Then again, we will have to wait until I have read that book since I currently don’t see how physicalism can account for sentience.
~Max
Am I correct in guessing that inflicting pain on a non-conscious, non-sentient body is less morally weighted than inflicting pain on a conscious, sentient body?
If so it seems this too will need to wait until I’ve read that book on consciousness and physicalism. So be it.
~Max
On second thought, you [POST=21598501]already answered[/POST] this.
~Max
I’m still confused on how, exactly, we choose to deal with permanently dead humans has any bearing the the larger question?
CMC fnord!
The transporter problem is something like this: if there were such a machine as to scan your entire physical body down to the smallest detail, zap you into a billion little pieces, and reassemble you in another machine in the exact same manner, from a billion different pieces in a different place, is the new you really you?
Would your opinion change if the original you was not zapped away?
What if the little pieces were physically moved from the one machine to the other?
~Max
It’s definitively impossible to inflict pain on a non-sentient entity.
Define “really”.
I think I was being a little too coy - I’m aware of the transporter Gedankenerfahrung, I just don’t see the problem. There’s nothing to settle in my view.
I don’t think so.
Don’t see that that makes a difference from reassembling me from “new” molecules. There’s nothing particular to the molecules that make me up (obviously, since they get replaced all the time. It’s a certainty that some of the molecules in the new set of me were part of me before, even, if you’re just zapping me around Earth.). It’s the system-level stuff that makes me Me. Or more properly, makes us Me.
Further to the above - it might help to understand that I see no problem with there being, for all intents and purposes, multiple “mes” in different bodies. Of course, they will very rapidly diverge. But in as much as up to transport, they retain all my experiences, they are both “me” immediately afterwards. Just as much as the me of 15 days ago is me even though from his existence to mine there have been multiple interruptions in continuity between us.
Hello! Good morning!
There’s something wrong with any cosmological model that is disproven by alcohol.
Consider: Alcohol, despite its nickname of ‘spirits’, is a fully physical chemical substance. It therefore can only have effects on the physical world. So when a person drinks alcohol the chemical physically makes its way into the bloodstream and physically makes its way to the brain and physically effects the physical brain. All this is a purely physical, chemical, and biological process. And yet it effects the mind. Thinking slows, attention wanders, inhibition lowers.
In your model there’s no way for a physical chemical to interfere with the spiritual matter that makes up the mechanics of the soul/mind. The closest you could get would be that the soul pretends to be drunk, noticing the chemicals in the physical system and then putting on a slurred and stupid act to maintain the illusion that the alcohol actually does something. Which makes no sense on two different levels: firstly there’s no reason whatsoever for the souls to play this little game, and secondly because we (in the model) know what the soul is thinking, because we are the soul. And I’ve heard no reports that drunk people are faking it.
So yeah, that’s big problem one with this model that separates the brain and the mind: alcohol, coffee, and myriad other mind-altering drugs would not work under it. And they demonstrably do.
Also, regarding your moral issues, if I’m understanding you correctly your entire difficulty with assigning moral value to meat sacks is because you don’t consider meat sacks sentient. But if dualism wasn’t true then the meat sacks necessarily would be sentient, so tell me again why it’s hard to assign moral value to them again?
Classic argument from ignorance.
Brain surgery can cause personality changes. Now I have no idea if you consider the mind to be just identity and not tied to personality, but if it is tied to personality then it must diverge after brain surgery. Losing a hand doesn’t change personality (much) but losing a part of the brain does.
Arguing for dualism from a complete lack of evidence - even possible evidence - is the very model of an irrational argument. That, and the argument from morality, remind me a lot of arguments for god - bad arguments. But I suppose if you buy arguments for the soul without evidence you should buy them for a god also. I’m not saying you do, but if you don’t why is the situation different.
Also, and not to hammer on you, but you say:
I’m not sure you fully grasp what this means - it means that when I do things, walk around, type this post, that the soul has nothing whatsoever to do with any of that. Because my actions in the physical realm are not caused by anything the soul does, in your model.
This is actually what interested me so much in your specific dualist model - how absurdly unintuitive it is, and how drastically it differs from the ‘standard’ concept of souls. As an example of this ‘standard’ concept, I will cite a TV show that I happened to be rewatching last night, the 2003 show Dead Like Me. In that show you have folks whose nine-to-five is being grim reapers, collecting souls from people after they die. However in one scene one of them gets annoyed and reaches in and rips the soul out of a living person. She proceeds to briefly chew the soul out, holding it by its lapels as she yells at it, before stuffing it back in the body. While its soul is absent the body stands there slack-jawed and immobile, only becoming conscious and aware again once its soul has been returned.
So yeah, under the standard concept of souls, a soulless person is less a p-zombie and more a zombie zombie. In your model, on the other hand, the body would have become a p-zombie and kept on carrying about its business whether the soul was present or not. It’s really an independent, separate person. A demonstrably conscious and aware sentient person, based on its actions; the soul really contributes nothing to the process. Since doing so, being the body’s puppetmaster, would definitely require the soul to be influencing events in the physical world. Because “acting conscious and self-aware” is something that is occurring in the physical world.
Seriously, under your model as you describe it, my soul could be completely different from me - I’m picturing a somewhat nebbish young girl named Susan who enjoys long walks on the beach and kvetching that she’s stuck with the big hairy dude begbert2 rather than, say, Brad Pitt. My soul having a completely separate and different mind wouldn’t matter, because the me that I’m aware of is actually a p-zombie, existing in the physical world and interacting with it. The soul is just following me around, barred from interacting with me, or through me.
Or at least, that’s the picture you imply by saying there are no direct, causal interactions from the spiritual realm onto the physical realm. It’s a fun picture, isn’t it? But I don’t think it’s what you really mean.
I thought that when you mentioned “transporter problem,” you meant something that a non-dualist physicalist view would have difficulty with.
Yes, I agree that our language as it currently exists doesn’t easily deal with the idea of a transporter or duplicator, because the language has all kinds of unspoken assumptions about what we mean with “you” and “me.” This is a semantic problem, not a problem with physicalism.
On the other hand, for someone who holds dualist views, the transporter/duplicator would present severe challenges to the very ideas they believe are fundamental.
ETA: To wit: The transpoter/duplicator’s problem for dualism is that if a machine creates a second “you,” and that “you” has a soul, then that means that we have a purely physical machine which can create souls. Does this seem like a conflict to you that your dualism has trouble with?
You got me - let me restate the question in another form.
How do you consider the morality of damaging a non-conscious, non-sentient body compared to a damaging a non-consenting, conscious, sentient body?
I think you will answer that the latter is inherently less moral than the former, excepting possibly property rights or incidental effects such as when cutting a rope to activate a guillotine.
~Max
Does an organ transplant change one’s identity? In dualism identity of self is identity of the soul, so though the physical body might change the soul remains the same. My form of dualism has no problem with an organ transplant because, by removing the organ from the donor, we have severed that organ from its soul (excepting “The Meaning of Life” and possibly China, the donor was already dead and thus the connection already severed).
Things get tricky if the brain or parts of the brain are transplanted. As I defend Dualism I would need to make further unfalsifiable claims about how the spiritual realm operates, so as to distinguish exactly how changes in the brain cause changes in the soul, or whether a soul can reconnect to a dead brain. If pressed I can do that.
With physicalism on the other hand, you seem to be saying that “self” is always a nebulous term and there are always degrees of “self-ness”. This goes against intuition, for me at least, and makes it difficult to decide whether an organ transplant is moral. A physicalist facing the decision might ask, “does this transplant change who I am? Is that change a moral change?”
I anticipate your positive answer to both of the physicalist questions.
The cyborg thing and even drugs such as Versed are a variant on the same theme.
~Max
You caught me again - “really” was superfluous and I used “you” in two different senses. The question should have been like this: if there were such a machine as to scan your entire physical body down to the smallest detail, zap you into a billion little pieces, and reassemble you in another machine in the exact same manner, from a billion different pieces in a different place, is the assembled body you?
It seems like you got the point. Now for a followup question. Does zapping away your original body constitute an immoral action? Is it immoral from the vantage point of the original “you”? How about the machine operator, or the advertiser?
I ask because it would seem the new “you” does not care what happens to the old “you”. But at the same time in the Versed debate, you argued that the doctor, with prior informed consent, might be morally culpable when inflicting pain upon the patient and then forcibly removing the memory of such pain.
~Max
Sure, without the exceptions, I don’t see property rights ever trumping human rights, myself…
Depends on the organ. Generally yes, a bit, I imagine. But then so does every other life experience, so it’s not particularly special.
So you admit your reasoning is just ad hoc reactionary response at this point? How the heck is that honest debate?
If you don’t actually know the Devil’s arguments, don’t be his advocate.
Dennett has quite a bit to say about intuition…
I wouldn’t care about the former identity of my new kidney if it was properly sourced. It’s an identity change, but not a moral challenge.
And if I *willingly *accept even a *radical *identity-altering transplant (say, a partial brain transplant) there’s no moral quandary to me.
Please explain how they’re extensions, I don’t really see the chain…
(Note: I’m not MrDibble and can’t speak for him. I’m also not his clone, as far as I know.)
From the point of view of the ‘new you’, the new you is the same you as the old you. And, conveniently, there’s not any other spare versions of you left lying around to contest your claim. (Which is not always the case in these thought experiments.)
If you agree to the process, and everything turns out as you wished, and everyone involved is a materialist, then why would there be a problem?
From any reasonable point of view the new you is the old you, and in transporter hypotheticals there’s typically no pain involved in the process for anyone to worry about, forgotten or not. Unless this transporter disassembles your molecules with a hacksaw or something?
Assuming I willingly stepped on the pad, aware of what would happen, it’s no less moral than any other suicide (i.e. perfectly moral)
I don’t blame them.
The actual analogy would be if you transported me into a new body, the old me stayed behind, and then some time later you killed the old me after the fact against his will to ensure there was only one of me (I believe there’s a Sci Fi story exactly like that). *That *would be immoral, (and unecessary, as the “mes” would have diverged anyway) .
Painless willing suicide here to continue living there is not the same thing.
I am trying to show differences between Dualism and non-dualist thought so as to discover whether a rational comparison might favor one over the other. If there is some sort of inconsistency in a non-dualist theory that would certainly help my defense, but that is not the express purpose of my line of inquiry.
Perhaps I should stop calling it Dualism and start calling it Moral Dualism, because I am of the opinion that Dualism itself is nonfalsifiable. My defense is not that Dualism is true, but that the leap of faith is justified if morals based on Dualism are “better” than non-dualist moral systems.
I don’t do this because I want to push my views on others. I defend Dualism as a devil’s advocate and take up the debate so as to convince myself.
~Max