Yes and no. I suspect that the functional aspects of the ego weren't present until late pregnancy and the self-continuity of the ego supported by memory and self-narrative weren't present until at least 1 or 2 years old. This continuity of the self is what a lot of people mean by "me". It was no more present than peaches are preset in a peach tree seed.

With respect to your identity qua thing/substance, however, absolutely: the whole activity of any one of us is rightly said to begin at conception. This could certainly be said to be "you" in an important sense.

I made a comment like that in the previous thread.

"I was once an embryo but an embryo was not me"  has an air of paradox to it. It is, on the face of it, a contradiction. If you think it's true, then you must be using "was"/"is" in a special sense other than that of identity. I don't know what that could be.

There are philosophers who defend psychological accounts of personhood according to which "I" am essentially a person, meaning that I am what I am (and persist over time) by virtue of continuing to bear certain (occurrent) psychological properties. Since embryos do not bear those psychological properties, they would say, I was never an embryo.

But that view faces very difficult problems. There is some embryo whose body is continuous to mine. Before it acquired psychological properties, it persisted over time. What were its conditions of persistence? Its likely, however one answers this question, that the conditions of persistence would imply that it persists now; the easiest way to deny this would be to say that its conditions of persistence involve its not possessing any psychological properties, but that's really odd and ad hoc. Anyway, are we to say that it ceased to exist and was replaced by me when it "acquired" psychological properties? (Strictly speaking, we would then be saying that human embryos cannot acquire psychological properties, or at least those relevant to personhood, for the subject that exists afterward is not the embryo.) Or does the embryo continue to exist, though separate from "me" the person? (These arguments are ably laid out by Eric Olson in The Human Animal.)

Last edited by Greg (3/09/2016 12:12 pm)

iwpoe wrote:

You would need to say that personhood is not identical with thing/substance-identity (which is, I suspect, indeed what's argued) and instead an emergent property of the human-once-embryo-thing.
 

Right, Olson argues that "person" is not a substance noun. Human beings persist over time but they don't do so as persons. You don't go out of existence if you cease to be a person, and it is possible that at some time you were not a person.

I am more or less fine with that way of talking since it jives well with the contemporary analytic discussion of personhood. I would, though, use the Boethian definition of "person" as "substance of a rational nature," which is not a "psychological" account as that is usually meant.