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2. The nature of persons: dualism vs. physicalism — Transcript

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0:01Professor Shelly Kagan: The first question we want to
0:04discuss has to do with the possibility of my surviving my
0:07death. Is there life after death?
0:09Is there a possibility that I might still exist or survive
0:14after my death? Now at first glance--and in
0:17fact, I think, at second glance it's going to
0:19turn out to be true--you might think that the answer to this
0:23question would depend on two basic issues.
0:26Do I survive my death? Do we survive our deaths?
0:29You think, the first thing we have to get clear on is well
0:33what am I? What kind of a thing am I?
0:37Or generalizing, what kind of thing is a person?
0:40What are we made of? What are our parts?
0:43It seems plausible to think that before we could answer the
0:48question, "Do I survive?" we need to know how I'm built.
0:53And so the first thing we're going to spend a fair bit of
0:56time on is trying to get clear on what's a person?
0:59What are the fundamental building blocks of a person?
1:03The second question that you might think we'd want to get
1:06clear on is, "What's the idea, or what's the concept,
1:09of surviving?" Before we ask, "Do I survive?"
1:13we need to get clear on "What am I?"
1:15and "What is it to survive?" What is it for something that
1:20exists in the future to be me? Now this question can be
1:24discussed philosophically in quite general terms.
1:27What's the nature of persistence of identity over
1:31time? But since we're especially
1:34interested in beings like us, people, this topic,
1:38this sub-specialized version of the question of identity,
1:42gets discussed under the rubric of the topic,
1:45personal identity. What's the key or the nature or
1:48the basis of personal identity? As we might put it:
1:52What is it for somebody who's here next week to be the same
1:58person as me? What's the nature of personal
2:01identity? So, as I say,
2:02at first glance you might think to get clear on the answer,
2:07"Do I or might I or could I survive my death?"
2:11we need to know, what am I? What's a person?
2:14What's the metaphysical composition of people,
2:17on the one hand? And we need to get clear on the
2:20nature of identity or persistence or,
2:22more specifically, personal identity.
2:24Now as I say, I believe that when push comes
2:26to shove, we do need to get clear about both of those
2:29questions and so that's going to take the first several weeks of
2:32the class. We're going to spend a couple
2:35of weeks talking about, "What's a person?"
2:38And then we're going to spend several weeks,
2:40or at least a week or so, talking about the nature of
2:43personal identity. But before we can even get
2:46started, there's a question, really an objection to the
2:51whole enterprise. So we're about to spend a lot
2:53of time asking the philosophical question: Is there life after
2:56death? Could there be life after death?
2:58Might I survive my death? But there's a philosophical
3:02objection to the entire question.
3:04And the objection is fairly simple.
3:06It says the whole question is misconceived.
3:10It's based on a confusion. Once we see the confusion,
3:16we can see what the answer to our question is.
3:20Could I survive my death? The answer has got to be--this
3:23is what the objection says--the answer has got to be,
3:26obviously not. All right, so here's the
3:28objection. I should mention that the very
3:31first reading that you're going to be doing is a couple of pages
3:35from Jay Rosenberg, a contemporary philosopher.
3:39He gives us a version of this objection.
3:42So I'll give you one version. You'll have another version in
3:46your readings. The objection basically says:
3:49What does it mean to say that somebody's died?
3:52We're asking, "Is there life after death?"
3:54What does it mean to say that somebody has died?
3:56Well a natural definition of death might be something like
4:02the end of life. So then, if that's right,
4:05then to ask, "Is there life after death?"
4:07is just asking, "Is there life after the end of
4:12life?" The answer to that ought to be
4:14pretty obvious. Well, obviously,
4:17the answer to that is no. After all, if we're saying once
4:22you've run out of life, is there any more life?
4:26Well, duh! That's like asking,
4:29when I've eaten up all the food on my plate, is there any food
4:33left on my plate? Or what happens in the movie
4:37after the movie ends? These are stupid questions,
4:41because once you understand what they're asking,
4:44the answer is just built in. It follows trivially.
4:48So although it has seemed to people over the ages that the
4:51question, "Is there life after death?"
4:53is one of the great mysteries, one of the great philosophical
4:57things to ponder, the objection says that's a
5:00kind of illusion. In fact, once you think about
5:03it, and not all that long, you can see the answer's got to
5:06be no. There couldn't possibly be life
5:08after death. There couldn't possibly be life
5:12after the end of life. Or suppose we ask the question
5:15in a slightly different way. Might I survive my death?
5:21Well what does the word "survive" mean?
5:24Well, survive is something like we say that somebody's a
5:28survivor if something's happened and they haven't died.
5:32They're still alive. When there's a car accident,
5:36you ask, so-and-so died, so-and-so survived.
5:40This person survived. To say that they survived is
5:43just saying that they're still alive.
5:45So, "Might I survive my death?" is like asking,
5:51"Might I still be alive after"--well what's death?
5:56Death is the end of life. So-- "might I still be alive
6:00after I've stopped living? Might I be one of the people
6:04who didn't die when I died?" Gosh, the answer to that is,
6:08again, duh! No.
6:10You couldn't possibly survive your death, given the very
6:13definition. It should remind us of--at
6:15least it reminds me of this joke that you probably told.
6:20It seemed hysterical when you were seven.
6:23The plane crashes exactly on the border of Canada and the
6:30United States. Exactly on the border.
6:33There's dead people everywhere. Where do they bury the
6:38survivors? The answer is:
6:40You don't bury the survivors. So when you're seven you think,
6:43"I don't know. Do they bury them in Canada?
6:45Do they bury them in America?" The answer is:
6:48You don't bury the survivors, because survivors are people
6:52that haven't yet died. So, "Can I survive my death?"
6:56is like asking, "Could I not have yet died
6:59after…?" The answer is,
7:01of course, you have to have died if you died and you haven't
7:05survived if you've died. So the question can't even get
7:09off the ground. That, at least,
7:11is how the objection goes. Now I don't mean to be utterly
7:15dismissive of the objection. That's why I spent a couple of
7:18minutes trying to spell it out. But I think there's a way to
7:24respond to it. We just have to get clearer
7:27about what precisely the question is that we're trying to
7:30ask. This is something that
7:32Rosenberg tries to get clear on as well.
7:34So here's my attempt to make the question both a bit more
7:37precise, and a question that's an open question.
7:40A question we can legitimately raise.
7:44Well, now as you will hear on several occasions over the
7:47course of the semester, I'm a philosopher.
7:49What that means is I don't really know a whole lot of
7:52facts. So I'm about to tell you a
7:55story where I wish I knew the facts.
7:57I don't know the facts. If I could really do it right,
8:02I'd now open the door and bring in our guest physiologist,
8:08who would then provide the facts that I'm--what I'm about
8:11to go is "blah, blah, blah."
8:13But we have the physiologist come in and he'd actually tell
8:17us these things. I don't know them.
8:19I don't have that person. But take a look at what happens
8:23when a body dies. Now, no doubt,
8:26you can kill people in a lot of different ways.
8:28You can poison them, you can strangle them,
8:32you can shoot them in the heart.
8:36The causal paths that result in death may start different,
8:41but I presume that they converge and you end up having a
8:45set of events take place. Now what are those events?
8:50This is exactly where I don't really know the details,
8:53but I take it it's something like: because of whatever the
8:57original input was, eventually the blood's no
9:00longer circulating and oxygen isn't making its way around the
9:04body. So the brain becomes
9:06oxygen-starved. Because of the lack of oxygen
9:09getting to the cells, the cells are no longer able to
9:13carry on their various metabolic processes.
9:16Because of this, they can't repair the various
9:19kinds of damage they need, or create the amino acids and
9:23proteins they need. So as decay begins to set in
9:26and the cell structures begin to break down, they don't get
9:29repaired as they would normally do,
9:32and so eventually have breakdown of the crucial cell
9:34structure and boom, the body's dead.
9:37Now as I say, I don't really know whether
9:39that's accurate, the little rough story I just
9:42told, but some story like that is probably right.
9:45And in typical philosophical fashion, I've drawn that story
9:49for you up here on the board. So the events that I don't
9:54really know the details of, we can just call B_1,
9:58B_2, B_3,
10:00up through B_n. Before B_1 begins,
10:04you've got the body working, functioning,
10:07in its bodily way--respirating, reproducing the cells,
10:11and so forth and so on. And at the end of the process,
10:16by B_n, the body's dead.
10:20B for bodily. B_1 through
10:23B_n; that's what death is.
10:25At least, that's what death of the body is.
10:27As I say, it's the sort of thing that somebody from the
10:30medical school or a biologist or a physiologist or something
10:34could describe for us. So here's the question then.
10:38Suppose we call that process "death of the body."
10:45Call what has occurred by the end of that sequence of events,
10:50"bodily death." Now here's a question that we
10:54can still ask, at least it looks as though we
10:57can still ask it. Might I, or do I,
11:00still exist after the death of my body?
11:06Might I still exist after bodily death?
11:12I don't mean to suggest in any way that we yet know the answer
11:16to that question, but at least that's a question
11:19that it seems as though we can coherently raise.
11:21There's no obvious contradiction in asking:
11:26Might I still exist after the death of my body?
11:34The answer could turn out to be no.
11:38But at least it's not obviously no.
11:42If the answer turns out to be no, it's going to take some
11:46sustained argument to settle it one way or the other.
11:50The answer could turn out to be yes, for all we know at this
11:54point. This just brings us back to the
11:56thought that whether or not I could still exist after the
12:00death of my body looks like it should depend on what I am.
12:04So in a minute, that's the question that I'm
12:07going to turn to. But it's a bit cumbersome to
12:10constantly be asking: Might I still exist after the
12:14death of my body? So no harm is done,
12:18once we've clarified the question that we're trying to
12:21ask, if we summarize that question in a bit of a jargon or
12:25slogan. We say, instead of asking:
12:28Might I survive? Or: Might I continue to exist
12:30after the death of my body? --you might put it this way.
12:34You might say for short: Will I survive the death of my
12:38body? No harm done.
12:40Or: Will I survive my death? Because what we were just
12:45stipulating we mean when we talk about my death in the context of
12:48this question is the death of my body.
12:50No harm done. We can just say for short:
12:53Will I survive my death or might I survive my death?
12:58For that matter, no serious harm done if we ask:
13:02Is there life after death? As long as we understand that
13:06what we're not asking about there is life of my body.
13:10Just another familiar way of trying to ask:
13:13Will I still be around after my death?
13:15Will I still exist after my death?
13:18So I think there's a perfectly legitimate question and that's
13:22the question we now want to turn to.
13:25As I said, it looks as though to answer the question,
13:28"Could I continue to exist after the death of my
13:31body?"--"Is there life after death?"
13:33"Could I survive my death?" for short--to answer that
13:37question, we need to get clearer about: What exactly is it for
13:41something to be me? That's a question we'll turn to
13:44in a couple of weeks. First, we've got to get clearer
13:49about: What am I? What kind of an entity am I?
13:55What am I made of? In philosophical jargon,
13:58this is a question from metaphysics.
14:00So we're asking the metaphysical question:
14:03What kind of a thing is a person?
14:06It seems plausible to think that whether or not a person can
14:11survive or continue to exist after the death of his or her
14:15body should depend on how he's built,
14:18what he's made of, what his or her parts are.
14:23So, let me sketch for you two basic positions on this
14:30question. What is a person?
14:33Two basic positions. They're both,
14:37I imagine, fairly familiar. What we're going to have to do
14:41is try to decide between them. They're not the only possible
14:45positions on the question of the metaphysics of the person.
14:48But they're, I think, the two most prominent
14:50positions and definitely the ones most worth taking seriously
14:54for our purposes. So, first possible position is
14:58this. A person is a combination of a
15:04body and something else--a mind. But the crucial thing about
15:11this first view that we want to talk about is that the mind is
15:14thought of as something separate from,
15:17and distinct from, the body. To use a common enough word,
15:24it's a soul. So people are,
15:27or people have, or people consist of,
15:31bodies and souls. The soul is something,
15:35as I say, distinct from the body.
15:38I take it the idea of the body is a familiar one.
15:41It's this lump of flesh and bone and muscle that's sitting
15:45here in front of you and that each one of you sort of drags
15:49around with you. It's the sort of thing that we
15:53can put on a scale and prod with a stick and the biologists can
15:58study, presumably made up of various
16:01kinds of molecules, atoms and so forth.
16:03So we've got the body. But on this first view,
16:07we also have something that's not body.
16:11Something that's not a material object.
16:14Something that's not composed of molecules and atoms.
16:18It's a soul. It's the house of,
16:21or the seat of, or the basis of,
16:24consciousness and thinking, perhaps personality.
16:28But the crucial point for this view is that the proper
16:33metaphysical understanding of the mind is to think of it in
16:38nonphysical terms, nonmaterial terms.
16:42That, as I say, is the first basic view.
16:45I'm going to say more about that view, a fair bit more about
16:47that view, over the next couple of weeks.
16:49First, let me sketch the other basic view.
16:52So this first view we can call "the dualist view."
16:57Dualist, of course, because there's two basic
17:01components--the body and the soul.
17:04Although I may occasionally slip, I'm going to try to
17:07preserve the word "soul." When I use the word "soul," I'm
17:11going to have in mind this dualist view according to which
17:16the soul is something immaterial, nonphysical.
17:20Some other kind--the body is a material substance.
17:23The soul is an immaterial substance.
17:27That's the dualist view. The alternative view that we're
17:31going to consider is not dualist, but monist.
17:35It says there's one basic kind of thing and only one basic kind
17:41of thing. There are bodies.
17:44So what's a person? A person is just a certain kind
17:50of material object. A person is just a body.
17:55Of course, it's a very fancy material object.
18:01It's a very amazing material object.
18:04That's what this second view says.
18:07The person is a body that can do things that most other
18:13material objects can't do. So on the monist view--which
18:18we'll call "physicalism," because it says that what people
18:23just are, are these physical objects--on
18:26the physicalist view, a person is just a body that
18:30can…now you fill in the blank. You point out the kinds of
18:35things that we can do. We can talk.
18:38We can think. We can sing.
18:40We can write poetry. We can fall in love.
18:42We can be afraid. We can make plans.
18:45We can discover things about the universe.
18:48According to the physicalist view, a person is just a body
18:52that can do all of those things: can reflect,
18:55can be rational, can communicate,
18:58can make plans, can fall in love,
19:01can write poetry. That's the physicalist view.
19:04As I say, we've got two basic positions.
19:08There's the dualist view--people are bodies and
19:13souls. And there's the physicalist
19:15view, according to which there are no souls.
19:19There are no immaterial objects like that.
19:23There are only bodies, though when you've got a
19:26functioning body like ours, so the physicalist says,
19:30these bodies can do some pretty amazing things.
19:33The kind of things that we all know people can do.
19:36Two basic views. From a logical point of view,
19:39I suppose you might have a third possible view.
19:41If we've got the monist who says there's bodies but there's
19:46no souls, you could imagine somebody who says there are
19:50souls but there are no bodies. This would roughly be a view
19:54according to which there are minds, but there aren't really
19:57physical objects. Physical objects are a kind of
20:00illusion, perhaps, that we fall into.
20:02Or thinking about them in materialistic terms might be
20:05greatly confused or mistaken. This view is sometimes known in
20:10philosophy as idealism: all that exists,
20:13are minds and their ideas. Physical objects is just a way
20:17of talking about the ideas the mind has or something like that.
20:22Idealism is a position that's got a very long history in
20:25philosophy and for many classes would be worth taking a fair bit
20:29of time to consider more carefully.
20:31But for our purposes, I think it's not a contender.
20:34So I'm just going to put it aside.
20:37The positions that I'm going to--and there are other
20:39possibilities as well. There are views where mind and
20:43body are just two different ways of looking at the same
20:47underlying reality where the underlying reality is neither
20:52physical nor mental. That view's also worth taking
20:56seriously in a metaphysics class, but for our purposes,
20:59I mention it and put it aside. The two views we are going to
21:03focus on are, on the one hand,
21:05the dualist view--people have souls as well as bodies--and the
21:10physicalist view--all we have, all we are, are bodies.
21:19Let me say something more then about the dualist position.
21:25According to the dualist, the mind is this immaterial
21:28substance and we could call it by different names.
21:32No harm would be done if we call it a mind,
21:35though the reason I will typically talk about a soul is
21:39to try to flag the crucial point of the dualist view.
21:43The mind is based in, or just is something
21:49nonphysical, something nonmaterial…The soul can
21:55direct and give orders to the body, on the one hand.
22:03On the other hand, the body generates input that
22:09eventually gets sensed or felt by the soul.
22:15You take a pin and you stick it through my flesh of my body and
22:23I feel pain in my soul, in my mind.
22:28So, two-way interaction. As always with philosophy,
22:32there's more complicated versions of dualism where maybe
22:36the interaction doesn't work both ways,
22:39but let's just limit ourselves to good, old-fashioned,
22:45two-way interactionist dualism. So my mind controls my body.
22:52My body can affect my mind in various ways.
22:56But for all that, they're separate things.
22:59Still there's this very tight connection.
23:07We sometimes put it: the soul is in the body,
23:11though talking about spatial locations here may be somewhat
23:16metaphorically intended. It's not as though we think
23:20that if you start opening up the body you'd finally find the
23:23particular spot. Here's the place where the soul
23:26is located. Though it does seem,
23:29from this dualist perspective, as though souls are located,
23:32I'm sort of viewing the world from here.
23:35Just like each of you is viewing the world from a
23:37particular location. So maybe your soul is located,
23:40more or less, in the vicinity of your body.
23:44Crucial point, of course, the attraction of
23:47the dualist view, from our point of view,
23:50is that if there's a soul as well as the body,
23:54and the soul is something immaterial,
23:57then when the body dies, when we have B_1
24:00through B_n and the death of the body occurs.
24:03So at the end of B_n, the body stops repairing
24:06itself. Decay sets in.
24:08We all know the sad story. The worms crawl in,
24:11the worms crawl out. At the end of the day--well it
24:14maybe it takes longer than a day--the body has decomposed.
24:18Yes, all that bespeaks the end of the body.
24:24But if the soul is something immaterial, then that could
24:29continue to exist, even after the destruction of
24:33the body. That's the attraction,
24:36at least one of the attractions, of the dualist
24:40view. The belief in the soul gives
24:43you something to continue to exist after the end of your
24:48body. So what's death?
24:51Well, if normally there's this super tight connection between
24:58my soul and my body, death might be the severing of
25:04that connection. So the body breaks and no
25:08longer is able to give input up to the soul.
25:12The soul is no longer able to control the body and make it
25:17move around. But for all that,
25:20the soul might continue to exist.
25:23And so at least the possibility that I'll survive my death is
25:28one worth taking very, very seriously if we are
25:31dualists.
25:36A couple of things to point out about this view.
25:41One is I've been talking as though a person is a
25:47combination, kind of a soul and body sandwich.
25:57So a person has two basic building blocks.
26:01The bodily part and the soul part.
26:04It's natural to talk that way, but if we want belief in the
26:08soul to help us hold out the possibility at least that there
26:12might be life after death, then I think we need to
26:17actually say that strictly speaking, it's not that a person
26:22is a soul plus a body. Strictly speaking,
26:26I think we need to say the person just is the soul.
26:30After all, if the person is the combination, if the person is
26:36the pair, soul plus the body, destroy the body,
26:40you've destroyed the pair. If the person is the pair and
26:45the pair no longer exists, the person no longer exists.
26:50So if we want belief in a soul to help us leave open the door
26:55to the possibility that I survive the destruction of my
26:59body, it had better not be that the
27:02body is an essential part of me. It's simpler,
27:06more straightforward to say instead, "What I am strictly
27:13speaking is a soul." As long as the soul exists,
27:17I exist.
27:21Of course, my soul, me, I, have a very tight
27:26connection to a particular body. But still, you could,
27:31in principle, destroy the body without
27:33destroying me. Look, I have a particularly
27:36close connection to the house I live in.
27:39But for all that, you can destroy my house
27:43without destroying me. So that's I think the position
27:47that we ought to ascribe to the dualist.
27:50The person is, strictly speaking,
27:52the soul. The soul has a very intimate
27:54connection with the body, but the person is not the soul
27:57and the body. The person is just the soul.
28:00So even if that intimate connection gets destroyed,
28:04the person, the soul, could continue to exist.
28:07The second point to clear up is that there's really three
28:12different issues that might interest us.
28:15One, metaphysically, are bodies and souls distinct?
28:21Is the mind to be understood in terms of this immaterial object,
28:28the soul? So are there two kinds of
28:30things? That's the first question.
28:32Are souls and bodies distinct? Second question,
28:38though, is: Does the soul, even if it exists,
28:43survive the destruction of the body?
28:48It could be something separate without surviving.
28:52That's why I've tried to say if there are souls,
28:56at least that opens the door to the possibility that we will
29:01survive our death. But, it doesn't guarantee it,
29:05because absent further argumentation,
29:08there's no guarantee that the soul survives the death of the
29:12body. Even if it's separate,
29:14it could be that it gets killed at the very same time or
29:18destroyed at the very same time that the body's being destroyed.
29:21Maybe when these physical processes, B_1 through
29:27B_n, take place,
29:30they set into motion--remember, after all we're interactionist
29:33dualists. There's this very tight causal
29:36connection between the body and the mind and the soul and the
29:39body, the body and the soul. Just like when you prick my
29:44body, that bodily process sets up certain things taking place
29:48in my soul. Maybe when B_1
29:51through B_n take place, they set up some other
29:56processes in my soul. Call them S_1 through
30:03S_n. And maybe S_1 through
30:07S_n results in the destruction of my soul.
30:11So simultaneously with my body dying, my soul dies.
30:19Okay, this one's going to be a little bit trickier to draw.
30:22The first part, S_1...,
30:25that's easy. S_n.
30:28The question is: How do I draw the soul?
30:30I don't really know .
30:40So the mere fact that we decide, if we do ultimately
30:44decide that there is a soul, something nonphysical,
30:48separate and distinct from the body, doesn't guarantee that we
30:53survive our physical death. That's going to be a separate
30:57question we'll have to turn to. The first question's going to
31:00be: Are there any souls? Next question is going to have
31:03to be: If there are, do we have any good reason to
31:07think that they survive the death of the body?
31:10Third question that might interest us, that does interest
31:15us, is this: If it survives, how long does it survive?
31:21Does the soul continue to exist after the death of the body?
31:26Does it continue to exist forever?
31:30Are we immortal?
31:36Most of us would like that to be true.
31:38We want there to be souls so that we can be immortal.
31:43And so the question's got to be not only, is the soul distinct?
31:48Does it survive the death of my body?
31:50But does it continue to exist forever?
31:57Those questions--hang on one second--are ones that especially
32:01interest Plato. So in about a week or so we'll
32:04start reading Plato's Phaedo.
32:06The purpose of that dialogue, of that philosophical work,
32:11is to argue for the immortality of the soul.
32:14That's a question we'll be turning to.
32:16Yeah? Student: [inaudible]
32:27Professor Shelly Kagan: Great.
32:43So the question is this. If the very idea of soul that
32:46we're working with here under the dualist picture is the soul
32:50as an immaterial substance, it's not made of ordinary
32:54atomic matter. If the soul is immaterial,
32:57doesn't it follow automatically,
33:00trivially, that the soul can't be destroyed by a material
33:05process? After all, there was death of
33:07the body, B_1 through B_n.
33:09That's a material process, a physical process.
33:12Doesn't it follow that a soul, an immaterial entity,
33:17can't be destroyed by a material, physical process?
33:23That's a great question. What I want to say is,
33:26the short answer for now is, I don't think it follows
33:30automatically. It doesn't follow trivially.
33:34It may follow. Plato's actually going to give
33:37us some arguments for pretty much that same claim.
33:41Plato's going to argue once we understand the sort of
33:45metaphysical nature of the soul, we'll see why it couldn't be
33:49destroyed. That's going to take some fancy
33:52arguments. The reason I think it doesn't
33:55follow trivially is because, remember, I said we're dealing
34:00with interactionist dualism. We've already admitted that
34:05bodies are able to affect the soul, right?
34:09The body is having all sorts of light bounce off my eyes of
34:14various wavelengths. And because of that my soul is
34:17having various visual sensations about the number of people in
34:22front of me, colors, and so forth and so on.
34:25I gave the example of pricking my body.
34:27That's a physical process that causes some sorts of changes in
34:33the mental processes occurring in my soul.
34:37Once we've admitted that on this kind of dualist picture the
34:43material body can influence what happens in the immaterial soul,
34:49then it doesn't seem that we have any grounds for shutting
34:52the door to the possibility that the right physical process,
34:55B_1 through B_n,
34:58might set up this horrible mental, soul process,
35:01S_1 through S_n,
35:03resulting in the destruction of the soul.
35:05It's a possibility. It's going to take more
35:08arguments to rule it out. Yeah?
35:10Student: [inaudible] Professor Shelly Kagan:
35:24Yeah, another great question. The question was:
35:33I said it seems plausible to say my soul is located,
35:37more or less, here because I seem to view the
35:40world from here. But maybe that's not right.
35:44Maybe we shouldn't talk about the location of the soul at all.
35:49After all, if the soul is an immaterial object,
35:54can immaterial objects have locations?
35:59I don't know. The short answer is I don't
36:03know. I know very little about how
36:05immaterial objects are supposed to work.
36:09So although I'm trying to sketch the dualist position,
36:14as I explained on Tuesday, I don't myself believe in
36:18souls. I don't actually think that the
36:23dualist view is correct. You might say,
36:26I'll leave that problem--are souls spatially located or
36:31not--to be worked out by those who believe in it.
36:35For our purposes, I think it doesn't really
36:38matter. If you want to say souls have a
36:41location, where are they located?
36:43They're located more or less where my body is.
36:45At least, as long as my body's working.
36:47Maybe at death the soul gets liberated from the body and is
36:51able to wander more freely. Sometimes people talk about,
36:54in fact we'll be reading about this, out-of-body experiences.
36:58And so maybe during those unusual times the soul wanders
37:01from the body and comes back to it.
37:03Or, alternatively, maybe the soul doesn't have any
37:06location at all. Maybe that's just an illusion
37:09created by the fact that I'm getting this visual input from
37:14my body. My body certainly has a
37:16location. Maybe the right way--imagine
37:19somebody who was in a room with remote control television setup
37:23and so forth and so on. And he's seeing what's
37:26happening in Chicago, even though he's sitting in a
37:30room in New Haven. Well, you could understand why
37:33he might fall into the trap of thinking of himself as located
37:37in Chicago with all the visual inputs coming from Chicago.
37:41So maybe that's how it works with the soul.
37:42We get lulled into thinking that we are where our bodies
37:46are. But that's really a
37:47metaphysical illusion. I don't really know.
37:50For our purposes, I think it's not crucial.
37:53Though it's a great question, but I'm not going to try to
37:57pursue it any further. All right.
37:59So one question: Is there a soul?
38:01Second question: Does it survive the death of
38:04our body? Third question:
38:06If it does, does it live forever?
38:08Does it continue to exist forever?
38:09Is the soul immortal? We will initially think about
38:13the first question: Do we have any good reason to
38:17believe in souls at all? And only after a while will we
38:21turn to the second and third question: Does it survive and,
38:25more particularly, is it immortal?
38:28That's the first basic view about the nature of a person.
38:33A person has a soul, something immaterial and not a
38:38body. I take it that the view is a
38:40familiar one. Many of you probably believe in
38:42it. Those of you who don't believe
38:44in it have probably, at least, been tempted to
38:45believe in it. I'm sure you all do know people
38:48who believe in it. It's a very familiar picture.
38:53But, of course, the question we're going to
38:55have to ask ourselves is: Is it right?
38:56Is there reasons to believe it's correct?
39:00Turn now to the second basic view, the physicalist view,
39:06according to which a person is just a body.
39:11This is a materialist view. People are just material
39:16objects, the sorts of things biologists poke and prod and
39:21study. It's important--I think this is
39:25the crucial point--that when we say a person is just a body,
39:30we don't understand that to mean--the physicalist doesn't
39:35mean that as--a person is just any old body.
39:40It's not as though there aren't important differences between
39:44different physical objects. Some physical objects can do
39:48things of a far more interesting sort than other physical
39:53objects. Here's a piece of chalk.
39:56It's a physical object. It's just a body.
40:00What can it do? Well, not a whole lot.
40:03I can write on the board with it.
40:05I can break it in two. You let go of it, it drops down.
40:10Not a very interesting physical body.
40:13Here's a cell phone. It's just a body.
40:17It's not the most interesting physical object in the world,
40:21but it's a whole lot more interesting than a piece of
40:23chalk. It can do all sorts of things a
40:27piece of chalk can't do. If the physicalist is right,
40:33then here's another physical object for you--me,
40:38Shelly Kagan. I'm a pretty impressive
40:42physical object. Now arrogant as I may be,
40:45I don't mean to suggest I'm any more impressive than you guys
40:49are. Each one of us,
40:51according to the physicalist, is just a body that can do some
40:58amazing things. We are bodies that can think.
41:04We are bodies that can plan. We are bodies that can reason.
41:09We are bodies that can feel. We are bodies that can be
41:14afraid and be creative and have dreams and aspirations.
41:18We are bodies that can communicate with each other.
41:21We are bodies that are--well, here's a word for it:
41:26We're bodies that are people. But on the physicalist view,
41:32a person is just a body. And that's where we'll take it
41:37up next time.

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