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Personal Identity
Thesis - Chapter 10 (Thought Experiments)
(Text as at 22/07/2014 22:23:31)
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AbstractAny account of personal identity needs to give an account of what is going on in the various thought experiments that have been thought relevant to the topic. It’s also the area that’s most fun. Indeed, I think that the entire Thesis will be an exercise in inference to the best explanation. It needs to account for our intuitions (if there is a universal response) or explain them away as confused. I will firstly briefly consider the propriety of using thought experiments in this domain of enquiry, and then consider the usual suspects, including the following:-
- Fission
- Fusion
- Replication
- Commissurotomy
- Multiple Personality Disorder
- Brain-state Transfer
- Brain Transplants
- Teletransportation
- Siliconisation
Research Methodology
- Follow this Link1 for a generic statement of how I intend to pursue each Chapter.
- The method is broken down into 12, possibly iterative, stages.
- This Chapter is at Stage 2/3.
Chapter Introduction
- To be supplied.
Main Text
- To be supplied.
Links to Books / Papers to be Addressed2
- In this Chapter I will consider the following papers or book chapters (together with some others referenced by these). There are doubtless many more that are relevant and which will be addressed in the course of the thesis, but these are probably sufficient to get us going. For ease of reference, the analytical Note for each reference is hyperlinked directly:-
- "Baillie (James) - Methodology Matters", Baillie
- "Brennan (Andrew) - Personal Identity and Personal Survival", Brennan
- "Cohnitz (Daniel) - Personal Identity and the Methodology of Imaginary Cases", Cohnitz
- "Dennett (Daniel) - Where Am I?", Dennett
- "Gale (Richard) - On Some Pernicious Thought-Experiments", Gale
- "Garrett (Brian) - Fission", Garrett
- "Hawley (Katherine) - Fission, Fusion and Intrinsic Facts", Hawley
- "Marks (Charles) - Commissurotomy, Consciousness and Unity of Mind", Marks
- "Nagel (Thomas) - Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness", Nagel
- "Noonan (Harold) - The Reduplication Problem", Noonan
- "Shoemaker (David) - Personal Identity and Immortality", Shoemaker
- "Snowdon (Paul) - Personal Identity and Brain Transplants", Snowdon
- "Sorensen (Roy) - Thought Experiments", Sorensen
- "Unger (Peter) - A Physically Based Approach To Our Survival". Unger
- "Van Inwagen (Peter) - Two Problems About Personal Identity: Memory and Commissurotomy", Van Inwagen
- "Wilkes (Kathleen) - Multiple Personality and Personal Identity", Wilkes
- "Wilkes (Kathleen) - Real People: Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments", Wilkes
- "Williams (Bernard) - The Self and the Future", Williams
- "Wilson (Jack) - Beyond Horses and Oak Trees: A New Theory of Individuation for Living Entities" (Section 4), Wilson
- Others to be supplied.
- Many aspects of these papers will need to be either ignored or reserved for other chapters.
- The motivation for these works is as follows:-
Links to Notes
- Propriety_of_Thought_Experiments3
- Principal Examples:-
Final Remarks
- This is work-in-progress13.
In-Page Footnotes
Footnote 2:
- See the section on Research Methodology for what is to be done with these.
- The author’s surname is repeated in the text to make it easier for me to see what’s going on in the encoded text I work on.
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