> "What in the devil's abstraction is this? Souls? Really?"
> Friend posts meme about forum post: "On building Omelas for shrimp; the implications of diversity-oriented theories of moral value on factory farming"
> Read's linked intro to Theory of Mind in the post
> Remembers arguments in this article
> Immediately convinced that soul theory is likely the best explanation of personal identity
I guess it just seems to me that the sorts of intuitions you're relying on here are the exact sort of intuitions we ought to doubt if naturalism is true - I see no particular reason why evolution would lead us to be able to have any sort of direct, unimpeachable insight into our own mental reality, and many reasons why such insight would even be negatively advantageous. Abandoning physicalism, which has been overwhelmingly successful in surviving many similarly structured challenges, and embracing an entirely new framework (one which seems unable, even in principle, to yield the sort of concrete empirical understanding physicalism at least anticipates) in response to these concerns seems obviously unwarranted to me. Why not just accept the idea that you might be wrong about whether two minds could exist alongside each other, or whether there is some further fact re: the experiencer? Especially since we know for a fact that human beings are capable of shedding such a sense in certain conditions?
Very interesting. I share your intuition about the necessity of an experiencer, but I tend to be skeptical of those feelings. For your second argument: 1) I feel that the use of 'who' in point 3 assumes the conclusion; 2) if we run this argument about two identical red shirts, need we posit an essence of shirt that enables the shirts to differ?; relatedly 3) if you did in fact have two minds, there would necessarily be a physical difference for them both to be instantiated--otherwise point 1 is also assuming the conclusion.
The idea that there couldn't be "no fact of the matter" about whether you survive some surgery strikes me as really implausible. Just about every distinction you can think of--between night and day, war and peace, even between being pregnant and not being pregnant--admits of hard to classify, borderline cases that it's natural to describe as cases where there's no fact of the matter which side of the distinction we're on. The clearest counterexamples--eg, the distinction between even and odd numbers--concern abstracta. If the distinction between personal identity and non-identity doesn't admit any vague, borderline cases, that's really surprising!
I admit its hard to first-personally *imagine* borderline cases of personal identity, but that strikes me as telling us more about the activity of first-personal imagining (in particular, it's always from an imagined point of view) than the metaphysics of identity.
Seems like the first two arguments beg the question. The idea that we can create “someone else” with “identical physical and mental characteristics” seems more like a contradiction in terms than something that is ideally possible. Why is it possible? I don’t think you say.
Similarly, it seems like if there were “two” literally identical minds attached to the exact same body, there is really just one mind. Nothing changes. The assertion that two minds exist is ipse dixit, and dixit that has zero observable effects isn’t very credible.
As for the last argument, I would say that splitting brain hemispheres or just duplicating someone so the two halves share continuity would just be splitting the soul. The line of continuity branches. This is odd to some degree, but the oddness comes from the assumption that we can somehow split people’s minds perfectly.
The third argument (if successful) would only show that I *have* a soul, not that I *am* a soul. For all the personal identity argument shows, I might be identical to a body-soul composite, which has a soul as an essential part.
(1) It seems that Parfit's fission cases give us strong reason to reject the claim "iii. Identity is intrinsic, not extrinsic." *What matters* is intrinsic. But identity isn't, since we could survive as either Lefty or Righty, but only in the absence of the other.
(2) "it seems like two beings with identical mental lives can swap minds" -- this could be explained by co-consciousness relations. BrainA gives rise to qualiaA, and brainB qualiaB, but then at time t2 brainB generates qualiaB2, which is unified (in a larger, temporally extended experience) with qualiaA, rather than the qualiaB that we would normally have expected.
In general, you seem to be underestimating the resources available to bundle theorists to resist positing metaphysically heavyweight substances with haecceities (primitive identity facts). For example...
(3) "These would be different minds. Yet what would make them different?" The fact that they are two in number rather than one. They needn't differ at all in their *intrinsic* properties. It's just that we've imagined a scenario in which your brain gives rise to two bundles of qualia instead of just one. Once that's happened, nothing further is required to "make" the two minds numerically distinct. Compare: https://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/03/constituent-vs-world-ontology.html
> Reads this post around New Years when published
> "What in the devil's abstraction is this? Souls? Really?"
> Friend posts meme about forum post: "On building Omelas for shrimp; the implications of diversity-oriented theories of moral value on factory farming"
> Read's linked intro to Theory of Mind in the post
> Remembers arguments in this article
> Immediately convinced that soul theory is likely the best explanation of personal identity
I'm a soul man, do do do dooo do do do doooo. Happy New Year
I guess it just seems to me that the sorts of intuitions you're relying on here are the exact sort of intuitions we ought to doubt if naturalism is true - I see no particular reason why evolution would lead us to be able to have any sort of direct, unimpeachable insight into our own mental reality, and many reasons why such insight would even be negatively advantageous. Abandoning physicalism, which has been overwhelmingly successful in surviving many similarly structured challenges, and embracing an entirely new framework (one which seems unable, even in principle, to yield the sort of concrete empirical understanding physicalism at least anticipates) in response to these concerns seems obviously unwarranted to me. Why not just accept the idea that you might be wrong about whether two minds could exist alongside each other, or whether there is some further fact re: the experiencer? Especially since we know for a fact that human beings are capable of shedding such a sense in certain conditions?
Very interesting. I share your intuition about the necessity of an experiencer, but I tend to be skeptical of those feelings. For your second argument: 1) I feel that the use of 'who' in point 3 assumes the conclusion; 2) if we run this argument about two identical red shirts, need we posit an essence of shirt that enables the shirts to differ?; relatedly 3) if you did in fact have two minds, there would necessarily be a physical difference for them both to be instantiated--otherwise point 1 is also assuming the conclusion.
The idea that there couldn't be "no fact of the matter" about whether you survive some surgery strikes me as really implausible. Just about every distinction you can think of--between night and day, war and peace, even between being pregnant and not being pregnant--admits of hard to classify, borderline cases that it's natural to describe as cases where there's no fact of the matter which side of the distinction we're on. The clearest counterexamples--eg, the distinction between even and odd numbers--concern abstracta. If the distinction between personal identity and non-identity doesn't admit any vague, borderline cases, that's really surprising!
I admit its hard to first-personally *imagine* borderline cases of personal identity, but that strikes me as telling us more about the activity of first-personal imagining (in particular, it's always from an imagined point of view) than the metaphysics of identity.
Seems like the first two arguments beg the question. The idea that we can create “someone else” with “identical physical and mental characteristics” seems more like a contradiction in terms than something that is ideally possible. Why is it possible? I don’t think you say.
Similarly, it seems like if there were “two” literally identical minds attached to the exact same body, there is really just one mind. Nothing changes. The assertion that two minds exist is ipse dixit, and dixit that has zero observable effects isn’t very credible.
As for the last argument, I would say that splitting brain hemispheres or just duplicating someone so the two halves share continuity would just be splitting the soul. The line of continuity branches. This is odd to some degree, but the oddness comes from the assumption that we can somehow split people’s minds perfectly.
The third argument (if successful) would only show that I *have* a soul, not that I *am* a soul. For all the personal identity argument shows, I might be identical to a body-soul composite, which has a soul as an essential part.
Interesting post! A few thoughts:
(1) It seems that Parfit's fission cases give us strong reason to reject the claim "iii. Identity is intrinsic, not extrinsic." *What matters* is intrinsic. But identity isn't, since we could survive as either Lefty or Righty, but only in the absence of the other.
(2) "it seems like two beings with identical mental lives can swap minds" -- this could be explained by co-consciousness relations. BrainA gives rise to qualiaA, and brainB qualiaB, but then at time t2 brainB generates qualiaB2, which is unified (in a larger, temporally extended experience) with qualiaA, rather than the qualiaB that we would normally have expected.
In general, you seem to be underestimating the resources available to bundle theorists to resist positing metaphysically heavyweight substances with haecceities (primitive identity facts). For example...
(3) "These would be different minds. Yet what would make them different?" The fact that they are two in number rather than one. They needn't differ at all in their *intrinsic* properties. It's just that we've imagined a scenario in which your brain gives rise to two bundles of qualia instead of just one. Once that's happened, nothing further is required to "make" the two minds numerically distinct. Compare: https://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/03/constituent-vs-world-ontology.html