Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > Brent Meeker writes: > > > > You don't have to. Body identity is not sufficient to establish the "fact of > the matter". People > > > may be acquited to murder (by reason of insanity) because they suffer from > multiple personality > > > disorder. In such cases, one "personality" is generally not aware of the > other(s). > > Mainstream psychiatry where I come from does not believe in MPD, but I > suppose it is theoretically possible that several independent > personality streams could co-exist in the same brain, and it is a good > model for our discussion. Suppose that one of the personalities commits > a crime, then lies dormant so that the personality in the pilot’s seat > when the police arrest the suspect honestly has no knowledge of the act, > but later, through psychotherapeutic intervention, both personalities > are reintegrated. Would it then be fair to punish “both” personalities > for the crimes committed by one before the reintegration took place?
I think that leads to digressions on "fair" and the purpose of punishing crimes. > > The question is, can you come up with a definition of personal identity > which allows us to decide in these and other unusual cases whether two > instances of a person are in fact the same person? That's a good question. Maybe, as in the case of punishing a crime, it depends on why we need to make this decision, i.e. what action we're contemplating. According to the popular description of MPD (and I don't know whether such really occurs or not) one personality knows about the other(s) but not vice versa. But suppose they were completely separate - by that I think you would mean they didn't share any memories, they just time-shared the body. Brent Meeker --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
