ABSTRACT
Physicalists who are determined to accept a psychological-continuity criterion of personal identity can render their views consistent if they are willing to make either a strange assumption about identity or a strange assumption about the way in which things in general—and not only human persons—persist through time. If dualism is true, our relation to our bodies is analogous to the relation of the operator of a remotely controlled device to that device. Anyone who, on reflection, decides that the duplicate would exhibit behavior indistinguishable from Alfred’s should conclude that the duplicate has a mental life like Alfred’s and that physicalism is therefore true and dualism false. It cannot be argued that the identity of persons across time is a mystery that confronts both the physicalist and the dualist in the same way and to the same degree. Many physicalists accept what they call a “psychological-continuity criterion of personal identity.”.
