6. Where Am I? by Daniel C Dennett – this is an excellent short story with Dennett himself as protagonist. Dennett accepts a job which requires him to get a surgical procedure to remove his brain from his body, put it in a vat and install radio connections between brain and body. Once he is following his assignment his brain-body connection fails. Sometime after that he is “revived” in a new body and is told that there is a computer copy of his brain which is synchronized. Throughout the story Dennett reflects on where he is. Is he were his brain is or where his body is? Where is he when he changes body? Or when he learns that there is a copy of his brain? Excellent, thought provoking.
7. Personal Identity by Eric Olson – this was a dense, difficult to read article of pure philosophy (of which I could only grasp it’s surface) . Olson is an expert in Philosophy of Mind and in this chapter he tries to answer several questions: What is to be a person? At what point in one’s develop from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person? What evidence bears on the question of whether the person here now is the one who was here yesterday? What it takes for us to persist through time? I learn a couple of concepts: first-person memory and psychological continuity, which try to explain the factors which make one person be the same person in a different time… cannot say much more, the text is complicated and got tangled in my brain.
8. Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons by Derek Parfit - The chapter starts describing real split-brain cases. That is, when people have their two brain hemispheres disconnected. Such people can have two separate and different experiences with either hemisphere at the same time. Does this mean that there's two streams of consciousness? Are there two people there? Parfit then discusses two theories about what persons are: the Ego Theory - the Ego or Subject of Experiences which unifies someone's consciousness at all time. The soul or spirit which exists apart from our physical existence. The Bundle Theory - persons do not exist. Instead we are a bundle of Experiences tied up by causal relations. Hard to understand but maybe connecting this definition to Buddhism may help. Parfit says Buddha was the first Bundle theorist....
There is another case described about someone teletransporting to another planet. The process starts with the person being scanned, body and brain, and the cells being destroyed at the same time. The information is sent to the other planet where a replicator makes an organic copy. Has that person travelled? Is the person in the other planet the same person or a replica? What if the original body isn't destroyed in the process? The discussion continues with Parfit proving that the Bundle Theory is real. I got lost in most if this discussion but I guess I got the message.
9. Who am I? What Am I? by Ray Kurzweil – a much more accessible read than the previous two. Here Kurzweil builds a case to support his view on who and what Am I. He says that we are "patterns that persist in time" patterns that evolve in time an can "influence the course of the evolution" of their own pattern. Kurzweil uses the case of cryonics where people are preserved in freezing conditions so in the future they can be rebuilt with new material thus making a copy (or not?). Kurzweil also explains that under normal circumstances our bodies replace the particles that comprise us on a monthly, weekly and even daily basis. So if we are completely different from what I was a month ago how come Am I the same person? Finally Kurzweil discusses the concept of Consciousness as something subjective, immaterial coming from by our objective brains. He believes that ultimately humans will come to accept that non-biological entities can be conscious as Consciousness isn't organic but subjective.
10. Free Will and Determinism in the World of Minority Report by Michael Huemer – uses the Minority Report movie (not the short story by Philip K. Dick) as an example to discuss free will and determinism. If our futures are predetermined then we don’t have free will. Therefore we cannot be held responsible for anything we do. Huemer says that Free Will requires: alternate possibilities and self-control. If we lack one of them we don’t have free will. He contrasts various views on determinism and how those deny free will. He finally presents a deduction which proves free will (got a bit lost here) and concludes that the abolishment of the Precrime system in Minority Report was right but for the wrong reasons.
11. Excerpt from “The Book of Life: A Thought Experiment” by Alvin I. Goldman – a one page story following Goldman in a library where he finds a book about his own life.
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