Theo Todman's Web Page - Notes Pages
Status Reports
Status: Personal Identity (2024 - June)
(Text as at 11/07/2024 23:08:10)
Rationale for this Project
- I am researching the subject of Personal Identity primarily because of its intrinsic interest and importance. But I think when I’ve sorted it out a bit, and have something to say, I’ll want to engage with other philosophers active in this field and re-starting a PhD at Birkbeck or elsewhere might be the only effective way to do this. While a PhD is not an end in itself, and certainly not the ultimate aim of my doing philosophy, it’s still true that a PhD would teach me research techniques, provide focus and direction, and furnish a professional qualification should I want to publish any results in this or any other area of philosophy.
- The best place to get an overview of my current views is here1.
- The jumping-off point for my thesis is here2, though follow the links from the Chapter Abstracts for the real work, and a (currently not very helpful) progress dashboard is here3.
Summary of Progress during April - June 2024
- I spent 281.5 hours in 24Q2 on this Project, or related work (964.25 hours YTD, where for "YTD" - Year to Date - I mean the (academic) year that commenced in October 2023). That's 86.4% of the planned effort (97.3% YTD). Overall, 37% of my Project effort in the Quarter was directed towards this project (making 42.6% YTD) - as against 40.3% planned (42.9% YTD).
- The – then upcoming – King’s College Cambridge 50th Anniversary Reunion on 12th August 2023 put in my head the question ‘what have I done with my life?’. One thing I’ve not done is complete my researches into Personal Identity. Nor will I ever complete a PhD without a radical change of priority. So, I decided at the end of July 2023 effectively to mothball the important or enjoyable distractions – Bridge4, Languages5, Philosophy of Religion6 – and try to focus exclusively on my Thesis, though with increased attention in the short term on my Web Tools project insofar as it is necessary to support my philosophy.
- I’ve carried forward the above bullet from the 23Q3 report as a reminder, because – yet again – while I am indeed focusing more on my Thesis, things haven’t quite gone to plan and I’ve re-instated to some degree these projects. This is – sadly – going on and on.
- As can be seen, I spent around 15% less than my time allowance, and the bulk of the time spent was largely a reflection of getting my Aeon reading under control. I did very little that was directly related to my Thesis.
- My immediate focus needs to be a very detailed analysis of "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology" now that I have at least finished reading the book.
- As previously noted, I got slightly stuck on the analysis of Chapter 3 ("Olson (Eric) - What Are We? Constitution") because I think Olson misunderstands Baker, not that Baker is right, of course.
- Having completed a thorough analysis of "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Materialism with a Human Face", the lessons learnt need to be applied both to my Thesis text and Notes and to Olson’s Chapter 3.
- A major recent diversion – albeit a useful one – has been from a detailed consideration of Teletransportation7 as exemplified in Star Trek. This still needs some tidying-up.
- A couple of major diversions reported last quarter still await resolution:-
- An alert – by my friend Pete – to "Thompson (Jon W.) - Personal Identity and Resurrection: Early Modern Philosophical Perspectives" and to follow-up items.
- Also alerted by my friend Pete, a review ("Ward (Keith) - Review - Goff - Why? The Purpose of the Universe") of "Goff (Philip) - Why? The Purpose of the Universe".
- Another item that popped up – triggered by Aeon – was a reconsideration of ‘Modularity, Connectionism & Innateness'. This has also been added to the list for resolution.
- To control the various links within my Thesis, I’ve created and maintained a PID Note Usage8 Page, though this didn’t get much of a look in this Quarter.
- Progress between reports can be obtained from the relevant section of my Summary Task List9.
- A full list of items worked on in the quarter appears below:-
Thesis (Total Hours = 261.75)
- Thesis - Reading / Writing (Total Hours = 247.75)
- "Abdessamad (Farah) - My elusive pain" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Aeon - Video - Adeus aos Livros" (Read / Write, 1 hour)
- "Aeon - Video - Cracking chirality: The mystery of mirror molecules" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Aeon - Video - Powernapper’s Paradise" (Read / Write, 1 hour)
- Aeon: Alma - The problem of erring animals (Comments; Write, 0.25 hours)
- Aeon: Desmond & Haslam - What is intelligent life? (Comments; Write, 0.5 hours)
- Aeon: Gerits - The route to progress (Comments; Write, 0.25 hours)
- Aeon: Glaser - Me versus myself (Comments; Write, 0.25 hours)
- Aeon: Hedebrant & Herlitz - In more prosperous societies, are men and women more similar? (Comments; Write, 0.25 hours)
- Aeon: Kakkar & Brady - How a ‘dominance’ mindset encourages leaders to put others at risk (Comments; Write, 0.25 hours)
- Aeon: Kelly & Westra - Moral progress is annoying (Comments; Write, 0.5 hours)
- Aeon: Krznaric - The disruption nexus (Comments; Write, 0.25 hours)
- Aeon: Video - Boudica: a Norfolk story (Comments; Write, 0.5 hours)
- Aeon: Video - Corals: On the Brink (Comments; Write, 0.25 hours)
- Aeon: Yilmam - The last great stigma (Comments; Write, 0.25 hours)
- Aeon: Zinn - You have multiple ‘social identities’ – here’s how to manage them (Comments; Write, 0.25 hours)
→ See "Hains (Brigid) & Hains (Paul) - Aeon: 2019+" (3.75 hours)
- "Alkema (Anne) & Boks (Marco) - The shadows cast by childhood abuse and neglect are not the same" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- "Anders (Charlie Jane) & Krell (Jason) - 10 Robot Deaths That Were More Moving Than Almost Any Human's" (Read / Write, 0.75 hours)
- "Andersen (Timothy) - All possible worlds" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Andersen (Timothy) - Quantum Wittgenstein" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Andrews (Kristin) & Birch (Jonathan) - What has feelings?" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Avigad (Jeremy) - Principia" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Baggini (Julian) - Goodbye Pixel" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Baggott (Jim) - Quantum dialectics" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "BBC & Pressly (Linda) - Dying together: Why a happily married couple decided to stop living" (Read / Write, 0.75 hours)
- "BBC, Bloom (Ben) - Black, white and shades of grey – what’s behind sprint’s race divide?" (Write, 0.75 hours)
- "BBC, Ghosh (Pallab) - Are animals conscious? How new research is changing minds" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Bhagabati (Dikshit Sarma) - India and indigeneity" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Card (David) & Krueger (Alan B.) - Minimum Wages and Employment" (Read / Write, 1 hour)
- "Cassam (Quassim) - Bad thinkers" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Cassen (Flora) - Hidden in translation – Jewish resistance to Spanish empire" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Castro (Jason) - How to make a map of smell" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Cheek (Nathan) - Many of us have the wrong idea about poverty and toughness" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Clark (Andy) - Microcognition – Philosophy Cognitive Science & Parallel Distributed Processing" (Write, 2 hours)
- "Corcoran (Kevin) - Persons and Bodies" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Coveney (Peter) & Highfield (Roger) - The Arrow of Time - A Voyage Through Science to Solve Time's Greatest Mystery" (Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Dalal (Mihir) - Inventing Hindu supremacy" (Read / Write, 2.5 hours)
- "Davis (Erik) - Acid media" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "De Cruz (Helen) - The necessity of awe" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- "De Leeuw (Manya) & De Leeuw (Eric) - Read Better, Read Faster: The Essential Guide to Greater Reading Efficiency" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "del Campo (Diego Ramirez Martin) - Eulogy for silence" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Desmond (Hugh) - Dominion" (Read / Write, 2.25 hours)
- "Dolezal (Stanislav) - Hatred and Awe. The Ambivalent Attitude of the Germans towards the Roman Empire in the First Century CE" (Read / Write, 2.5 hours)
- "Dworkin (Ronald W.) - Last hours of an organ donor" (Read / Write, 2.25 hours)
- "Egid (Jonathan) - Forging philosophy" (Read / Write, 3.25 hours)
- "Elman (Jeffrey), Bates (Elizabeth), Johnson (Mark), Karmiloff-Smith (Annette), Parisi (Domenico) & Plunkett (Kim) - Rethinking Innateness" (Write, 2.25 hours)
- "Farris (Ted) - A man beyond categories" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Fisher (Alec) - The Logic of Real Arguments" (Write, 1 hour)
- "Fisher (Mark) - What would Thucydides say?" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Fodor (Jerry) - Review of Jeff Ellman et al., Rethinking Innateness" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- "Fodor (Jerry) - Review of Stephen Mithen's The Prehistory of the Mind" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- "Fodor (Jerry) - There and Back Again: A Review of Annette Karmiloff-Smith's Beyond Modularity" (Read / Write, 4.75 hours)
- "Fodor (Jerry) & Pylyshyn (Zenon) - Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis" (Write, 0.75 hours)
- "Forbes (Graeme A.) - How to think about time" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Frank (Adam) - Alien life is no joke" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Frankish (Keith) - The mind isn’t locked in the brain but extends far beyond it" (Read / Write, 2.25 hours)
- "Frick (Walter) - Economics 101" (Read / Write, 2.75 hours)
- "FT, Dennett (Daniel) & Warburton (Nigel) - Five Favorite Books" (Read / Write, 7.25 hours)
- "Gasser (Georg) & Quitterer (Josef) - The Power of God and Miracles" (Read / Write, 0.5 hours)
- "Gleick (James) - Chaos - Making a New Science" (Read / Write, 4.5 hours)
- "Gleick (James) - Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" (Write, 0.75 hours)
- "Gopnik (Adam) - The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Graves (Shawn), Hereth (Blake) & John (Tyler M.) - In Defense of Animal Universalism" (Read / Write, 5.25 hours)
- "Haerle (Pablo Hubacher) - If thinking is rational, what makes overthinking irrational?" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- "Hains (Brigid) & Hains (Paul) - Aeon: 2019+" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Ham (Paul) - Censoring offensive language threatens our freedom to think" (Read / Write, 2.75 hours)
- "Harari (Yuval Noah) - Disruption, Democracy & the Global Order" (Write, 1 hour)
- "Heyam (Kit) - Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender" (Write, 2 hours)
- "Heyam (Kit) - The Reputation of Edward II, 1305-1697: A Literary Transformation of History" (Read / Write, 3.25 hours)
- "Hoeg (Mette Leonard) - Aphantasia can be a gift to philosophers and critics like me" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Hudson (Hud) & Wasserman (Ryan) - Van Inwagen on Time Travel and Changing the Past" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Hughes (Christopher) & Adams (Robert Merrihew) - Miracles, Laws of Nature and Causation" (Write, 1 hour)
- "Hume (David) - Of Miracles" (Read / Write, 5.25 hours)
- "Huston (Matt) - How babies’ and children’s temperament varies around the world" (Read / Write, 1.25 hours)
- "Jaarsma (Ada) - Choose your own birth" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - Beyond Modularity: Preface" (Write, 2.5 hours)
- "King (Rachael Scarborough) & Rudy (Seth) - The ends of knowledge" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Kipnis (Andrew) - The haunting of modern China" (Read / Write, 2.25 hours)
- "Lähde (Ville) - Decoupling" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Lähde (Ville) - The polycrisis" (Read / Write, 2.5 hours)
- "Lenharo (Mariana) - Do insects have an inner life? Animal consciousness needs a rethink" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Lewis (Berit) - Rather than fearing getting old, here’s how to embrace it" (Read / Write, 1.25 hours)
- "Lewis (David), Le Catt (Bruce) - Censored Vision" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Loughlin (Felicity) - Conscientious unbelievers" (Read / Write, 1.25 hours)
- "Love (Shayla) - How to embrace being a lark or an owl" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Love (Shayla) - Is it better to live in ‘clock time’ or ‘event time’?" (Read / Write, 1.25 hours)
- "Love (Shayla) - What is it like to remember all the faces you’ve ever seen?" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Love (Shayla) - You can want things you don’t like and like things you don’t want" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- "Luckhurst (Roger) - Tomorrow people" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Lyons (Siobhan) - Death and the Machine: Intersections of Mortality and Robotics" (Read / Write, 3.75 hours)
- "Lyons (Siobhan) - Whither Philosophy?" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Malesic (Jonathan) - Our big problem is not misinformation; it’s knowingness" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Marshall (Richard) & LePore (Ernie) - Ernie Lepore: Meaning, Truth, Language, Reality" (Read, 0.25 hours)
- "Mavrodes (George I.) - The Life Everlasting and the Bodily Criterion of Identity" (Read / Write, 1.25 hours)
- "McGivney (Annette) - ‘Bees are sentient’: inside the stunning brains of nature’s hardest workers" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- "Mersini-Houghton (Laura) & Kuhn (Robert Lawrence) - Video - Laura Mersini-Houghton - A quantum multiverse" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- "Mestyan (Adam) - The Arab Kingdom" (Read / Write, 2.75 hours)
- "Metzinger (Thomas) - Are you sleepwalking now?" (Read / Write, 2.25 hours)
- "Mishra (Anandi) - The divided self: does where I live make me who I am?" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- "Mithen (Steven) - The Prehistory of the Mind" (Write, 0.75 hours)
- "Mithen (Steven) - This is what a Neanderthal conversation would have sounded like" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Mooney (Justin) - The possibility of resurrection by reassembly" (Read / Write, 6.25 hours)
- "Nguyen (C. Thi) - Escape the echo chamber" (Read / Write, 2.5 hours)
- "O'Donnell (Patrick S.) - Death & Dying: A Select bibliography" (Write, 1 hour)
- "O'Donnell (Patrick S.) - Human Nature, Personhood, and Personal Identity: A Select bibliography" (Write, 0.75 hours)
- "O'Dwyer (Shaun) - Chastising little brother" (Read / Write, 2.25 hours)
- "Petersen (Rachael) - Do plants have minds?" (Read / Write, 2.75 hours)
- "Pinsker (Shachar) - On Jewish revenge" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Plunkett (Kim) & Elman (Jeffrey) - Exercises in Rethinking Innateness - A Handbook for Connectionist Simulations" (Write, 1.5 hours)
- "Polk (Emily) - Peregrinations of grief" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Price (Huw) - Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: Chapter 10 (Overview)" (Read / Write, 5.25 hours)
- "Price (Huw) - Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: Chapters 1 - 9" (Write, 1 hour)
- "Price (Huw) - Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: Preface" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- "Prigogine (Ilya) - The Arrow of Time - Foreword" (Read / Write, 0.75 hours)
- "Pylyshyn (Zenon) - Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation of Cognitive Science" (Read / Write, 5 hours)
- "Quinn (Philip L.) - Personal Identity, Bodily Continuity and Resurrection" (Read / Write, 0.75 hours)
- "Quinn (Philip L.) - Some Problems about Resurrection" (Read / Write, 1 hour)
- "Rank (Mark R.) - What we gain by recognising the role of chance in life" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- RI: Chaos theory and geometry: can they predict our world? – with Tim Palmer (Read, 0.25 hours)
→ See "PC Pro - Computing in the Real World" (0.25 hours)
- "Robson (David) - ‘Like a film in my mind’: hyperphantasia and the quest to understand vivid imaginations" (Read / Write, 2.25 hours)
- "Rowlands (Mark) - Brotherwolf" (Read, 1.25 hours)
- "Rowlands (Mark) - Connectionism and the Language of Thought" (Read / Write, 6 hours)
- "Rowlands (Mark) - The Clearing" (Read / Write, 1 hour)
- "Saul (Jennifer) - Beyond dogwhistles – racists have a new rhetorical trick" (Read / Write, 3.25 hours)
- "Schutz (Elna) - You are your body: here’s how to feel more at home in it" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- "Schwenkler (John) - What does it take for someone to become a ‘different person’?" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Shermer (Michael), Gould (Stephen Jay) - Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time" (Write, 3.75 hours)
- "Simon (Ed) - If animals are persons, should they bear criminal responsibility?" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Singer (Peter) - The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty" (Read, 2.75 hours)
- "Todman (Theo) - Thesis - Time" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Todman (Theo) - Thesis - Time Travel" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Touretzky (David S.) & Hinton (Geoffrey E.) - A Distributed Connectionist Production System" (Write, 0.75 hours)
- "Uzan (Elad) - Moral mathematics" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Van Aken (Erik) - Chaos and cause" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "van der Lugt (Mara) - Look on the dark side" (Read / Write, 3.5 hours)
- "Van Inwagen (Peter) - The Possibility of Resurrection" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Vazard (Juliette) - Perplexed? Embrace it! Confusion is a symptom of learning" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Velasco (Pablo Fernandez) & Loev (Slawa) - How ‘feelings about thinking’ help us navigate our world" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Vonnegut (Kurt) - Slaughterhouse 5, or The Children's Crusade - A Duty-dance with Death" (Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Wallingford (John) - Building embryos" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Wasserman (Ryan) - The Paradoxes of Time Travel" (Write, 2 hours)
- "Wasserman (Ryan) - Theories of Persistence" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Wasserman (Ryan) - Vagueness and the Laws of Metaphysics" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- "Wheatley (Chris) - There is nothing new about gender fluidity and nonconformity" (Read / Write, 1.75 hours)
- "Wirzbicki (Peter) - Ralph Waldo Emerson would really hate your Twitter feed" (Read / Write, 2.25 hours)
- "Wisher (Izzy) - Why make art in the dark?" (Read / Write, 1.25 hours)
- "Woods (Evan Thomas) - The Problems of the Many" (Read, 0.25 hours)
- "Woodward (Sam) - Terrifying vistas of reality" (Read / Write, 2.25 hours)
- "Yaden (David) - William James was right about our strange inner experiences" (Read / Write, 1.5 hours)
- "Yang (Eric T.) & Davis (Stephen T.) - Composition and the Will of God: Reconsidering Resurrection by Reassembly, OUP, 2017" (Read / Write, 2 hours)
- "Yu (Lili), Liao (Sixin), Kruger (Jan-Louis) & Reichle (Erik D.) - What does switching from paper to screens mean for how we read?" (Read / Write, 3 hours)
- "Zeman (Adam) - When the mind is dark, making art is a thrilling way to see" (Write, 0.25 hours)
- Thesis - Research Repositioning (Total Hours = 14)
Thesis Background (Total Hours = 8.75)
- Thesis Background - Reading / Writing (Total Hours = 3)
- Thesis Background - Status
Plans for the Near Future – Top Priority Tasks
- As far as effort is concerned, I’ve had to reduce the plan by 4 hours to 21 hours / week10 rather than increasing it as I’d like. This is on account of two weeks’ holidays in the coming quarter.
- One thing that repeatedly occurs to me is that I’ve got into the habit of collecting stuff – masses of it – and loosely engaging with it, but not doing so seriously enough because of a scatter-gun approach.
- Also, I very seldom write anything of my own without close reference to what others have written. In a sense this is a good thing but is destructive of creativity.
- So, I intend to spend at least an hour each and every day writing my own stuff. This isn’t enough, but we’ll see how things go. Sadly, it hasn’t gone anywhere much in the last academic year.
- So, I have set myself a challenge: write a full-length paper on what I consider to be the critical issue in the philosophy of personal identity: the difference between forward and backward psychological continuity11. Sadly, this hasn’t got far yet. I also want to write a full-length paper on the persistence of Androids12, which might be easier to accomplish.
- I have a skeleton thesis13 in place. This now needs to be filled out.
- I need to continually review the Note describing my Current Beliefs14 on the topic of Personal Identity, and ensure the associated Notes have some text. Maybe expand it into a proper paper, let Sophie have a look at it and consider submission to Aeon.
- In the coming quarter I hope to
- Ensure that all recently acquired Books and pdfs are logged to my database and appear in the relevant Thesis Chapters, as appropriate.
- Create and correct the Notes in the list below.
- Most of what I’m working on appears in the reading lists for the Thesis chapters. Items below15 are either those that don’t, or which require particular focus:-
- Detailed Task List
- Continue with my Thesis16; in particular
- Spend at least an hour a day writing something original; namely, essays on:-
→ The difference between Forward and Backward Psychological Continuity17.
→ The persistence of Androids18.
- Continue filling out those sections of my Thesis that I can write something on without further research, using books / papers already analysed.
- Continually review the Note describing my Current Beliefs19 on the topic of Personal Identity.
- Regularly review and update of the Notes I’ve created on Personal Identity, focusing on those directly referenced by my Current Beliefs20.
- Adjust, Create and Complete new PID Notes as seems necessary:-
- Aristotle: Set up
- Connectionism: Set up
- Epistemology / Knowledge: Set up
- Innateness: Set up
- Language of Thought21: Convert to Language (with LOT as a subsection)
- Metaphilosophy22: Complete draft
- Modularity (of Mind): Set up
- Names: Set up
- Panpsychism: Set up (or include under another Note: Mind or Consciousness. See below)
- Paradox: Set up
- Rationality: Set up
- Thought23: Complete draft
- Truth: Set up
- Make progress on specific Chapters of my Thesis, using the tasks outlined in my Thesis Dashboard24, using the materials listed25 in the Chapters and underlying Notes.
- Ensure the following foundational Books26 required for my Thesis are fully annotated27. In particular:-
- "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View",
- "Olson (Eric) - The Human Animal - Personal Identity Without Psychology", and
- "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology".
- Read / review the following fall-out items from my review of "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Materialism with a Human Face":-
- "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Why Constitution is Not Identity"
- "Burke (Michael) - Copper Statues and Pieces of Copper: A Challenge to the Standard Account"
- "Burke (Michael) - Persons and Bodies: How to Avoid the New Dualism"
- "Forsey (Jane) - Humans and Dumb Animals"
- "Gibbard (Allan) - Contingent Identity"
- "Johnston (Mark) - Constitution is Not Identity"
- "Noonan (Harold) - Constitution Is Identity"
- "Olson (Eric) - Reply to Lynne Rudder Baker"
- "Phillips (Patrick) - Talking to the Animals"
- "Snowdon (Paul) - Persons, Animals, and Ourselves"
- "Wells (J'aime) - Language-Using Apes"
- Draw up a further SHORT list of books that MUST be studied in great detail. I'll add them in as they arise in the analysis of the above books.
- "Hawley (Katherine) - How Things Persist",
- "Heller (Mark) - The Ontology of Physical Objects: Four-Dimensional Hunks of Matter",
- "Hoffman (Joshua) & Rosenkrantz (Gary) - Substance: Its Nature and Existence",
- "Hudson (Hud) - A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human Person",
- "Mellor (D.H.) - Real Time II",
- "Noonan (Harold) - Personal Identity",
- "Van Inwagen (Peter) - Material Beings",
- "Sider (Ted) - Four-dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time",
- "Wiggins (David) - Sameness and Substance Renewed", and
- "Wilson (Jack) - Biological Individuality - The identity and Persistence of Living Entities"
- Read and comment on28 the following remaining PhD Theses relevant to my own Thesis:-
- "Baggini (Julian) - Psychological Reductionism About Persons: A Critical Development",
- "Eddebo (Johan) - Death and the Self: A Metaphysical Investigation of the Rationality of Afterlife Beliefs in the Contemporary Intellectual Climate",
- "Ferner (Adam) - Metaphysics and biology: a critique of David Wiggins’ account of personal identity",
- "Gendler (Tamar Szabo) - Imaginary Exceptions: On the Powers and Limits of Thought Experiment",
- "Keles (Serap) - Personal identity and persistence over time : the hybrid view with regard to hylomorphism",
- "Kotak (Aakash) - The Hybrid Theory of Personal Identity" (MPhil Thesis)
- "Lechthaler (Manuel) - Composition and Identities",
- "Lybaert (Fauve) - Personal Identity and the Formal Self",
- "Paez (Eze) - Abortion: What We Ought to Believe - An Ontological and Normative Analysis",
- "Parsons (Josh) - Theories of Persistence",
- "Rau (Philipp) - The Author, Not the Tale: Memory, Narrative, and the Self",
- "Skow (Bradford) - Once Upon a Spacetime",
- "Southgate (Susan Jane) - Personal Identity: The Simple View",
- "Trakas (Marina) - Personal Memories", and
- "Woods (Evan Thomas) - The Problems of the Many".
- Apply the issues raised by recently-read PhD Theses relevant to my own Thesis to my various Notes:-
- "Atkinson (Thomas) - Human organisms and the survival of death: a systematic evaluation of the possibility of life after death given animalism", see also the Section on Resurrection below
- "Hodson (Sommer) - A Hybrid View of Personal Identity",
- Follow up on Keith Augustine's comments on my review of "Hershenov (David) - Review of Nancey Murphy's 'Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?'".
- Follow up on Wayne Stewart's comments on my Note on Closest Continuers29, including reading and reviewing the following:-
- "Clark (Tom) - Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity"
- "Clark (Tom) - A Notable Theoretical Convergence",
- "Epstein (Dmitry) - What if We’re Still Here? A Selfish Reason to Care for Future Generations",
- "Stewart (Wayne) - Metaphysics by Default",
- "Stewart (Wayne) - Metaphysics by Default - Chapter 09: Existential Passage",
- "Stewart (Wayne) - Uzgalis: Accidentally Opening a Transmigration Window by Nixing the Proper Continuer",
- "Robert (David) - The Existential Passage Hypothesis",
- "Uzgalis (William) - Review - Dainton - The Phenomenal Self",
- Teletransportation30 (Update Note using the following):-
- "Science Unbound - Teleporters: The Death Machines You Don't Want": Complete reading / reviewing relevant passages in these follow-up items
- "Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek"
- "Gribbin (John) - Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality"
- "Kaku (Michio) - Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel"
- "Krauss (Lawrence M.) - The Physics of Star Trek"
- "Penrose (Roger) - The Emperor's New Mind"
- "YouTube - Video - The Trouble with Transporters"
- Resurrection31
- "Atkinson (Thomas) - Human organisms and the survival of death: a systematic evaluation of the possibility of life after death given animalism", a PhD Thesis noted above
- "Ayers (Michael R.) - Locke's Theory of Personal Identity",
- "Ayers (Michael R.) - Personal Identity Before the Essay",
- "Gasser (Georg), Ed. - Personal Identity and Resurrection: How Do We Survive Our Death?",
- "Graves (Shawn), Hereth (Blake) & John (Tyler M.) - In Defense of Animal Universalism",
- "O'Connor (Timothy) & Jacobs (Jonathan D.) - Emergent individuals and the resurrection",
- "Locke (John) - Of Identity and Diversity",
- "Loose (Jonathan) - Constitution and the Falling Elevator: The Continuing Incompatibility of Materialism and Resurrection Belief",
- "Loose (Jonathan) - Materialism Most Miserable The Prospects for Dualist and Physicalist Accounts of Resurrection",
- "Mavrodes (George I.) - The Life Everlasting and the Bodily Criterion of Identity",
- "Mooney (Justin) - The possibility of resurrection by reassembly",
- "Olson (Eric) - Immanent Causation and Life After Death",
- "Olson (Eric) - Life After Death and the Devastation of the Grave",
- "Quinn (Philip L.) - Personal Identity, Bodily Continuity and Resurrection",
- "Quinn (Philip L.) - Some Problems about Resurrection",
- "Thompson (Jon W.) - Individuation, Identity, and Resurrection in Thomas Jackson and John Locke",
- "Thompson (Jon W.) - Personal Identity and Resurrection: Early Modern Philosophical Perspectives",
- "Van Inwagen (Peter) - The Possibility of Resurrection",
- "Zimmerman (Dean) - The Compatibility of Materialism and Survival: The “Falling Elevator” Model",
- "Zimmerman (Dean) - Bodily Resurrection: The Falling Elevator Model Revisited"
- Complete analysing the following papers32:-
- "FT, Baggini (Julian), Warburton (Nigel) - Five Books - The Best Books on How To Think (Like a Philosopher)", **New**
- "FT, ChatGPT - Five Books - The Best Books on Artificial Intelligence", **New**
- "Cofnas (Nathan) - Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry",
- "Corabi (Joseph) & Schneider (Susan) - The Metaphysics of Uploading",
- "Frary (Mark) - Beyond Repair",
- "Galton (Francis) - Visualised Numerals",
- "Giusti (Elena) & Derbew (Sarah) - Decolonizing Blackness, alongside the Classics Curriculum: A conversation with Dr Sarah Derbew",
- "Gradesaver - The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie: Study Guide - Introduction", Etc.
- "Hume (David) - Treatise I.IV.VI: Of Personal Identity",
- "Kobie (Nicole) - Neuralink: an old idea that could be the future of medicine",
- "Korhonen (Anna), Woodward (Sarah) - This idea must die: 'AI will outsmart the human race'",
- "Middleton (Anna), Welford (Megan) - The Ethics of Genomics"
- "Moreno Figueroa (Monica), Jolin (Lucy) - A world without oppression to you",
- "Mulhall (Stephen) - Non-Identity Crisis", **New**
- "Olson (Eric) - The Central Dogma Of Transhumanism",
- "Paris (J.J.) & Elias-Jones (A.C.) - Do we murder Mary to save Jodie?",
- "Peckham (Jeremy) - AI, humanity and Christian ministry",
- "Putnam (Hilary) - Brains in a Vat",
- "Stenger (Victor J.), Lindsay (James A.) & Boghossian (Paul) - Physicists Are Philosophers, Too", **New**
- "Van Inwagen (Peter) - Materialism and the Psychological-continuity Account of Personal Identity",
- "Walker (Robert) - Mary And Jodie – The Case Of The Conjoined Twins",
- "Watkin (Christopher) - Christianity and critical race theory",
- "Wikipedia - Large language model", and
- "Zangwill (Nick) - Our Moral Duty to Eat Meat"
- Consciousness33
- Dismantle the above report
- Transfer historic Actuals to Thesis
- Transfer text to:-
→ This Status Report,
→ My Note on Consciousness34.
- Aeon35: Read & annotate papers as they arise, especially ...
- "Chittka (Lars) & Wilson (Catherine) - Bee-brained": Write-up
- "Frankish (Keith) - The Consciousness Illusion": Write-up
- "Frohlich (Joel) - Frames of consciousness": Read & write-up
- "Parks (Tim) & Manzotti (Riccardo) - You are the world": Read & write-up
- "Pigliucci (Massimo) - Consciousness is real": Read & write-up
- "Seth (Anil Kumar) - The real problem": Read & write-up
- "Seth (Anil Kumar) - How we build perception from the inside out": Write-up
- Panpsychism:-
- Set up Note on Panpsychism (as above)
- "BBC, Bragg (Melvyn) - In Our Time - Panpsychism": Review / revise.
- "Goff (Philip) - A Change of Heart on Fine-Tuning": Re-read & comment
- "Goff (Philip) - Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness": Book. Read.
- "Goff (Philip) - Is the Universe a conscious mind?": Re-read & comment
- "Goff (Philip) - Panpsychism is crazy, but it’s also most probably true": Re-read & comment
- "Goff (Philip) - Purposeful universe": Re-read & comment
- "Goff (Philip) - Why? The Purpose of the Universe": Book. Read.
- "JCS - Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 13, Issue 10-11 (2006)": Book. Read.
- Modularity, Connectionism & Innateness: update Note36 using the following:-
- "Clark (Andy) - Microcognition – Philosophy Cognitive Science & Parallel Distributed Processing",
- "Fodor (Jerry) - There and Back Again: A Review of Annette Karmiloff-Smith's Beyond Modularity",
- "Fodor (Jerry) & Pylyshyn (Zenon) - Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis",
- "Elman (Jeffrey), Bates (Elizabeth), Johnson (Mark), Karmiloff-Smith (Annette), Parisi (Domenico) & Plunkett (Kim) - Rethinking Innateness",
- "Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - Beyond Modularity",
- "Plunkett (Kim) & Elman (Jeffrey) - Exercises in Rethinking Innateness - A Handbook for Connectionist Simulations",
- "Pylyshyn (Zenon) - Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation of Cognitive Science",
- "Rowlands (Mark) - Connectionism and the Language of Thought",
- Action the following Books and Papers:-
- "Bonhomme (Vincent), Etc. - General Anesthesia: A Probe to Explore Consciousness": Read & write-up
- "Crane (Tim) - Elements of Mind - An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind": Re-read and review notes.
- "Dehaene (Stanislas) - Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts": Read.
- "Dennett (Daniel) - Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness": Read.
- "Donald (Merlin) - A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness": Read.
- "Eliot (Lise) - What's Going On in There?: How the Brain And Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life": Read.
- "Kammerer (Francois) - The Hardest Aspect of the Illusion Problem - and How to Solve it": Read.
- "Metzinger (Thomas), Ed. - Conscious Experience": Burst out Papers and add Metzinger's Abstracts
- "Seth (Anil Kumar) - Being You: A New Science of Consciousness": Read.
- "Shapiro (Lawrence) - The Mind Incarnate": Read.
- "Strawson (Galen) - The Consciousness Deniers": Read & write-up
- "Tegmark (Max) - Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence": Write up Chapter 8: Consciousness
- Ensure the annotations from recently-read Papers are added to the relevant Notes:-
- "Ayers (Michael R.) - Locke on Living Things"
- "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Materialism with a Human Face"
- "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Review of 'What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology' by Eric T. Olson"
- As background tasks:-
- Ensure all items in:-
- "Various - Papers on Desktop", and
- "Various - Papers in Desk Drawer"
are either addressed or re-filed.
- Maintain "Various - Papers & Books Yet To Be Logged", and log papers therein if they become important.
- Convert old PDFs to Notes:-
- Review the two reports:-
- PDF-précis,
- PDF-essays37.
- Determine how the first is produced, and why the pdfs aren't highlighted, and compare with Write-ups Notes Jump Table
- Convert outstanding Essays & Précises.
- Complete cataloguing the books downloaded from Springer,
- Continue / complete reading / annotating various books38 that have landed in my in-tray:-
- "Barash (David P.) - Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are",
- "Blatti (Stephan) & Snowdon (Paul), Eds. - Animalism: New Essays on Persons, Animals, and Identity",
- "Bostrom (Nick) - Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies",
- "Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death",
- "Clark (Andy) - The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality",
- "Dennett (Daniel) - Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking",
- "Edmonds (David) - Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong",
- "Erber (Joan T.) & Szuchman (Lenore T.) - Great Myths of Aging",
- "Green (Joel B.) - Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible",
- "Heyam (Kit) - Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender",
- "Hofstadter (Douglas) & Dennett (Daniel), Eds. - The Mind's I - Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul",
- "Kagan (Shelly) - How to Count Animals, more or less",
- "Korsgaard (Christine) - Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals",
- "Loke (Andrew Ter Ern) - The Origin of Humanity and Evolution: Science and Scripture in Conversation",
- "Levitin (Daniel) - The Changing Mind: A Neuroscientist's Guide to Ageing Well",
- "Lyons (Siobhan) - Death and the Machine: Intersections of Mortality and Robotics",
- "Martin (L. Michael) & Augustine (Keith) - The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death",
- "Miller (Kristie) - Issues in Theoretical Diversity: Persistence, Composition, and Time",
- "Peckham (Jeremy) - Masters or Slaves?: AI And The Future Of Humanity",
- "Price (Huw) - Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time",
- "Ricard (Matthieu) - A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion",
- "Rowlands (Mark) - The Philosopher and the Wolf",
- "Schneider (Susan) - Artificial You",
- "Shermer (Michael), Gould (Stephen Jay) - Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time",
- "Seung (Sebastian) - Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are",
- "Singer (Peter) - The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty",
- "Vonnegut (Kurt) - Slaughterhouse 5, or The Children's Crusade - A Duty-dance with Death",
- "Walker (Matthew P.) - Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams",
- "Wasserman (Ryan) - The Paradoxes of Time Travel", and
- "Wyatt (John) - Matters of Life and Death".
- Continue reading and reviewing papers issued by Aeon39 (and the occasional spin-off). In particular, complete write-ups40 for the following 107 items: Follow this Link41.
- Keep up with the Journals via JSTOR & Cambridge Core.
- Update my Journals Note42: Review the journals I have access to; more are available as a Cambridge Alumnus.
- Keep up with the philosophical world by regular reviews of "Interaction - Philos-List", but only seriously pursue items relevant to my research.
In-Page Footnotes:
Footnote 10:
- 25 hours / week – while still ludicrously inadequate for what I want to achieve – is approximately what would be expected of a part-time research student. So, planning to exceed this is ‘a good thing’ provided I use the time wisely and efficiently.
Footnote 15:
- This list is absurdly long, and cannot represent what I’m really working on. It’s really an aide memoir.
Footnote 25:
- I used to itemise in this Note an ever-growing list of items accummulated over time, broken down by Chapter and Note.
- However, now both Chapters and Notes are getting into shape, there is no need to list these items again here, so they have been cut after checking they are covered in their place elsewhere.
Footnote 26:
- This list could get very long, so restrict it to 3 books!
- I'll replace these with new ones when completed.
Footnote 27:
- This is extremely time-consuming, and will not be possible for all books and papers of interest.
Footnote 28:
- There are rather a lot of these, so some will have to be skimmed.
- There were a few more on less central topics.
- I hope to whittle these down as time goes by!
Footnote 32:
- This list used to get inordinately long and has been culled.
- Ensure this doesn't happen again!
Footnote 38:
- This list is getting ludicrously long, and either needs addressing or pruning!
Footnote 40:
- I've managed to reduce the backlog of 'Priority 1' items on my Aeon page to the required 10 items.
- To achieve this in an acceptable timeframe, as well as restricting the new additions, I've been either downgrading the priorities or reading the papers on my Kindle and then adding brief comments and logging them to my database.
- Consequently, most of them then get added to this list for more detailed investigation.
- I'll now - hopefully - start whittling down this list of 107 items, but there's a risk that it'll continue to grow.
- To help with the 'whittling' I've added both the date the item was added to this list and its current status, which is to progress down the following list:-
→ 1. Read, or ...
→ 2. Re-read
→ 3. Draft 'Paper' Notes
→ 4. Read Aeon Comments
→ 5. Update 'Paper' Notes
→ 6. Apply to PID Notes
- Above '2. Re-read' is a little directionless. It usually means 'Re-read with the intention of performing one or more of actions 3, 5 and 6.'
Table of the Previous 12 Versions of this Note: (of 92)
| Note last updated |
Reference for this Topic |
Parent Topic |
| 11/07/2024 23:08:10 |
518 (Status: Personal Identity (2024 - June)) |
Status: Summary (2024 - June) |
Summary of Notes Referenced by This Note
To access information, click on one of the links in the table above.
Summary of Notes Citing This Note
To access information, click on one of the links in the table above.
Authors, Books & Papers Citing this Note
| Author |
Title |
Medium |
Extra Links |
Read? |
| Chapman (Colin) |
The Israel-Hamas war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict |
Paper  |
|
Yes |
| Todman (Theo) |
Thesis - The Form of the Argument |
Paper  |
|
Yes |
Text Colour Conventions
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2024