Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through this galaxy. We are creating some of these risks, and discovering how we could respond to these and other risks.
Could she be a different person now? Was I talking to the same patient who had asked me the original question? Was the pre-injury person the same with the coma-questioner and with the patient-in-rehab? Before leaving her I said I was really glad she was doing so much better she smiled and answered remarkably: “and I am glad to be someone again”.“What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We continued conversing, she did not remember much from the past few weeks and was told that she seemed less interested in some of her prior favorite activities. I explained then that the more careful answer is that during coma she was no one she gave me a puzzled look, and I quickly added that her person was “carried through” the thoughts of her loved ones and of the medical team that cared for her. I confessed that my first impulse when she asked me was to answer that during coma she had been nowhere (yet under strict medical supervision!). She did not, yet found the question interesting anew. The backbone of this embodied-part view is the idea that we are not human beings, or animals, but are the conscious, thinking, controlling parts of these animals.Ī couple of weeks later she was doing a lot better, I visited and asked her if she remembered asking me about her coma. A person on this Lockean-conception is a self-conscious, rational entity. John Locke was the seventeenth century philosopher who defined a person as “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places”. In recent work with the characteristic title “We are not human beings”, Parfit argues that we are embodied Lockean persons. This idea follows the thinking of an influential contemporary philosopher, Derek Parfit. The next step to take then is, after we have rejected that we are or that we have souls, to reject that we are human animals and instead describe us as something embodied, intermittently present and yet conditionally persistent and individuated over time. This mystery, I believe, is born out of misidentifying “one of us” (mature adult human persons) as either souls or human animals. Although this physical description is true, it again does very little to alleviate the profound sense of mystery that my patient felt. Further, the presence of the same brain via altered states of anatomy and physiology is to account for the different states of being. It could be argued that the presence of the same human animal is what grounds the unity of my patient. Maybe then we can focus on a reductionist, physicalist, brain-based approach and face the brute fact that we are human animals. In fact, if we did concede that the soul can be intermittently present then we would lose the very reason to accept such a view, which is to have a criterion of continuity and unity. It would be absurd to be talking about a soul in coma, or an intermittently present or functioning soul.
It does not capture the deep wonder of my patient to her intuition that she was somehow absent during her coma state. I believe though that the “soul theory” fails in another fundamental way. Nevertheless, on both conceptual and empirical evidence grounds there is very little to support such a view. The term “soul” is here placed in quotation marks to delimit the term and include the idea of a non-materialistic, not strictly religious, further fact (e.g., the Platonic soul or the Kantian noumenal self) as our core essence. A common view is that each of us has a “soul” that individuates us and contains what is needed for us to persist. Admittedly, many think that she was and she is, even throughout the coma, a single, unified, and unique entity.
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