Dualism Personal Identity
Jared White
Don Wacome
Philosophy and Christianity
May 2, 2010
Personal Identity and the Afterlife Inquiring about personal identity will inevitably give birth to questions dealing with our being people, or, as many philosophers like to say, persons. To the thoughtful person, these questions may be familiar, but still remain complex: What am I? When did I begin existing? What is going to happen to me when I die? Others are more complex: How is it that a person can persist from one time to another? What is it to be a person? What does it mean when I say the word “I”? These questions are capable of being answered in numerous different ways. I seek to answer these questions in light of the resurrection as conceived in Christian …show more content…
Therefore, we should look to some variety of materialism. The materialist view is easier to argue as a metaphysical truth about the nature of humans. However, there remains one key problem for materialist versions of the resurrection: personal identity. In the dualist view, personal identity is maintained through the persistence of the soul. Yet in the materialist view, there is nothing to bridge the temporal gap between the body that dies and the body that is resurrected. How is it possible for the resurrected person to be numerically identical to the person that …show more content…
It seems to make sense, especially on the surface of things. One cannot deny that I am the same person now that I was an hour ago especially if I have maintained both physical and psychological continuity. This claim also helps support the fact that I am the same person now as I was ten years ago. I am the same person because I am both physically and psychologically continuous with who I was then. This does not mean that I haven’t changed in any way since then. It instead means that I have qualitative differences, yet I am numerically identical with who I was. One objection to this is to say that I do not maintain consciousness while I sleep, therefore, I cannot be psychologically continuous with who I was ten years ago. But this is not true because when we sleep, we do not go unconscious; rather we merely slip into a state of sub-conscious. Consciousness doesn’t stop altogether during periods of sleep. Even if it is maintained minimally, it is still
Don Wacome
Philosophy and Christianity
May 2, 2010
Personal Identity and the Afterlife Inquiring about personal identity will inevitably give birth to questions dealing with our being people, or, as many philosophers like to say, persons. To the thoughtful person, these questions may be familiar, but still remain complex: What am I? When did I begin existing? What is going to happen to me when I die? Others are more complex: How is it that a person can persist from one time to another? What is it to be a person? What does it mean when I say the word “I”? These questions are capable of being answered in numerous different ways. I seek to answer these questions in light of the resurrection as conceived in Christian …show more content…
Therefore, we should look to some variety of materialism. The materialist view is easier to argue as a metaphysical truth about the nature of humans. However, there remains one key problem for materialist versions of the resurrection: personal identity. In the dualist view, personal identity is maintained through the persistence of the soul. Yet in the materialist view, there is nothing to bridge the temporal gap between the body that dies and the body that is resurrected. How is it possible for the resurrected person to be numerically identical to the person that …show more content…
It seems to make sense, especially on the surface of things. One cannot deny that I am the same person now that I was an hour ago especially if I have maintained both physical and psychological continuity. This claim also helps support the fact that I am the same person now as I was ten years ago. I am the same person because I am both physically and psychologically continuous with who I was then. This does not mean that I haven’t changed in any way since then. It instead means that I have qualitative differences, yet I am numerically identical with who I was. One objection to this is to say that I do not maintain consciousness while I sleep, therefore, I cannot be psychologically continuous with who I was ten years ago. But this is not true because when we sleep, we do not go unconscious; rather we merely slip into a state of sub-conscious. Consciousness doesn’t stop altogether during periods of sleep. Even if it is maintained minimally, it is still