Jim Stone

'The Biological Approach,' Eric T. Olson writes, 'is the view that you and I are human animals, and that no sort of psychological continuity is either necessary or sufficient for a human animal to persist through time.' Human 'persons' are self-aware human animals which, as they aren't essentially self aware, aren't essentially persons. Ranged against this position is the 'Psychological Approach,' a spectrum of views according to which 'some psychological relation is both necessary and sufficient for one to survive.' The Psychological Approach is sufficiently broad to include the view that you survive because of a relation between your basic mental capacities in a physically continuous realizer, e.g., your cerebrum. The Biological Approach merits more attention than it has received from philosophers, and Olson's lucid and engaging defense of it is welcome. His book is full of interesting arguments of which I will consider only the most central.

I find a lost wallet containing the owner's address and a lot of cash. Shall I keep it or return it? Suppose I have the ‘liberty of indifference’: whatever I do, I could have done otherwise. Indeed, part of what is meant in saying I act freely is that either way what I do is up to me. And let's allow this liberty requires that my choice is not a logical consequence of the past and natural laws. If I return the wallet, I could have kept it without violating a law of nature or changing the past. Let's call this ‘situation S’ . Suppose I return the wallet.Others are also in S: free people find lost wallets every day. Each of us can freely return the wallet we find. It doesn’t follow immediately that we can all return it, however. That each ticket holder can win the lottery doesn’t entail they can all win it. We need the additional premiss that no number of people freely returning the wallet prevents the remainder from freely returning it. In short: each of us in S can freely return the wallet. Further, no number of us doing so prevents the remainder from doing so. Therefore it's possible that we all freely do what I do.According to Modal Realism , other possible worlds are concrete realities and the people in them as real as you and me. Some of these people are in S. Each of them can freely return the wallet; none of them is prevented from exercising that ability by others doing so, including others in worlds causally isolated from theirs. For instance, our doings in the actual world no more limit their abilities than ….

This paper argues that there are no people. If identity isn't what matters in survival, psychological connectedness isn't what matters either. Further, fissioning cases do not support the claim that connectedness is what matters. I consider Peter Unger's view that what matters is a continuous physical realization of a core psychology. I conclude that if identity isn't what matters in survival, nothing matters. This conclusion is deployed to argue that there are no people. Objections to Eliminativism are considered, especially that morality cannot survive the loss of persons

The dissertation is composed of five papers, each of which either deals with a topic in contemporary metaphysics or uses concepts central to contemporary metaphysics as part of the machinery of its argument. Three papers deal with the problem of personal identity. In Hume on Identity: A Defense I argue that Hume, in maintaining that we are always mistaken in ascribing identity to persons, is presenting a fundamental metaphysical problem about identity through change, not trying to analyze the way we talk about change as his contemporary critics charge. I explicate Hume's argument for this alarming conclusion and show it is far more powerful than has been realized. In Parfit on Identity, I criticize recent attempts to reduce persons to series of psychophysical states or stages. I outline a Realist account of persons and argue that identity is what matters in survival. In Memories, Brains, and Identity, I attack John Locke's contention that present identity is a function of present experience. I use counter-instances derived from the literature on split-brains to show that my present experience could have belonged to someone else. A consequence is that the memory criterion of personal identity is essentially incomplete. ;Examples from the literature on personal identity involving fissioning are central to Abortion and The Control of Human Bodies in which I argue that an organism with a strong right to life has a right to the continued use of the biological equipment, the use of which it acquires through the species-typical process of its own creation. A consequence is that if a fetus is a person, he has the right to the continued use of the mother's womb whether she has given it to him or not. ;The papers on Locke and Parfit rely upon the apparatus of possible worlds, which is central to Dreaming and Certainty. If I believe that I am in a world in which I have conclusive evidence that I am awake, and there is a possible world in which I have the same belief and it is false, can I know which is actual on the basis of the evidence I believe is conclusive? I argue that being wide-awake is a self-recognizing state: when I'm not in it I can mistakenly believe that I am in it, but when my belief is true, I know it. I argue that this enables me to recognize that I am not dreaming

Moderate Monism is the position that permanent, but not temporary, coincidence entails identity. Harold Noonan writes: " According to the moderate monist if God creates ex nihilo a bronze statue and later annihilates it, destroying both the statue and the bronze of which it is composed , the statue and the bronze are identical. If, however, God simply radically reshapes the bronze at t10 the statue ceases to exist and the piece of bronze survives, so despite their coincidence up to t10 the statue and the piece of bronze are two things. "