  The second objection was Reid's, about transitivity of identity in  the Brave Officer case. What gets Locke in trouble is that memories  fade, so someone may no longer be capable of having direct memories  of what is clearly his earlier life. But one may certainly have  direct memories of some past stage that itself had direct memories of an earlier stage, and so on, until every stage in the life is linked  by a chain of overlapping direct memories. What one can then insert  into the criterion of identity across time is a  continuity  of direct (q-)memories, so that the retired general is the same  person as the apple-stealer insofar as he directly remembers the  experiences of the brave officer, who himself directly remembers the  experiences of the apple-stealer. Of course, one direct memory of  some past experience won't be sufficient to establish identity, it  seems. Suppose I volunteered to have your memory trace of walking in  Antarctica implanted in me (and I myself had never been there), and I woke up having that q-memory of walking in the bitter cold and deep  snow. Surely this would not make me you, even though there is a  direct memory connection between us, so theorists taking this route  will talk about the need for strong memory connections,  where this just consists in a significant number of such connections  (Parfit 1984, 205–206, 219–223). 