Causal efficacy of content Breaking Glass https wwwyoutubecomwatchvIZD8ffPwXRo Representational Properties An opera singer can theoretically break a crystal wine glass with her voice ID: 383595
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Slide1
Personal IdentitySlide2
Causal efficacy of contentSlide3
Breaking Glass
https
://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZD8ffPwXRo
Slide4
Representational Properties
An opera singer can (theoretically) break a crystal wine glass with her voice.
Suppose she’s singing about love. That doesn’t matter. The physical properties of her voice AND NOT what they mean are causally relevant/ causally efficacious. Slide5
Mental Representation
Later in class we’ll talk lots about mental representation. The general idea is that beliefs like the belief that there is a dog represent things (like the fact that there is a dog).Slide6
Mental Representation
We’d like to think that the representational properties of mental states are causally efficacious:
1. the belief that there is a dog and
2. the belief that all dogs are animals
causes
3. the belief that there is an animal
because
what the first two represent entail what the third belief represents.Slide7
The Opera Problem
But the case looks a lot like the opera singer. If beliefs are realized by brain states, what a brain state can do is determined by its physical properties– not by what it represents!Slide8
The Transitivity of CausesSlide9
Causal Theories of Representation
RepresentsSlide10
Personal identitySlide11
Derek Parfit
Born in Chengdu
成都
, China
Emeritus fellow at All Souls College, Oxford
Author of
Reasons and PersonsSlide12
Numerical Identity
X and Y are numerically identical when they are literally the same as one another.
Numerical identity is the relation every object bears to itself and to nothing else.Slide13
Other Senses of “Identity”
In the social sciences, ‘identity’ can mean “
a
person's conception and expression of their individuality or group
affiliations” (Wikipedia).
Here, one and the same numerically identical person might have different “identities” over time– e.g. I might identify as an American and then later as a Hong
Konger
.Slide14
The Criterion of Personal Identity
The goal in the philosophical study of personal identity is to find the criterion of numerical identity for persons.
If I have two people at different times, and they satisfy the criterion, they are the same person; if they don’t satisfy the criterion, they are different.Slide15
The Criterion of Personal Identity
The Soul Theory: Everyone has an immaterial soul. If you want to know whether X and Y are the same person, you just find out whether they have the same soul.
The Body Theory: X and Y are the same person if and only if they have the same body.
The Memory Theory: X and Y are the same person if X
remember’s
Y’s experiences, or Y
remember’s
X’s experiences.Slide16
Locke on Personal Identity
John Locke famously defended the memory theory of personal identity.Slide17
The Adventures of Little Finger
Suppose I cut off your little finger. Now suppose your whole consciousness, your memory of everything you did in the past continues on in the little finger, but a new conscious awareness, with a different memory and no knowledge of what you did in the past comes to exist in the rest of your body. Locke says (a) it’s the little finger who is you and (b) you (little finger) should not be concerned with the actions taken by the body.Slide18
Vs. The Soul Theory
The prince and the cobbler.Slide19
Socrates Waking vs. Socrates Sleeping
“If the same [substance] Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same person. And to punish Socrates waking for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more right than to punish one twin for what his brother-twin did, whereof he knew nothing, because their outsides were so like that they could not be distinguished.”Slide20
Constitutive Reductionism
Parfit
argues for a combination of the body/ mental state theory:
“A person is an entity that has a body and has thoughts and other experiences.” p. 656
Notice that here, the
person
is not identical to any of the other things.Slide21
The Statue and the Lump
“If we melt down a bronze statue, we destroy this statue, but we do not destroy this lump of bronze. So, though the statue just consist in the lump of bronze, these cannot be one and the same thing.”Slide22
“Bare Truth”
“Suppose that I already know that several trees are growing together on some hill. I then learn that, because that is true, there is a copse on this hill. That would not be new factual information. I would have merely learnt
that
a group of trees can be called a ‘copse.’ My only new information is about our language.” p. 657Slide23
Eliminative Reductionism
Buddha has spoken thus: ‘O brethren, actions do exist, and also do their consequences, but the person that acts does not… There exists no Individual, it is only a conventional name given to a set of elements.’ (
Cila
Mara???)Slide24
The TeletransporterSlide25
Argument Against: Replica = Me
Suppose the
teletransporter
malfunctions and fails to destroy my body, even though it succeeds at creating a new one just like it on the planet.Slide26
The Physical Spectrum
The Ship of Theseus:
http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVAHXiKjgRo
Slide27
The Yes/No Principle
The Yes/No Principle maintains that there is always a fact of the matter about whether I exist. We can ask of anyone who does exist: Is this person Michael? And there will either be a Yes answer or a No answer (even if we don’t know what the answer is).Slide28
Sharp Boundary
If we accept the Yes/No Principle, and we accept that my replica is not me, then we will be forced to say that there is a specific point in the Physical Spectrum where the replacement of one cell causes me to cease to exist.Slide29
No Fact of the Matter
Parfit
thus rejects the Yes/No Principle. Instead, he says there are possible cases where there is no fact of the matter whether I survived or died. It’s not true that this person is me, and it’s not false either. Slide30
Personal Identity Purely Linguistic
“I may ask [in the TTP case], ‘Will that person be me?’ But that is a misleading way to put my question. It suggests that I don’t know what’s going to happen. When I know these other facts, I should ask, ‘Would it be correct to call that person me?’ That would remind me that, if there’s anything that I don’t know, that is merely a fact about our language.”Slide31
“Merely Verbal” Questions
Sometimes
disagreements aren’t disagreements over facts.
Some people claim to have been electrocuted. I don’t think they have been, but not because I dispute any of their factual claims.Slide32
Comparison w/ Consciousness
If we find an intelligent alien or a robot, there is a real factual question as to whether it has conscious experiences or not. We may not be able to ever find out, but there is a
real fact.
Parfit
thinks this is not true in the difficult personal identity cases. There’s nothing that we don’t know.