1.

Difference between possible and probable:

Weirnob wants Miller to convince her that to convince her that her survival after the
death of her body is possible not probable.
- More likely than their contrasting states of affairs.
- Physical possibility requires that state of affairs must are consistent with what we
know about this world (e.g., the laws of nature).
- Metaphysical possibility:
- Conceivability excludes only states of affairs that we cannot think or imagine. We
cannot imagine a bachelor who is married or a triangle with 4 sides.
- Actuality:
- Necessity: something that is necessary is something that is required in any given
world (it is necessary for a triangle to have 3 sides).

2. The naïve solution (Kleenex box)

Weirnob will survive after death because in the afterlife, there will be person that exists
and that is “identical” to her.
- Objection: “identical” vs “exactly similar” (qualitative and quantitative identity)
“Identical” is not the same as “exactly similar”. The Weirnob that will exist in heaven might be
similar to the Weirnob sitting in the hospital in every respect, but that does not mean they are
identical.
Ex. The box of Kleenex. If someone was to completely destroy a box of Kleenex (which is what
happens to the human body after death) and then they went home and found the same box of
Kleenex, it would be absurd to say that the box has “survived” because it does not share the same
identity with the box that was destroyed.
In the case of human beings, identity is the condition of memory and correct anticipation. So to
say that heaven Weirnob shares the same identity as dying Weirnob would entail that dying
Weirnob anticipates the experiences of heaven Weirnob and that heaven Weirnob can feel pride
or remorse for the actions of dying Werinob, which is not the case.
It is useful here to differentiate between qualitative and quantitative identity. Things that are
qualitatively identical share the same properties (like the 2 boxes of Kleenex), however,
quantitative or numerical identity can only hold between a thing and itself. For instance, I am
quantitatively identical to the person I was 10 years ago, although I am not qualitatively identical
to her.

3. Dualism/Sameness of souls
Fundamentally, there are two aspects to human beings: the material aspect (the body) and
the immaterial aspect (the soul or mind). Humans are not their bodies, they are an
immaterial soul (that cannot be seen, smelled, touched, etc.) and it’s this soul that will
continue in the after-life.
- Objection 1: Knowledge of others
If the self is the soul, and the soul is immaterial in the sense that it cannot be
perceived how is it possible to know that a person is still the same person every time
we see them when we only have access to their bodies and not their souls
 - Counter-Argument:
Only on Earth, there is a correlation between bodies and souls (same body equals
same soul). This correlation does not exist in the Afterlife because it would create the
box of Kleenex problem again

1. The First Night

The Challenge

Weirob challenges her friend Miller to comfort her on her death bed by showing that there is, at
the very least, the mere possibility of her surviving after her death. The next three nights, then,
are spent arguing whether such a thing is possible.

Numerical Identity vs. Qualitative Identity

Weirob is first careful to make the distinction between numerical identity and qualitative identity
(in the dialogue, Perry calls the former "identity" and the latter "exact similarity"). Numerical
identity is the relation that each thing holds to itself--e.g., I am numerically identical to myself,
you are numerically identical to yourself, Jon Stewart is identical to himself, etc. Qualitative
identity, on the other hand, is the relation that many things can have to many others, provided
that they have the same properties in common. For example, in recitation I talked about how two
pieces of chalk could all have the same properties--e.g., they could both be white, cylindrical, so
many inches long, kept in a cardboard box, etc.--yet since they are two pieces of chalk they are
not numerically identical. Rather, they merely share properties, but are not one and the same
piece of chalk.

The Soul View

Miller's first stab at proving that survival after death is possible involves claiming that people are
identical to souls, not bodies. If this is right [so the argument would go] then survival after death
is possible because even though your body dies, you--your soul--lives on.

Weirob challenges this in the following way: the soul is defined as something immaterial--
something that cannot be seen or felt or touched or smelt, etc. Yet all we have access to are
material bodies--things that can be seen or felt or touched or smelt, etc. Souls in principle cannot
be seen or sensed in any way; that is, by their very nature they are inaccessible from the outside.
So, even though I might want to conclude that you are the same person in class this week as you
were last week, the only thing I have to go by in concluding this is what I see or sense. I cannot,
for example, see or sense that your soul is here--indeed, souls are just the sort of thing that one
cannot see or sense! So Weirob's objection to the claim that people are identical to souls is that
there is a serious problem of accessibility.
In class we will discuss one of the flaws of this kind of argument: viz., that it might be
committing the intensional fallacy.
Instead of finding fault with Weirob's reasoning, however, Miller instead claims that there is a
correlation between bodies and souls, which is why we can conclude that a certain soul is around
whenever a certain body is. But as Weirob is keen to point out, we aren't justified in making such
claims of correlation if we don't have some other, independent way of showing that souls are
around whenever we think they are. Since we can never see or sense that souls are around, then
we can never justify the claim that souls are correlated with bodies.

The Soul View Take 2

Miller attempts the soul view again, this time claiming that we can legitimately establish a
correlation between souls and bodies. He claims that because bodies exhibit certain behavior that
implies certain psychological characteristics--e.g., because someone may scream this or that, or
argue in a certain manner, or be a happy or sad, or be really energetic or act like a drunken fool,
etc.--we can infer from this that there is the sameness of soul, and then correlate this with the
sameness of body.

Weirob objects that we cannot judge from the sameness of psychological characteristics that we
have the sameness of soul. To make her point, she proposes the following analogy: If we wanted
to test whether a certain river--say, the Ohio River--was the Ohio River, as opposed to any other
river, we would check to make sure that the water was of a certain quality, that it flows in a
certain place, that our fishing hole we went to the other day is still there, etc. If we found that the
water of a certain river was of a decidedly different quality, or it suddenly had entirely different
fish, or our fishing hole was no longer there, etc., we would more than likely conclude that the
river we are at is not the Ohio. So: we judge that a river is the river it is because of the qualities
that we expect it to have after getting to know it. [Notice the parallel to people: we judge that
people are who they are because of the psychological characteristics we expect them to display
after getting to know them.] However, a river, while perhaps exhibiting certain characteristics
over time, is continually changing waters. That is, since rivers run, there will always be different
waters flowing through the same river over time. Likewise, Weirob argues, souls might work the
same way. In fact, because we can't be certain that this isn't how souls work, Miller cannot
conclude the sameness of souls from the sameness of psychological characteristics.

Miller tries to respond that he at least knows he himself has a soul, and he can thus establish the
correlation between soul and body in his own case. Then, he can generalize by analogy to other
cases, resulting in the general conclusion that there is a correlation between souls and bodies.
[For info on Arguments by Analogy, go to my logic page here.]

Weirob's response is that this move doesn't help him. For the river analogy still holds...it is still
possible that psychologically similar souls could be flowing in and out of one's body, such that
one could not detect a difference. The problem, Weirob summarizes, is that by the very nature of
what a soul is--i.e., immaterial, un-see-able, un-sense-able, etc.,--one cannot have a legitimate
principle of personal identity based on them
1. Definition of personal identity:
 The question of personal identity is the question of what makes a person quantitavely
(numerically) the same over time.
2. Why does personal identity matter?
- Technological issues: the problem of teleportation
- Psychological issues: feeling remorse, anticipation, regret, etc.
- Religious issues: life after death
- Moral issues: punishment for crimes

-Defining synchronic and diachronic identity

-Evaluating the soul hypothesis
-Understanding different positions and problems for where the self is
-Distinguishing necessary and contingent relations, and qualitative and quantitative identity
-Defining and evaluating spatiotemporal continuity theory, and psychological continuity theory
-Understanding the problem of defining identity as nonbranching
-Distinguishing ego and bundle theories
-Understand different theories’ responses to teletransportation cases

Principle of Deductive Closure:

Justified in believing p
P entails q (has nothing to do with me, it has to do with the relationship between p andq)
I’m justified in believing q
I believe q
Justification can be deduced, it transmits
You’re getting one out of the other (deductive)
Gettier mistakenly thinks that his argument depends on this principle
1. The Naïve Solution: I’ll just exist in heaven (Box of Kleenex example)
2. Dualism: the soul will survive BUT if the soul is immaterial how do I know that who I’m
talking to is the same person
The relationship between soul and body is either contingent (in this case, I can’t know that
people are still the same: chocolate example), or it is necessary (in this case, the soul has to die
with the body)
I know it’s the same person because of similar psychological characteristics, but the brain is
responsible for those and the brain is the body (if I’m angry, it doesn’t mean I have an angry
soul)
I know that I am the same person, so this must apply to everyone. Maybe my psychology is
constantly flowing like the water in a river (the river example)

Qualitative identity: Things that are qualitatively identical share the same properties (like the 2
boxes of Kleenex or identical twins)
Quantitative or numerical identity can only hold between a thing and itself, it’s the sort of
sameness expressed by the equals sign in mathematical statements like ‘2+2=4’.
For instance, I am quantitatively identical to the person I was 10 years ago (I am the same person
as her), although I am not qualitatively identical to her (we have very different physical and
psychological characteristics). Qualitative identity is not sufficient nor necessary for quantitative
identity.

Spatiotemporal Continuity:
- A continuous series, a series of locations in space and time containing an object,
convinces us that the same across. If we observe no such continuous series, we may
suspect that two objects at different times are different. (the baseball). The same principle
can be applied to humans (the twins in a cell).
- Everyone agrees that spatiotemporal continuity is a good practical guide to personal
identity but the spatiotemporal continuity theory says that spatiotemporal continuity is
the essence of personal identity, not just that it is a good practical guide.
- Objection: what if a person is captured, melted into a pot and turned into soup. Although
we can trace a continuous series from the person to the soup, the soup is not the person,
and the person no longer exists.
- To solve this problem, we can say that we need to have the same parts AND the same
relations between these parts for a person to be identical over time. persons are
numerically identical if and only if they are spatiotemporally continuous via a series of
persons. The case of the soup is no longer a problem.
- The prince and the cobbler: Suppose an evil scientist swapped the brains (psychologies)
of a prince and a cobbler.

There are two theories about what persons are, and what is involved in a person's continued
existence over time.
The Ego Theory: a person's continued existence can be explained as the continued existence of a
particular Ego, or subject of experiences. An Ego Theorist claims that what unifies someone's
consciousness at any time is that these are both experiences which are being had by me, this
person, at this time  what explains the unity of a person's whole life is the fact that all of the
experiences in this life are had by the same person, or subject of experiences. In its best-known
form, the Cartesian view, each person is a persisting purely mental thing - a soul, or spiritual
substance.
Bundle Theory: we can't explain either the unity of consciousness at any time, or the unity of a
whole life, by referring to a person. Instead we must claim that there are long series of different
mental states and events (thoughts, sensations) each series being what we call one life. Each
series is unified by various kinds of causal relation, such as the relations that hold between
experiences and later memories of them. Each series is thus like a bundle tied up with string.