This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
That comic is wonderful, :D. Thank you for sharing.
As a Catholic I take the soul as an article of faith. It hasn't been adduced or supported by any scientific evidence. It'll probably indefinitely stay contained within the realm of philosophy and theology at best. The trend of the evidence has been in one direction. I'm not sure uploading human consciousness is something to get anymore excited about than reincarnation though. With WBE's for instance, you could in theory simulate a brain up to behavioral isomorphism of all it's inputs and outputs. Provided it be fully scaled up in complexity with the brain it's emulating, it indeed would be every bit as real and just as complex as the brain. Neuron by neuron, atom for atom. But that's in the same sense I could say I have two water bottles sitting in the refrigerator. They are identical as far as their material constituents go even though the tetrahedral geometry of the arrangement of water molecules will differ. But in neither are they the same in the sense that taking a drink out of one of them will cause water in the other bottle to disappear. Which is the kind of thing people are asking for.
People can't think clearly about the ontology of identity a lot of the time because it isn't always clear how one should think of it. People's folk notions of it are incorrect as you said, but even we've been discussing it at the level of a folk notion that only approximates reality because it's easier for us to understand each other this way. When you dispel the idea of personal identity as one of human being's being made up of these persistent billiard balls bumping around but get used to thinking of it in terms of the ontology reality itself seems to use, the correct frame of mind is to think of identity the way it's described by Special Relativity, which is to say points in space-time that are related to each other causally. I'd push back on the idea that when we wake up, we can be thought of as waking up as a reconstruction of sorts. There's a physical continuity between the me right now and the me of one second ago. The me of one second ago isn't dead per se, but it no longer exists either. But my thinking on this issue I'll readily concede isn't completely clear to me. Science can definitively rule out a notion of personal identity that depends on your being composed of the 'same' atoms because modern physics has taken the concept of "same atom" and thrown it out the window. Subatomic particles themselves do not possess a sense of personal identity. It's completely, experimentally ruled out, which makes it difficult for anyone to speculate about where personal identity is located.
The brain doesn't exactly repeat itself. The state of your brain one second from now is not the state of your brain one second ago. The neural connections don't all change every second, but there are enough changes every second that the brain's state isn't cyclic, not over the course of a human lifetime. With every little fragment of memory new you lay down and every thought that pops in and out of short-term memory and everything that changes the visual field of your visual cortex, you ensure that you never repeat yourself exactly as before.
Over the course of a single second (not seven years, which people mistakenly think all the atoms in the body are replaced), the joint position of all the atoms in your brain will change far enough away from what it was before such that there's no overlap with the previous joint amplitude distribution. The brain doesn't repeat itself. In just a single second, you will end up being comprised of a completely different, non-overlapping volume of configuration space. And the quantum configuration space is the most fundamentally known reality, at least according to what our best physical theory says. Even if quantum mechanics turns out not to be truly fundamental and there's something deeper, it has already finished superseding the notion of individual particles.
And actually, the time for 'you' to be comprised of a completely different volume of configuration space is much less than a second. That time is the product of all the individual changes in your brain put together. It'll be less than a millisecond (even less than a femtosecond). And then there's the point to consider that the physically real amplitude distribution is over a configuration space of all the particles in the universe. 'You' are just a factored subspace of that distribution. This means that the idea that you can equate your personal continuity with the identity of any physically real constituent of your existence is false and any attempts to rehabilitate that folk conception of personal identity is a dead end. You are not the same 'you' because you are made of the same atoms. You have no overlap with the physical constituents of yourself from even one nanosecond ago. There is continuity of information, but not equality of parts. This is where I think personal identity will ultimately be located. The new factor over the subspace looks a lot like the old you and that isn't by coincidence because the flow of time is lawful.
Whatever makes you feel that your present is 'connected' to your past it has nothing to do with an identity of physically fundamental constituents over time (hence why I think the Eastern metaphysics of reincarnation is bullshit).
He's not the only one to do this. Peter van Inwagen attempted to do something similar at one point. I remember reading his books but I can't fully recall the details. The subset of Christian materialists is something that's caused me to raise an eyebrow and I've always found it interesting. You're correct that you don't need to buy Polkinghorne's thesis to explain personal identity. In fact I don't buy it at all. But if you're a non-denominational Christian or something of his particular stripe, you need what he's selling or something close to it to preserve personal identity in the classical sense, given what science says about it currently.
We very much do agree on what's important about family. The rest of your overall comment leaves me with some interesting things to consider and think about. I wouldn't want to respond prematurely on it.
Thank you, and I appreciate you taking the time to have this discussion.
I'm not as demanding as these people, but if they want a version of "continuity" that strict, they're likely out of luck. In a very important sense, I consider it a good thing that changes made to one copy of me won't necessarily affect the other. The whole point of making backups of me, or of one's wedding photos, is that damage or destruction to one won't delete the other.
You can, of course, achieve such ends far easier on a digital substrate. Google Photos does version control, it is also possible to provide exactly the same input to two digital copies of me. Assuming the hardware and software has error-correction, we should get indistinguishable outcomes. I just don't see this as all that important, my copies are not beholden to grow and develop in the exact same manner as the "original".
"Reconstruction" is a fuzzy word, so if it helps things, I would say it's analogous to putting a computer to sleep and rebooting it. Windows might update, the time on the clock might change, but for all practical purposes it is the same PC, even if it differs slightly when you zoom in very hard.
I can reasonably expect my pc to not change overnight. But in a year? Two years? Five? It might have had some/all it's components overhauled or replaced. At that point, the question of whether or not it's the "same" pc becomes arbitrary (or more arbitrary than it already was!), or at least context dependent. As long as it still has a valid Windows license, my files are still there etc, I'll call it my PC.
So it goes for the most personal of all computing platforms: myself.
Other than that, I agree with your claims regarding the physics of things.
As always, a pleasure, and if you want to continue our discussion when you have thought my claims over, I'll be around. While we'll likely never get on the same page about beliefs in a "soul", it's been enjoyable nonetheless.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link