PHIL 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Reductio Ad Absurdum, Single Person
10 Apr 2019
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If we could functionally separate the hemispheres, it doesn"t seem like a big deal: but the two bodies will be psychologically alike initially, as they start acting independently it will seem less and less plausible. If they have the same body the hemispheres have the same experience ! It seems strange to say that i survive as a divided person made up of x and y. So the third answer doesn"t seem to work either: the self is fragmented, contradictory--can"t constitute a single self, these cases show our intuitions, showing that our ideas about personhood don"t really fit together! We can believe in survival without having an answer: sameness of persons or selves is not all-or-nothing but a matter of degree. If someone says they had a religious conversion after committing crime: we can"t decide that he is or is not the same person. Sometimes there is no clear answer to "is this john or not?"
