Vern has been bringing his old Volvo for servicing at Grace's Garage for many years. Unknown to Vern, Grace kept every single part that she replaced. Every time Vern dented a wing or a door, the panel was replaced by a new one. What Vern didn't know was that a couple of decades later Grace had Vern's entire original car in the form of a heap of (still usable) parts hidden in the back of her garage.
So which is Vern's Volvo, the one he's been driving for 20 years, or the heap of parts? Why?
What if, instead of having only the parts, Grace actually used those parts to create (or recreate) the Volvo? Would that be, somehow, a different issue?
So which is Vern's Volvo, the one he's been driving for 20 years, or the heap of parts? Why?
What if, instead of having only the parts, Grace actually used those parts to create (or recreate) the Volvo? Would that be, somehow, a different issue?
Vern’s Volvo is the car that Vern is driving; that is, it is not the Volvo that can be made using the still-functioning spare parts that the creepy auto mechanic, Grace, kept. I say this because identity is something independent of the object itself, something we project as sentient and conscious beings onto objects or even other people. This is so essential to any entity’s identity that I would so far as to say that for something to exist, it must be perceived and made sense of by the human mind. In other words, should a huge meteorite strike Earth, thereby wiping out all sentient life on the planet, things like the moon, my house, or even time, would no longer exist because they no longer are being perceived and made sense of by humans.
Vern’s Volvo has two parts to its identity; it is a car (specifically, a Volvo), and it is under the ownership of Vern. Both parts predicate the existence of someone to call it a car as well as Vern himself. Vern provides the unifying idea that gives the car its collective identity. Otherwise, it would be just what Grace has in her possession; a large, seemingly miscellaneous collection of spare parts. For example, what makes a wall a wall? What makes it different from a lucky combination of bricks and mortar? Where does the wall go when I take it apart? A wall does not have anything “extra” on top of the exact matter that makes up the pile of bricks it came from. What it has is the metaphysical cement that we attribute to these parts, the unifying idea our meaning-making brains cloth the bricks in. Vern’s car is thus not defined by what it is made out of, but its relation to Vern, specifically how Vern understands his Volvo to be.
If replacing every part of Vern’s Volvo made that an entirely different car, the implication would be that human beings are constantly changing identities. We are constantly shedding, destroying, and replacing cells so that after a surprisingly short amount of time (I forget the exact interval) all of the cells in our body have been regenerated. Should my identity be dependent on the matter or parts I am made of, I would be logically changing my identity every time I regenerated all my cells. If I were to take a biological perspective on psychology (meaning I believe all behavior, including identity, can be explained using biological processes) or even a physicalist (everything can be explained by the physical properties of an object, opposing dualism) then if my body changes, my identity should change as well. As every unit of time ticks by, I experience something new; that in turn, should be encoded chemically in our brain, thus changing my physical make up.
Let’s say you defined identity and the collective experience and knowledge of a person; does it make the Emily at three years old a different person from the Emily of 17 today? Do I become a different person every time I changed my opinion on something, or even if I learned something new? To relate this back to Vern’s Volvo: imagine that Vern’s Volvo was exceptionally hardy and never needed a single replacement, but Vern was a particularly careless driver. After years of driving the same car, Vern had scratched up the outside of his car until the paint had peeled away completely, and should a person familiar with the car in its new state stumble upon it after, it would be hard to think of it as the same car. Comparing snapshots of the car in specific moments in time would certainly lead one to believe that there are two different cars depicted in either picture. However, Vern’s car has existed continuously through time along with Vern. In other words, Vern kept driving his car throughout the entire changing-the-parts shebang, which itself happened gradually over a period of time. Because each moment in time was only a snapshot of the whole long “tube” of sorts, all connected by the glue of time and Vern’s conception of his car, Vern’s Volvo remains Vern’s Volvo.
