[Philo]

[ QUOTE ]
Man that's some bad prose. Does the writer speak English? Does he have a tumor?

Clarifications needed: "numerically identical"
"just in case"
"the human animal we are identical"?
"persistence conditions"
"persistence"

They seem to be playing with the definition of persistence - basically saying that if the majority of an organism's cell continues to survive and be functional, then the "person" does too. But the leading paragraphs don't define their terms well enough to be able to critique the theory.

[ QUOTE ]
Do you think that BTA shows that animalism is false?

[/ QUOTE ]
No. The whole question is so poorly written and defined that you can't respond to it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good questions. To clarify:

"numerically identical": If a and b are numerically identical then a and b are one and the same thing. For example, Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens are numerically identical.

"just in case" is shorthand for the biconditional "if and only if," which expresses a relationship between a and b in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

Thinking of a and b as events now, "if a, then b" means a's happening is sufficient for b's happening, and b's happening is necessary for a's happening.

So, "a if and only if b" (or "a just in case b") means that if a happens then b will happen, and if b happens then a will happen.

"persistence": to persist is to continue to exist over time. If an object O existed yesterday and also exists today, then that object O has persisted from yesterday to today (and hence the object O today is numerically identical to the object O of yesterday). The "problem of personal identity" is the problem of figuring out what our persistence conditions are, i.e., what constitutes our continued existence over time as the numerically same entity.

So, to say that I persist (or continue to exist) 'just in case' the human animal that I am identical to continues to exist is to say that I will continue to exist if that human animal continues to exist, and that if that human animal continues to exist then so will I.

Since the continued of existence of biological organisms in general does not seem to require psychological continuity (or even the continuation of psychological capacities), the animalist claims that my persistence does not require the continuation of my psychological life. BTA tries to show that this claim is false.