Our Identity and the Separability of Persons and Organisms

Dialogue-Canadian Philosophical Review

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 519-534

  Persson, Ingmar ^a  

^a LUND UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85012433571     PISSN: 00122173     EISSN: 17590949     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0012217300046874     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. I here assume personalism to be a reductionist theory in Derek Parfit's sense, i.e., one that does not view persons as existing separately from their bodies and their psychological states; see his Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), sec. 79.
2. See Michael Ayers, Locke (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), vol. 2, chap. 19
3. and Fred Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 6
4. but contrast Eric T. Olson, The Human Animal (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 136, 150–53.
5. William R. Carter, “How to Change Your Mind,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 19, 1 (March 1989): 1–16, especially pp. 9–11.
6. Paul Snowdon, “Persons, Animals, and Ourselves” in The Person and the Human Mind, edited by C. Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 83–107, especially p. 91.
7. Ayers, Locke, vol. 2, pp. 283–85.
8. Olson, The Human Animal, pp. 106–109.
9. Since these writers—who, employing the term Snowdon coined in “Brain Transplants and Personal Identity” (in Human Beings, edited by D. Cockburn [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], pp. 109–26), will be labelled animalists—formulate their objections somewhat differently, I will not attempt any verbatim rendition. Rather, I will try to capture the quintessence of their objections.
10. Interestingly, Carter slips into conceding the existence of two subjects of thought and experience. Discussing a case in which the mind/brain of a human organism who has climbed Mt. Everest is transferred to another organism, he writes that, after this transfer, this “mind remembers being part of an individual who climbed Everest” (Carter, “How to Change Your Mind,” p. 13). Here it is granted both that a mind performs mental operations such as remembering and that it is part of a human individual or organism. Since Carter insists that the latter is also the subject of mental predication, he is committed to there being two such subjects.
11. This proposal is also immune to what seems (but only prima facie, I think) to be a difficulty for the idea that persons and their organisms have all matter in common; what is it, then, that gives them different persistence conditions? This objection is pressed by Olson, The Human Animal, pp. 97–102.
12. Thus, there is a tension between Olson's claim in The Human Animal that each of us “comes into being about sixteen days after fertilization” (p. 91)
13. and his claim that “your brainstem, as the organ that is chiefly responsible for directing your life-sustaining functions, is essential to you” (p. 140).
14. Hence, Peter van Inwagen cannot be correct in arguing that (a) there is a unitary thing that elementary particles compose if and only if their activity constitutes a life, and that (b) if there is thinking and feeling “there must be a thing, one thing, that is doing the thinking and feeling” (Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990], section 9; p. 12; see also sec. 12). It is (a) that we should be suspicious of.
15. For further discussion, see my “Critical Study” of van Inwagen's book in Notûs, 27, 4 (December 1993): 512–18.
16. The philosophical discussion of this issue was sparked off by Thomas Nagel's paper, “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness,” reprinted in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
17. It is also discussed by, among others, Parfit in Reasons and Persons, chap. 12.
18. For further elaboration of these reflections, see Olson, The Human Animal.
19. I argue for the circularity of a psychological criterion that appeals to experiential memory in “The Involvement of Our Identity in Experiential Memory,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 27, 4 (December 1997): 447–65.
20. I am grateful to Eric T. Olson, Derek Parfit, and Paul Snowdon for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 20