking ‘What is?’ questions about and then debating for centuries, like ‘meaning’, ‘happiness’, ‘love’, ‘friendship’, ‘art’, are actually very similar to this. You just need to think hard about the ways they’re used to realise this. Wittgenstein showed this in Philosophical Investigations, the book that is basically the one progenitor of this essay.

Obviously, most philosophers would concede that this is the case. They’d say, ‘Of course people don’t use these words in a logically consistent fashion and have no idea about our lovely, logical theories. This is because most people are not philosophers! It’s our job to think hard about this stuff and to try to get to some truth of the matter.’ But this is predicated on the assumption that there is something more to identity than the way people use it. And isn’t that quite mystical? What reason do we have to think that the real ‘concept’ of the word identity has to be a logically consistent theory? Why can’t the word be exactly what it is: a word? And if it is just a word, why do philosophers purport to be expressing truths when they make claims about what it is? All they are doing is insisting on some specific definition of the word that has no relation to the real world, are they not?  These, I believe, are the real questions, but philosophers doggedly refuse to answer them.[2]

You may have noticed that I’ve scrupulously avoided talking about philosopher F, Derek Parfit, who doesn’t believe that identity exists. Obviously, he suffers from exactly the same ailment as all the other philosophers, given that, in the construction of his theory, he treated the word as if it had a nebulous essence. However, he is different in the way that he then showed (supposedly) that it doesn’t. Evidently, the word identity does exist and is used frequently and functionally, so he is prima facie wrong like all the other philosophers who make claims about the word. But he isn’t quite like the other philosophers, and I believe that his argument (which appears in his seminal, acclaimed 1984 book Reasons and Persons) does contain some kind of truth. As I demonstrated way back near the start of this essay, when you listen to the way people speak in the real world, you realise there is a profound inconsistency in our understanding of the concept identity, because, to everyone who isn’t a philosopher with a particular theory of identity, there is no one concept of identity, and we don’t even really think about what we mean by the word identity when we use it.

In light of that truth, let us now consider these mostly very basic facts: our bodies are constantly changing, with age or with injury; it is often very hard to recognise an adult from their childhood picture, or a really old person from a picture of them at a young age, and basically impossible to identify a person from a baby picture; our cells are constantly dying and replicating, meaning it takes only seven years for our bodies to replace every single one; our personalities change discernibly over time, even after we have left the tumult of childhood and adolescence; we don’t like to think that our relatives have become different people when they become senile with old age; we don’t like to think that our loved ones have become different people when they suffer a brain injury that lowers their IQ or affects their personality in some other way; we don’t like to think that our loved ones have become different people when they suffer some horrific and transformative physical injury; there is almost certainly no such thing as a soul.

I don’t know, really, what we should take from these facts, but I do understand, on one level, why Derek Parfit might use them to conclude that identity does not exist, even if I think that such a claim must be prima facie wrong. If we are physically and mentally changing all the time yet we like to think that we have some kind of fixed identity, and even when we are physically and mentally identical to another person (as in Parfit’s aforementioned thought experiment) we like to think that we don’t have the same identity as them, then something has to give, right?  

But this is so deceptive, because, as we’ve already made so clear, the word identity is deeply problematic. Sure, it seems iron-clad and logical. Yes, we’re tempted to think, if identity is to exist we need to think that two identical people have the same identity. But we don’t. Therefore, identity does not exist. What a syllogism! However, this syllogism doesn’t actually mean anything. Identity is just a word. What reason do we have to trust the intuitions of people on whether two identical people have the same identity given that they have no consistent sense of the concept of identity? Given that identity is such a fucking adaptable word? Again, why should I think that “Identity does not exist” is not prima facie wrong given that identity is a word that does exist and is functional?

You may think that I’m the one playing with words. I am aware it may seem that way. But I am not the mystic here. I am not the one trying to penetrate a word. I know that this will still be a bitter pill to swallow, but I think it is an ultimately salubrious one, like Panadol. I do admit that people understand what Parfit means when he says ‘Identity does not exist’ and that it is therefore a meaningful statement. In fact, I essentially agree with what I believe to be the sentiment and logic behind it, even if I object so vehemently to its phrasing. I seem to get what he means. So, in the interests of reaching a satisfying conclusion, I hereby propose my own philosophical theory of identity that taps into the same basic ideas:

 We have no reason to think that there is something that makes us who we are throughout our life or – to put in a way more accurate yet kind of spacey way – that there is necessarily anything physical or mental that unites the various people that have the same birth certificate. We have no reason to think that these various people have some quintessence, given that most of us now know that the belief in souls is just a superstition like any other.

However, we are obviously extremely physically and mentally similar to the person we were a day ago, and very similar to the person we were a year ago. And psychologically we don’t necessarily have to change a great deal in adulthood, barring some trauma, because there are no big biological transformations that occur.  

You may have noticed that this is not really a philosophical theory at all, just a statement of a few facts that doesn’t include the word ‘identity’ even once. This is logically consistent with what I’ve said.

I’m afraid I’m sceptical about profundity. It seems usually to rely on the manipulation of words.  

References

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations through http://www.accionfilosofica.com/misc/1307418043crs.pdf

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[1] Did I get lost somewhere along the way there?

[2] You can understand why, though: they’d be taking away their own jobs.