Identity Scenarios

Our identity is a continuum but nevertheless subjected to constant change. Our "ego" changes permanently and is strongly influenced by the environment, culture etc. Below we develop a few identity scenarios that may appear highly artificial but are helpful to understand the nature of human identity.

If our parents had moved to a distant and foreign culture in our early childhood, our identity would be different from what it is. Let us assume that we were born a few centuries earlier. Our identity would have developed in an enormously different way, and we would not be able to identify us with ourselves anymore. (26)

Some people suffer memory loss as the result of an accident. In such cases the person concerned is sure that he lived before the accident, but he could not identify himself with his former life anymore. What a dramatic situation - knowing that you must have lived before but knowing nothing about it! If such an accident occurs away from home and you carry no document specifying your name, address or other criteria referring to your original identity, it would take a long time or even be impossible to find your original identity. You would have to start a second life without reference to your past!

Another scenario is this: We need our bodies to live. We know very well that many body cells are replaced regularly. Therefore one thing is clear: It is not a specific but a specifically structured substance that makes up our body and thus our spirit but. Philosophically speaking the substance thus structured could be finded in an identical form somewhere or sometime in the universe. The conclusion is both incredible and unambiguous: This "you" would be "me". It should again be noted that consciousness can occur only in the present and hence in the here and now, i.e. irrespective of space and time.

The main characteristic of human beings is their body, their functioning as an organism, embeddedness into an environmental context, past experiences and relation to the future. Wishes, goals and therefore, inevitably, emotions, only become possible through a space-time relationship, and hence through the organic-functional continuity of man. There would be no firmness of purpose, no needs, no states of mind, no self-consciousness, no personal identity without this continuity, which includes the past and the future.

We said above that our "me" changes continuously but we can still identify ourselves with our changed "me". Thus no identical duplicate would be required to find our selves in a "you". (27)