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From: barry@ames.UUCP (Kenn Barry)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Software, 'meat', and *you*
Message-ID: <673@ames.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 3-Dec-84 14:53:07 EST
Article-I.D.: ames.673
Posted: Mon Dec  3 14:53:07 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 5-Dec-84 00:51:12 EST
References: <525@wucs.UUCP>
Distribution: net
Organization: NASA-Ames Research Center, Mtn. View, CA
Lines: 37

[]
	From Paul Torek:

> From: mwm@ea.UUCP	(<mike)
>> Now, read the last line from me carefully: "I hope to be uploaded to
>> *something* ... ." Key word: "something." I claim that "I" can function on
>> other hardware, be it meat, silicon, plasma, or whatever. [I also claim I
>> can *prove* that that can happen, barring dualism!] Therefore, I can change
>> "bodies" - so I am not a body, any more than I am a house. Both are things
>> that "I" temporarily make use of. 
> 
> Well, actually I hope you're right, but here's why I think you're not.
> I don't think you can endure on any type of hardware except "meat".  The
> reason is that your mental life is bound up with the type of activity that
> occurs in the brain, and this may be relevantly different from the type of
> activity in a silicon chip.  My view is called "type-type materialism" 
> (because it holds that each type of mental event is identical with a type
> of physical ("material") event), and you can find a defense of it in a
> recent (Je? 84) issue of the philosophical journal *Synthese*.

	This seems to me clearly half-right (no equivocation here!).
I'm sure if I were uploaded to a silicon brain I would change, and change
in ways that would not have occurred if I hadn't been moved to different
hardware. But, hey, I change every day, anyway. Whatever changes occurred
would, I think, be gradual enough that I would still have the continuous
sensation of "selfness". I'm already a far different entity than I was
when I was 5, for instance; not only externally, but also in my experience
of my own selfness. Am I the *same* person? Does it matter?
	Give me a shot a silicon immortality and I'll take it. That's
the only answer I can give to this question; anyone have any other ideas?

-  From the Crow's Nest  -                      Kenn Barry
                                                NASA-Ames Research Center
                                                Moffett Field, CA
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