Marlon asked:

What do you understand by Personal Identity?

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I assume that you have read all about personal identity and find the literature lacking. Firstly, see my
answer to Jessica.

You will have read of the logical possibility of fission and fusion of the self, that survival matters rather
than identity, that the body and memories do not determine identity because your brain — or your
experiences — could pass to some other subject, that you, as a subject could come to possess
someone else's experiences and body, etc or you could become an amnesiac.

A question is whether a reduced atomistic subject can think I "am" before the thought is whisked
away from him as the moment "now" passes and he is simply "now" again. The "am" reaches beyond
the "now" in the sense that subject becomes something. Initially, perhaps, it might be suggested that
what it becomes is a Cartesian thinking thing — but what kind of thing is that? The answer is any
thinking thing. For a specificthinking thing, the unique 'I', the notion of the person, what is required is
either a set of memories or a body. Either could be duplicated, but one set of memories or one body
will give the 'I' a singularity, duplicated elsewhere or not. From a subjective point of view it doesn't
matter if someone else has the same experiences: We can't, after all, share them. Each of us are
individuals because our internal lives are subjectively lived by us.

So what I understand by personal identity is something subjectively accessible which provides me
with a sense of identity over time, though perhaps a very short time. For a prolonged sense of self,
this could be mental in terms of memories which only I can access subjectively. Even if someone else
could access the same events in their memory, the other person's memories are still not mine
because they lack the quality of being mine, and remembered by me. On the other hand, the
subjective could be the awareness of physical body. Someone else may have a replica body, but he
wouldn't feel my feelings in this body. I assume personal identity in this sense is available to an
amnesiac. Both body and memories are relative to me and subjective. I access them immediately
without any wilful attempt — if another wanted to access them another form of will would be required,
such as telepathy, for instance, and this is not a natural relationship with the self, but with another.

Rachel Browne