University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Senior Honors Projects Honors Program at the University of Rhode Island 2011 What Is a Human Person? An Exploration & Critique of Contemporary Perspectives Emmanuel Cumplido [email protected] Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog Part of the Epistemology Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Metaphysics Commons, Philosophy of Mind Commons, Philosophy of Science Commons, and the Social Psychology Commons Recommended Citation Cumplido, Emmanuel, "What Is a Human Person? An Exploration & Critique of Contemporary Perspectives" (2011). Senior Honors Projects. Paper 206. http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/206http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/206 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Honors Program at the University of Rhode Island at DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. What is a Human Person? by Emmanuel Cumplido HPR 401 Senior Thesis 16 May 2011 Professor D. Zeyl Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Philosophy at The University of Rhode Island. The author hereby grants to The University of Rhode Island permission to reproduce and distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis and to grant others the right to do so. 2011 Emmanuel Cumplido. All rights reserved. Cumplido 2 Acknowledgements I want to express deep gratitude to Professor Donald Zeyl for sponsoring my Senior Project and sustaining an extraordinary level of patience as I sometimes too-slowly made my way through the research. I am thankful for his willingness to undertake the project with me as a learning experience and consider myself very fortunate to have been able to work with him during his last academic year as a professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island. I know that he will be missed and I hope that the end-result of our shared can add to the already sufficient list of goals he has helped students accomplish. I pray God blesses him as he moves on from the Professorship. Thanks also go to several other professors at the University of Rhode Island for their conscious and unconscious contributions to my research during the past nine months. A large thank you goes to Professor William Krieger for allowing me to use an important book on Paul Churchland, an unconscious contribution as it was, and for presenting undergraduates with challenging material in the University’s courses on Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science. Much of my research would not have developed as it had if it were not for those courses, neither would my interests have increased towards the philosophy science and epistemology. I thank Professor Cheryl Foster, Professor Zahra Meghani, Professor John Peterson, Professor Craig Nichols, and Professor Galen Johnson for teaching me in various courses. All learning is connected and my project has intersected with just about every philosophy course I’ve taken to date. I give special thanks to Dr. William Young. His friendship, example, and advice in the past have been invaluable. I think it safe to say that if it were not for the many books I’ve read in his personal library, the challenging conversations I have had with him (on everything from Augustine to our independent study of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus), I would not even have thought of this project. He has one of the most penetrating minds I have ever witnessed, and he’s contributed more to my desire and ability to understand the world than any human person I’ve known. Last but certainly not least, I thank my entire family for supporting me through my undergraduate career and being more understanding of my workload than most would be. I thank Adam, Bryant, Erik, Alfredo and Michael for being friends through my reclusiveness, Mr. and Mrs. Bankston for going beyond what’s necessary to help me in innumerable ways for the last several months, and Bryna, for being my closest friend and helping me to both stay focused, and stay (somewhat) normal. Most of all, I thank God as my Savior, the ultimate source of all good things, and sustainer of my life. Cumplido 3 Contents I. INTRODUCTION 4 II. A METAPHYSICAL ARGUMENT AGAINST PHYSICALISM 6 III. CAN A PURELY PHYSICAL THING HAVE BELIEFS? 12 IV. INTENTIONALITY 17 Hilary Putnam and “Twin Earth” 18 Functionalism, Fred Dretske, and Moths 26 Kim’s Close and Dennett’s Dodging 30 Why Try Eliminativism? Stich and Churchland Answer 35 Why Abandon Eliminativism? Boghossian on Content 43 Microfeatures, Social Psychology, and Insensitive Seminary Students: Alternative Motivations for Eliminativism 45 V. PHYSICALISM’S EPISTEMOLOGICAL PRECIPICE 53 Preliminaries: Warrant and Your Brain on XX 53 The Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism 58 VI. PERSONAL IDENTITY 65 What's a Ship? A Physicalist’s Identity Crisis 65 The Psychological-Continuity Criterion for Identity 67 Organic Identity: Persons as Organisms and Processes 71 VII. PHYSICALISM, DUALISM, & BIOETHICS 77 Human Persons and Abortion 78 Reproductive Technologies, Cloning, and End-of-Life Care 82 VIII. SOME OBJECTIONS TO DUALISM 85 What's the soul made up of? 85 “Dualism is Anti-Scientific” 86 Mind Kiss Matter? The Energy-Conservation & Interaction Objections 87 IX. A DUALIST CONTRIBUTION TO QUANTUM MECHANICS 93 Quantum Superpositions 93 The Snow Leopard’s Not Dead: Entanglement and Linear Dynamics 67 Not So Super: The Measurement Problem 99 Soul Scientists: The Dualist Interpretation 101 X. CONCLUSION 104 WORKS CITED 106 Cumplido 4 I. Introduction The title of this thesis exposes its core question: “What is a human person?” This can be translated as a very personal, existential question for each one of us, that being: “What am I?” This question has been a subject of debate for millennia, and the answers that have garnered people’s allegiance through history fall under two broad categories: “physicalism” and “dualism”. By “Physicalism” I mean the idea that everything about human persons, from our mental lives to our identity, is entirely determined by and dependent on the physical facts of the world, especially the physical facts of the human body. One of the earliest renditions of physicalism was the philosophy of the ancient Greek atomists. In their view, all of reality could be explained through two principles: atoms and empty space. As a consequence, people were thought to be nothing but assemblages of atoms in space; human persons are human bodies. By “Dualism”, I mean, at the least, a denial of physicalism. Not everything about us human beings is determined by physical facts of the world or our bodies. Plato’s Phaedo presents one of the earliest philosophical endorsements of dualism by arguing for the existence of an immaterial mind, or soul, that is the grounds for a human person's identity and responsible for our unique mental abilities, such as logical thinking. The idea that a human person is, fundamentally, an immaterial mind or soul has also been a long-standing position for many of the world’s major religions in both Western and Eastern traditions. My position throughout this thesis will be that of a substance dualist. I maintain that human persons are more than just purely material entities. Human persons are to be thought of as things distinct in kind from purely physical objects. Most fundamentally, we are immaterial Cumplido 5 minds, or souls. I use those terms interchangeably throughout because though their meaning differs, I will not be concerned with specifying the kind of substance dualism I think is best.1 What I will be concerned with in what follows is a critique of physicalism. With advances in cognitive science and a recent revival of academic interest in studying consciousness, the debate on human nature has been receiving some special treatment. Physicalism has emerged as the dominant perspective in academic circles and it has often been a presupposition in my undergraduate courses outside the field of philosophy. I will be presenting a few of the troubling consequences that physicalism has in relation to epistemology, personal identity, and ethics. To close, I will also give a brief apologia by responding to the most frequently cited objections to dualism, and point us to how dualism could even contribute to our ever-developing scientific understanding of the universe. My conclusion will be that the problems facing physicalism are insuperable, and should move us into investigating what sort of substance dualism can resolve these problems. 1 This is because I have not settled that question for myself. My purpose here is to say that some kind of substance dualism is right, and there are many options, just as there are for physicalist theories Cumplido 6 II. A Metaphysical Argument Against Physicalism Plantinga’s Replacement Argument (RA hereafter) starts by presenting a possible situation where I exist when my body (“B” hereafter) does not. It leads to the conclusion that, because of Leibniz’s law of identity and the law of non-contradiction, I am not identical to B, or any part of B, since I have the property “possibly exists when B does not” (Plantinga, Against Materialism 3). He paints this picture in the first-person, and I will follow the same strategy. The idea is that anyone else can go through the same steps, and come to the same conclusion and that therefore, no other human person is identical to their body either (Van Inwagen, Plantinga’s Replacement 3).2 There are two presuppositions to the argument that Physicalist metaphysician Peter Van Inwagen points out, with which some physicalists would agree.