Den Beste offers a typically thoughtful post on the subject of personal identity.
A paragraph in Marc Ciocco’s comments struck me:
I seem to have the ability to switch mental models rather easily, viewing a problem from a number of different perspectives and attempting to figure out the best way to approach a problem. I seem to be able to reconcile my various perspectives with each other as well (for example, I seem to have no problem reconciling science and religion with each other), though the boundries are blurry and I can sometimes come up with contradictory conclusions. This is in itself somewhat troubling, but at the same time, it is also somwhat of an advantage that I can approach a problem in a number of different ways. The trick is knowing which approach to use for which problem; hardly an easy proposition. Furthermore, I gather that I am somewhat odd in this ability, at least among believers. I used to debate religion a lot on the internet, and after a time, many refused to think of me as a Catholic because I didn’t seem to align with others’ perception of what Catholics are. I always found that rather amusing, though I guess I can understand the sentiment.
I can identify with this. I’ve also often found myself in the position of mediating between various world views, whether religious or not. Although I’m a Nicene Christian, I think of myself as a rationalist. Many of my more traditionally religous friends view this with some alarm, since I’m not reticent in expressing my opinions on:
- Evolution: if the Lord God made the world to look 4 billion years old, who are we to disbelieve Him?
- Scripture: the OT up to Samual, and the apocalyptic literature of both OT and NT are not literal.
- Inerrancy: I wrote a paper once proving the errancy of Scripture as a corollary of Godel’s Theorem.
- The Soul: my view is similar to Den Bestes: the soul is the arrangement of information currently encoded by the brain (memory, cognition), and the sensory and endocrine systems.
Of course, this definition of the soul gets fuzzy when you try to find the dividing line between body and soul.
There’s a movement in theology to do away with the traditional body/soul dualism, and define the self, the person, as comprising both body and soul. If that is so, what about the Hensel twins (twin girls who share a body; that is, they have one body with two heads)?