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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: More Atheistic Wishful Thinking
Message-ID: <1732@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 1-Oct-85 21:18:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1732
Posted: Tue Oct  1 21:18:43 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Oct-85 03:14:49 EDT
References: <718@utastro.UUCP> <27500134@ISM780B.UUCP>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 235

[Note: the referenced article has been heavily edited to bring it in line
 with standard net referencing convention.]

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).

>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.

As usual, Jim makes the error of assuming that I wish to demonstrate
resurrection scientifically.  I see no need to; the proposition is too vague
to be a useful hypothesis, and it invokes the supernatural.  What I am
interested in is demonstrating that resurrection has not been scientifically
demonstrated to be false.

>>[balter]
>>Charles, do you have any objective evidence that we don't all turn into
>>mosquitoes with our souls buried in the right hind leg where they can't
>>express themselves, when we die?  *Who cares*?  Philosophic inquiry
>>is a game that requires analysis and evidence as part of the rules.
>>The "anything is possible" game is stupid and childish; it is like playing
>>dealer's choice and declaring all the cards wild.  Intelligent people who
>>have played the game for a while get tired and bored of yokels who come
>>along with "you can't prove me wrong" like it was something *deep*
>>and *original*.

>[balter]
>Not unfair at all.  You have just stated that Charles is cool because he
>only doing those things which I just stated are the things done by yokels.
>I didn't say that Charles offered dogma, or insisted existence, or provided
>something inconsistent, so why are you responding to that strawman?
>What I did was criticize those who offer models *merely because they
>cannot be proved wrong*.

There is a long list of mistakes here, beginning with Balter's
identification of philosophical inquiry with science.  In fact, the two are
quite different.  What we are doing here is philosophical inquiry (perhaps
bad, but that isn't relevant); it is certainly not science.  The discussion
earlier spawned a subdiscussion concerning the possibility of duplicating
humans, and their identity with respect to the original.  Some parts of that
discussion (the brain simulation, for example) have produced models that are
capable of scientific validiation.  But the main discussion is not science.
It is however philosophical inquiry, since one field of that is the
identification of the proper forms of ideas.

Now on to little blue men.  Resurrection as christianity posits it is not
scientifically demonstrable-- but doubt can be cast upon it.  This comes not
in the form of "I can't see it so it isn't there", but instead is of the
nature of "the structure of the brain is sos-and-so, making resurrection
very doubtful."  It is worthwhile to investigate the plausibility of the
hypothesis, even though it cannot be truly resolved.

>[balter (with regard to reincarnation)]
>It isn't an issue of whether it is only "one particular faith";
>it is a matter of faith, not a philosophical issue, unless you can
>demonstrate the *possible necessity* of reincarnation.  Show some question
>in the real world such that world_model_X does not answer it but
>world_model_X + reincarnation does, and then it will be possible to discuss
>reincarnation beyond the level of "some people believe in it and you can't
>prove them wrong".  Otherwise, it belongs in net.religion or net.sf_lovers.

Totally specious.  This is not net.science.  The whole question of how
science should consider reincarnation is again philosophical inquiry, not
science.  ANd I don't think that having a problem with the model is the only
driver of scientific inquiry.  Scientists work out models which subdivide
quarks and devise gravitational theory different from GR not because the
existing theories have proven inadequate, but because of curiousity and a
deisre to test the current standard models.


>[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.
>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.  Most important is to read the writings
>of people such as Bertrand Russell who have analyzed these issues deeply.
>As I see it, identity is a linguistic concept which we use to organize and
>coordinate our sense perceptions into a coherent model.  The idea that there
>is some sort of "thread of identity" that exists as a thing in the real world
>seems rather confused to me.  To ask whether I am the same person as I was
>five minutes ago, or whether a teleported copy of a rock is the same rock, is
>to ask for a refined definition of the word "same".  It is *our choice* as to
>whether they are the same; whether we want "same" to mean that or not.  So
>many of these discussions seem to stem from this fundamental error of
>assuming our words are universals.  If an electron disappears and one
>with the same qualities shows up elsewhere simultaneously, are they the same?
>Well, aside from the non-existence of simultaneity and the fact that they
>differ enough in the quality of location that we were forced to ask the
>question in the first place, how do you tell?  What does it mean for them to
>be the same?  An electron is the same as itself, but beyond that it is all
>linguistics.  Saying "it disappeared from A and it showed up at B" and "one
>disappeared from A and one just like it showed up at B" are equivalent
>discriptions.  They both adequately describe the observed phenomenon.  But,
>since sameness is not an observable or measureable quality, in fact is not a
>quality at all, neither description is more "true" than the other.

Again, not science but philosophy.  And Balter is about to commit Rich
Rosen's favorite error of defining words without worrying about what they
mean now.  If we are going to put this to scientific test, we need to come
up with a set of models and a set of destiguishing experiments.  Right now
we are going through the model formulation stage.  The first problem we
encountered is that there are three different senses of sameness here: there
is identically-the-same-at-this-point-in-time, which I think we all agree is
not the kind we are concerned with; there is the-same-as-that-object-in-
the-past; and there is the subjective sense of personal continuity.  The
third sense is the critical one, and especially its relationship to the
second.  Now the nature of the third is quite debatable; if we restrict
consideration to those models which deny supernatural souls and the like,
then copying a person should preserve type 3 sameness.  This is true without
regard to the exact nature of the mind; it is a fundamental axiom of science
that duplicating the state must duplicate the behavior.

>>[wingate]
>>Sorry, Rich, reasonableness is not objective and not science.  You have no
>>evidence, so there is no reason to choose one over the other, especially in
>>the light of competing analogies with existing systems.  My competing
>>hypothesis is that "the mind is *represented* in the body, and is possibly
>>capable of expression in other media."  The only reason to choose on or the
>>other at this point is purely subjective convenience, since the evidence
>>neither confirms nor denies either.

>[balter]
>Reasonableness certainly is part of science, as Occam's Razor.
>One could offer a "super-astro-observer theory", which says that distant
>objects wink into existence when being observed, but disappear or jump
>somewhere else when no one is looking; such a theory isn't *disprovable*,
>but it isn't *reasonable*.  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.

Is it? How do you know?  How can you define the mind without having
investigated the matter?  Your statement is unscientific.  Occam's razor is
indeed a codification of reasonability, but tremendously restricted, and it
only comes into play when you can't experimentally destiguish between two
"theories".  In this case, you can, so Occam's Razor says nothing except "Go
and see for yourself."  

>>[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.

Irrelevant, since the extra mechanism is detectable and verifiable.

>misleading: separates the mind from memory, mood, history, thought, as a
>trace of the change of physiological states in the brain.
>To reduce the mind to mere information is misleading.
>I think the best analogy is mind to process (computer science sense),
>brain to computer running a specific (powerful problem-solving) program,
>and input to input.  Of course a process is non-physical, just as a mind is,
>but it isn't *separate* from the physical.  You cannot extract out the
>process; you can only repeat it.

Really?  Do you have any proof?  What's misleading is this rather religious
statement about the nature of the mind.  Balter has no more proof for his
hypothesis than I do, so I can hardly accept this half-baked argument. 

In any case, there is a reason why I specifically restricted myself to
atom-for-atom copying.  Balter's process arguments are in fact an
undetectable complication unless he is willing to give up the axiom of "same
situation produces same behavior", because a process mind will still have to
produce the same result when copied (just as would happen if you copied the
entire state of a computer into an identical model).  NOW Occam's razor IS
relevant-- and it denies talk about processes!

>[balter]
>I think you are quite confused about what my position is, and the best way
>I can think to illustrate it is to ask you if you think that the harder
>people insist that a machine is mechanical, the more convincing Charles'
>case becomes?  I never said that mind *is* matter; rather it is process;
>it is purely descriptive.  As I see it, Charles' (and your) case
>is that mind is matter, in that it is some kind of entity that exists on
>its own.  I view mind as simply a *way of describing the actions of the
>brain* (in conjunction with a specific input stream, including signals
>and other impingements from the rest of the body).

In the absence of extra-natural inputs, though, the two must perforce
produce the same results, since the ongoing state of the process must be
determined (to whatever extent allowed by "freedom") by the instantaneous
state of the matter.  In any case, however, the instantaneous state of the
mind could in principle be represented by something other than matter,
allowing for the possiblity of copying the identity of a person in to
something non-living.

>>[ellis]
>>Are the atheists and anti-religionists here now insisting that the matter
>>composing one's body possesses some `special spiritual aura' that is somehow
>>passed along (just like one's legal identity) during your life?

>[balter]
>Obviously not, and the fact that it may seem that way to you should encourage
>you to consider that you have misinterpreted their position.

Well, Padraig's reservations seem to me to be clearly based upon some
intuition about continuity, an intuition which I don't share.

>And in any case, I cannot see what this has to do with religion;
>there are plenty of religious people who have a mechanical view of
>human consciousness.

The vociferity with which the case for copying people has been argued
against is suprising, especially since it doesn't especially affect the
question of resurrection, where a quite different transformation must be
taking place (reasons for which have previously been argued).  A suspicion
of religious fervor on the part of the anti-copyists seems entirely in order.

Charley
Wingate


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