Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

simply an ‘epi-phenomenon’ of the physical brain. This takes us back to the materialism and physicalism encountered above and in earlier chapters, and is sometimes called the ‘identity theory of the mind’. It is noticeable that people are likely to just accept this, unless faced with a hypothetical scenario such as a version of Star Trek’s teleportation system, where an exact copy of an individual is constructed at a new location, but the original person (that’s you!) is destroyed. If physicalism is true there should be no problem with this — memories and thoughts should be completely intact. But most people have severe misgivings about trusting their belief in physicalism this far! We might say — and probably with severe understatement — that some essence is likely to be lost in the process of teleportation. (This thought experiment is attributed to Derek Parfit. See his, Reasons and Persons.) Likewise, most people seem wary of having their minds uploaded to a computer, even though this seems like a reasonable possibility if physicalism is true.

One reason for dividing up our mental experience in some way is that we do seem to be of divided mind. There are motives beneath our conscious level. There is a vast amount of brain activity that is sub-conscious. There is an image of ourselves that is often at odds with the image others have of us. There is a sense in which we feel there is a ‘real me’, which I am only partly in control of and which others either cannot see or can only partly discern. Plato illustrated these various mental states in his Phraedrus, with the metaphor of a charioteer trying to steer horses. In more modern times,

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