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Libertarianism is a kind of politics that says the government should have less control over people's lives. It is based on the idea of maximum liberty. Libertarians believe that it is usually better to give people more free choice

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Determinism is the belief that every event or phenomenon, including human actions, is determined or caused by prior events and conditions. According to this view, given the state of the universe at any given time and the laws of nature, there is only one possible outcome or future trajectory. In other words, the present state of the universe, combined with the laws governing it, completely determines what will happen next, leaving no room for genuine randomness or free will

Indeterminism, on the other hand, posits that not all events are causally determined. It suggests that there are genuinely unpredictable or random events that do not have a fixed cause or that may be influenced by factors beyond our current understanding. Indeterminism allows for the possibility of true spontaneity and randomness in the world

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What if you woke up one day and all the things that looked red to you before going to sleep suddenly looked green, with the entire color spectrum shifted accordingly?

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What if you woke up one day and all the things that looked red to you before going to sleep suddenly looked green, with the entire color spectrum shifted accordingly?

Welcome to the "inverted spectrum argument," a critical piece of philosophical lore (dating back to John Locke, more widely known for his theory of natural rights) with implications for the meaning of human consciousness and, of course, that problematic dress that set the internet ablaze Thursday night.

Qualia

The thought experiment is meant to prove that there is such a thing as what something looks like that is separate from the question of what it is. An identical .JPG file, for example, can look one way to some of us and another way to others. These things - the blackness you see or the goldness I see - are called qualia (quale is the singular) in the philosophical literature.

One common line of argument about qualia is that their existence and importance shows that crucial matters of consciousness cannot be reduced to a mere biophysical understanding of how the brain operates. In his famous 1974 essay "What Is It Like To Be a Bat," Thomas Nagel asks us to consider the qualia induced by navigating the world via echolocation. We can, through physical examination, come to understand a great deal about bats. But we cannot understand what it feels like to be a bat:

We describe bat sonar as a form of three-dimensional forward perception; we believe that bats feel some versions of pain, fear, hunger, and lust, and that they have other, more familiar types of perception besides sonar. But we believe that these experiences also have in each case a specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive.

This is more or less why the dress dispute was so vehement and so captivating. I can look at the photo of the dress. And I can image a black and blue dress. But I can't understand what it's like to see that very dress as a black and blue dress. Common sense indicates that the disagreement must have to do with screen brightness settings or background color or monitor tilt - some physical property of the image. When it turns out that two people can look at an identical image on an identical screen and see different things, it seems like someone has gone insane.

Mind and body

To many philosophers, these qualia issues demonstrate that the conscious human mind cannot be reduced to the physical and biological processes of the brain. Other philosophers dispute this (it is philosophy after all) and propose various theories to reconcile the presumption that the whole world is physical with the lived reality of subjective experience and qualia.

Another approach entirely was taken by Tufts University professor Daniel Dennett in his 1988 article "Quining Qualia". It's a pun based on the name of W.V.O. Quine, a philosopher from the previous generation who was widely known for vehemently denying the existence of many things posited by common sense. Dennett's argument is that, despite their distinguished lineage in the philosophical literature, nobody can give a consistent account of what qualia are. It's easy to get freshman philosophy students to believe in them with a couple of thought experiments, but they're not a normal word of everyday language because they're really just a flight of fancy philosophers dreamed up to deny the truth of materialism. Normal people would just go to church and talk about souls.

The fault is in our eyes

The fact that nobody yet seems to have devised a conclusive account of how the dress puzzle arose inspires speculations about qualia and consciousness. But the direction that investigations are going in tends to suggest a more Dennett-style approach. Our eyes contain many different rods and cones that perceive light and color, and even though human eyes are all broadly similar, a whole range of factors are going to lead one person's set of rods and cones to differ from another person's.

Through some miraculous happenstance, this particular washed-out photo of dress seems to have hit onto a dividing line where one large fraction of the population sees it one way and another large fraction sees it another way. But just because people see things differently doesn't mean there's no physicalist explanation of that fact. Things that look blurry to me seem sharp to people with 20/20 vision, and that's because of the shape of my eyeball. Until someone explains in detail exactly what physical differences lead some people to see the gold parts of the dress as black, we're going to keep arguing with each other.

But it's extremely likely that an explanation will be forthcoming. It's not so much that our subjective experiences are incomprehensible to one another, but our eyes just function very slightly differently in a way that happens to be relevant to the perception of one viral photo.

That doesn't mean the consciousness argument will be solved in Nagel's favor, of course, since he still has the bats to fall back on. The awful thing about philosophy is that unlike internet riddles, its big problems never get resolved.

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What that weird dress tells us about the metaphysics of consciousness

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Philosophy can explain why we can't stop fighting about the dress.

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Memory is portrayed as a mental faculty that allows us to access past experiences, thoughts, or knowledge. It enables us to reengage with ideas that were previously imprinted or learned, even if they have faded from our conscious thoughts or have been temporarily put aside

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bundle theory, these attributes are often referred to as "bundles" or "bundles of properties." They could include physical characteristics, thoughts, emotions, memories, perceptions, and any other mental or physical states that make up an individual's experience

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the quote highlights the importance of self-reflection and self-awareness. It implies that as we gain deeper insights into our true nature and how we change over time, we should reevaluate our beliefs about what is right or wrong, what motivates us, and what choices we should make. It implies that discovering the truth about ourselves can lead to a reassessment of our values, goals, and ethical framework, prompting a need for change in our beliefs and subsequent actions.

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Is this possible? and what are the implications? One argument is psychological continuity. If a person's brain is transplanted into a new body, which body would house their continued sense of self? Would the person's identity reside in their original brain or in the body that now contains that brain? This scenario challenges the idea that personal identity is solely tied to the physical body and suggests that the brain plays a significant role in shaping our sense of self. There is also the mind-body problem, would it be compatible? and of course there's persistence of identity:  If someone's brain is transplanted into a new body, there may be a sense of continuity in terms of memories, cognitive abilities, and personality traits. However, the change in physical appearance and bodily experiences might raise questions about the consistency and stability of one's identity.

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'A full head swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage.... We stand on the brink of a revolution, not only in medicine but in human life'

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The Frankensteinian notion of head - or, more accurately, body - transplants moved closer to reality Friday with the announcement that the first head swap has been carried out on human corpses.

The next step, said Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero, is a head transplant between two brain-dead organ donors.

Canavero announced at a press conference in Vienna on Friday that a surgical team led by his collaborator in China, Xiaoping Ren, had "successfully" transferred a head from one human cadaver to another. The maverick surgeon said details of the surgery, led by a team from Harbin Medical University in China, would be released within days by a surgical journal.

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After experimenting on mice, rats, dogs and primates, the first "full rehearsal" on a human body has taken place, Canavero announced with his signature theatrical flair.

"The first human transplant on human cadavers has been done," he said. "A full head swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage," he said, adding that an operation on a live human being will be imminent.

"Today we stand on the brink of a revolution, not only in medicine but in human life as well."

According to Canavero, the transfer of heads between corpses took 18 hours, half the anticipated time. Ren, he said, was "absolutely satisfied with the results."

In May, Canavero and Ren published a ghoulish account of experiments that involved transplanting the heads of small donor rats onto the back of the neck of bigger, recipient rats. Fourteen of the freakish pairings survived for an average of 36 hours.

Reporting in the journal CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics, Canavero said a special pump and silicone tubes were used throughout the rat surgeries to ensure adequate blood supply to the donor's brain while the head was being connected to the recipient.

"The whole operation process preserves the carotid arteries, jugular veins and vertebral arteries," they reported.

Canavero is the audacious and controversial creator of HEAVEN, the "head anastomosis venture" project. The plan would see two teams of surgeons swiftly cut off the heads of two people - one, a person whose body is crippled by, for example, a neurological disease or car crash, the other from a brain-dead organ donor. The healthy head would be shifted onto the donor body using a custom-made swivel crane. Next, surgeons would reconnect and stitch up the trachea, esophagus, the carotid arteries and jugular veins, link up the spinal cords and wait for the recipient to reawaken, and - most importantly - move and talk.

1. Meet Sergio Canavero, the brain behind the world's first head transplant and, perhaps, the key to everlasting life

2. Do Amish hold the key to a longer life? Study finds anti-aging gene in religious group

Bio-ethicists have accused the "noggin exchange" surgeon of being reckless. Transplant surgeons say nobody has been able to repair a spinal cord that has been cut clean through.

But Canavero insists he has developed a way to coax axons and neurons to grow across the gap between the two severed spinal cords using a special glue-like substance developed by a B.C. researcher.

"I understand humans love the gory side of the surgery, but this is a medical procedure for a medical condition for people who are suffering awfully," Canavero said. "So, it's not a joke."

His critics say that even if it proves technically feasible and the person survives, there's no basis for the supposition that the transplanted head - and brain - will retain the person's mind, personality or consciousness once it's hooked up to its new body.

"The person will encounter huge difficulties to incorporate the new body in its already existing body schema and body image," Italian scientists wrote in 2015 in the journal Surgical Neurology International, noting similar problems have occurred in cases of face and hand transplants. The result, they said, could be serious psychological problems, "namely insanity and finally death."

Canavero was short on details Friday, less he confuses people with "surgical gibberish." He hinted the Chinese would also announce results from the first test in humans of his special fusogen, dubbed TEXAS-PEG, used to repair damaged spinal cords.

"We have worked with those who have suffered too long from the failure of academic groups around the world," he said. "We have an answer. It's coming."

But Canavero has said his true goal (which he revealed to the Post last year) is life extension via brain transplants - the idea that, as we age, we could have our brains transplanted into more youthful bodies (though it's not clear where those bodies would come from).

"It will be a revolution the likes of which have never been seen before," he said.

Observers criticized the science-by-press conference and said Canavero still has offered no evidence that the biggest hurdle - reconnecting the severed spinal cords from two different people and restoring brain motor function - has been overcome. "To be able to say you can just stick someone else's head on someone else's body is not really feasible based on current medical understanding. I'd be very keen to hear his explanation about how we've got around these issues," said Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist and psychiatry lecturer at the Centre for Medical Education at Cardiff University.

And doing it on dead bodies doesn't prove success, he added. It's just an anatomical exercise. "

You can sew dead organs together all you want and say that's a successful attachment," Burnett said.

The rat experiments weren't head transplants, but "pointless head grafting onto a creature which doesn't really need a second head."

Even if it proves technically feasible, there are deeper philosophical questions, he said.

"If you appreciate the brain is the source of you, then you are the same person," Burnett said. "But if you go on pure mass, percentage of body weight, you are more the donor than you are yourself."

If you had someone else's DNA running through your system, he added, "who are you?"
* Email: skirkey@postmedia.com | Twitter: sharon_kirkey ‏ Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.

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World's first human head transplant successfully performed on a corpse, scientists say

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'A full head swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage.... We stand on the brink of a revolution, not only in medicine but in human life'

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This thought experiment puts into perspective of persisting identities. "All things move and nothing remains still" quoted by Plato is essentially what he thinks of Ship of Theseus. This argument maintains that nothing retains its identity, or that identity is a fluid concept, and never one thing for very long. Therefore, neither ship is the original Ship of Theseus.

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Batman's alter ego, Bruce Wayne, presents himself as a wealthy playboy by day, but at night, he transforms into a vigilante crime-fighter, Batman.The idea of dual identities is rooted in philosophical concepts such as the divided self and the mask theory of the self. Batman's dual identity represents the dichotomy between Bruce Wayne's public persona and the hidden depths of his true self as Batman. However, the question becomes unclear as to who the original identity

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Some people say that they weren't the same person they were 7 years ago. You could say that basically you aren't because technically all your cells do a cleanse and become new again. But people looking on the outside still see the same person, no matter how much you think you have changed. So what is it that stays consistent...The mind? The soul?

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

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You are a person. Presumably, you used to be a younger person. But, in virtue of what is it the case that you and that younger person are one and the same individual? In other words, how is it that you continue to exist over time?

There had better be something that grounds our continued existence, for we make judgments that presume that people continue to exist every day-for instance, when we assign rewards and punishments to them, or moral obligations, or property rights, and so on:

the woman presently being punished for some past crime had better be the same person who committed it, or else her punishment is unjust;

if I am obligated to keep a promise, I had better be the one who made it in the first place, or else I have no such obligation;

if you presently possess a car, you had better be the one who purchased it, or else you have no legitimate claim to its ownership.

Clearly, the question of what grounds the persistence of one's identity is an incredibly important one. Let's look at some proposed answers.

Maybe our bodies have something to do with our continued existence; as long as my body continues to exist, I continue to exist.

But, mere sameness of body over time does not seem to be enough to ground the continued existence of a person. ¹ For, if that were the case, then a brain-dead body in a persistent vegetative state (entirely lacking consciousness) would still be the same person as the one who once talked and thought and laughed with others. That seems wrong.

To illustrate further, imagine this story:

The human body of your next-door neighbor leads two completely different lives-one during the day, and one at night. From 6am to 6pm every day, his body claims to be named "Day Man." Day Man thinks that his body sleeps every night, but what really happens is that, from 6pm to 6am, his body is awake and claiming to be named "Night Man." Night Man and Day Man have different jobs, friends, goals, tastes, etc., and, furthermore, have no knowledge of each other.

Doesn't it seem like what we have here is a case of two persons inhabiting one body? If that is correct, then sameness of body is not what grounds sameness of person; for, in that case, it would turn out that Day Man and Night Man were really just one person and not two (since they share the same body).

Many people believe that what we are is not something material, but rather something immaterial. They say that each of us has a soul-or rather, is a soul-and that souls are immaterial things that reside in bodies. Maybe our souls ground our continued existence; so long as my soul continues to exist, I continue to exist.

But, if that were so, we would have no way of knowing whether or not people continue to exist over time. Since souls, if they exist, are immaterial, we cannot see or touch or smell them: souls would be completely undetectable by the senses. And yet, it seems that we can know whether or not someone in the present moment is the same person as some earlier one. You do not greet your friends and say, "But, how can I know whether or not you are really my friend? My friend is merely an immaterial thing, and since I cannot see immaterial things, I have no way of knowing whether or not my friend stands before me."

Furthermore, people who believe in souls typically believe that souls can leave their bodies and go elsewhere (for instance, to heaven). But, then, for all we know, when a soul leaves one body it simply inhabits another. Abraham Lincoln's soul might have left his body after his death and migrated into mine. If that happened, then I am Abraham Lincoln-one and the same person, such that I was once the 16 th president of the United States, who wrote the Gettysburg Address and so on-a result that many find counter-intuitive.

3. Psychology

If Day Man and Night Man are two different people, then it is because they have two different psychologies. If a body in a persistent vegetative state is no longer a person, then it is because that body is no longer conscious. If I am not Abraham Lincoln, despite sharing one and the same immaterial soul, then it is because I cannot remember doing anything that Lincoln did.

For these reasons, we might think that psychology or consciousness is what grounds our continued existence.

But, consciousness alone will not do. Imagine that your body woke up today claiming to be Pope Francis; your body now possesses all of the pope's beliefs and opinions, and claims to be the pope. In short, imagine your body waking up with the pope's psychology. ² Imagine also that the actual body of Pope Francis woke up in the Vatican this morning and continued with business as usual, doing pope things. Now you both have the pope's psychology, so, apparently, you are both Pope Francis. But, that can't be. You cannot both be the pope (how could one person be in two places at once?). So, psychology alone does not seem to be what grounds identity.

4. Conclusion

Intuitively, the real pope is the man who wakes up in the Vatican. Meanwhile, your body is merely an imposter pope. Might this be because the man in the Vatican has the same body and psychology as the man elected to the papacy, while your body has only his psychology?

This line of reasoning has led to many hybrid proposals. For instance, perhaps you continue to exist over time only so long as your body and your psychology do. On this proposal, survival of only your body (e.g., as a human vegetable) or only your psychology (e.g., if downloaded into a new body) would not suffice for the survival of you.

1 For one thing, strictly speaking, we do not even have the same bodies over time. After all, our bodies are constantly taking in new material as we breathe and eat and drink, and constantly shedding material as we perspire and excrete and exhale or lose our hair and skin our knees. So, most body-theorists do not actually believe that exact sameness of material is what grounds identity. Rather, it is only bodily continuity that matters. For instance, even though my body is made of slightly different material today than it was yesterday, there is nevertheless some causal continuity between my present body and my former one which binds them together as one and the same.

2 Or do you merely seem to have his psychology? E.g., if you seem to remember something the Pope did, do you actually have his memories, or does it just seem like it? What's the difference between remembering something, and it seeming to you that you remember something? How do answers here make a difference to psychological theories of personal identity?

References

Locke, John (1689). "Of Identity and Diversity", in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, section II.27.

Olson, Eric T. (2019). "Personal Identity", in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Parfit, Derek (1971). "Personal Identity", in Philosophical Review, vol. 80, 3-27.

Parfit, Derek (1987). "Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons", in Mindwaves, Blakemore and Greenfield, eds. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), 19-26.

Perry, John (1978). A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality.

For Further Reading

Korfmacher, Carsten. "Personal Identity". The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Related Essays

Possibility and Necessity: An Introduction to Modality by Andre Leo Rusavuk

PDF Download

About the Author

is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the College of William and Mary. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He also holds degrees in astrophysics and theology. He specializes in metaphysics and is also very interested in normative ethics, applied ethics, philosophy of religion, and early modern philosophy. wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/cvance/home

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Personal Identity: How We Exist Over Time

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Author: Chad Vance Category: Metaphysics Word Count: 1000 You are a person. Presumably, you used to be a younger person. But, in virtue of what is it the case that you and that younger person are one and the same individual? In other words, how is it that you continue to exist over time?

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Discusses perception of oneself and how others perceive you and how it influences oneself. Appearance does not equal mind

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The 3 parts of the soul (according to Plato)

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The 3 parts of the soul (according to Plato)