Of course dualism is falsifiable - beer falsifies it.
And how are dualist moral systems better than non-dualist moral systems?
That is exactly the next step in this inquiry. What if the machine malfunctioned and the original “you” survived being zapped, reports extreme pain, and appears on all the evening holo-news decrying teleportation booths as immoral murder machines?
We need not limit ourselves to sci-fi. There is a real question as to whether guillotines or injected death are as humane as they were advertised.
~Max
I imagine there would be a drop in teleporter stock in that case.
As for morality, if the person operating/managing the teleporter honestly didn’t expect that to happen, then they’re not really culpable (unless they stood there pointing and laughing as they watched, or something). Afterwards morality would require that they make it clear to potential users that there are risks involved, and let them make their own decision as to whether to use the service. If the client is aware and willing to take the risk, then all good.
On other words, it’s the same moral quandary airlines face.
Would souls help or hurt these scenarios, in your opinion?
I must be falling behind in the thread… I think some posts are being marked as read before I read them. I’ll address this shortly.
This is the point of the thread. I have thus far been presented with a form of physicalism where there are degrees of self and I am told qualia or experience does not exist. Having “degrees of self” makes it much harder, possibly impossible to evaluate the morality of events where the injured party physically cannot complain. This does not sit well with me - it is dangerously close to a system of morals where the ends justify the means and morality is assigned after the fact, and is therefore almost useless in-the-moment.
The truth of physicalism I need not decide, but it certainly runs against my intuitions. I will be heading to a library to read Dennett and find out why.
~Max
Qualia =/= experience.
I don’t see how having degrees of selfhood negates the sentience of injured entities.
Yes, the physicalist says that there are degrees of self-ness. It goes against the assumptions of our language, and in some ways against some of our intuitions, but those are limitations of our language and intuitions, not of physicalism.
You have mentioned several aspects that you consider to be problems for physicalism somehow, but so far you haven’t convinced anyone here that anything you’ve mentioned is actually a problem. IMO, you seem to be dragging some of the dualist ideas (a “soul”) into a physicalist world and that is causing you confusion, but you just need to leave the dualist ideas behind completely and then there are no inconsistencies.
Yet there are inconsistencies with a dualist approach in the very examples you cited.
So you may pretend to accept that something is true because it leads to you to better behavior? I don’t know how that works.
I want to accept things that are true and then just choose to behave morally without it being propped up on falsehoods.
I don’t really know about degrees of self, and don’t really think that removing a person’s ability to complain makes things more moral. I’m just confused what you think souls add.
Presume, for a moment, that everything you imagine a soul does is instead done by the human brain, with the following exceptions:
- brain-minds don’t survive the loss of the body.
- brain-minds don’t exit the body.
- brain-minds are effected by things done to the body.
If, other than those things, brain-minds are functionally equivalent to soul-minds, what moral changes are introduced by introducing souls?
Well, with my form of Dualism the new “you” is actually a zombie so it makes less sense to step into the booth to begin with. Maybe as a form of suicide but not as an option to “teleport” your “self”.
~Max
Right - which casts serious doubts on the morality of any moral system that relies on whether people are arbitrarily declared to have one of these fictional ‘soul’ things.
The dude who walks out of the the other end of the transporter is in literally every observable way the same person who walked in. His thoughts, beliefs, actions, ability to feel and react to pain - all the same. All that has happened is that he, like all accountants, has now been arbitrarily designated as a “p-zombie” and marked for torture and murder by the dualist set. He is no longer human, in their arbitrary eyes, so evil can be done to him, despite the fact that he’s obviously aware and able to feel pain.
This don’t feel right to me, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
Now, if souls were actually real, then there wouldn’t be any of this made-up p-zombie bullshit, and if the real souls also didn’t carry through when somebody was teleported, then you wouldn’t end up with zombies, you’re end up with corpses. Which would have the effect of really tanking the stock prices.
Oooohh, you hadn’t explained your view earlier. I assumed that the new person created was every bit a person as the old one, therefore the machine has created a new “soul.”
But you’re saying that this new instance of me is a zombie, that it has no self-awareness, even though it tells you that it does and acts in every way just like the old “me.” And therefore you feel this lack of “soul” means that we don’t need to consider its feelings in deciding morality. Man, that’s fucked up.
I will note that all this really depends on what souls do - which as far as I can see has not been made clear.
If souls control (or even influence) the behavior of the human they’re attached to, then p-zombies are impossible. Losing the soul would cause an obvious change in behavior, or death.
If souls merely follow fully autonomous material humans around without contributing to their minds and behavior, then souls are superfluous and irrelevent, and p-zombies are…still impossible, because I don’t think it even makes a shred of sense to say that a person without self-awareness could plausibly act like people do, and that’s the actual definition of a p-zombie.
Souls don’t “do” anything to the physical world so there would be no difference. Your usage of “brain-mind” is synonymous with my usage of “brain”. You are asking the wrong question.
~Max
Is the right question “Why should we give even the slightest crap about these ‘soul’ things if they don’t do anything?”
I suppose it bears asking explicitly:
If I were to say to you, “I prefer not to be tortured, thanks,” would that be my brain saying that, or my soul saying that?
That is… a good point. It doesn’t sit well with me, either.
I will have to adjust the form of Dualism I am defending to as to disallow p-zombies. This means, yes, physical events can cause new souls to come into existence in the spiritual realm. The receiving machine creates a new soul in the spiritual realm. Conveniently this works for birth, too.
As such I also adjust the dualist’s approach to the teleporter problem. His response is more similar to MrDibble’s in [POST=21607494]post #22[/POST]. It is no more or less moral than other forms of suicide, excepting the positive implications of creating a new, identical person at the other end of the teleporter. To an external observer you may as well have teleported, although at an individual level you must give informed consent. If the information required to make informed consent is not available (nobody knew the machine could malfunction), just like other natural events, there is nobody to blame for the resulting harm. If someone withheld information that is a misrepresentation on their part.
~Max
So souls are a side effect of brain activity…are they still eternal?
Because if they are, then the transporter would result in two souls, one of which is presumably annoyed to find itself floating in the void rather than arriving at its destination. The moral implications of this are…weird.
Suppose I had the ability to analyze and modify people’s brains from a distance, without them or anyone else noticing. Am I entitled, by virtue of these superpowers, to sit in a park and analyze and possibly modify the brains of any passerby as if I were some sort of moral police? Why so, or I hope, why not?
Joe would still, to a degree, be the same person after I messed with his brain. But he would not be able to raise a defense because the parts of Joe that were “wronged” are unable to complain.
~Max
If it turns out Dualism is functionally equivalent to physicalism, Dualism falls to the argument from simplicity.
~Max
I keep on arguing because I’m not convinced. There’s a limit to how many ad hoc changes I will make before admitting I’m licked. I like the debate and I want to be convinced one way or the other.
I will be reading Dennett’s book at the next opportunity.
~Max
So let’s establish where we are, then. I myself am not sure, because I’m not really the one holding the image-of-dualism-under-discussion in my head; I’m the one taking potshots at it. And it does seem to be a moving target. 
So the theory is that there’s a supernatural plane. Fair enough.
The theory is that there are these ‘soul’ things that exist on the supernatural plane. Fair enough.
‘Souls’ have six eyes, seven horns, and breathe fire. No wait, that’s something else. Souls…wait, what do they do again? My brain is telling me that there are at least a couple ideas under discussion:
-
They are the mind behind the brain, providing consciousness and thought to humans. Without souls humans stand around and drool, or die. There are therefore a massive number of constantly operating magical interventions in brain matter to make the ‘puppet strings’ work, which science hasn’t noticed because scientists are doody-heads. (There are also serious concerns regarding things like booze, which we can get into if this is actually the model.)
-
Souls are do not have a causal connection to the brain, and thus are completely irrelevant to consciousness and behavior as observed in everyday life, and as it is experienced by humans. They’re mostly like ectoplasmic barnacles that adhere to humans and ride around on them, providing the humans no benefit.*
- There’s a big caveat here, because barnacle-souls could in theory provide one benefit - they could operate as an offsite backup, which after the person dies is used to ‘reboot’ the mind in a different environment. (Probably hell.) Of course with the level of discussion we’re having in this thread we’re obligated to note that this doesn’t actually help the human at all - it just creates a new spirit human later that thinks it’s the original resurrected. The original human, the physical one, is still very dead.
I’m honestly not sure which version of ‘soul’ we’re discussing at this point.
For either of the above soul-versions it’s worth wondering when and how they come to exist. Two obvious approaches are that every soul predates its human, and merely attaches to it at birth and separates from it upon death. If this is the case then a particularly spry soul could notice when its deconstructed body had gone through a transporter and reattach to the new copy body on the other end. This works less well if the transporter fails to disintegrate the original first or produces multiple output copies simultaneously.
The other obvious approach regarding souls is that they’re dynamically produced as a side effect of brain activity. This would handily solve transporter issues, though the soul at the source of the transporter would not end up attached to the copies and would presumably die. Or if such souls are eternal you could end up with one person spawning lots of copies of his soul at different stages of life each time he transports (killing himself in the process).
And on a completely different subject, I’m really not sure how any of these souls are supposed to impact morality. Every way I can think of the souls would either have no effect on morality (as compared to materialist moral models), or possibly would even allow more loopholes to be punched in it, because if people live on after death why is murder immoral?