When Dan Korman came in and talked about coincidence, he went over various issues for the coincidence theorist. One of the issues was this argument.
- There is an organism sitting in your chair
- That organism is a thinking thing
- There is only one thinking thing sitting in your chair
- So, you are that organism
The organism is presumably the thing left over after death, and presumably something we are coincident with. Dan concluded that the coincidence theorists only option is to appeal to substance dualism, and reject 2. As someone with dualistic intuitions, I didn't mind this consequence, but Dan didn't seem to happy, and I can see why. It seems a heavy consequence to just get shackled with.
With regards to this issue, I have two questions I'm interested in. Does the coincidence theorist have any other options, with which to make physicalism compatible with their theory? Also, to what extent do other theories have to deal with this problem?
What are everyone's thoughts on this?
Hi Justin,
ReplyDeleteHere is Ted Sider's paper you and I discussed after Professor Korman's lecture. As I previously mentioned, my cursory reading and subsequent poor deconstruction did not do it justice.
http://tedsider.org/papers/yap.pdf
Let me know what you think.