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From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Souls
Message-ID: <621@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 26-Aug-85 21:31:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: mmintl.621
Posted: Mon Aug 26 21:31:06 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 29-Aug-85 23:43:22 EDT
References: <581@utastro.UUCP> <1322@umcp-cs.UUCP> <588@utastro.UUCP>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT
Lines: 36
Summary: is reconstitution resurrection?


In article <588@utastro.UUCP> padraig@utastro.UUCP (Padraig Houlahan) writes:
>> >Resurrection implies continuity of something. The continuity
>> >is contained in the "we" that is resurected, since the "we" was there
>> >before, and after, resurrection. There's no way out of this. All
>> >this talk about our lack of understanding of life, and whether or not
>> >to take our intuition seriously is a bunch of horsefeathers that is
>> >going off on a tangent from this issue.
>> 
>> I see.  At A I have X, and at B I have X, so there must be a continuity of X
>> between the two.  There are so many assumptions implicit in this that it's
>> hard to know where to start.
>
>Well let me show you:
>
>  1) Let A be life before death, and B life after death,
>  2) we have X at A where X is the "we" in "we are resurrected"
>  3) we have X at B where X is the "we" in "we are resurrected"
>
>These assumptions are implicit in the resurrection claim. These are not
>being challanged here. Now X forms an uninterrupted succession, therefore
>it is continuous.

Neither side seems to me to have focussed on the key point here.  It seems
to me that what is being proposed here is that the "resurrection" consists
of the reconstituting of the body more or less exactly like it was just
before death.  Presumably the health will be improved, but at a minimum
the memories and attitudes will be the same.  Clearly this does not require
that anything of the person exist in the interrum (sp?).

The question is, in what sense is this the resurrection of the "same" person,
instead of just a "copy"?  To make the question more pointed, suppose two
such "copies" are made simultaneously; are both the same person?

This question is not of purely religious relevence; we will have the
technology to make such copies soon (within 30 to 100 years, I would guess;
but the time scale is not important to the philosophical argument).