The Christian Vanguard

The problem, according to Richard Swinburne, with the body theory is that one part of the body, the brain, seems to be of crucial importance for determining the characteristic behavior of the rest, which isn’t true of other body parts. You could have a heart or liver transplant and be the same person, but the same cannot be said of the brain. So the brain would have to be “the core” of the body and not the body simpliciter. This makes it susceptible to duplication problems. If you were to split the brain of some Person P1 into its two hemispheres and put each hemisphere into an empty skull, both hemispheres would seem to have a claim of being P1. So if the brain is the core of the person, and the brain can be split into two, then it seems you can have two of the same persons, which would fail the criterion of identity. The problem with memory theory is that it also has duplication problems. Suppose someone claiming to be Guy Fawkes claims to have done all the things Fawkes has done a...

In my Metaphysics textbook, there is an article by David Parfit describing split brain experiments and its implications for the philosophy of mind. So, the experiments go something like this. You take a brain and you split it into the two hemispheres. Each part of the brain controls a different part of the body. Next, the patient is shown a card that is half blue and half red. Now, say the right eye is focused on the red, and the left eye is focused on the blue. Then ask the patient which color he sees, and his right arm will write red, and his left arm will write blue, but the patient cannot comprehend both at the same time. He thinks he only sees blue and he also thinks he only sees red. He cannot conjoin the two beliefs.  What Parfit says this proves is that our conscious is not a unified thing. Consciousness is supposed to  unify all beliefs, and this unified consciousness is what we call the self. But since we know that a single patient can have two streams of consci...