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both Jones and C-Jones have the same functio- same person to survive death through resur-
nal properties. Would such an understanding rection. The intuitive option that seems ready
of personal identity not commit us to asserting made to be this something more is that humans
that both could be the very same person at least must have an essential component responsible
at the moment of the creation of C-Jones? It is for their identity over time that endures beyond
beyond the scope this present work to flesh out death.
the problems that arise for moral responsibility Physicalist critiques of dualism have often
and agency from a model of personal identity charged that it fails to appreciate the substanti-
that allows two distinct individuals to be the al developments in neuroscience and embodi-
same person. I will herein state only that I think ment theory that demonstrate how constituted
any theory of personal identity that allows two and conditioned our minds are by our bodies
distinct individuals to be share the same iden- (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 2017). Yet, there
tity likely functions as a reductio ad absurdum are key features of our existence that this remar-
for such a model of personal identity. kable body of work leaves unexplained. David
The non-reductive physicalists problem of per- Chalmers (1995a) referred the explanatory gap
sonal identity noted above presents similar for physicalism as the hard problems of cons-
challenges for the Christian doctrine of resur- ciousness. The more we discover about the
rection. Consider what happens when Jones brain and mind, he observed, the more it seems
dies. Let us assume that a person is resurrected clear that we are no closer to answering the hard
who believes themselves the same Jones that problems of consciousness than before the age
had once been cloned. Jones appears to have of neuroscience. Chalmers (1995b) explained:
an body that nevertheless seems like the body ““The really hard problem of consciousness
possessed prior to death apart from some mi- is the problem of experience. When we think
raculous upgrades. Further assume that the re- and perceive, there is a whir of information-
surrection occurred some many centuries after processing, but there is also a subjective aspect.
the death and the prior body had long sense de- ...there is something it is like to be a conscious
cayed. The matter from the decayed body had organism. This subjective aspect is experience.
long since reentered the biosphere and in the …”
course of the life cycle been a part of the bodies This “subjective aspect” of experience refers to
of multiple organisms, including some people various introspective observations that resist
who are also now being resurrected. Thus, re- naturalistic reduction including: the unity of
surrection could not be simply reanimation of experience, the subjective experience of what
the same physical system that constituted Jones’ is like to have an experience of something (i.e.,
body while alive. Yet, if the resurrected body qualia), or even the experience of conscious
is merely a replica of the pre-death body that awareness itself. Neuroscience has made great
Jones remembers having, how would it be the strides in informing us about how the contents
same „person“ in resurrection as the one who of consciousness can be populated and shaped
existed previously? Let’s suppose resurrected by our bodily processes and structures and in
Jones thinks they are the same Jones that existed identifying neural correlates of conscious ex-
pre-eschaton because of a continuity of memo- perience. Recently, network neuroscience has
ry, relationship, moral self-understanding, and been offering increasing promise at decoding
spiritual inclinations, in a physically recogniz- the modular structure of entire cognitive sy-
able body. How would resurrected Jones be the stems and detecting their brain correlates (Ber-
same Jones that had died any more than the tolero et al., 2018). But none of this explains
physically indiscernible pair created by cloning how our subjective and holistic awareness of
are the same person? that bodily input comes about.
Such thought experiments have left me convin- Consider visual recognition of a person. We
ced that there must be something more than know light is transduced into neural impulses
merely a bundle or memories, narrative states, and we know something about how different
reanimated bodies, or duplicated bodies for the regions of the visual cortex differentially contri-

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