This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warton.

Philosophy bites is available at W.

W.

philosophy bites.com. Unfortunately, I no longer look like I did 10 years ago. Hair has fallen out, the

odd tooth has been capped. Physically we all change all the time. What's more

our memories of our earlier selves are both fallible and incomplete.

So what is it that makes me the same person that I was a decade or two decades or three decades ago?

The question has profound implications in many areas, for example in religious belief and moral responsibility.

Christopher Shields has achieved the impressive feat of moving from the universities of Colorado to Yale to Stanford to Oxford

while always remaining Christopher Shields.

Christopher Shields, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Good to be here, thank you.

The topic we're going to talk about today is personal identity.

Could you tell us what personal identity is and why it matters at all?

It's one of those topics in philosophy that takes some motivating

precisely because it seems not to arise in our day-to-day life,

but it really is at the margins of the way we think about ourselves as responsible beings.

We don't hold people responsible for things they didn't do, and so we expect to think

that someone can exist from one moment to the next. It's as easy as that, and it's obviously

correct. At the same time, many people are in one way or another religious, they think that they're responsible

for their deeds in this life in the next, all the same they think their bodies don't go

with them into the next life. If they think that

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