Or there could be one great universal (or multiversal) spirit, and what we perceive as “souls” are merely punctures in its ectomembrane through which our minds transceive our Qi.
I literally made it up for the sake of argument. I don’t like being the arbiter of what happens in the spirit world, but I want to be certain that this philosophy is or is not the most pragmatic.
At this point intuition is out the window. My intuition doesn’t extend to the gathering of souls interpretation. Before that level of detail? Sure.
~Max
Complicated is right.
So firstly, let’s review the fact that, I, at least, both have a cognition and my cognition experiences linear time. This is yet more proof that my physical brain stores my cognition and not some dumb soul, because “my” soul doesn’t even share chronological continuity with my cognition. There’s really no connection there at all.
And you want to know what I think of when I hear that souls/god/elvis/whoever doesn’t experience mortal time? Books. Books and movies. In a book in my hand time runs linearly from the first page to the last page, and yet I hold all of that time at once in my hands. I can flip forward and backwards through the pages looking at moments out of chronological order, all that. That’s an entity living outside time.
In your model souls are just dudes doing literary review. Reality is just a big book they’re flipping through, citing the book to debate whether Frodo or Samwise is a cooler hero, and whether Sauron or Saruman was a more interesting villain. The connection between a given soul and a given human character is specious at best - it’s not like the souls are the authors or anything. They’re just observers. They’re just fanboys arguing on the internet.
How any of this fanboy arguing provides moral imperatives for Frodo or Samwise to act differently eludes me. Frodo and Sam don’t even know they’re in a book!
I agree with Humpty Dumpty… I think? My words mean whatever I want them to mean but obviously when two people communicate they have to agree on meanings or it just doesn’t work out. This is as true in philosophy as any other instance.
If you have a definition for self awareness, I can start using that. My definition is the ability to identify something as self or non-self. Within the context of dualism that means linked to the soul or not linked to the soul. Consciousness and sentience are properties of the soul so I can test if something is self or non-self by applying stimuli and observing whether that produces the expected qualia. I’m not quite sure myself and that definition is probably flawed, but it is a definition.
So an amputated arm - that is my arm in the sense that this is my house but it is no longer me as in myself. On Versed - that is my body but it is not, for a time, myself. Part of my brain is surgically replaced with a cyborg brain - not sure if it’s me or not. Depending on how the implant works it could still be me - or I could find myself unable to feel parts of my body.
~Max
The thing that is typing these words into this browser is being driven by something that is able to identify itself as a self.
This means that that particular self is able to causally influence events in the physical world. (Specifically, it’s making my fingers push keyboard keys.)
In your model, are souls able to causally influence the physical world, or not?
I can dig it. Consciousness as the physical processes of the brain is different than the definition I was using. This sense of the word doesn’t apply to what I was saying when describing dualism. And consciousness in this physical sense still exists for dualists.
But the physical consciousness wasn’t the basis of morality. Qualia was. It seems there are no qualia in physicalism. What is the basis of morality then?
~Max
I’ll take a hint and ask, how do you define cognition?
~Max
There are several different possible moral systems. Off the top of my head:
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God/Mommy/Teacher/Cop/President told me what is good! This is the Obedience model. It’s how you get people who think bigotry and hatred are morally justified.
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What feels good and is fun is good! The Hedonism model. Most children revert to this when they think they can get away with it. This isn’t generally considered to be a very good moral system.
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What feels good and is fun is good (and I have to deal with the consequences)! The basic Pragmatism model. This gets you people who are pretty decent, because unpopularity sucks. Also jail sucks too.
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What feels good and is fun is good (and I have to deal with the consequences (and life’s better in general if everyone’s doing well))! The advanced Pragmatism model. It recognizes that dystopias suck too.
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What feels good and is fun is good (and I have to deal with the consequences (and life’s better in general if everyone’s doing well (especially since I’m capable of empathy!!)))! The Empathic Pragmatist model. May be the best model.
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Be nice to other people, stupid! The Empathic Pragmatist model as implemented via the Obedience model. Close enough for government work.
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Alien Soul things are watching me while I pee! This…I’m not sure what this is.
This thing behind my eyes? The thing that’s looking out of them and typing words into this browser? That’s cognition. That’s the baseline. Any definition that doesn’t include that is invalid in my eyes.
Google provides this definition for cognition: “The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.” That seems like a good summary; you have input through senses or some other input, you process the data, you draw conclusions from the data, you react to the data. Cognition is the act of doing this; the actual processing. The execution of the program in action.
It’s probably worth noting that I don’t quite equate cognition and self-awareness. Self-awareness is what it sounds like: the thing has to be aware of itself as a thinking entity. Mere cognition doesn’t require that, necessarily.
I’m actually pretty tolerant in what I’d call cognition. Okay, very tolerant in what I’d call cognition. Monkeys seem to have a form of cognition, based on their behavior and ability to learn. Dogs too. Cats. Mice. You don’t have to have a complex brain to have cognition, and you don’t have to be very smart.
I’m so tolerant that I’m willing to assign the label to certain processes in computer programs. Simulations of reactive behavior, even the simple routines that drive the behavior of computer-controlled video game characters, could be called a form of basic cognition in my opinion. (Especially if the character learns.) Some of them even have a rudimentary self-awareness.
TL;DR: cognition is a behavior. It’s something that something does. It’s not a magic substance available to spirits only.
Oh, and as you might be able to infer based on me saying that video game characters can have it, I don’t consider cognition inherently precious. It’s not bad to kill humans because they have cognition; it’s bad to kill humans because they’re human, and human society works a lot better when the humans in it don’t have to worry about being randomly killed, and it’s better for me to live in a society where I’m not likely to be killed. That’s why killing humans is bad.
I don’t extend that to everything else with cognition - human society can do pretty good even if a mouse is killed. Or a rat, or dog, or a cow. Whether they have cognition or not.
My definition of sentience is different from yours. Sentience is the ability to experience things as opposed to simply reacting. It is important to morality because a reaction is hardly moral or immoral. I’ll drop my definition from now on when dealing with non-dualism.
Suppose I have a hammer, and I strike your hand with it. My brain causes the muscles in my arm to relax, which in turn causes the arm to fall due to gravity and the hammer with it. The hammer strikes your hand, and the shock causes a signal to go up into your brain. This signal causes a chain reaction, not fully understood but purely physical. At some point down the line there are a number of neurons firing, and their arrangement and connections correspond to a memory map for behavior. After a threshold is reached, the brain in aggregate sends signals to your diaphragm, throat and mouth. These in turn cause you to produce the sound, “Wh-”. The neurons keep firing and reaching thresholds and you produce the sentence: “What the hell, Max?”
Whence do we find your sentience?
There’s a good chance I got most of that wrong. Feel free to modify the hypothetical as needed.
~Max
Sentience is a property of the computer programming running on the grey matter of the brain. Those neurons firing, and such.
Consider the browser window you’re looking at. If you opened up your computer/tablet/phone, pried open the hard drive with a screwdriver, searched through the inside of the broken case with a fine-toothed comb, you would not find the browser window. You wouldn’t even find it if you opened up your executable files with a text editor. It’s just not there. The browser window only exists in the actual active processes that are making it happen in real time.
Thusly, sentience. Dismantling the brain down to its component neurons isn’t going reveal a sentience particle, because that’s just not how things like that work.
1, 6, and 7 are compatible with dualism as I am defending it in this thread (before the gathering of souls thing, which is just 7).
2-5 require some definition of “feeling”. I’m not sure how to “feel” in a world described by physics. You can go around observing people react to “good” and “bad” stimuli, and establish a behavior of “feeling good” and “feeling bad”. But how can you put moral culpability in there? What happens when someone doesn’t fit your pattern?
~Max
If I open my computer with a screwdriver, I will “see” an exact picture of a browser window in the video buffer somewhere in memory. I don’t even need to open the computer, I can just plug the video cable into my monitor.
Even if we were talking about some other process, deep down in the hard drive there is a list of instructions that describes how to construct the picture of a browser window to the dot. Those instructions are highly fragmented (split up into distant places on the disk), but they are there.
I like talking about computers. Go on.
~Max
When you say “souls don’t provide us with consciousness”, this is a bit of a trick because in dualism the soul is the self. You can’t say souls don’t provide us with consciousness because in dualism, “us” means “our souls”. A soul need not provide itself with anything it already has.
If you meant to say “souls don’t provide our physical bodies with consciousness”, I would agree. And they aren’t supposed to, either.
If you meant to say “souls don’t provide our physical bodies with physical processes in the brain”, then I would also agree. This exists without souls, and demonstrably so.
You are making the same mistake I am accused of making - trying to disprove dualism by applying non-dualist definitions to a dualist argument.
~Max
Where does the morality derive from, though? 1 explicitly requires an outside authority to tell you what’s moral or not. I’m not really seeing that in you model - and I’m not seeing how the presence or absence of souls impacts that. 6 also doesn’t mention souls - you seem to be asserting based on literally nothing that we need to be nice to souls and NOT people, but there’s no way to tell if a soul is present and no reasons given for why souls matter specifically. And 7 is nonsensical to me and provides no moral guidance anyway.
Most people don’t have to be told how to feel emotions; they happen naturally, as part of the cognition happening in their physical brains. And as for the rest of it, well, that comes down to which moral system you’re talking about.
2 doesn’t worry about what other people think or feel.
3 observes how the world around reacts to things, and worries about that. Understanding feelings is only a means to an end; you avoid making people mad not because you particularly care that they’re mad, but rather because you don’t like getting punched in the face.
4 observes the world even harder, but still is worrying about cause and effect more than emotion. You want everyone well-fed and cared for because you have to live in the city that everyone’s sharing. You’re part of that society, and life is just better when everybody’s happy, for purely pragmatic reasons such as having clean streets, friendly people, and fewer torch-wielding mobs disrupting traffic.
5 is that halcyon state where you actually have observed enough people to be able to intuit their emotions, and your cognitive processes helpfully give you that information in the form of the emotions themselves. This makes it really, really easy to engage in actions that produce good outcomes, because you don’t have to be so pragmatic all the time; you can be selfish instead - helping other people gives you a direct emotional reward. It’s a cheap high, with positive outcomes to boot.
Honest, 1 and 7 (and 2) are basically shit as moral systems go, and 6 only works at all because it’s trying to imitate 5. Real morality requires you to be aware of how the world works, because morality is about how you operate within the world you’re in.
It is similarily a category mistake to assume your soul has a body and is aware of or reacts to its environment in the spiritual realm. It is a mistake to even assume such a thing as “environment” exists over there.
You only have one foot in my philosophy of dualism. You act as if a body could argue against its soul, and you represent the body.
Remember that the soul is, well it is you. This is a core premise of dualism, any form. A soul looking back at your life is a soul looking back at its own life. You are the soul, and you are calling yourself a parasite of your own body.
Even in the gathering of souls interpretation, each soul holds a record of its own life.
~Max
Reminds me of people that insist that the pyramids must have been a creation of aliens because Man just isn’t capable of such feats all by himself.
In NORMAL dualism souls provide people with consciousness. In YOUR dualism they don’t because you explicitly said that souls can’t influence the physical world and while I may have missed it I haven’t seen you back down from that.
Since I’m all about the computer analogies, consider the soul, the brain, the body, and the browser I’m typing in to all be separate things that transmit information to one another via cords. (The cords analogize to any form of communication you like.) If the thought starts in the soul, then the soul has to have a cable to the brain, and from thence to the body in order to communicate the text of this post to the body and from it down another cable to my keyboard. And your model has cut that cord. If you don’t explicitly allow the soul to be physically altering the physical world then there’s no connection there, no cable, and nothing in my soul can be typing this post. And when I say “altering the physical world” we’re talking literal magic. Literal miracles. Happening constantly. Right under cognitive scientists’ noses.
That’s what we’re talking here. If the soul isn’t magically manipulating the brain, then the soul has nothing to do with anything anyone does.
That’s fine, but it’s a different form of consciousness than the one I know how to base morals on. There’s no agency.
~Max