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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Perspectives
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Psychological-continuity views are incompatible with the view that we are biological organisms.

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Psychological continuity is neither necessary nor sufficient for a human organism to persist.
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    • 2.Human organisms have brute-physical persistence conditions.
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    • 3.On any psychological-continuity view, a person goes with their transplanted brain.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Locke's distinction between 'man' and 'person' entails that biological and psychological persistence conditions track fundamentally different kinds.
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    • 2.If personal identity tracks psychological continuity while organismic identity tracks biological continuity, the same entity cannot satisfy both sets of persistence conditions.
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    • 3.Any view identifying persons with organisms must collapse Locke's distinction, yet this collapse generates systematic counterexamples in fission, transplant, and gradual replacement cases.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Parfit's reductionism demonstrates that what matters in survival is psychological continuity, which can obtain in degrees and branches independently of any single organism's persistence.
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    • 2.Biological organisms, as Snowdon and van Inwagen establish, persist through brute physical-causal continuity that neither admits of degrees nor permits branching in the relevant sense.
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    • 3.Because psychological continuity and organismic continuity diverge structurally—one admitting of branching and degrees, the other not—no single metaphysical kind can simultaneously obey both sets of persistence conditions.
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