Argument from perpetual identity against naturalism.

[Angrboda]

A couple minor points.

Metaphysical assumptions about consciousness and mind, especially ontological assumptions, strongly shape the answers one can see, imagines, or accepts. I view consciousness and "the self" as mere ideas in the brain. They are "constructs." So, no, they aren't perpetual, and their "identity" and what identity means are highly dependent on how these constructs are created, maintained, and used by the brain.

I'll get off that a moment and point to an interesting nuance. Over the years, I have changed in my religious beliefs, and my feelings about certain religions, and have changed substantially, both in how I view their religion, and my own. (My thoughts about consciousness have changed as well.) But all these changes have occurred gradually, over a long period of time. In some sense, the idea that things are remaining largely fixed is an illusion of adopting a particular metric in terms of time, and what timespan we measure change over. Woody Allen said, "Tradition is the illusion of permanence," and in the same way, identity is similar. But I want to contrast this with something different. When I was younger, my sister had a large, black Afghan hound (39" at the withers, which is over standard). One day, I was walking him, and the lead became unhooked from his collar. When I reached toward him to grab the collar, he turned on me. He followed me as I ran back to our house, biting at me all the way. Since that day, I have had an instinctive fear of large dogs, and indeed any large animal makes me nervous. (Which hurts, because I love horses and Irish Wolf Hounds.) Anyway, the me that I had been the day before had vanished in the space of a day. The thing is, the brain has multiple systems for integrating experience into personality, and the features that determine what gets integrated, where, how, and how strongly, are not unitary. So if you look for a unified process called "identity," then you may be looking a long time.

Second, just to throw this out there, there is a concept from Heidegger that I have found very useful over the years. I don't have a quote, but his idea is that, "there is sameness in difference, and difference in sameness." The concept of similarity requires difference, because if two things aren't in some way different, then they are the same thing, not two similar things; likewise, difference requires similarity, because if there's not anything in which two things are identical, then there is no way to compare the two (in order for this red ball to be different from that blue ball, they both have to have color, otherwise there's no way to say in what way they are different).

Anyway, just a couple notes. Nothing to really add to the discussion.