Persons, bodies, and human beings

Abstract

Personal identity in cases where physical and psychological continuity diverge is indeterminate and empty, as there are no further metaphysical facts to discover beyond the specific details of those continuities. While some maintain a bodily criterion of identity, this position fails to account for the intuitive significance of the brain as the controlling organ and the seat of consciousness. The extrinsicness objection, which asserts that identity cannot depend on factors external to the relationship between two entities, is misplaced; numerical identity can depend on extrinsic facts, much like the property of being an only child depends on the non-existence of siblings. Furthermore, persons are not numerically identical to their bodies or to the human animals that constitute them. Just as a statue is distinct from the lump of matter composing it due to differing life histories and persistence conditions, a person is a distinct entity from their biological organism. Animalist arguments fail to establish that identity must follow the body rather than the brain in transplant scenarios. Ultimately, what carries rational and moral weight is psychological survival and continuity rather than the maintenance of numerical identity, which remains a matter of conceptual redescription in puzzle cases. – AI-generated abstract.