The Christian Vanguard

Baker’s constitution view states that personal identity depends on mental property of the First Person Perspective. This is the ability to conceive oneself as oneself, or as a referent to the first person pronoun. This is not to say it is a being with a point of view, as mere animals do, but mere animals cannot conceive of themselves as the subject of such thoughts. Having a point of view is necessary but not alone sufficient for being a person. Having a FPP is sufficient for being a person. Further, human persons are constituted by human bodies. Now constitution is a relation between different primary kinds, which entails that they are not identical. A statue may be constituted by copper, but the statue is not identical to the statue because they have different persistence conditions. For example, a bronze statue may be flattened to make copper wire, and though the copper persists, the statue does not. On the other side of the coin, a statue may be made of marble or cheese, and the ...

I wrote the following for my medical ethics class. Nothing in here is original. There were footnotes, but they don't transfer over in a copy-paste.  In this paper, I will argue that abortion is morally impermissible. I will begin with narrowing down questions that need to be answered in the debate. From there, I will examine what it is that I am, then explore why I have moral status, and argue that I am numerically identical to the fetus. Throughout all this, I will be contrasting it with the personhood view, which I take to be the strongest opposing view.  Suppose one day you are washing dishes, and your child comes up behind you and asks, “Mommy, can I kill this?” It would be foolish to answer without turning around and seeing what “this” refers to. If it is a worm on a fishing hook, it’s probably permissible to say, “Sure. Go do it outside.” However, if you saw your child was holding a knife to a puppy’s throat, you probably would not respond the same way. This sho...

The problem of temporary intrinsics is that for persisting things, they change their intrinsic properties, such as shape. When I sit, I have a bent shape and when I stand I have changed my shape to a straight shape. This is distinguished from it's relations such as weight and height. For example, being the heaviest person in the room (weight) is not an intrinsic property because a heavier man may enter the room and I am no longer the heaviest man, even though nothing intrinsic about me has changed. So the problem is to explain how this change in intrinsics is possible. Lewis’ solution to this problem is to say that things perdure , not endure. Under perdurance, I have temporal parts, and intrinsics would be properties of that particular temporal part, and obviously these parts differ from one another, so it is no mystery how a thing could change its intrinsics properties. So for example, a road perdures, that is, it has different parts at different times, but doesn’t endure i...

The problem given in the question “Can you bathe in the same river twice?” is that since the substance of the river is constantly renewed, it would seem that it is not the same river, and so our words, that is the names we give the things we are trying to describe, are too vague to denote that this is a river. The same is true of similar examples, such as the ship of Theseus.  Quine’s answer to the problem is to say that these questions don’t really concern the nature of identity, but rather, they concern what we choose to count as a river, a boat, or a person. What makes gives something the nature of identity is not that they have the same river stage or same river substance, but that it is a process of continually replacing the substance or stages of time. So we may be tempted to point at the Ganges River at two different times and say that because of the constant change of substance they are not both the Ganges River, but all that would be true here is that you are pointin...

Chalmers suggestion for addressing the hard problem is to posit that consciousness is a fundamental feature or law such as space, time, mass, and change in that it is not reducible or explained in terms of more basic entities. So it will have its own rules and regulations, like the other basic or fundamental features of our world do. He wants to call them psychophysical laws. This wouldn’t be without precedent for Chalmers as he notes that electromagnetic phenomena couldn’t be explained by previously known physical features and laws, and so they had to posit electromagnetic charge as a new basic feature of the world since nothing in the physical world could explain it. Likewise with consciousness, since there seems to be no already existing theories which encompasses it, then something new is required.