Personal Identity in Adulthood

Identity in Late Adulthood

I feel that the death of my mother in the year I turned 65 really put me up a generation so that I became superannuated, as it were, officially. I was pleased that I felt ready to move out of paid employment. But I’m also very conscious of the feeling of transition now—this sense of a very large challenge looming ahead, and a sense of preparing for that. The older I get, the more I worry about ...

Personal effort in social relationships across adulthood.

We explored age differences in the amount of personal effort that people put forth to maintain relationships across adulthood in diverse family-life contexts. More specifically, we examined how personal effort in social relationships is age-differently related to emotional closeness and perceptions of reciprocity. A total of 658 early-midlife (37 years) and old-age adults (73 years) from three ...

Personal Identity and Uploading

Objections to uploading may be parsed into substrate issues, dealing with the computer platform of upload and personal identity. This paper argues that the personal identity issues of uploading are no more or less challenging than those of bodily transfer often discussed in the philosophical literature. It is argued that what is important in personal identity involves both token and type identi...

Inferences About Personal Identity

We investigate the features people use in making inferences about continuity of individual persons. Using a transformation paradigm, we show that people weigh both continuity of the brain and continuity of mental content. Across experiments, we document instances in which participants are more likely to assert individual continuity than continuity of personhood. We discuss these results in term...

Utilitarianism and Personal Identity