False Memory and Personal Identity

Abstract

In current philosophy of mind, there are two main approaches to the question of personal
identity. The first one claims that personal identity is based on our memory and for several
decades has been known as a psychological approach to the problem. The second one has been
called an animalistic approach and considers personal identity as a biological property of human
beings or as a specific feature of our bodily continuity. Experiments on creating false memories
in mice brains, recently conducted at MIT, seem to shed new light on the question of personal
identity, taking into account the fact that the mouse brain is morphologically quite similar to our
brain. The purpose of the article is to clarify the question about whether the above-mentioned
experiments support one of the approaches: the psychological or the animalistic. Using the
conceptual instrumentarium of contemporary analytic philosophy and cognitive phenomenology
the author differentiates between strong and weak false memories and argues that we cannot
consider the conducted experiments as supporting the animalistic approach.