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But in fact the question and its answer cannot be intelligibly mooted without recourse
to the nature of the brain associated with the self in question. Suppose that the brains
of some persons have just one hemisphere capable of sustaining a self, that others
have (like our brain) two, others twenty-seven, yet others a thousand: then the selves
of each of these creatures will be said to have as many parts, and be capable of
generating as many non-identical survivors, as the number of parts their brains have.
This consequence seems extremely odd, since the selves of each type of creature
will present themselves as possessed of the same unitary and non-composite inner
constitution. (Contrast this with divisible plants of variously many parts.) Moreover,
the trouble we have in projecting ourselves into the perspectives of two future selves
seems compounded when the numbers increase; it begins to seem even more like
making new selves out of bits of your old brain.
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What we have here is a genuine collision between the way we antecedently conceive
the self and the way fission and fusion cases invite us to think of our survival; no such
collision attends the nonpersonal cases of survival without identity. This collision is
what produces the peculiar unease and sense of being duped that we naturally feel
when first confronted with alleged cases of personal fission; we obscurely feel that
something is going wrong, though we are hard put to it to shape this unease into a
principled resistance to the conclusion about survival we are asked to draw. This
perplexity seems to issue from a prior commitment to the simplicity of the self which
runs up against certain facts about the relation between the brain and the person. It is
the strength of this commitment which motivates and explains why preserving both
hemispheres of the brain might be reasonably viewed as less like survival than
preserving just one: for the former case requires us to regard the self as divisible,
whereas the latter does not. So on the ordinary naïve conception of the self we can
understand why such a double success can be a failure: making two selves from the
brain of one would have to be seen as the creation of totally new selves, whereas the
preservation of a single hemisphere could assure the survival of the one old self.
Having your brain divided would not, on the ordinary naïve conception, be as good as
having your life span doubled, since these require quite different things of the nature
of the self. According to the naïve conception, then, the self is so constituted that its
survival cannot consist in anything other than its identity with a future self: this is
because, not having self-like parts, it cannot continue to exist by virtue of division--
identity is the only mode of survival for a simple substance.
It is tempting to infer from the foregoing discussion that cases of brain splitting and
recombination may be dismissed as not showing what they are claimed to, namely,
that there can be personal survival without identity. But, though we have brought
forward reasons for doing this in a motivated way, we cannot really dismiss these
cases as easily as that; for there is, it seems, no honest denying that brain division is
not tantamount to total destruction. Even if you were intellectually persuaded by the
previous discussion that the self cannot divide in the way the claim of survival without
identity requires it to, you would probably still prefer brain division to death--despite
your justified puzzlement as to how the self could survive in two or more parts. The
truth of the matter seems to be that we are here
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confronted with a genuine antinomy: two sets of considerations about the self seem
individually compelling, but they point to contradictory conclusions. What is significant
is that the two sets of considerations issue from different ways of approaching the
self--from the point of view of the ordinary psychological concept of the self, and from
the point of view of the physical basis of the self. Viewed in this way the antinomy
about the conditions of personal survival is a special case of the general problem
(discussed in Chapter 2) of reconciling the content of our mental concepts with the
fact of the physical involvements of the mental. The simplicity of the self is analogous
in this respect to the subjectivity of sensations: our sensation concepts tell us that
sensations are subjective in a way no merely physical state could be, yet we also
believe that sensations must in some way depend upon physical properties of the
brain--so we get a clash between two ways of thinking about sensations. Similarly,
our concept of the self tells us it is a simple substance, but we also believe the self to
depend upon the brain, which is a complex divisible substance: thought of mentally,
the self cannot be divided, but when we think of it physically we seem compelled to
suppose that this simplicity is in some way illusory. The choice therefore seems to be
between deciding to ignore, however unreasonably, considerations drawn from the
physical facts about the brain, on the one hand, and deciding to abandon or radically
revise our conception of the self in the light of those facts, on the other. Neither
decision can be taken in good conscience; so we are reduced to looking the antinomy
in the face and despairing of a satisfying resolution. But there are occasions on which
despair is to be preferred to concealing the troubling facts and so preventing full
recognition of their import. The right response to brain fission and fusion cases, it
would seem, is first to point out that the claim of survival without identity requires us
to conceive the self in a way we in fact do not and whose coherence is dubious; then
to acknowledge the force of the cases that have these rebarbative implications, thus
admitting an antinomy in our ways of thinking about the self; and to diagnose the
antinomy as arising from the difficulty of co-ordinating the distinctive character of the
mind with the fact of its physical involvements, withholding final judgement pending
some resolution of that general problem.
The conception of the self that has seemed to elude explanation in other terms was
the naïve notion we are naturally prone to operate with. It may be that this notion is
not, after all, coherent; but it is the
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notion we have, and any philosophical account of the self has as its first duty the
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