John Locke's Theory Of Personal Identity

If someone in class today was asked what their personal identity was, they would likely respond with an affiliation to one or several groups that would reflect physical appearance or the perception they had of themselves. The person may respond by associating themselves with a gender, age, ethnicity, or sexual orientation that most closely aligns with how they view themselves.
John Locke, a modern empiricist philosopher, argues that personal identity is solely dependent on consciousness and not on any of the categories described above—those relate to a different type of identity for Locke. A human is considered to have the a personal identity if they have a continuous consciousness, which is heavily reliant on memory to recall past experiences
The most famous example of his critique is the “Brave Officer”. In the example, a small boy is punished for stealing an apple. As a young officer, he still remembers the punishment for stealing the apple. As an old general, he remembers acting bravely as a young officer, but he no longer remembers being punished for stealing the apple. According to Locke, the young officer is the same person as the young boy, and the young officer is the same person as the old general. But, the old general and the young boy are not the same person. He makes this claim because the young officer can remember the punishment, the old general can remember being a young officer, but the old general cannot remember being punished. The consciousness is discontinuous. However, since A (young child) is the same person as B (young officer) and B (young officer) is the same person as C (an old general), then A (young child) must be the same person as C (an old general) due to basic transitive properties (Shoemaker 2017). This “Brave Officer” example is concrete evidence that Locke’s personal identity theory cannot be upheld because his logic refutes basic mathematical knowledge that is almost universally accepted. Additionally, the idea of consciousness being tied almost exclusively to memory is too fragile to be applied to a real scenario. Since memories fade and people do not have
Assume a pinky finger was severed from the body, and it took the memories and consciousness of the person who is was attached to with it when it was detached. The pinky would become the person who it was attached to; this would also mean that the pinky would take upon the personal identity of the original person (Locke 144). This is contradictory to Locke’s definition of personal identity because it states that the being can repeat the idea of a past action with the same consciousness as it has in the present. By transferring the consciousness to the pinky, any memory from the past is not actually the pinky’s, since it did not have first-hand experience, but that of the body’s. By only having the inherited personal identity, the pinky can recall the body’s past actions but it will not be with the same consciousness because the pinky did not have that initial