ABSTRACT
Proponents of the dual aspect view claim that we still have good reason to take persons as existing over and above psychophysical elements. Special egoistic concern for one's future, for instance, requires that one identify future stages as stages of oneself, an enduring person, something that is clearly irrational if there are no enduring persons. Schechtman's strategy for convicting Reductionism of Punctualism is quite simple. Reductionists maintain that the continued existence of a person just consists in the occurrence of a series of appropriately related physical and psychological entities and events, all of which allow of completely impersonal description. A better strategy might be to give a selectionist account of the arising of the personhood convention, using a combination of species and cultural selection. The Reductionist can respond to this objection by saying that persons are constructed out of collections of psychophysical elements exhibiting the property of maximal causal connectedness.
