Lesson 5 Flashcards
The possibility of continuing personal existence after death
Personal identity as physical, involving spatio-temporal continuity of the body and brain
Personal identity as metaphysical, involving continuity of consciousness
Personal identify as psychological continuity of personality and memory
Two issues
First - what, if it were to happen, would count as the ‘person’ surviving the death of the body?
Second - is there any evidence that this occurs?
To understand the idea of personal existence after death, we have to unpack the idea of personhood – of how we identify ‘persons’
In other words what is personal identity?
Progressing through life… + identity
-As we progress through life we change radically, from being a small baby through to adulthood and old age
-Along the way things may happen to us that affect how we think of ourselves and how other people see us
-For example, a physical injury may damage my brain. An emotional trauma they leave me depressed. I may lose my memory.
-But through all these events, I still think of myself as an individual person, So what is it that constitutes my identity through life.
Difficult to know we can survive death…
-Unless we come to some view on that, it is difficult to know how we can survive death in some form because we need to know what constitutes the ‘I’ who might survive
Personal existence after death
-In terms of logic, the very notion of life after death’ is a contradiction in terms. The usual meaning of death is that life has stopped.
-LAD suggests that what we call death is nothing of the sort, it is simply the failure of the physical body, but it allows something else (the mind, the soul) to continue, or that death is a temporary state, awaiting the possibility of a resurrection or reincarnation at a future date.
-Whether the idea of life after death can be possible in some form or other, including the value of evidence such as near-death experiences.
-Whether or not what survives death can be said to be the same person as the one that died.
There are three sets of ideas about personal identity:
o that it consists in the physical identity of body and/or brain
o that it consists in metaphysical identity of consciousness/the soul/pure ego
o that it consists in psychological characteristics of personality and of memory.
Personal identity as physical, involving spatio-temporal continuity of the body and brain
1 A physicalist would argue that you cannot do without your brain and still be a person.
2 Physicalists generally agree that to be the ‘same person’ throughout life depends also on the spatio-temporal continuity of a functioning body and brain.
A physicalist would argue that you cannot do without your brain and still be a person.
-If you have no brain, you have no memory, no personality and no thoughts.
-Whereas many of the cells in your body are replaced as you get older, the neurons in the cerebral cortex are never replaced.
-Moreover, no neurons are added to the cerebral cortex after birth and any cerebral cortex neurons that die are not replaced.
-At the very least, then, the brain retains its identity of the neurons in the cerebral cortex.
2 Physicalists generally agree that to be the ‘same person’ throughout life depends also on the spatio-temporal continuity of a functioning body and brain.
-This cannot, of course, be the ‘same body’ as the one you were born with, since your current body is much larger.
-Although is popular myth that every cell in the body is replaced every 7-10 years, the rate of cell replacement in the body does mean that there a significant discontinuity between the body’s various states over the period of life time.
-Also, you can lose various bodily parts through illness or accident.
-Bodily ‘identity’ is therefore more case of spatio-temporal continuity. In other words, your body/brain occupies unique location in space and time throughout its life.
Personal identity as metaphysical, involving continuity of consciousness
-To say that the T has metaphysical identity of consciousness means that what is ‘really real’ about persons is not something physical, but their unchanged conscious awareness - hence Descartes’ cogito: I think, therefore I am.
To get the flavour of what this means, the philosopher C.A. Campbell gives an illustration of the clock Big Ben striking 1 o’clock then 2 o’clock:
C.A. Campbell
-Suppose I hear Big Ben striking. A moment later I - the same subject - hear it striking again… It is a pre-condition of my apprehending the second stroke as the second stroke that I remember having heard the first.
-But then I do not ‘remember’ having heard the first (and here is the crucial point) unless I am aware that it was I, the being who now hears the second stroke, who hears the first stroke; unless, in other words, I am not merely the same subject, but also conscious of my selfsameness, in the two experiences.
If you think about this carefully, you’ll see what Campbell means:
-When Big Bang strikes 1, then 2, these two strikes are separate events in space-time.
-How then does an observer/listener know that the clock has struck 2?
Because the observer/listener is conscious during both strikes of the vis clock.
AND is consciously aware of being the same self as heard the clock strike 1 as now hears the clock strike 2.
So memory is dependent on the ‘I’ being self-aware.
Relating Campbell to Descartes
-Now think of the objection to Descartes’ Substance Dualism, on page 78 above, that the logic of Descartes’ argument establishes only that there is thinking”, not that there is an ‘T’ who thinks.
-For Campbell, mere ‘thinking’ could never relate the two strikes of the clock. To do that relation requires a conscious, self-aware mind - a ‘substantial self’, so perhaps Descartes was right.
