β Scribed by John Morreall
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
One kind of argument for spatio-temporal continuity as a necessary condition of personal identity appeals to the possibility of a replica replacing a person if spatio-temporal continuity is broken. The replica would look and act like the original person in every way, and would even appear to have his memories, but would nonetheless be a different person. Antony Flew insists that after a person has been totally destroyed, no person coming later could be identical with the original person; at best what followed could be a replica. I Terence Penelhum, too, claims that our concept of a person does not allow for spatiotemporal gaps. In Chapter 9 of Survival and Disembodied Existence 2 he admits that we could change our concept of a person to allow for such gaps. The trouble is that were we to do so, we would be left with no way to distinguish the original person reappearing after a spatio-temporal gap from a replica making its debut. Adopting a gap-inclusive concept of a person would not offer us what some believers in resurrection, for example, might hope it could offer -a possible state of affairs which would have to be identified as ourselves (and not a bunch of replicas) existing again in a future world. Because altering our concept of a person to permit spatio-temporal gaps would always leave it optional whether we identified this post-gap person as A or as a mere replica of A, I think Penelhum would want to say, it is probably for good reasons that we have the concept we do have of persons, a concept which requires spatio-temporal continuity.
What I would like to show is that this appeal to the possibility of replicas replacing persons, in arguments for the importance of spatio-temporal continuity in personal identity,is a two-edged sword. For while the possibility of replica replacement may provide a basis for arguing that spatio-temporal continuity is a necessary condition of personal identity, the possibility of one kind of replica (a kind I shall call a 'smooth replica') can be used to argue that spatio-temporal continuity cannot serve as a sufficient condition of personal identity. The latter conclusion would be an unwelcome one for Flew and Penelhum, both of whom stress the primacy of the bodily sameness Philosophical Studies 38 (
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