Persons and the Unity of Consciousness
The Waning of Materialism March 25, 2010 William Hasker
The human person is typically understood as having a unified, coherent self that is a rational agent capable of responding to others. However, phenomena like split-brain patients and multiple personality disorder challenge this unity. This chapter presents the unity of consciousness argument, rooted in Leibniz and Kant, as a counter to those challenges. While the empirical evidence seems to show disunity, the argument and evidence are not inconsistent. Together, they pose a problem for materialist accounts of mind and also reveal a serious difficulty for standard Cartesian dualism. The author concludes by outlining emergent dualism as their preferred metaphysical view of persons.