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References
See B.A.O. Williams ‘Personal Identity and Individuation’ inProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 57, 1956–7, (pp. 238–9) and J.J. Clarke ‘John Hick's Ressurection,’Sophia, October, 1971.
I.e. if we ignore highly speculative and in themselves logically suspect accounts of identical parallel universes, and the like.
See, for instance,Persons and Life After Death, London, Macmillan, 1978, p. 86.
It may be said that this awareness of ours of immediate past events should be distinguished from memory. But this is arbitrary. Like all remembered events, they happened in the past. It surely won't do to deny that we remember them just because our awareness of them is unquestionably reliable. This would be to presume at the start that memory cannot be as reliable, the very thesis the case in point is meant to refute.
It is true that mental disorder could cause delusory ongoing experiences with false ‘memories’. But such abnormality presupposes the norm that most people have real experiences. All we need for our case is that there can be such experiences, for this means memorycan be authenticated without bodily continuity for the reasons given.
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Wei, T.T. Bodily continuity, personal identity and life after death. SOPH 29, 33–39 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02789875
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02789875