The 2006 film Away from Her related the story of a retired couple, Grant and Fiona. Fiona is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and, as her condition worsens, she eventually decides to enter a nursing home. The facility has a policy that requires each new resident to have no visitors for a period of 30 days to adjust to their new life. After the period of adjustment is over, Grant visits his wife. However, she has forgotten her husband and instead has focused her attentions on Aubrey, a mute man she has met at the facility.
Is Fiona the same person in the facility who has forgotten most memories of her past life as the women who was happily married to Grant for all those years?
While Fiona has the same physical body and one could argue that she is the same using the body view (“S and P are the same person if and only if S has the same body as P”), she is essentially not the same person due to her Alzheimer’s diagnosis and failure to remember past experiences after she was admitted into the nursing home (which contradicts the memory view). Alzheimer’s is a disease that attacks and destroys your memory when brain connections and brain cells start to die off. This results in memory loss and affects the perception that people with Alzheimer’s have about close friends and relatives since they may not remember them or special memories they shared with them. Once Fiona was placed in the nursing home for 30 days without having contact with Grant, her memories of him began to fade away until she no longer remembered him and created new memories with Aubrey. This strongly conflicts with the memory view of personal identity. One of the main points of the memory view is that "S and P are the same person if and only if S remembers the experiences of P." However, Fiona can’t even remember her own experiences prior to her diagnosis, let alone her experiences with her husband and who he is as an individual. So, because she can’t remember her past experiences and is unable to prove that she experiences them, Fiona is not the same person that she was before entering the nursing home facility.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the memory view of personal identity, Fiona in the film "Away from Her" is not the same person in the after as she was before developing Alzheimer's disease. The memory view argues that one retains their identity if, and only if, they maintain a link of memory to a past version of themselves, and that this chain of remembrance extends through the duration of the existence of their identity. Fiona develops Alzheimer’s disease throughout the film, which involves the degeneration of neurons and the deterioration of one’s ability to form memories or respond to their environment. As this happens, she loses most of the memories of her marriage to Grant, and instead becomes interested in Aubrey, a man she meets at the nursing home where she has begun to stay. Although Fiona is sometimes able to remember small glimpses of her past, she does not maintain a continuous chain of memory, a requirement of the soul view in order to maintain personal identity. After not being allowed to see his wife for 30 days, Grant notices that she is senile: not able to remember his preference of coffee over tea, or even that he is her husband at all. Although this progression of memory loss may be too subtle for Fiona or the nursing home staff to notice it, the fact that someone as significant as Fiona’s husband noticed a shift in her identity after just one month indicates change in her identity on a fundamental level.
ReplyDeleteFiona has forgotten a big portion of her memories since being at the Alzheimer facility, but she is still the same person she was when she arrived. Though Fiona forgot some crucial parts of her life she is still the Fiona that her husband knows, yet she is a different form. The memories that Fiona made in her lifetime are just lost in her head and she cannot recall them. She also has the same body as the Fiona her husband remembers. When I say it is a different form of Fiona, I mean that her early memories are still there. Fiona talking about Aubrey and not recognizing her husband is as if she took a different direction in life. It is like going back in time and taking a left at an intersection instead of a right. Taking the left instead of the right causes you to get into a car accident. You are fine, but that event does not inherently change who you are it just mean you experienced something different. She is the same person but turned out differently than the way that is familiar to her husband. The early experiences that are still intact are the same. She also has the same brain and personality, the neurological changes that she is going through does not completely change who she is. If we take the approach of the soul view, she is still the same person, though that is harder to prove because there is no way for the human eye to see the soul. The soul is the spiritual immaterial essence and energy inside of you that makes you who you are. Assuming that she has the same soul she is the same person and no living person can share her soul. The soul is moldable so changes in your memory and life will not change who you are inherently. Thus, Fiona is the same person she was when she arrived just in a different form that is physically but not mentally recognizable by her husband.
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