 Under this kind of reading, Locke’s claim that the identity of any person does not rest in the identity of substance (L-N 2.27.10 and 23) amounts to the claim that if any person wants to determine whether they are the same, they do not look to substance to find out. The idea is that because we have such an impoverished notion of substance in general, we do not look to substratum to determine if we are the same person over time in Locke’s view.