TY - GEN

T1 - Personal Identity and False Memories

AU - Разеев, Данил Николаевич

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - In current philosophy of mind, there are two main approaches to the question of personal identity. The first one claims that personal identity is based on our memory and, for several decades, has been known as a psychological approach to the problem. The second one has been called an animalistic approach and considers personal identity as a biological property of human beings or as a specific feature of our bodily continuity. The experiment on creating false memories in mice brains, recently conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), seems to shed new light on the question of personal identity, taking into account the fact that the mouse brain is morphologically quite similar to our brain. The purpose of my paper is to consider whether the above-mentioned experiment supports one of the approaches: the psychological or the animalistic. Using the conceptual instrumentarium of contemporary analytic philosophy and cognitive phenomenology, I differentiate between strong and weak false memories and I argue that we cannot consider the conducted experiment to have created false memories in the strong sense. I develop a thought experiment showing what it would be like to experience an implanted (weak) false memory in the human brain. I conclude that there is not and cannot be an experience of the (strong) false memory.

AB - In current philosophy of mind, there are two main approaches to the question of personal identity. The first one claims that personal identity is based on our memory and, for several decades, has been known as a psychological approach to the problem. The second one has been called an animalistic approach and considers personal identity as a biological property of human beings or as a specific feature of our bodily continuity. The experiment on creating false memories in mice brains, recently conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), seems to shed new light on the question of personal identity, taking into account the fact that the mouse brain is morphologically quite similar to our brain. The purpose of my paper is to consider whether the above-mentioned experiment supports one of the approaches: the psychological or the animalistic. Using the conceptual instrumentarium of contemporary analytic philosophy and cognitive phenomenology, I differentiate between strong and weak false memories and I argue that we cannot consider the conducted experiment to have created false memories in the strong sense. I develop a thought experiment showing what it would be like to experience an implanted (weak) false memory in the human brain. I conclude that there is not and cannot be an experience of the (strong) false memory.

KW - Personal identity False memory Animalism

KW - Animalism

KW - False memory

KW - Personal identity

KW - CONSTRUCT

KW - SELF

KW - NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

KW - PSYCHOLOGY

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85101535757&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/0542f097-4cde-397b-9f5c-528b6d5b315f/

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-67220-1_8

DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-67220-1_8

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85101535757

SN - 978-3-030-67219-5

T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

SP - 100

EP - 107

BT - Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2020 Collocated Workshops - ASYDE, CIFMA, and CoSim-CPS, 2020, Revised Selected Papers

A2 - Cleophas, Loek

A2 - Massink, Mieke

PB - Springer Nature

CY - Springer

T2 - 2nd International Workshop on Automated and Verifiable Software System Development, ASYDE 2020, 2nd International Workshop on Cognition: Interdisciplinary Foundations, Models and Applications, CIFMA 2020 and 4th International Workshop on Formal Co-Simulation of Cyber-Physical Systems, CoSim-CPS 2020 collocated with the 18th International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods, SEFM 2020

Y2 - 14 September 2020 through 15 September 2020

ER -