The Human Animal by Eric T. Olson

Author:Eric T. Olson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195134230
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-02-24T14:04:59+00:00

III. Coincidence

No advocate of the Psychological Approach is going to deny that there are such things as human animals. Thus, the view under consideration is that there is a human animal sitting in your chair and wearing your clothes right now. It occupies the same region of space that you occupy; it has the same size and shape, the same mass, the same chemical composition and cellular structure as you have. That is because that animal is made of the same matter as you are, arranged in the same way. Yet that animal is not you, for it would outlive you if it became a human vegetable. You and the animal are numerically different because you have different persistence conditions.

This view faces a general metaphysical difficulty.2 You and the animal are now made up of the same atoms, arranged in the same way. This would appear to make you and the animal exactly alike: you are, now at least, perfect duplicates of one another. This raises an apparently unanswerable question: How can we destroy just one of two qualitatively identical objects by applying the same forces to both of them? That is, why does the destruction of your mental contents or capacities destroy you but not the human animal connected with you? And why does destroying all of you but your cerebrum destroy the animal but not you? What is it about the animal that enables it to survive such a thing, and what is it about you that prevents you from surviving it? What is the difference between you and the animal that gives it different persistence conditions from yours?

You may think that the animal survives the adventure in question while you do not because the animal is an animal and you are a person; and being able to survive the loss of all mental features is part of the nature of animals, while being unable to do so is part of the nature of people. That is, the animal survives and the person does not because each has a different criterion of identity. This might be a perfectly good way to explain why some particular animal survived, and some particular person did not survive, on some particular occasion: this particular animal survived brain damage today because it had the capacity to survive it, and that particular person didn’t survive the very same brain damage because it lacked that capacity. But that leaves us wondering why the animal can survive that adventure and why the person cannot. What gives the person and her coincident human animal these different capacities or dispositions? We cannot answer this question by appealing to the difference between people and animals and the fact that the person is a person and the animal is an animal. For all that makes one of the two things in question a person and the other an animal is this dispositional difference; the only difference between you and the animal is modal or dispositional.

To be sure, you and the animal might have different histories, as we saw in the previous chapter.

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