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Most arguments for the Psychological Approach are based on the conviction that anyone who got your psychological features would be you. The possibility of fission proves this conviction false. Those who think that identity has no practical importance will find it even more difficult to argue for the Psychological Approach.

The animalist view of personal identity, according to which we human persons are identical to animals, is arguably the simplest view of the relationship between human persons and animals. But animalism faces a serious challenge from the possibility of brain transplants. This chapter develops, on behalf of animalism, a new way of modeling such cases. The model is developed by analogy with situations of environmentally determined reference shift familiar from the literature on externalism in the philosophy of mind and language. The resulting externalist animalist model is put to work in describing a range of variant cases and in accounting for certain anti-animalist intuitions. In the final section some wider consequences are elucidated, concerning the extrinsic nature of thought, and the coherence, within a broadly materialist framework, of disembodied consciousness.

The chapter addresses forms of the neuro in popular culture. Film and literature have in many ways rehearsed the connection between personal identity, having a body and being a brain, and have been major sites for elaborating and questioning the human as cerebral subject. Numerous works can be identified as “brain movies” and “brain novels:” most Frankenstein films since the 1940s; B-series productions from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, in which brains themselves are protagonists; science-fiction novels of the same period, which stage and exploit brain transplants or brains in vats. While we shall give room to this particular literary and filmic subgenres, our focus will be on later novels and films. We shall privilege works that explore existential, interpersonal, psychological, ethical and scientific aspects of the relations between having a brain and being a person less through the basic structure of their plots or the direct display of physical brains than through stylistic and formal features. In both areas we demonstrate that even the productions that start out treating humans as cerebral subjects end up contesting brain reductionism, and that such constitutive ambivalence is emblematic of the status of the cerebral subject in the modern and contemporary world.

Most philosophers agree that some sort of psychological continuity is necessary or sufficient for us to persist – the Psychological Approach to personal identity. Some implications of this view are sketched. The Biological Approach, by contrast, says that our identity, over time, consists in brute biological continuity.

This chapter addresses a serious problem for animalism, and shows that it has no really satisfying solution. Mark Johnston has argued that animalism, the view that we are animals, implies that removing your brain from your head and enabling it to continue functioning would create a “remnant person” constituted by the naked brain. If this is so, then putting the brain into a new head would destroy this remnant person. These implications look absurd. The problem has no really satisfying solution. This chapter argues that the problem, though serious, has nothing to do with animalism as such, and afflicts virtually all other views about what we are in equal measure.

This chapter asks whether there are further reasons for being doubtful about the judgement that the subject or person goes with the brain in brain transplant cases. Some have argued that a case can be made for thinking that intuitions about brain transplants are not reliable, which, if true, would strengthen the response to the transplant argument. This chapter explores two attempts to generate scepticism about these kinds of intuitions—by Kathy Wilkes and Mark Johnston. It is argued that both these attempts, although interesting, are not persuasive. However, there are aspects of the judgement about the brain taking the person which indicate that we are entitled to be sceptical about its soundness. The chapter discusses why, despite this, people tend to have the intuition that the person goes with the brain. It is finally argued that when presented in a slightly different way the idea that minds are being swapped between people in such cases is not outrageous.

The preceding discussions have tried to show that there are no plausible examples of [A&~P] dissociations, and that most suggested categories of [P&~A] dissociations are also implausible. In both cases the implausibility derives from problems with the judgements regarding ourselves, either that we are absent from or are present in the imagined scenarios. However, the candidate dissociations which have had most influence on the philosophical imagination are so-called Shrinkage Cases. The specific version that has seemed plausible to many is that of brain transplants. It is argued that the standard brain transplant story rests on four main assumptions, one of which normally is presented as an intuition about such cases that the person goes with the brain. It is then argued that the other premises are rather convincing but it is open to deny the intuitive claim. It is further argued that Mark Johnston’s famous argument in favour of the intuition is based on unconvincing grounds.