Case Study: Personal identity

Description

Main Post: Write a minimum of 200 words discussion about the topics below. (due date: Monday by 11:59 pm) (Part A of the assignment) (Worth 7.5 points)

Peer Response: Read and respond to at least two other classmates (Minimum 75 words). (due date: Monday by 11:59 pm) (Part B of the assignment) (Worth 7.5 points)

Note: The peer response must contain relevant content as well. Avoid repeating (even in different words) what you wrote about in your main discussion as part of the response to the classmate. Whether you agree or disagree with your peer’s discussion, add new content to your peer’s post.

While you may add comments such as “I agree with you” or “Interesting findings,” that is not enough to receive a grade for the peer response. Your reaction to a peer’s discussion must contain relevant content taken from the material learned in class or external sources.

Case Study: Personal identity

Consider the famous psychological case of Phineas Gage. Gage was a 25 year old railroad worker who reportedly had a gentle, discipline, and kind personality. One day while working to destroy some rock impeding the way, the gunpowder that was used exploded and sent a meter-long bar (3.2 cm in diameter) through his skull, damaging several parts of his face and brain. A couple of months later he recovered, but he developed a different personality. He became rude, disobedient, and extremely irritable. He was fired from his job and decided to move to a different country.

Eventually after four years with his chaotic personality, he started to slowly revert back to his old personality, but let’s say for the purposes of this thought-experiment that he never returned back to his old personality and he completely lost his memory. Answer the following questions with this information:

1) What do you consider as the core aspect of what consitutes the self? Do you think the self is most defined by a consistent memory, desires, or passions? Do you think you have one, many, or no unifed self? Do you think the self is intact and seperate from the body like a “soul” or do you think the self is merely the product of brain chemical and neurons?

2) Do you think that this version of Gage completely lost his self with his noticable personality traits, goals, memory, and relationship changes? Or do you think his core self was retained thoughout the entire sequence of events. Use aspects of question one as support for your answer. For instance, if you think the self is defined by key relationships with other crucial individuals, then Gage clearly became a different person; but if you think the core self is similar to a soul-like entity, then perhaps Gage did not become a different person.

3) Now imagine that Gage before the incident owed 200,000 dollars to a couple of old friends, and they want their money back several years after the incident. The new version of Gage argues that his old self has died, and thus he does not owe anything anymore because he is not the same person. Do you think that Gage’s arugment has any weight at all considering the tragic accident that completely changed who he is? Support your answer with a couple of reasons.