Responding to Swinburne, Williams

In response to my last post, I wanted to add a few comments as to why I don't agree with Professor Williams. First of all, the situation Williams was positing was misrepresented in the paper I was originally reading by Swinburne. Williams created a situation whereby one person swapped brains with another. Swinburne edited this position as carving one person's brain into two halves and placing them into two new people.

So my response is more to Swinburne, than it is to Williams. Swinburne's attempt to support Descarte's substance dualism is flawed because:

a. his conception of consciousness as a unity cannot be supported. Consciousness isn't a unity. I am never conscious of everything that I have ever been or am now. Think about it: Aren't there memories that you have that you can't recall right now but may at a later date remember and could affect your consciousness?
b. the only thing he ever proves is that we conceive our identity as associated with our brains. How does this prove the existence of the mind?
c. consciousness is immediately affected by our bodies. whatever body we may enter, we are conscious of that body as a limitation of our abilities.
d. we need a body. we can say nothing of the brain unless we have a body to put that brain in.
e. his characterization of perceiving with the mind only is severely flawed. This is my problem with people who have out of body experiences. You see because you have eyes. You hear because you have ears. You feel because you have nerves. You smell because of your olfactory senses. If your mind left your body, you wouldn't have these senses.

Swinburne, as well as Descartes (pictured above), can never get around these problems, nor can any other dualist.