Pour résoudre les paradoxes bien connus de la mécanique quantique, on propose une interprétation par ramification (ou univers parallèles) analogue à celle d?Everett, mais avec des différences: (i) on propose une infinité continue de branches, dont les poids (o[ugrave] probabilités) se calculent par intégrale; (ii) les branches sont séparées par des ramifieurs qui se propagent à la vitesse de la lumière. Lorsqu?est négligeable la composante d?énergie négative de la fonction d?onde, le poids de chaque branche en un point donné (...) u est égal au flux du quadrivecteur (courant-densité de présence), soit à travers l'élément d?écran antérieur à u sur lequel l'impact est perçu, soit à travers le cône passé de u si aucun impact n?est perçu. In order to solve well-known paradoxes in quantum mechanics, we propose a reworking of Everett's interpretation with ramified branches (or many worlds), yet somewhat different: (i) branches form an infinity continuum and each weight (probability) is defined by an integral; (ii) branches are separated by ramifiers which propagate themselves with the velocity of light. Assuming we can neglect the negative-energy component in the wave function, then the weight of each branch at a given point u is equal to the flux of the quadrivector (current-presence density), either through the screen element where the impact occurs, or through the past light-cone of u if no impact occurs. (shrink)

Consistent throughout his writings on aesthetics and education, Bennett Reimer maintained the idea that music must be understood and studied as non-conceptual. Music’s forms of knowing point to the subjective realms of life and operate effectively without the assistance or necessity of language. An education in the arts is an education in feelings, a claim that became untenable in an age of evidence and standardization. Critics hostile to a characterization of music as unknowable pointed to very clear concepts, locating the (...) activity of music in both social and sonic contexts whereby extra-musical delineations could be articulated and musical conventions taught. The authors of this essay argue that music can be understood in ways that are both conceptual and non-conceptual, if by the latter one draws upon post-structural notions of the text, particularly Roland Barthes’s explorations of what he called the third meaning or the third space. We leave open the idea that Reimer, in his own explorations of the non-conceptual, shared in this discovery. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education by Randall Everett AllsupJuliet HessRandall Everett Allsup, Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016).As a leading voice in music education, Randall Allsup works continually to reconceptualize music education toward democratic and socially just praxis.1 He routinely challenges the field to become self-conscious of practices that limit forward (...) movement, providing powerful critiques2 and urging music education toward open possibilities.3 Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education is work that will shift our field. His comprehensive philosophy of music education looks, longs, for moral openings4 through which twenty-first-century music education may become a space of possibility. His writing interweaves stories and theory toward what he calls an "open philosophy," drawing upon the ideas of John Dewey, Maxine Greene, and Roland Barthes. Allsup introduces stories of Dapper Dan, Jiro Ono, Kafka, Atul Gawande, and the Orpheus Orchestra in New York City to illustrate powerful points about current and possible paradigms of music education.Chapter 1, "Toward Open Encounters," discusses the making and breaking of the law (tradition) and explores how tradition and the Master-Apprentice model restrict what is possible in music education. Allsup explores the nature of music education and the limitations it places upon its participants. Chapter 2, "Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise," asks fundamental questions of our field and [End Page 100] explores and challenges the "place and purpose of public schooling in a democratic society."5 Allsup speaks to the function of education and critiques music education. Chapter 3, "learning in laboratories," puts forward a Deweyan laboratory model in which a museum is at the center of the school with learning laboratories situated around it. He explores what this structural fluidity might enable and develops notions of lawmaking and lawbreaking, extending possibilities of the open encounter. The final chapter, "looking, Longing, for Moral Openings," calls on music educators to embrace a more open music education paradigm. Allsup draws upon Greene to challenge music education to move "from the predictable to the possible."6 He puts forward the Orpheus Orchestra, a conductorless orchestra, as one possibility.I situate myself as an anti-racist, anti-colonial, feminist scholar rooted in anti-oppression scholarship.7 locating my review through this framework, I elaborate upon what I see as the major strengths and limitations of this work, drawing upon Judith Butler8 and postcolonial theory. significantly, Allsup's book calls upon music education to "give an account of [it]self" and promotes a self-consciousness crucial for our field in the age of high stakes accountability measures. I contend that he provides a music education philosophy for what stuart Hall terms the "postcolonial moment"9 and ultimately positions music education as a space of possibility. Alongside these strengths, I offer a challenge toward what I view as the open possibilities of closed forms and a critique of his "pedagogy of travel and surprise."Judith Butler points to the impossibility of giving an account of oneself. she notes,I speak as an 'I,' but do not make the mistake of thinking that I know precisely all that I am doing when I speak in that way. I find that my very formation implicates the other and me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others.10Butler notes the subject's "partial opacity to [her]self."11 In Remixing the Classroom, Allsup calls upon music educators to account for the practices and traditions continually reinscribed in the field. He poses challenging but fundamental questions in the work in music education, asking readers to consider what they do unconsciously. Butler asserts we can never fully account for ourselves. Allsup challenges the field to try, pushing music educators to face hard truths and limitations of what music education is and has been. In chapter 1, for example, he argues:To call a studying musician "unmusical" is to extinguish a light; it is to act as if the future is certain and that human potential is somehow fixed. It is to act [End Page 101... (shrink)

Translated from the German by Roland Everett and edited by Rhona Everett.

Amalgamating evidence from heterogeneous sources and across levels of inquiry is becoming increasingly important in many pure and applied sciences. This special issue provides a forum for researchers from diverse scientific and philosophical perspectives to discuss evidence amalgamation, its methodologies, its history, its pitfalls, and its potential. We situate the contributions therein within six themes from the broad literature on this subject: the variety-of-evidence thesis, the philosophy of meta-analysis, the role of robustness/sensitivity analysis for evidence amalgamation, its bearing on questions (...) of extrapolation and external validity of experiments, its connection with theory development, and its interface with causal inference, especially regarding causal theories of cancer. (shrink)

Definition of the problem: Contemporary bioethics as an academic discipline mainly focuses on moral questions – according to its articulated self-concept and the explicit arguments in most areas of bioethical reflection. Concepts and theories of the good life are hardly considered. Arguments: In reality the ‘good life’ plays a much more important role than it is assumed, but mostly only in an implicit way. The article demonstrates this by referencing three selected fields of bioethical discussion. Hence the article argues that (...) bioethics should turn the ‘good life’ into an issue of intense, explicit and systematic consideration. Furthermore, the article provides an initial answer to the questions as to why the ‘good life’ has been marginalized within bioethics up to this point and which function it can assume in future bioethical reflection. Conclusion: The ‘good life’ is the blind spot of bioethics. A more intensive and systematic consideration of the ‘good life’ is a challenge for contemporary and future bioethics. (shrink)

We investigate strong versions of enumeration reducibility, the most important one being s-reducibility. We prove that every countable distributive lattice is embeddable into the local structure $L(\mathfrak D_s)$ of the s-degrees. However, $L(\mathfrak D_s)$ is not distributive. We show that on $\Delta^{0}_{2}$ sets s-reducibility coincides with its finite branch version; the same holds of e-reducibility. We prove some density results for $L(\mathfrak D_s)$ . In particular $L(\mathfrak D_s)$ is upwards dense. Among the results about reducibilities that are stronger than s-reducibility, (...) we show that the structure of the $\Delta^{0}_{2}$ bs-degrees is dense. Many of these results on s-reducibility yield interesting corollaries for Q-reducibility as well. (shrink)

What does it mean to ‘calculate’—today? The pause introduced by the dash in this question marks the inescapable necessity of historicizing the problem of calculation. In his provocative essay, ‘Toward a Critique of the Ineffectual: Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle and the Construction of an Action without Ends’, Dimitris Vardoulakis proposes a philosophical and political programme in order to counter the negative effects of ‘Heidegger’s mistake’ (the conflation of causality and instrumentality through a mistranslation of Aristotle) that has led to the (...) theoretical fetishization of the ‘ineffectual’ (action without ends) in continental philosophy. In his conclusion, Vardoulakis advocates for a return to a politics and ethics of practical judgment that avoids the twin pitfalls of asserting either the impossibility or the absolute possibility of calculation. As he puts it, we need to acknowledge today ‘the exigency to calculate in the face of the provisional ends of instrumentality, or to perform the judgment that the Greeks called phronesis’ [2022: 244]. This is why we should keep in mind that Heidegger’s critique of technology in the 1950s was articulated in the context of the early Cold War, atomic warfare, and the rise of cybernetics. But, as many have recently argued, in the age of so-called ‘Big Data’, neoliberal rationality has increasingly replaced the epistemology of ‘causality’ with epistemologies of ‘correlation’: the algorithmic calculation of probabilistic relations between clusters of variables (based on information harvested by digital technologies designed for the total surveillance of human life). As Chris Anderson notoriously announced in his 2008 editorial, ‘The End of Theory’, ‘correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all’. He calls this epistemology ‘dimensionally agnostic statistics’ (the amount of data available can no longer be visualized in its totality). This worldview, however, functions as a basic attack on one of the fundamental (and still often repeated) ground-truths of modern science: correlation is not causation. As Anderson puts it: ‘There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough”’. In other words, the stakes of Vardoulakis’s argument must be tested against the rise of this neoliberal elimination of causality from corporate epistemologies that has led to an inversion of the terms of the Heideggerian critique of technology: as it turns out, technology has produced an ideology of pure instrumentality without causation. Today, there are only ends without causes. (shrink)

The contribution focuses on Neo-Confucian texts as collected by Zhu Xi and Lü Zuqian and is a look from the ‘outside’, from the perspective of German theories of Bildung. It aims at demonstrating that among other insights that today’s readers may gather from Neo-Confucian literature, one aspect protrudes from others: that learning can be considered as a virtue—even a meta-virtue—a form of life and mode of self-formation of the person. It does not seem exaggerated, from this perspective, to state that (...) Neo-Confucian philosophy is—to a large extent—a philosophy of learning and self-transformation which offers fruitful irritants for questioning the widespread habits of thinking about skills and their development in today’s strong and problematic discourses and corresponding educational policies. (shrink)

The results of three experiments suggest that pre-existing mood increases the intensity of affectively congruent emotions while dampening the intensity of incongruent emotions independent of attributional knowledge. This result was obtained using a new method for inducing mood states unobtrusively and with minimal or no cognitive concomitants. The results of Experiment 1 revealed that for participants who were exposed to positive feedback a pre-existing positive mood led to stronger feelings of pride in comparison to negative mood. The results of Experiments (...) 2 and 3 suggest that pre-existing mood directly influences the experience of subsequently elicited emotions independent of what one knows about the causes of this feeling. When participants were required to differentiate between the funniness of a cartoon and their subjective humour response, mood influenced only the latter judgement (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, reminding participants of the mood induction resulted in a contrast effect in judging the funniness of a cartoon. However, the pre-existing mood continued to exert an assimilation effect on the overt mirth response. In conclusion, these results suggest that the feeling and knowledge component are partly independent bases of emotional responses. (shrink)

Nothing seems more possible to me than that people some day will come to the definite opinion that there is no copy in the… nervous system which corresponds to a particular thought, or a particular idea, or, memory.WittgensteinIn a recent essay it was emphasized that brain and mind appear to the mind as complementary and reciprocally recursive domains of a hermeneutic circle (Fischer, 1987). An outstanding and not yet recognized feature of this hermeneutic circle is that interpretation within this circle (...) is not rule-governed and hence appears self-organized: individual features of the world (or the brain) become intelligible in terms of the whole context (of the mind)… while the entire context becomes intelligible through individual features (or brain functions). How, or from where then is significance arising? (shrink)

Although neglected by psychology, self-respect has been an integral part of philosophical discussion since Aristotle and continues to be a central issue in contemporary moral philosophy. Within this tradition, self-respect is considered to be based on one's capacity for rationality and leads to behaviors that promote autonomy, such as independence, self-control and tenacity. Self-respect elicits behaviors that one should be treated with respect and requires the development and pursuit of personal standards and life plans that are guided by respect for (...) self and others. In contrast, the psychological concept of self-esteem is grounded in the theories of self-concept. As such, self-esteem is a self-evaluation of competency ratios and opinions of significant others that results in either a positive or negative evaluation of one's worthiness and inclusionary status. The major distinction between the two is that while competency ratios and others' opinions are central to self-esteem, autonomy is central to self-respect. We submit that not only is self-respect important in understanding self-esteem, but that it also uniquely contributes to individual functioning. Research is needed to establish the central properties of self-respect and their effects on individual functioning, developmental factors, and therapeutic approaches. (shrink)

This article addresses the role of science and science advisory bodies in modeling practices for the support of policy-making procedures in the Netherlands in the field of health care. The authors show, based on a detailed investigation of a prestigious interdisciplinary modeling project in which an economic care model was developed for governmental use, that science advisory bodies are entangled with the policy actors they advise in what we call boundary configurations. Boundary configurations are strongly situated interconnections between science advisory (...) institutes and policy institutions that share a specific approach to problem definitions and methods and that are embedded in specific social, discursive, and material elements. Importantly, as the case study shows, such boundary configurations shape the kind of science, and related, the kind of social and political theories about the world, that is effectuated in modeling practices. In this case study, the boundary configuration in which economic experts and policy makers participated contributed to the articulation of health care in terms of a market-based policy program for the health care sector. (shrink)

Philosophers of religion divide neatly into two camps on the problem of evil: those who think it fatal to the concept of a loving God and those who do not. The latter have established a wide array of defensive positions down through the centuries, but none that has proved impregnable to sceptical attack. In his new book Mr Hick wisely abandons these older fortifications and falls back on highly mobile reserves. Not for him the ‘Fall of Man’ thesis, with its (...) unexplained choice to give up finite perfection; nor the Plotinian principle of plenitude, evil being an inevitable petering out of God's goodness; nor the ‘aesthetic’ gambit where the horrors of life constitute mere ‘shadows’ designed to highlight the beauty of creation; nor the ‘cosmic Toryism’, as someone called it, of Leibniz's ‘best of all possible worlds’; nor even, one might say gratefully, the gaseous obscurantism of Karl Barth's ‘das Nichtige’. All of these defences, and others besides, Mr Hick lumps together under what he calls ‘the majority report’ in Christian theodicy: the Augustinian tradition or type. In place of these venerable ramparts Hick elects the more fluid defence afforded, he thinks, by Irenaeus, Eastern Christianity and, in modern times, by Schleiermacher and a few contemporary thinkers. (shrink)

The aim of psychology is to understand the human mind and behavior. In contemporary psychology, the method of choice to accomplish this incredibly complex endeavor is the experiment. This dominance has shaped the whole discipline from the self-concept as an empirical science and its very epistemological and theoretical foundations, via research practice and the scientific discourse to teaching. Experimental psychology is grounded in the scientific method and positivism, and these principles, which are characteristic for modern thinking, are still upheld. Despite (...) this apparently stalwart adherence to modern principles, experimental psychology exhibits a number of aspects which can best be described as facets of postmodern thinking although they are hardly acknowledged as such. Many psychologists take pride in being “real natural scientists” because they conduct experiments, but it is particularly difficult for psychologists to evade certain elements of postmodern thinking in view of the specific nature of their subject matter. Postmodernism as a philosophy emerged in the 20th century as a response to the perceived inadequacy of the modern approach and as a means to understand the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the times. Therefore, postmodernism offers both valuable insights into the very nature of experimental psychology and fruitful ideas on improving experimental practice to better reflect the complexities and ambiguities of human mind and behavior. Analyzing experimental psychology along postmodern lines begins by discussing the implications of transferring the scientific method from fields with rather narrowly defined phenomena—the natural sciences—to a much broader and more heterogeneous class of complex phenomena, namely the human mind and behavior. This ostensibly modern experimental approach is, however, per se riddled with postmodern elements: creating phenomena in an experimental setting, including the hermeneutic processes of generating hypotheses and interpreting results, is no carbon copy of “reality” but rather an active construction which reflects irrevocably the pre-existing ideas of the investigator. These aspects, analyzed by using postmodern concepts like hyperreality and simulacra, did not seep in gradually but have been present since the very inception of experimental psychology, and they are necessarily inherent in its philosophy of science. We illustrate this theoretical analysis with the help of two examples, namely experiments on free will and visual working memory. The postmodern perspective reveals some pitfalls in the practice of experimental psychology. Furthermore, we suggest that accepting the inherently fuzzy nature of theoretical constructs in psychology and thinking more along postmodern lines would actually clarify many theoretical problems in experimental psychology. (shrink)

This study offers a specific interpretation of the Taiping Revolution in China in the mid-nineteenth century. It was not only the largest revolutionary movement in the world at the time, but also one that was inspired by Christianity. Indeed, it marks the moment when the revolutionary religious tradition arrived in China. My account of the revolution stresses the role of the Bible, its radical reinterpretation by the Taiping revolutionaries, and the role it played in their revolutionary acts and reconstruction of (...) economic and social relations. After providing this account, I raise a number of implications for Marxist approaches to religion. These involve the revolutionary religious tradition, first identified by Engels and established by Karl Kautsky, the question of political ambivalence of a religion like Christianity, and the distinction between ontological and temporal transcendence. (shrink)

SummaryJohn Tyndall, Irish-born natural philosopher, completed his PhD at the University of Marburg in 1850 while starting his first substantial period of research into the phenomenon of diamagnetism. This paper provides a detailed analysis and evaluation of his contribution to the understanding of magnetism and of the impact of this work on establishing his own career and reputation; it was instrumental in his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1852 and as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the (...) Royal Institution in 1853. Tyndall's interactions and relationships with Michael Faraday, William Thomson, Julius Plücker and others are explored, alongside his contributions to experimental practice and to emerging theory. Tyndall's approach, challenging Faraday's developing field theory with a model of diamagnetic polarity and the effect of magnetic forces acting in couples, was based on his belief in the importance of underlying molecular structure, an idea which suffused his later work, for example in relation to the study of glaciers and to the interaction of substances with radiant heat. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 9, September 2020, Page 65-67.

The debate on the question of the moral status of human beings and the boundaries of the moral community has long been dominated by the antagonism between personism and speciesism: either certain mental properties or membership of the human species is considered morally crucial. In this article, I argue that both schools of thought are equally implausible in major respects, and that these shortcomings arise from the same reason in both cases: a biological notion of being human. By contrast, I (...) show to what extent being human is morally relevant in a non‐biological sense. I establish the living human form as the essential criterion for belonging to the moral community, and defend it against a number of possible objections. This new morphological approach is capable of capturing essential elements of personism and speciesism without sharing their faults, and of reconstructing widespread moral intuitions. (shrink)

Concrete Causation centers about theories of causation, their interpretation, and their embedding in metaphysical-ontological questions, as well as the application of such theories in the context of science and decision theory. The dissertation is divided into four chapters, that firstly undertake the historical-systematic localization of central problems (chapter 1) to then give a rendition of the concepts and the formalisms underlying David Lewis' and Judea Pearl's theories (chapter 2). After philosophically motivated conceptual deliberations Pearl's mathematical-technical framework is drawn on for (...) an epistemic interpretation and for emphasizing the knowledge-organizing aspect of causality in an extension of the interventionist Bayes net account of causation (chapter 3). Integrating causal and non-causal knowledge in unified structures ultimately leads to an approach towards solving problems of (causal) decision theory and at the same time facilitates the representation of logical-mathematical, synonymical, as well as reductive relationships in efficiently structured, operational nets of belief propagation (chapter 4). (shrink)

The philosophical relationship between mathematics and the natural sciences is the subject of Converging Realities, the latest work by one of the leading thinkers on the subject.

Duncan Pritchard has argued that his basis-relative anti-luck construal of a safety condition on knowing avoids the problem with necessary truths that safety conditions are often thought to have, viz., that beliefs the contents of which are necessarily true are trivially safe. He has further argued that adding an ability condition to truth, belief, and his anti-luck safety conditions yields an adequate account of knowledge. In this paper, we argue that not only does Pritchard’s anti-luck safety condition have a problem (...) with necessary truths, adding an ability condition is of no help. Indeed, the same sort of case that precipitates Pritchard’s introduction of an ability condition shows the inadequacy of his completed anti-luck account of knowledge. Moreover, reconstruing safety as an anti-risk condition as Pritchard has recently done does not fix the problem we’ve identified. We conclude by entertaining a radical suggestion to the effect that the failures of safety-based accounts of modal knowledge are due to failures of doxastic success rather than failures to satisfy an anti-luck (or anti-risk) condition. Accepting this radical suggestion makes available the view that there is, after all, no special problem between safety and necessary truths. (shrink)

In this article we present a conceptual overview of relevant interpretations of what state neutrality may imply; we suggest a distinction between inclusive neutrality and exclusive neutrality. This distinction provides a useful framework for understanding the several positions as presented by the parties in the Lautsi case. We conclude by suggesting a solution of the Lautsi case that might provide a more viable solution.

How is distributive justice possible with respect to immigration if political decisions about entry and membership cannot be grounded in the symmetry of a prior commonality, human or otherwise, that could guarantee reciprocal relations between members and nonmembers? This paper deals with both aspects of this question. Initially, it engages critically with Seyla Benhabib's plea for ‘dialogical universalism,’ showing why the strong discontinuity between political and moral reciprocity precludes understanding distributive justice as the process of mediating between political particularity and (...) moral universality. Subsequently, it suggests that a way out of this conceptual and normative impasse can be found in the fact that boundaries create a double asymmetry. This double asymmetry is constitutive for the ‘dia’ of the political dialogue that separates and joins members and nonmembers. This ‘in between,’ which eludes control by the parties to a dialogue, is the realm of distributive justice. (shrink)

We describe a number of puzzling phenomena and use them as evidence for a hypothesis about why bodily continuity matters for personal identity. The phenomena all belong to a particular kind of symbolisation: each of them illustrates how an entity (object or person) sometimes acquires symbolic significance in virtue of a material link with the symbolised entity. Relics are the most obvious example of what happens here: they are cherished, desired or respected, not because of their intrinsic features, but because (...) of their material link with some significant individual person. Crucial for the hypothesis we wish to defend, is the fact that a human being can in some cases and for some others function as a relic of what she used to be; in these cases a human individual has a specific significance in virtue of a material link (bodily continuity) with her own past. We argue that this phenomenon can be extended and that the importance of bodily continuity for personal identity is constituted by the kind of symbolisation upon which the existence of relics is based.1. (shrink)

Child labor evokes deep emotions and is cause for growing international concern. Most recent global estimates show that 186 million children are engaged in full time economic activity.

We prove that if $A$, $B$ are noncomputable c.e. sets, $A<_{sQ_{1}}B$ and [($B$ is not simple and $A\oplus B\leq _{sQ_{1}}B$) or $B\equiv _{sQ_{1}}B\times \omega $], then there exist infinitely many pairwise $sQ_{1}$-incomparable c.e. sets $\{C_{i}\}_{i\in \omega }$ such that $A<_{sQ_{1}}C_{i}<_{sQ_{1}}B$, for all $i\in \omega $. We also show that there exist infinite collections of $sQ_{1}$-degrees $\{\boldsymbol {a_{i}}\}_{i\in \omega }$ and $\{\boldsymbol {b_{i}}\}_{i\in \omega }$ such that for every $i, j,$ (1) $\boldsymbol {a_{i}}<_{sQ_{1}}\boldsymbol {a_{i+1}}$, $\boldsymbol {b_{j+1}}<_{sQ_{1}}\boldsymbol {b_{j}}$ and $\boldsymbol {a_{i}}<_{sQ_{1}}\boldsymbol {b_{j}}$; (...) (2) every c.e set in $\boldsymbol {a_{i}}$ is a maximal set; and (3) every c.e. set in $\boldsymbol {b_{j}}$ is a non-maximal hyperhypersimple set. We prove that a noncomputable c.e. $sQ$-degree contains either only one or infinitely many c.e. $sQ_{1}$-degrees. The $sQ_{1}$-degrees of c.e. cylinders are dense upper semilattice. (shrink)

This article tries to establish a possible close affinity between Malebranche’s “Research after Truth” and Proust’s one. There are some surprising parallels on the level of the description and the status of the sensations and the dreams. But moreover, we will suggest how some aspects of Malebranche’s metaphysical project resonate in Proust’s vision on art.

[We understand by ‘person’] a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself, as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places….There has been a tendency among philosophers ever since Locke to conflate the problem of the self with the problem of personal identity, and since memory is clearly essential to a sense of one's identity through time, it is easy to suppose that having a concept of self requires memory too.

Borowski ("identity and personal identity," "mind", Volume lxxxv, Number 340, October 1976, Pages 481-502) claims that if x's brain were successfully transplanted into y's body, Our judgment of who the survivor z really is would be relative to our interest in z: for example, If the body y is that of an athlete or film actor, We would say it is y if we are athletic coaches or film directors. This view completely overlooks that acting talents and athletic skills are (...) also stored in the brain. If my brain controlled pele's body, Or laurence olivier's, I could not play football or act well. (shrink)