Persons and temporal parts

On perdurantism, we are four-dimensional beings made of temporal parts, and our actions are fundamentally those of the temporal parts.

This is troubling. Imagine a person with a large number of brains, only one of which is active at any one time, and every millisecond a new brain gets activated. There would be something troubling about the fact that we are always interacting with a different brain person, and only interacting with the person as a whole by virtue of interacting with ever different brains. And this is pretty much what happens on perdurantism.

Maybe it’s not so bad if each brain’s data comes from the previous brain, so that by learning about the new brain we also learn about the old one. And, granted, on any view over time we interact to some degree with different parts of the person—most cells swap out, and we would be untroubled if this turned out to hold for neurons as well. But it seems to me that it is a more attractive picture of interpersonal interactions if there is a fundamental core of the person with which we interact that is numerically the same core in all the interactions, so that the changing cells are just expressions of that same core.

This is not really much of an argument, just an expression of a feeling.