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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   23112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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I'm a Dennett fan, but I can agree it's a hard problem; the hard problem, even. But even so, there are answers which are clearly incorrect. I'd argue all forms of dualism fall into that category, but the story puts forward a particularly nonsensical variant in which there is a soul... but it doesn't do anything. It thinks it does -- the story talks a lot about putting on a performance of what the characters would have done if they couldn't perceive the future -- but it in fact does not, because every last atom in their bodies behaves identically to how it otherwise would. The soul has no causal or explanatory role on any observation except the subjective experience of perceiving the future. Why would it work like this? Obviously such a thing would never evolve -- it can't provide any fitness benefit since it doesn't do anything. Why would god or whoever make people this way? It's not like the soul is responsible for the body's actions: those were set in stone when the universe was created, and, anyway, that would require the soul to do something, which it never does.

Dualism is very sneaky. Like you said, it makes very little logical sense; it almost certainly doesn't describe anything real. But it's so hard to get over our instinctive belief in it. It can show up in many ways, some of them quite subtle.

My personal bugbear is the Doomsday Argument, which many rationalists believe, including Scott. But for a statistical argument like this one to work, there has to be some actual selection process, not metaphorical, not a clever turn of phrase, but a really truly actually real random lottery. And such a process requires the absurd form of dualism that you've mentioned. Your soul has to be presented with the deterministic universe as a whole, with all the humans that will ever live already set in stone, and will then "find itself" (the obscuring language Wikipedia uses) in one of the humans. And which one you inhabit can't have a physical effect on anything, because otherwise how could future humans have been available as a choice?

In an experiment where you create a simulated universe in your basement, flip a coin to determine whether it will simulate 2 entities or 20, and then ask entity #2 what it thinks the coin flip was, of course it should say 50/50. Repeating the experiment will show it's miscalibrated if it says anything else. Now, if duality holds, then perhaps some soul came along and is "surprised" to be inhabiting entity #2 in a universe that could have up to 20, and maybe that soul is subjectively correct to believe in the Doomsday Argument. But like the main character of Story of Your Life, that realization can't be shared with anyone else. When you ask the entity what it thinks, it can't give a different response based on whether this time it's souled or a p-zombie. So it has to give the averaged answer: 50/50.

Despite the resultant absurdity, the idea of "finding yourself" as a particular human - that your awareness is separable from the body you inhabit - still survives in a Wikipedia article. And in Scott's writings. It's embarrassing that rationalism isn't enough to conquer this trope.

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