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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Re: More Atheistic Wishful Thinking
Message-ID: <708@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 2-Oct-85 06:56:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: mmintl.708
Posted: Wed Oct  2 06:56:40 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Oct-85 04:27:43 EDT
References: <718@utastro.UUCP> <27500134@ISM780B.UUCP>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT
Lines: 81

[Not food]

In article <27500134@ISM780B.UUCP> jim@ISM780B.UUCP writes:
>>[wingate]
>>I am NOT arguing at all the ressurection takes place (or rather, I am not
>>arguing for objective evidence for it).  I am simply arguing that there are
>>no objective objections to it (i.e., that there is no counter-evidence).
>
>[balter]
>Just like little blue men.  No objective objections.  Counter-evidence
>is not required, only lack of necessity.  When someone proposes a theory,
>the burden is on the proposer to provide evidence for the theory; the
>theory must answer some question left unanswered by current theory.
>That is a fundamental rule of scientific method.  Merely demonstrating
>that the theory is not provably wrong is not sufficient for it to be
>considered.  That is the error that almost all crackpots make.

Actually, I think Charlie was misstating his position above.  He is not
arguing for ressurection *at all*.  He is arguing that ressurection does
not depend on the concept of a soul.  If he were arguing for ressurection,
your point would be valid.

>[balter]
>Actually, I think the identity discussion arose after the discussion of
>reincarnation, but in any case, I consider the discussion naive because
>you cannot deal properly with the effects of transporters etc. on your
>notions of identity *until* you have formulated a notion of identity.
>And notions of identity of objects are being confused with
>personal identity, sometimes viewed from without and sometimes from within.

I don't think I have made any of these errors.  I stated quite early that
identity was not a concept of the real world, but an abstraction we put
on it; since then I have been trying to define it in a way maximally
consistent with ordinary usage.

>The discussion would be more coherent if restricted to transportation of
>rocks first; if you can decide questions of duplicate copies of rocks,
>transmitting rocks with or without destroying the original, etc.,then you can
>expand to more complicated questions.

Ah, but people are quite different from rocks.  I think there is a consensus
that if you make a copy of a rock, whether by analyzing and duplicating it,
or by deconstructing and reconstructing it, that the result is not the same
rock.  The same is true of a person's body.  But personal identity is, I
maintain, different from physical identity.

>>A model of the mind which says that it is
>>not a direct result of the workings of a particular brain requires extra
>>mechanism, for which there is no evidence (at least it can be argued that
>>there is not; I haven't seen any arguments that the mind is not mechanical
>>that are not easily refutable).  To suggest that the mind can be expressed
>>in other media says nothing about the nature of the mind; given a mechanical
>>view, it simply suggests that the brain is simulatable.  To say that the
>>mind has an existence separate from the brain is misleading.  The mind is
>>different from the personality; it is the sum total of memory, mood, history,
>>thought, as an evolving process.  My mind now is quite different from what
>it was a minute ago.

I do not dispute that the mind is the process which is taking place in the
brain; this is perhaps a more accurate way of saying what I mean by the
mind is the information content of the brain.  The question is, if that
process is simulated (with sufficient accuracy) in another medium, is
that the same person?  I maintain that it is more consistent with the
normal use of the word identity to answer yes than no.


>[ellis]
>Whatever is misleading or unreasonable about the mind as nonphysical
>information? For a wishful religionist, Charles has taken a surprisingly
>nonreligious position here!
>
>[balter]
>To repeat:
>unreasonable: requires extra mechanism.

No one is proposing any different mechanisms here.  The question here is
one of definition.  The discussion for some time has been on that basis;
you seem not to have noticed.

Frank Adams                           ihpn4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Multimate International    52 Oakland Ave North    E. Hartford, CT 06108


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