confusing souls for personality

When talking about death it is not uncommon to mention souls and believing in souls. In A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality written by John Perry, the characters Gretchen Weirob and Sam Miller are in debate relating to the proof of personal identity and sameness of soul. Weirob states her opinion that there is no personal identity for the reason that there is no proof stating we hold one soul. Miller disagrees saying that there is no proof of human bodies holding multiple souls.

I agree with Miller and his argument from the first chapter of the book. There are ways to identify people and objects by characteristics. Without the characteristics then how can someone identify a person or object with no visual aid? Agreeing with Miller, the idea of having one soul in our body for our entire life is engraved in our minds. Having Weirob question that idea leaves me with more questions.

A part in the book that stood out the most to me is the argument by Weirob saying “...the immaterial soul which you think is lodged in my body might change from day to day, from hour to hour, from minute to minute, replaced each time by another soul psychologically similar”. Is this a confusion of soul vs personality? A personality can change with age and emotion, but overall we keep the same personality. Our personality makes up who we are; would that not be the same with our soul? They both become an identifying way to separate ourselves from others. If our souls can change as often as Weirob suggests, then how many souls can one person possess?

Comments

  1. Joshua MihalikFebruary 4, 2019 at 7:43 AM

    In adding to your point about confusing soul with personality, I think that a soul is more akin to a person's consciousness than their personality. I agree with your point about how personalities can be influenced by the environment, and personalities can change, but souls are more static in nature. I would argue that, if souls are real, it is reasonable to say that a person's soul has to have some level of awareness that shapes it to influence the person who it belongs to to commit good behaviours or bad ones, to follow the law or not, and so forth. My idea of what Weirob means about souls continuously being replaced by another throughout a person's life is that a person's soul can reach different levels of consciousness.

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    1. Ethan HerringMarch 14, 2019 at 10:18 PM

      What you said about your interpretation of Weirob's scenario of the ever-transient soul is very interesting; I had not though about it that way, and looked at it mostly as forming a distinction between secular and non-secular conceptions of the soul, but yours could be interpreted to be either, and both conceptions of attaining different levels of consciousness are intriguing.

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  2. Deborah Adekunle-OdeleyeFebruary 4, 2019 at 7:11 PM

    The issue with conflating soul with personality is that we can not observe souls directly, so what other measure are we so supposed to use.As Gretchen said our body and memories can easily observed by others which they used to identify us. Although, what other characteristics can we use to see a soul if we can not even agree on whether it exist. I think this is a hard thing to prove because one we don't have the enough experience to tackle it and the concept of soul is religion based.

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