Analysis of Derek Parfit’s Article “Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons”
At the center of philosophy is the question of what exactly are the underpinnings of a human being, what constitutes a person and at what point does a person cease to be or becomes another person. Derek Parfit in his essay "Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons" uses split brain patience in which the left and right hemispheres of the brain act autonomously of one another, in order to advanced an argument in support of bundle theory which sees the self as a compilation of particulars which compose the overall entity that we refer to as the self. In split brain patients there is an instance of on stream of consciousness that only sees red occurring at the same time the other only sees blue. This is a confounding instance when asking the question which level of awareness is the true one. The answer is both and neither. Parfit does not believe that their are two people living inside the head of a split brain patient as some philosophers have previously proposed. Rather, he sees it as two streams of consciousness being experienced by the same person. Parfit points out that if "a person's dominant hemisphere is destroyed, this person is able to react in the way in which, in the split-brain cases, the sub-dominant hemisphere reacts." (Parfit, 383) Though this would be called brain damage in instances in which it occurs in the real world, it must also be noted that brain damaged by extension implies that part of the brain, and the self derived from that self still functions. As Parfit puts it, “we do not believe that such a person is just without an automaton, without consciousness” (Parfit, 383).
Parfit disagrees with the ego theory of the self as misunderstanding the nature of the self. He uses the example of teletransporation in which a person would be destroyed and an exact replica of that person would materialize on a different part of the earth or another planet entirely. The central question here is whether or not the copy of the person in fact the person, or if that light of consciousnesses has been permanently put out and another one that while identical, replaces it. An example of bundle theory that is more applicable to everyday person than split brain patients would be when a person vacillates between two decisions. This dynamic finds it’s way linguistically into every day speech. When a person says, “A part of me wants to go running, but another part of me wants to sit on the couch all day eating potato chips” that person is not saying that they are multiple person, but it is interesting that we do not suffer an identity crisis when a “part of us” wants to do something, and a “part of us wants to do something else” Obviously, a person deciding between two alternative and different options is just one person. But human beings are dynamic enough that many parts compose the whole, and this is the perspective that Parfit adopts in his believing in bundle theory ass the guiding principle to take into effect when evaluating which theory best describes the nature of persons. Bundle theory has a lot of cross over with the Buddhist understanding of the self in that they deny the ego existing, and that it is instead the illusion of consciousness, that we get from the different particulars that compose the self. The self is memories, it is also goes for the future, it is the feeling of what is happening around it, it notes the temperature and can do all of these things simultaneously. In split brain patients, there is a more dramatic separation as the brain loses it’s ability to do all these things in harmony and individual parts of the brain, or it could be said, components of consciousness act independently of each other. Theories of the self have been developed and adjusted since long before we had the ability to use brain image scans and had a firm understanding in neural biology. According to Parfit, these advances have gone to confirm the veracity of Bundle Theory. Parfit says that given these advances “psychology and neurophysiology, the Bundle Theory may now seem to be obviously true.” (Parfit, 385).
The human experience has impressions that seem true intuitively but science points to being wrought with errors in understanding. A good example of this would be the earth being a sphere and not flat. People for years thought the earth was flat because the ground outside seemed flat. But science later corrective this intuitive, yet incorrect belief.
you, the person, are not a separately existing entity” (Parfit, 385).
I agree with Parfit and buy into Bundle Theory. It seems that human beings have a natural capacity to guard and protect our individuality. We do not like to think that a copy of us could be made of us that is us in every way except that their existence would in no way extend our own ego’s existence. However, when we really analyze what composes the consciousness of the whole, we see that it is made up of a component of many different things. Each one by itself is not the self, but combined become what we refer to as the self.
Work Cited
Derek Parfit’s “Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons” Print
