The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 38 of 254
Dementia as a real-life thought experiment
Kathleen Wilkes complained that the philosophy of personal identity depends far too much on fanciful thought experiments, and that this is entirely unnecessary, because real life provides all the test cases we need.1 Dementia is perhaps the cruellest and most revealing example. Many philosophers have argued that we are constituted by a psychologically continuous web of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and memories. Dementia says, well, okay, let’s pick that web apart, piece by piece and see if anything of you remains.