Persons, Animals, Ourselves by Paul F. Snowdon

Author:Paul F. Snowdon [Snowdon, Paul F.]
Language: eng
Format: azw
ISBN: 9780198719618
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

6.3 Shoemaker’s Termination Case

Shoemaker has proposed his own [A&~P] case. He says this:

If ‘philosophical amnesia’ is taken to mean total and irretrievable loss of all memories of all kinds, then it, the claim that a person can survive such amnesia, is far more questionable. For what we are now imagining is something close to what has been called a ‘brain zap’—the total destruction of all the effects of the person’s past experiences, learning, reasoning, deliberation, and so on…Suppose that in a terrible accident a person suffers brain damage amounting to a total brain zap, and that somehow the surgeons manage to repair the brain in such a way that its possessor is able to start again…Eventually that body is the body of someone with the mental life of a mature human being…It is anything but obvious that this person would be the person who had the body prior to the accident. So if total amnesia means this sort of brain zap, it is far from uncontroversial—indeed it seems just false—that it is something a person could survive. 6

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