According to dualist survivalism, at death our bodies perish but we continue to exist with nothing but a soul (until, Christians believe, the resurrection of the dead, when we regain our bodies).
A lot of the arguments against dualist survivalism focus on how we could exist as mere souls. First, such existence seems to violate weak supplementation: my souls is proper part of me, but if the body perished, my soul would be my only part—and yet it would still be a proper part (since identity is necessary). Second, it seems to be an essential property of animals that they are embodied, an essential property of humans that they are animals, and an essential property of us that we are humans.
There are answers to these kinds of worries in the literature, but I want to note that things become much simpler for the dualist survivalist if she accepts a four-dimensionalism that says that we are four-dimensional beings (this won't be endurantist, but it might not be perdurantist either).
First, there will be a time t after my death (and before the resurrection) such that the only proper part of mine that is located at t is my soul. However, the soul won’t be my only part. My arms, legs and brain are eternally my parts. It’s just that they aren’t located at t, as the only proper part of me that is located at t is my soul. There is no violation of weak supplementation. (We still get a violation of weak supplementation for the derived relation of parthood-at-t, where x is a part-at-t of y provided that x is a part of y and both x and y exist at t. But why think there is weak supplementation for parthood-at-t? We certainly wouldn’t expect weak supplementation to hold for parthood-at-z, where z is a spatial location and x is a part-at-z of y provided that x is a part of y and both x and y are located at z.)
Second, it need not follow from its being an essential property of animals that they are embodied that they have bodies at every time at which they exist. Compare: It may be an essential property of a cell that it is nucleated. But the cell is bigger spatially than the nucleus, so it had better not follow that the nucleus exists at every spatial location at which the cell does. So why think that the body needs to exist at every temporal location at which the animal does? Why can’t the animal be bigger temporally than its body?
Of course, those given to three-dimensional thinking will say that I am missing crucial differences between space and time.
24 comments:
If God is capable of destroying body and soul (which Jesus seemed to indicate at Matt. 10:28), then I wonder how your 4-d approach would work. He'd have to make us cease to exist at all points throughout history in which we existed. But then, it wouldn't be true that we sinned at t=x....
When we destroy something, we make it be the case that it doesn't exist at future temporal locations. We don't make it be the case that it doesn't exist simpliciter.
But, if we are making use of the "continued existence" of the past parts of a person in a thought experiment like yours, then shouldn't we also think that destruction of a soul-body would involve removing ALL parts of it?
For that matter, God's ability to destroy ANYTHING just becomes His ability to decide that its 4th dimensional extension stops at a particular point. The thing exists just as much as anything does, it is just shaped differently.....
"But why think there is weak supplementation for parthood-at-t?"
Don't we have all the same reasons for thinking that parthood-at-t is weakly supplemented as we have for thinking that weak supplementation holds in general? Of course, you think the reasons for thinking that it hold in general are very weak to begin with, but I don't see why the proponent of WSP couldn't use all the same reasons to motivate WSP-at-t.
"We certainly wouldn’t expect weak supplementation to hold for parthood-at-z, where z is a spatial location and x is a part-at-z of y provided that x is a part of y and both x and y are located at z."
I certainly expect weak supplementation to hold for parthood-at-z, if I were to accept four-dimensionalism: a part-at-z is going to be weakly supplemented by its temporal successors and predecessors, just as parts-at-t are weakly supplemented by the other spatial parts of the whole of which it is a part. This fits well with the Aristotelian prohibition on instants of time: because instants are impossible, all temporal parts will be weakly supplemented. This is exactly what we would expect if WSP were generally true.
"However, the soul won’t be my only part. My arms, legs and brain are eternally my parts. It’s just that they aren’t located at t, as the only proper part of me that is located at t is my soul. There is no violation of weak supplementation."
There is still a violation of WSP, it just isn't the person that is violating it anymore, it is the temporal part of the person that exists in the interim state. As long as you admit that that temporal part exists, you have a weak supplementation problem. You can't escape a violation of weak supplementation by pointing out that the entity that is violating it is itself part of a larger whole that doesn't violate it. So four-dimensionalism doesn't evade the violation of WSP any more than one could evade a violation of WSP by saying that the person in the interim state joins the choir in Heaven, and the choir is weakly supplemented. As long as you admit that the temporal part exists, it has to be weakly supplemented like everything else has to be.
It need not be true that the temporal part violates WSP.
First, there might not be any temporal parts.
Second, even if they are, the temporal part of the soul at t could be an improper part of the temporal part of the person at t.
Imagine a vase made made of point particles. The vase has a handle. There might be a plane H through space such that intersects the vase at exactly one particle, and that particle happens to be in the handle. Then the spatial part of the handle at H is an improper part of the spatial part of the vase at t.
And to the four-dimensionalist there need not be an important metaphysical difference between spatial and temporal parts.
The temporal part at t will be weakly supplemented by its successors and predecessors, yes. But it won't be weakly t-supplemented by them, since the successors and predecessors are not parts at t.
Hi Dr Pruss,
Doesn't the conjunction of four-dimensionalism and any (eternal) survivalism violate causal finitism? If the B-theory of time is true, and I live forever, then there is an infinite chain of cause and effect comprising my eternal life. But causal finitism says no object has an infinite causal history.
That's an infinite causal future, not an infinite causal *history*.
On a B theory of time the future is as real as the present. So there is a real person who exists an infinite number of years in the future who has an infinite causal history
No, because every future time is only a finite number of years in the future.
But, isn't every past time only a finite number of years in the past?? An infinite history is still impossible. So why isn't an actually infinite future equally impossible?
Infinite futures don't give rise to all the paradoxes infinite histories do.
I appreciate your answers Dr Pruss. I'm struggling to see why there isn't a person who has lived aleph-null years? God can see all times in our life equally, and if we live forever, then there is no highest number of years lived that He can see, which is to say that He can see people who have lived aleph-null years. What am I missing.
Think of it this way: In a standard picture of eternal life, the eternal life is made of years. The first year, the second year, the third year, and so on. The years correspond to the positive integers 1,2,3,... There is no year during eternal life when the person has lived aleph-0 years, as aleph-0 isn't an integer.
One could imagine an alternate scenario where a person lives during years 1,2,3,... and then after all this infinity of years, lives another year omega, and another year omega+1, and so on. That (a) isn't the standard picture of eternal life, and (b) violates causal finitism.
Don't you get Hilbert's Hotel sorts of absurdities just from the existence of an actual infinity?
No, you don't get absurdities, just strangeness. :-)
No, you don't get absurdities, just strangeness. :-)
I can't help myself.... Are you saying that Hilbert's Hotel isn't absurd; just strange? Or are you saying that an actually infinite series of events in my eternal life isn't a Hilbert's Hotel case?
There is nothing absurd in Hilbert's Hotel. No true principle is contradicted by it. (The closest is the principle that a set cannot be put in one-to-one correspondence with a proper subset. But Hilbert's Hotel is just a counterexample to that principle. :-) )
Lol. A violation is not a counter-example, Pruss....
Also, I would submit to you that, given the usual definition of "full" or "no vacancies", the idea that we can move people over to different rooms and thus accommodate new guests is indeed absurd.
Or, how about the fact that evicting an infinite number of people can yield any number of empty rooms from 1 to infinity? Or that evicting any finite number of people always yields the exact same situation (all the rooms full, all the people accommodated)?
You don't consider these things absurd?
Nothing absurd here, and I think I have clear and distinct conceptions of how these things happen.
Fair enough. I certainly don't....
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