386 NOTES15 Read it as saying that Whether persons are substances or collections, the substance
or collection that is identical to me exists now; neither a Jain-type nor a Buddhist-
type account of persons is built into the first premise.
16 Cloning a person does not destroy her; it simply gives her a twin. I have a clone at
T does not entail I do not exist at T; hence premise 6 is true. This remains the case
even if we replace the notion of a clone by the notion of a clone so that a clone is
either another person cloned from me or something created ex nihilo that is an exact
copy of what a clone of me would be (and also bears R to me).
17 Justice, if you prefer.
18 Save, perhaps, for the unorthodox, extremely minority-status Buddhist Personalists.
19 I assume for convenience that the act was itself momentary; otherwise there will
also be a problem about the identity of the original agent of the action.
20 See previous note.
21 I take it to be evident that logically necessary truths are internal to all positions,
including those that deny them. What is true in all possible worlds is also true in all
possible positions; some positions deny this, and in so doing deny what renders
them possibly true positions; so they are necessarily false positions.
22 For example, is there within Buddhist metaphysical resources any relation R such
that one person(1) bearing R to another person(1) will tie them together into a
person(2) in any sense in which a person(2) actually would be a person? Memory
relations obviously won’t do – Person(1)X did A and person(1)Y remembers having
done A assumes Person(1)X and person(1)Y belong to a single person(2) and so
cannot be used to explain what being a single person(2) amounts to. Resemblance
seems irrelevant. Causality is a common candidate, but of exactly what sort (lots of
causal relations won’t do)? I doubt that any such analysis is even plausible, but that
is another matter.
23 It may be helpful here to notice a possible difference between composite nonendurers
and composite endurers. All of the elements of a composite nonendurer exist
simultaneously. Thus it may be possible for them to be so related that while singly
none of them is an organism, together they comprise an organism, albeit a very brief
one. The elements of a composite endurer do not exist simultaneously. By the time
one element arrives, its preceding elements are all gone. So the elements of a composite
endurer cannot be so related as to comprise an organism. A composite endurer is
simply and only a succession of composite nonendurers. If each such nonendurer in
a succession is an organism, then it is a succession of organisms.
24 Remember that E1 and E2 are composite nonendurers that exist at different times.
25 The temptation is to think that because the elements of a composite nonendurer can
be an organism (something somehow more than just its parts), so can composite
endurers be organisms. But even if the former is true, the latter is not; a succession
of organisms is a succession of organisms, and is not itself an organism. To think
otherwise is to embrace confusion.
26 Strictly, of course, if P entails Q and Q is logically inconsistent or self-contradictory,
then P is also logically inconsistent or self-contradictory – i.e., necessarily false.
Hence not only is the complexity view not true; it is not even logically possible that
it be true.
27 I think that there are only two logically possible accounts of the metaphysical
structure (so to say) of persons. This is argued briefly in “A Defense of Dualism,”
Faith and Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 4, October 1995, pp. 548–66, in an issue that
includes all of the main papers read at the 1994 Notre Dame Conference on the
Philosophy of Mind.