Three Metaphysical Questions Without Answers (maybe)
There are three questions which have vexed me for most of my life. I am a retlired lawyer, living on Sanibel Island, Florida with my wife of 44 years. First, I wonder why I am me and you are you and Joe Shmo is Joe Shmo. Consider: Billions of people have been born in the world, and most have died. At conception you have two cells merging into one and later dividing to become a person, a bunch of stuff called DNA, chemicals, and all that. And all this adds up to what I call 'me' and you, you. But how did this consciousness which I call 'myself' connect with --- reside in --- my brain rather than in one of the other billions of brains in other bodies, now and all the way back in time and all over the world? All the other billions of bodies and brains belong to others. How and who decided that this particular brain and body would house this particular mind, soul and consciousness that I call "myself".
Second, Am I the same 'me' that I was yesterday, five years ago, 10 years ago? How do I know? If we assume continuity of personality, as I do, isn't that a straw in the wind indicating that there is some Great Mind behind all this? Otherwise I could be a robot remembering the past, not a person who was actually in the past. I would not think that a brain would require the inhabitation of a continuous personality to serve as an instrument of biological survival. Why would it? From the standpoint of evolution, the soul, personality and consciousness would seem to be surplusage. We could still have memory, as a computer does, but a computer has a kind of memory, but not the kind which fondly and nostalgically recalls Thanksgiving at Aunt Edna and Uncle Stu's farm.
Third: The brain is physical --- a bunch of cells arranged in a complex way. You can dissect it all you want without finding any person --- any 'me' --- there. Yet we know that the physical world and the mind are intimately related. A blow on the head, alcohol, anesthetics , Alzheimers, arteriosclerosis --- all these alter thought and personality. How do we explain something which is obviously immaterial and yet altered, even radically, by material, physical events and things? William James, the philosopher, agreed with materialists that thought is a function of the brain, but he went beyond that to maintain that, yes, thought is a function of the brain but it is more than that. It is a transmitting function, like a radio or TV transmitter and receiver. In other words, his difference with materialists was that he did not believe that thought is only a function ot the brain. It is words like 'only' or 'merely' which separate a materialist philosophy from a spiritual or religious one. That is how William James believed that he was able to combine the functional physical brain with a limited life and an immaterial soul which may be capable of surviving death.
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