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Consider this weird thought experiment I was reading about in Peter Van Inwagen's book,  Material Beings.  Imagine yourself as a freshly fertilized egg. Call it A. The single cell then becomes two cells, A and B. Now imagine that B fails to make it and A goes on to divide making A and C and so on. After grieving the loss of B it is reasonable to assume that A is you. But what if rather than A surviving, B survives instead? It would be equally reasonable to think that B was you. But now suppose that both A and B survive but that they become detached and go on to be identical twins. It appears that you would be both A and B. But that is absurd. Why is it weird? Surely whichever one survives is you and so what's the problem? Well, consider Leibniz law. Leibniz law states that for any objects X and Y, if X is identical to Y then X has all the properties that Y has and Y has all the properties that X has. Furthermore, the law implies that X is always going to have to have t...

Eric Olson’s main contention is that when we refer to “I” we should be referring to one thing or perhaps no thing, but not multiple things. For any theory of identity one must avoid the thinking animal problem – positing more than one entity answering to the reference “I.” Olsen’s suggestion is that we are animals. Animalism is the view that each human being is numerically identical with an animal. An animal is a biological organism that lives by virtue of being a self-organizing “biological event” that maintains a complex internal structure.