Are their answers to the reading questions from the book Doing Philosophy 5th ed
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Are their answers to the reading questions from the book Doing Philosophy 5th edition ISBN:0078038251, ISBN-13: 9780078038259, Authors: Theodore Schick, and Lewis Vaughn. Chapter 4 Page 311. "Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons." If so, can you paste them.
1. What is the difference between the ego theory and the bundle theory? Which theory does Parfit prefer? Which do you think is more plausible? Explain. 2. Parfuit asserts that most of us have false beliefs about what persons are and about ourselves. Why does he say this? Do you agree with him? Explain. 3. What point is Parfit making about the bundle theory by using the analogy of the club meetings? Do you think the analogy helps to explain what persons are--or is it misleading? 4. According to Parfit, how do split-brain cases support the bundle theory? Do you concur? Why or why not?Explanation / Answer
1) Parfit argues for the Bundle Theory, which states that we cannot explain the unit of consciousness through people but rather as a series of mental states and events. Each one of these series constitutes a life, denying the existence of a person to be existing separately from one's body.
Parfit brings into existence science fiction's favourite toy: the teleporter. It is a device which can read the configuration of your matter while destroying it, then transfer the information to another location (at the speed of light). The receiver reads this information creating an exact copy of your matter there. For all intensive purposes, argues Parfit, you will die. However, you will have a replica of yourself who will pick up where you left off with life. The replica will not be you, rather, it will be someone who will be exactly similar to you.
The question that Parfit raises is whether or not the person would be the same person as you are. He insists that the answer is no. Although the replica would be psychologically contiguous upto the point you completely dematerialised, it would not have a ``normal'' cause. The wrong line of reasoning, he states is to believe that the teleporter will not get ``you'' to Mars. You want the person on Mars to be ``you'' in a specially intimate way in which no one else could ever be. This line of reasoning, he argues, is fallacious because it falls under the Ego Theory.
The Ego Theory states that the person's continued existence is explained through the persistence of a particular subject of experiences. In other words, personal identity obtains when the individual, as subject to experiences, persists through time. To ground the argument on actual data, Parfit introduces split-brain patients. Split-brain patients are those whose brains lack the dominant hemisphere leaving the sub-dominant halves. As a result, if you present a blue placard visible to one side, and a red placard visible to the other, then when you ask the individuals to write down what colour they see, the left hand will write blue, and the right hand will write red.
The Ego Theorists would argue that split-brain patients have two separate streams of consciousness, and that there are not two persons. What unifies the experiences in one person's stream is the fact that the blue experience and writing of blue is being had by one subject, the opposite being true of the other stream. The Ego Theorists separate the person from the subject of experiences; as such, they violate Ockham's razor: the introduction of the subject of appearances that are not persons.
The Bundle Theorists would argue, however, that very much like persons having several different experiences at once, one may have several states of awareness of several different experiences. This does not introduce any sort of third entity like the ego which are not the same as the person (patient) in the split-brain analogy.
Parfit prefers the Bundle Theory.
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