The Mad Surgeon Story

"Who is this dashing young man?" you may ask. Well, it's Bernard Williams, the 20th-century western philosopher who published an article entitled "The Self and the Future," in which he posited the "mad surgeon story," which is summed up like so by Richard Swinburne in his chapter on Body and Soul:

Suppose that a mad surgeon captures you and announces that he is going to transplant your left cerebral hemisphere into one body, and your right one into another. He is going to torture one of the resulting persons and free the other with a gift of one million [dollars]. You can choose which person is to be tortured and which to be rewarded, and the surgeon promises to do as you choose. You believe his promise. But how are you to choose? You wish to choose that you are rewarded, but you do not know which resultant person will be you. You may have studied neurophysiology deeply and think that you have detected some all-important difference between the hemispheres which indicates which is the vehicle of personal identity; but, all too obviously, you could be mistaken.

The exercise is meant to force one into the position of affirming that the brain alone, or at all, cannot be the source of a person's identity, but rather the mind, or soul. I have some arguments against this, which I will share tomorrow. But I'm curious to see if you all have something to say first. Post a comment or send me an e-mail.