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Again, coming back to the distinction between persons and animals,

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we might want to collapse, that we might want to say maybe we don't need that distinction.

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Maybe we should just go with identity of physical organisms. We can see that way in the 17th and 18th centuries.

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They might not have been keen to do that because it does seem to ruin the prospects for an immortal soul or new material.

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So. And that, of course, could be a reason for people not wanting to do that nowadays.

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But suppose we don't mind about that. Suppose we do not believe in immaterial souls.

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In that case, we might be tempted to collapse. The distinction between person and organism.

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But this does have significant implications. If I was once a foetus.

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And this human organism was once. It seems to follow that I once wasn't a person.

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To be a person, you need to have some significant mental life, or at least that is how most people wouldn't understand the notion of person.

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Maybe there will come a time when this physical organism is still operating as an organism that has no conscious life.

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Maybe at the end of my life. This will be a physical organism after the person who has gone.

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So it might seem to follow that being a person is, as it were, an accidental property of mine rather than an essential property.

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And that might seem to be rather an uncomfortable position to think of myself as not necessarily a person.

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OK. Suppose we bring these together. Suppose we're impressed by that thought.

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Could we not then identify the person with the developed functioning brain rather than the whole organism?

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So in other words, maybe we want to say that a person only comes into existence,

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not when the embryo is formed, not at conception, not even when there's a very early foetus.

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But when the brain starts developing, when consciousness emerges,

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that's when a person comes along and the person is to be identified with the developed functioning brain rather than with the whole organism.

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So that can make sense of the Williams cases where the brain gets transplanted, blunted.

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Maybe they're we fairly unproblematic. We want to say that my brain, your body is one and the same person as my brain.

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My body. So when you have a brain transplant, actually, it's a body transplant, not a brain transplant.

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And you can imagine some devious,

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clever person approaching somebody who's a bit simple but happens to be blessed with an extremely good body and

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persuading them that it will be greatly to their advantage to have this wonderful brain transplanted into their body.

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And thus the the old genius gets rejuvenated.

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OK, so this solves some of the problems. But unfortunately, things aren't so simple.

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Split brain cases, for example. If the nerves between the hemispheres of the brain are surgically cut.

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That is a procedure that can be done. I think a treatment can be an extreme treatment for epilepsy, for example.

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Then you can have a single brain giving rise to two conflicting behaviours.

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You can find the two hands do different things. They no longer coordinate.

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OK. Let's build a problem case from this.

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Suppose we have a single brain that split and putting two bodies, each half of the brain can in certain circumstances survive alone.

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Suppose that that is if part of the brain is destroyed.

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One can make do with less. Suppose it became possible to transplant the two halves into separate bodies.

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In that case, you'd have two new persons, both having brain and memory continuity with the original.

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OK, so both the two persons would remember being me. There would be at least significant continuity over both of both brain and thought.

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What do we say then? Well, maybe if this happened, we'd actually give up the notion of strict personal identity.

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Maybe if this became a common thing, we would no longer think of personal identity as all or nothing.

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And Derek Parfit actually suggests this as the way we ought to think about personal identity.

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It's a matter of degree. And we can bring loks forensic thought in here.

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If what matters is our concern, both moral.

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And utilitarian, as it were, about our future self, what matters about personal identity,

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what matters about me tomorrow is that I today care about that person and will make plans on the assumption.

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That that is me. Then that seems to reflect the way we would judge about split brain cases.

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Suppose I knew that I was going to my brain was going to be split and put into two separate bodies.

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I mean, let's suppose I've got some medical condition. My have done too much philosophy and my brain is beginning to fall apart.

49
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And the solution is to cut it in two and give each half a separate life.

50
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I don't know quite how I'd negotiate things with my wife in these circumstances, but maybe, maybe we decide that's the best thing to do.

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I think I'd want to make sure that both of those individuals were provided for.

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We would care about both future selves.

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So maybe thinking of personal identity as a matter of degree would be an appropriate thing to do in those circumstances.

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And I want to leave you with a concept which I think is a particularly useful one for thinking about some of these problems.

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Not only personal identity, but other concepts in philosophy as well.

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Friedrich Weisman, who spent many years at Oxford, in fact.

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Yeah, a lot of them did. Coyte coined this term for concepts which become vague in radically novel situations.

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And he actually suggested that most empirical concepts are like this, that with most of our ordinary everyday concepts,

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if you dream up dramatically radical novel situations, it becomes very unclear how to apply them.

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And the thought here is not. That there is that it's a difficult question how to apply them, we have to think a lot about it to get to the truth.

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Rather, the thought is that maybe there is no correct way to apply them.

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It raises a new question. So let me give you an example. He used to be when I was growing up.

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Taken for granted that marriage always could only involve one man, one woman.

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Of course, you could have things like divorce and so forth, but marriage applied straightforwardly to a man and a woman you couldn't marry.

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You couldn't have marriage between two men, you couldn't have marriage between two women.

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That simply wouldn't be marriage, whatever it was. OK.

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Lines have been blurred. But think yourself into that situation.

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And then ask. Okay. Suppose somebody is had a sex change operation.

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What then? Can a man marry a sex change woman?

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Born a woman, now a man, can they marry? What about the other way round?

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Born a man, now a woman kind of man, men marry her.

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And you can see that it's just left radically unclear. When people, as it were, invented, the concept of marriage,

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the idea of a sex change or someone changing their sex during the course of their life was simply out of the question.

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So there wouldn't have been any thought about this situation, the concept of marriage took for granted that sex was stable.

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And if it isn't, maybe there's no right answer as to how that concept should be taken forward.

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Maybe one could answer in different ways. Maybe we're going to invent have to invent a new concept to deal with this kind of situation.

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But in many cases, what we do when we have a radically new situation, we reinterpret our old contact, let's say having a conversation.

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We know what having a conversation with someone is like. Okay. And then the telephone comes along.

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Is that having a conversation? Well, sort of, yes. It seems pretty close.

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What about e-mail, is that having a conversation? You can see that as technological change takes place.

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It may become radically unclear how we should adapt our concepts to cope with it.

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And it may be that personal identity is a concept which takes for granted all sorts of things, which in the vast majority of cases are true of us.

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We do retain the same consciousness in the same body, continuously developing through life.

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It may be that when we dream up these puzzle cases, we are inventing situations to which there is in fact no right answer.

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If such things were to become commonplace, then maybe we'd have to adapt our concepts.