The Nuance Of Memory And Identity

The simplest and most foundational part of personal identity pertains to the law of identity: an individual is metaphysically identical to himself or herself.  Even if two beings had bodies with an indistinguishable appearance, they would be separate beings, or else there would be only a single entity.  Beyond the basic application of the law of identity, though, personal identity becomes far more complex.  Memory is the faculty that binds an individual's experiences together in their mind, but there are at least two different aspects of this that need to be addressed.

A person who takes their memories at face value--that is, someone who simply assumes that past events must have occurred if they remember them--will think that their recalled behaviors define them.  They will hold that if they remember committing acts of kindness, then they are a kind person, or that if they recall starting a business, then they are a businessperson.  In contrast to this is the awareness that a lack of confusion at a given time means that one's memories are internally consistent, which in turn means that one does have a stable perception of identity at a particular time.

One's memories of past events may very well be nothing but false memories, and thus it is entirely possible that whatever aspects of one's perceived identity that are bound to those alleged past events might not correspond to anything outside of one's mind.  This, however, does nothing to change the fact that one's memory nonetheless grounds one's identity in the sense that it maintains a stable sense of self from one moment to another.  An example can clarify the distinction between these two forms of identity and how memory can be irrelevant to one and yet inseparable from the other.

For instance, suppose that a person has memories of working as a scientist on an innovative project.  The work provides her with a sense of purpose, fulfillment, and competence.  She closely associates the work with her identity as an individual.  In actuality, her memories are intramind hallucinations (they are not sensory hallucinations of perceived external objects), and she lives in a mental institution as she is treated for psychosis.  It follows that her memories do nothing to reveal her occupational and past identity to herself.  Nevertheless, without a memory that functions on some level, she would not even have internal clarity as one moment elapses and leads into another.

Personal identity is far more nuanced than simply recalling certain events and identifying with specific values or goals.  There are very different components of one's core identity, and one component does not necessarily have the epistemological verifiability of another.  One can never know one's true past as long as one cannot verify the historicity of one's memories.  At the same time, one can always know one's immediate memories, desires, and perceptions, and continued awareness of them across consecutive moments by necessity means that one has some form of stable identity.