Parfit Argumentative Essay

If a mad scientist were to transplant half of my brain into someone else’s brainless body, and the other half of my brain into a second’s person’s brainless body, which person would I be? Would I be neither of them or would I be just one of them? Assuming that my personal “fission” could support all of my mental life, According to Parfit’s article Personal Identity, personal identity does not matter and that I would be the same person at first but afterwards both people will become different people. Parfit sketches a theme called, “reductionist” thesis that personal identity through time is constituted by relations between mental and physical events in the absence of anything like a necessarily determinate, indivisible soul. The second theme is given reductionism; some of our commonsensical beliefs about rationality and morality need to be revised. Parfit describes the experiment as personal fission. The fission experiment was the central role for Parfit’s argument that identity is not what matters in survival. Parfit suggests that a person’s existence just consists in the occurrence of a series of interrelated mental …show more content…
Parfit says that his most important claim is that “personal identity is not what matters” and that it is continuity plus connectedness that matters in survival. The argument follows that in fission one would have what matters at least twice but one would be identical with no one living afterwards in anticipating a fission one’s current stage will not be copersonal with any post-fission stages. Identity is not what matters in survival; there is a significant shift in Parfit’s assumption about the relation between survival and personal identity. Both continuity and connectedness are necessary for survival, and it is the inclusion that connectedness that makes survival a “matter o degree” also introducing the notion of a “future self” and this idea can be linked to