Identity seems to be a bit more than memory. Consider this post which explicitly tries to brdige a memory gap:
I’m not sure that is “identity” in the way I’m defining it.
If pre-memory-erase me writes down everything he can about himself in extreme detail—events he has experienced, how they made him feel, what goals he was interested in, what he had learned about how to optimize his pursuits, etc. -- and then post-memory-erase me is given those volumes, it still seems to me the essence of identity is lost.
I’m not sure if I’m using it correctly, but the term that comes to mind would be qualia—the pre-erase me and post-erase me will be experiencing fundamentally different conscious subjective experiences.
The process described above (manual memory back-up plan) would go a long way to making the two mes seem the same from the outside, I think. But they’d be different from the perspective of each me. I can imagine pre-erase me saying, “I’ll write this stuff for him, so he can be like me—so he can become me”, where post-erase me might say, “I’m glad he wrote this stuff down because it is interesting and helpful...we sure do have a lot in common. But it’s weird: It’s almost like he wants to become, and take over, me and my body. That can’t really happen though, because I am me, and he cannot be me.”
I’m not sure that is “identity” in the way I’m defining it.
If pre-memory-erase me writes down everything he can about himself in extreme detail—events he has experienced, how they made him feel, what goals he was interested in, what he had learned about how to optimize his pursuits, etc. -- and then post-memory-erase me is given those volumes, it still seems to me the essence of identity is lost.
I’m not sure if I’m using it correctly, but the term that comes to mind would be qualia—the pre-erase me and post-erase me will be experiencing fundamentally different conscious subjective experiences.
The process described above (manual memory back-up plan) would go a long way to making the two mes seem the same from the outside, I think. But they’d be different from the perspective of each me. I can imagine pre-erase me saying, “I’ll write this stuff for him, so he can be like me—so he can become me”, where post-erase me might say, “I’m glad he wrote this stuff down because it is interesting and helpful...we sure do have a lot in common. But it’s weird: It’s almost like he wants to become, and take over, me and my body. That can’t really happen though, because I am me, and he cannot be me.”