The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 58 of 254
No further facts about persons
in the split-brain case, there is a truth about what has happened to the person which we cannot know on the basis of the physical facts, namely, which of them is me. This is an example of what Derek Parfit calls a ‘further fact’ view of the self.8 According to such theories, knowing all the facts about a person’s brain, body, thoughts, feelings, relations and so on is never enough to tell you all there is to know about who the person is. There must be some further fact, perhaps a fact about which soul they possess, which is needed to settle such matters. But why should we think such further facts exist? Nations provide an apt analogy here. A complete account of the lands, peoples and relations of a nation tell you everything about that nation. There are no further facts which make nations nations. It is true that wholes are greater than the sums of their parts, but that is not because wholes are additional, different kinds of parts. Persons are no exceptions. We are greater than the sums of our parts, but not because there is some further part left out of the sum. We are nothing but our parts, but we are more than just our parts.