Maroczy - Korchnoi ?
Friday, July 2, 2010 at 12:24AM The Hungarian grandmaster Geza Maroczy died in 1951, but on some reports, his chess career didn't end there. He took about 34 years off, and then, with the help of a medium named Robert Rollans, played a game against Viktor Korchnoi that lasted until 1993. (He lost, but hey - he was rusty. You can replay the game here.)
A reader of this blog, "guitarcameron", mentioned this article on the game, in which it the author concludes that it "strongly suggests that consciousness survives physical death and lives on in a spirit world." Should we believe this?
It is in fact difficult to give an answer to the question, posed this straightforwardly. For one thing, while we have the game, we don't have access to the questions and answers that were posed to "Maroczy", which constitute part of the case for its really being him. Second, there are many different levels of belief. Taking the game as proof of post-mortem existence in a spirit world demands a much greater evidential standard than taking it as confirmation of that hypothesis, or of making it plausible. A third issue, obvious but extremely important, is that how one is inclined to evaluate such a claim will be based not only on the evidence in some "stand-alone" way, but on one's background beliefs.
To elaborate on the last point, and to borrow an example from one of my first philosophy teachers, imagine that someone falls onto the subway tracks as the train is pulling into the station, and the train manages to come to a screeching halt inches before killing him. Suppose that among the spectators there's a Christian, a Hindu and an atheist. The Christian says "Thank God!", the Hindu says "Good karma!" and the atheist remarks "Wow, that was lucky!"
So it will be here. Someone who thinks there's nothing more to reality than the subject matter of the natural sciences will be inclined to an alternative explanation of the Korchnoi-"Maroczy" game, no matter how good the evidence might be. A New Agey person might find this story pretty ordinary, just the sort of thing one would expect on his worldview. A Christian (or any other traditional monotheist) might believe that the medium was having real experiences, but not take it for granted that Maroczy was on the other end of the "phone"; it might have been a demonic being, for instance, doing so to draw people away from a biblically-based trust in God over to occultism.
Note that neither the Christian nor even the New Ager is forced to say that the event was with something "spooky". Rather, it's that both, in different ways, are open to a non-worldly explanation in light of their prior ontological commitments. (An ontology is simply an inventory of the kinds of things that exist. If one already thinks that there are non-physical spirits, then there's no a priori objection to Maroczy's existing in that way.) Indeed, I myself am a Christian and think it's a lot more likely that the game is a fraud. "Maroczy's" play was good but hardly amazing for a 7-8 year long "correspondence" game, and the medium hardly needed to seek a GM's help to produce credible moves. Had the game been played in a single sitting, the "Maroczy" = Maroczy conclusion would be far more reasonable. (Or at least that some sort of immaterial agent was involved. I'm strongly disinclined to think that human beings after death and before judgment are playing chess.)
* Recommended reading, for those interested in thinking about this topic further: Beyond Death, by JP Moreland and Gary Habermas. The authors argue to, but do not assume, a Christian point of view, but consider evidence from reincarnation stories and near-death experiences along the way.
Reader Comments (48)
‘During the opening phase Maróczy showed weakness,’ Korchnoi commented after the 27th move. ‘His play is old-fashioned.'
To my mind, this attempt at making the scam 'realistic' just gives the game away. I can't imagine the spirit of a GM, with all the time in the world on his hands post-physical death, would devote no time to modern opening theory and practice. If you say he was in some way 'prevented' from so doing by his situation, that begins to sound like some vision of permanent solitary confinement hell. The transcendent has been reduced to being depressingly mundane, even cruel.
To put it another way, if real, 'Maroczy' would demonstrate either one extreme or the other. Either he would be super-theoretician with loads of heavenly novelties up his sleeve, or too busy contemplating the infinite glory of the universe to spend time on trivialities such as chess.
a point on the afterlife...
I think we should go on our own experiences (not what people said 2000 years ago for eg).
So, what is the closest Ive been to death ?
That was before being born...
What did I "experience" in that "state"?
Nothingness
When my body dies and goes back to the "ashes and dust" where it came from, why should it be any different to the time before I was born ?
For me that is the "logical" way of looking at it... its the closest thing to evidence I think we have on this subject.
As an atheist Christian, I'm prone to dismiss it on ontological grounds alone, but there's an interesting question in there that's not tied to one's ontological beliefs: What are the points to consider in trying to identify a game of chess with the player? This reminded me of the mysterious "Mozart" player Nigel Short played on the internet a couple of years ago. Short claimed it was Bobby Fischer based on his style and strength of play and a couple of offhand comments on games and tournaments during the game. It'd be interesting to see how well strong level players are at identifying games with their creators.
>Chunky Rook: What's an atheist christian?
@cramnic: That reasoning might be evidence against some positions, such as those that claim the pre-existence of a fully rational soul. But to those who views that don't claim that, it's question-begging. That I didn't have any experiences before my birth (or conception) isn't exactly surprising if I didn't exist then, but it isn't any evidence (or offer any rational support to the claim) that I won't have any experiences after my death. (Of course I won't have any if I don't exist, but we don't need any analogical reasoning to figure that out. If I cease to exist, there's no one there to have an experience.)
@Dennis
Ok let me add a predicate that should make my arguement a little clearer:
The "soul" (also: "mind" or whatever we're calling it) is the "physical brain"
for eg:
*if you damage certain parts of the brain, peoples temprement and personality changes (their "soul")
*if you damage other parts they can lose long term or short term memory (their "soul")
*there was a case of a man who damaged his brain in a spot (I think a nail went thru, so it was in a small precise spot and he forgot I think it was the number 7)
*if someone takes drugs it changes the state of their "soul"
All these are "physical" things... the brain is a "physical" thing.
So if the brain is cramated along with my body when i die (ie the physical thing that was my soul), we come back to my original argument, that now the brain "soul" is in pretty much the same state as it was before i was born, therefore, I dont expect to live on in any sort of consciousness.
A side note, I think the word "physical" causes a lot of confusion... (it seems to to say things are either physical or this other category: mystical and magic)
Why arent my thoughts physical ? (they are in time, space and i can feel them)
All my thoughts are the sum of:
words or sounds (simply relations between sounds as stored in the brain),
feelings (responses of the body),
visual (from the visual pathways in the brain)
For eg, people distinguish between "physical pain" and "mental pain"...
I think they are both "physicial", infact usually what people refer to as "mental pain" is always expressed by the body (eg head ache, heart, stomach, lungs, "lump in the throat") etc, etc
@fromoort
atheist Christian
is a "now atheist" (was previously baptised Christian, I dont think you can undo it, unless the church ex-communicates you). :P
>cramnic: What, is it like some sort of branding that leaves a permanent, physical imprint on you?
I ran the game through Rybka, which clearly bears out Korchnoi's assessment of the game, as quoted in the article. My depth-13, 50-PV run tabbed White as making an aggregate 3.51 pawns' worth of mistakes in moves 9--19, but playing the Rook endgame nearly flawlessly. The latter jives with what we know of Maroczy, but the former is out-of-character according to other data I have---Maroczy was exceptionally accurate for his era in all phases of the game. Of course, it's unwise to draw conclusions from such a small sample---one could easily retort that anyone could get lost in the modern gambit treatment of the Winawer French.
Cramnic, the place I like to take your argument is embodied by this NY Times article, and this Sci. American article by noted MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark. Personally, I conjecture the former's problem is solved by replacing standard calculus probability with "algorithmic probability", and I disbelieve the latter on religious grounds. But allowing Tegmark's argument sheds light on yours. Namely, there can possibly exist configurations of matter that embody memories of your entire life. They might even be in a cellular-automaton transition relation with your current molecular configuration. You can call them "copies of a later you". However, it is impossible for your past configurations to have memories of---or to be in the same transition relation with---anything prior to your conception. Thus there is a concrete difference in your possible states before being born and after. (Well apart from Tegmark, many scientists believe that this is the only difference between "before" and "after".)
Chunky Rook, you raise a very interesting question of whether "style"---or any identifying fingerprint of one's play---can be distilled into mathematical parameters. Hopefully more on this later...
@cramnic: Thanks for clarifying your position. Admittedly, I don't see how the original statement could have implied the second, but never mind - let's get to the second!
The view that the mind (or "soul") is the brain is a very typical one, and you offer some suggestions as to why we should think this. Essentially, they come down to thoughts of this type: certain sorts of brain damage cause mental damage, therefore the brain just is the mind. Fortunately, this does not follow, any more than it would follow that causing damage to the eye would imply that it's the eye that sees, rather than the person seeing by means of their eyes. Cameras don't see, and neither do eyes - to see something is to be in a certain sort of mental state that has, at least a partial cause, light bouncing off objects, entering the eye, being converted to electrical signals that travel up the optic nerve, etc. Causation is at work, but not identity.
Now, to deny that a correlation between brain damage and mental disabilities implies that the two are identical is not to prove that they are distinct. To do that requires further argument. Here's a quick (but not the only or even the best) one:
1. I am numerically the same person over time.
2. If I'm essentially my body (or some special part of my body, like my brain), then my numerical sameness over time would imply sameness of body (or brain) over time.
3. But my body (brain) is not the same over time - it changes in all its physical dimensions. Nor is it the same at a cellular level - my cells all change every seven years or so.
4. Therefore, something else, something non-physical and essential to me, must account for my sameness over time. (E.g. a "soul" or an immaterial mind.)
Dennis, the relationship between the brain and the mind is deeper than a mere correlation: if I understand you correctly, you're saying something like, "The relationship between the brain and the mind is something like the relationship between a voice-transmitter and the person speaking - destroying any part of the transmitter might disrupt communications, but it doesn't mean that the transmitter is somehow identical with the person originally making the sound." This argument breaks down on closer inspection: what modern neuroscience shows us is not merely that our thoughts are correlated with activity in the brain (e.g. that thoughts of a certain type show up in a certain place in an MRI scan), but rather that the structural features of the brain explain behavior - they explain why we respond to external stimuli in a particular way. One could never obtain such an explanation of the content of a voice-transmission by examining the radio transmitter. Certainly, the vast majority of behaviors have not yet been explained precisely because they are so complicated, but everything we know about the brain suggests that they eventually will be, and in fact, this has already been accomplished in primitive organisms like flatworms. You might disagree that the same will be true of humans, but this is a scientific question and I believe that the vast majority of psychologists and neuroscientists agree with me (I would conjecture that this is still true if we poll only Christian psychologists and neuroscientists, although I'm certainly open to any evidence you can present that suggests otherwise).
I think your further argument makes a related error. What matters about the brain is not the particular atoms composing it, but the structural features of that brain. If we could somehow replace every neuron in your brain with a mechanical replacement that functioned in the same way, you would be in a sense the same person, not because you have an immaterial soul but because the structural features of your brain would have been preserved. Likewise, you are in a sense the same person as your younger self because you share many of those structural features: you share goals, memories, ambitions, etc...
I say "in a sense the same person" because the whole notion of sameness here draws a sharp distinction where none exists. Is a person with serious alzheimer's disease "numerically the same" as their younger self? In what sense? Why is this a meaningful thing to say? Certainly, he developed from his younger self, and the younger self may well care about the well-being of the older self. Family members call him by the same name as when he was younger and likely feel that despite his current impaired mental state, he is still deserving of love and affection. But what in the world do any of these observations have to do with the claim that he is "numerically the same" as his younger self in a sense that requires an immaterial soul?
@ Dennis:
When you mention "sameness", you are implying that you stay the same person over time, while the cells - inter alia - are replaced. But really that is just the question. Are you really the same? What you consider "sameness" is basically a roughly identical organisational scheme of youself, the blueprint that maps out not only your genes, but also the de facto state of the arrangements of your cells and other relevant subparts of your body.
Sameness is really a question of definition. Are things that are similar to one another the same? Is a car of one brand the same as another car of the same brand? We would say no. Is a car were 1% of the parts have been replaced the same? We would say yes. What if 10, 50, or 75, or 100 % of the parts have been changed?
With the humans we tend to consider ourself "the same" even if we are quite somone else, both physically and from the way we think and are.
I really am not the same person I was wenn I was 3, 15, or now (31). And when I will be senile, I will be a different person. It is just by legal definition, that I am still considered to be the same subject, because the changes were gradual, and it would be highly impractical to deal with constantly changing legal enteties. (And you couldn't justifie prison sentences).
By the way, the question of sameness is relevant to our every day life when it comes to acting on behalf of ourself in the future. And it happens in real life. Lets imagine a lucid (whats lucid?) person aged 60 that decides (and even writes it down), that he does not want to be kept alive by advanced medical care in case of severe injury. The "same" person, age 80, now senile, having a legal guardian for incapacity reasons might very well ask his family in a childish way, but fearing death: "don't make me dead". Do you keep up intensive care? Did the person aged 60 have the right to decide for the person aged 80? Should the ward dismiss the "don't make me dead", on the grounds that the persons incapacity and contradicting will while lucid? Or is this 80-year-old a different person, over which the 60-year old has no power?
By the way: the subject discussed in this thread is a well known philosophical one dicussed under the title "Identity of subject and object" or as German philosophers were the first to name the problem: "Subjektidentität". Short conclusion by the way: there is none, if defined correctly.
@Kenneth W. Regan
I read the 1st article, doesnt make any sense to me whatsoever...even says they dont believe it themselves... I dont see how you could test it in any way anyway ? The second article (the link didnt work) but it all sounds like its in the physical realm...
@Dennis
Regarding your eg at the bottom, I dont think people are the same over time, I think people change all the time.
As people get older they start to lose the full power of their sense, the memory starts to go, hormones dip etc
Its interesting even their personalities change... (with babies the pre frontal cortex in the last to develop, in old people its the first layer to start to go) Thats why often the elderly return to a childish way of behaving, they both have smaller frontal cortexes.
Someone with post traumatic stress for eg is definitely not the same person they used to be....
If we have "immaterial souls":
where does it go when you sleep? (why would it get tired in the first place if its not material?),
or if you have a blackout, faint, or go into a coma ?
But I think the main concern with the "immaterial souls" hypothesis is that its just not testable in any way...
The eye analogy you used... let me use it here in this way:
Its simple to test "whether its the eye that sees or something else"... and science has solved this problem, there are already sophisticated cameras and visual cortex connectors which are helping blind people to see instead of using their own eyes.
So how do you test the existence of something thats immaterial ?
To find the Tegmark article, delete the parts of the URL before "space.mit.edu", which may have been inserted when I clicked to post since they come from this blog. Here's another try.
The relevant aspect of the NY Times article is that physicists do take seriously the idea that configurations of matter can just pop into being as a result of large-scale quantum fluctuations, and that the universe is large enough for this to be an issue.
What I'm getting at by "cellular automaton transition relation" is an approach to the subject-identity problem, from the admittedly-shaky perspective of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind Of Science. Edward Fredkin, of the Fredkin Prizes in computer chess, holds the same view that physics can be described by cellular-automaton transitions. His site is digitalphilosophy.org, and includes a paper titled "On the Soul" (the navigation icons at the bottom to scroll pages show up blank in my browser).
@Jason: Correlation is more interesting than you suppose. On one end of the spectrum, you could have a pair of dancers or synchronized swimmers. The correlation of their movements does not reflect any deep causal relationship between them. At the other end, the "behavior" of a passing car and its shadow are very closely correlated due to the ontological dependence of the latter on the former. But in any case, correlation does not prove identity, which was the point of my reply to cramnic.
So even supposing that we could someday perfectly "read" the brain and predict behavior perfectly (a supposition I probably don't accept, but don't need to deny here), that wouldn't demonstrate mind-brain identity any more than facts about a light source, a car and a back surface makes them identical to the shadow we can perfectly predict.
On your reply to my argument: you suggest that "[w]hat matters about the brain is not the atoms composing it, but the structural features of that brain." That's a very plausible suggestion at first glance, but there's a problem with both halves. First, if one makes the structures of a brain the basis of personal identity, then a molecule-for-molecule replica of my brain would also be me - even if that brain and mine exist simultaneously. But since that's clearly impossible, that can't be the basis of personal identity. (I don't mean that the molecule-for-molecule replica is impossible. That's obviously technologically impossible at the moment, but there's no in-principle reason why God or some hypothetical future neuroscience couldn't do that. What is impossible is for me to be identical to a second person.)
But then there's the second suggestion, when you say it's the structure of that brain that counts. But what makes it that brain? It can't be its structure, for the reason that we just gave, and it can't be its parts, for the reasons I gave in my original argument. Just asserting that it's the same brain begs the question, so this looks like a fatal difficulty.
Indeed, you seem to conclude by chucking the concept of numerical identity. Certainly that's possible, but it seems to me a pretty hard bullet to bite. I'll say more about this in another comment, since it recurs in other responses.
@Jason, "me" [could you choose a more grammatically useful "name", please?] and cramnic:
To say that something maintains numerical identity over time means that it is the same thing across some span of time. It doesn't mean that it is identical in every respect across time, but only in its essential properties. If any change suffices to disqualify identity through time, then if I gain or lose a single cell, then I cease to exist at that moment and a new being, one very similar to me, comes into being. This is the sort of crazy thing one believes only when they are in the grips of a philosophical theory (or terrified of an alternative theory), or is convinced of based on overwhelming evidence, evidence which is lacking in this case.
@me: I don't think there are any cars, strictly speaking, because I don't think they have an internal principle of unity. The collection of parts we call a car is, in the absence of humans, just a bunch of physical bits piled together. There isn't any sort of "nature" in the absence of beings with purposes - namely, people who make and want to use cars. But on the supposition that there are cars, and that something's being the same car over time is to be a fact about the car rather than about the law, I'd want to say that it can't be the same car once more than 50% of it has changed. Applied to human beings, all of our parts change every 7 years, so either our lives last no more than seven years or what makes us who we are is not some set of physical facts.
"I really am not the same person I was [when] I was 3, 15, or now (31)." In one sense, you're right; in another sense - the sense that's relevant to the topic at hand - it's self-refuting. When *you* were 3? As the ancient Greeks noted, we must distinguish between essential change and accidental change. Essential change is something one doesn't survive - if you heat water to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen, then the water is gone. If it's just heated to change from an ice cube to a liquid, then it's accidental change. It's still water, just in a different form than it had been in.
So when we grow, that's accidental change *if* our essence isn't our body parts (and the structure/organization argument doesn't work either - see my previous comment). Likewise, when we learn, or fall asleep, or undergo other mental changes, it's accidental change. My personality can change too - it's *my* personality - it's an aspect of me, not me full stop.
@cramnic: Most of your key questions are addressed (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) in the previous comments.
As for testing the existence of something immaterial, what sort of testing are you after? The arguments we're considering are a form of testing. There's also introspection, indirect causal arguments, other philosophical considerations, etc. What matters is whether those arguments or approaches succeed, not whether the thing we're investigating is or isn't non-physical.
In fact, there's a bigger problem for the implicit suggestion that one should only accept the empirically verifiable. (This might be what underlies your question; if not, then never mind!) The problem is that the thesis that only the empirically verifiable should be accepted is not itself the result of empirical verification, and it's not even remotely obvious that it could be. (Further, if we accepted it, practically all knowledge would go out the window: inductive beliefs about the future, about scientific laws, about the past [we can't empirically verify that the world is more than 5 minutes old and that our memories are genuine, for instance], etc.)
This is not a claim that "anything goes", it's just an argument against a crude empiricism.
If I am outside on a pitch black night and I feel water falling on my head, I will conclude that it is raining rather than concluding that I am under attack by a CIA predator drone armed with squirt guns. That is because rain is a common, ordinary, well-documented phenomenon whereas a drone attack would be extraordinary and unprecedented. It really doesn’t matter whether I believe that the CIA has the technology to simulate rainfall with a predator drone or not, rainfall would still be the most likely explanation for water falling from the sky.
By the same token, dubious claims made by the overly imaginative to the gullible regarding contact with the dead are reasonably ordinary, common, and well documented while actual, reliable, repeatable, verifiable contacts are completely extraordinary and unprecedented regardless of whether one's worldview admits of their possibility. Occam’s Razor will always prefer the natural explanation over the supernatural.
Vinny: Occam was a Christian, so it's rather unlikely that he was suggesting that one should prefer naturalism to supernaturalism. What the "Razor" says instead, roughly, is that one should not multiply entities beyond necessity. If two explanations are otherwise on a par in all relevant respects, one should prefer the one that posits fewer entities. It doesn't say that one should automatically prefer the ontologically parsimonious explanation, irrespective of the total evidence. Imagine then that you knew that there were CIA predator drones in your area and that they fired squirt guns in civilian areas to test the electronic systems, and also knew that the sky was cloudless and that no rain was expected, and further that no water was falling anywhere else around you. In such a case it would still be true that in the abstract rain is a far more likely explanation than squirt guns from predator drones, but given the particularities of the situation that would be far less clear.
(This doesn't mean that I disagree with you about the Korchnoi-Maroczy game, but it's our background beliefs about the reliability of such claims, based on our experience [or really, on the purported experience of those we think have most reliably investigated such matters], that's doing the work.)
@Dennis,
The argument about whether you are "essentially" the same person is completely question-begging. The notion of "essential" sameness seems to add nothing to our positive description of the world. There are normative questions one could ask about identity: do we have good reason to care about our future selves? Is it fair for other people to treat our current self in light of the actions of our past selves? But one can answer these questions without recourse to an unchanging immaterial soul: it suffices to point out that our current self shares memories, ambitions, goals and learned abilities with our former self (and the degree to which we are "the same" in a normatively relevant sense depends on the degree to which these properties are shared). I don't think anyone here is defending the claim that for normative purposes whenever the atoms in our makeup change, we should be treated as if we are a completely different person. As I clarified above, what matters are the structural features of our brain, not the component parts. If you were to change all of my memories, abilities, goals, etc... just by rearranging the very same atoms, then for normative purposes I would be a completely different person!
To point out that we still call both our past and current selves "me" implies nothing about an "essential" nature. In the world we live in, "Me 10 years ago" is a useful linguistic construct with a clear referent. But why should we take this to imply anything metaphysical? Why should this imply that I share an essential immaterial property with myself 10 years ago rather than the obvious definition that I'm referring to the organism that existed 10 years ago, that developed into my current self, and that shares many normatively relevant properties in common with my current self even though it is not identical?
If I had specific evidence relating to a specific incident of rain falling from the sky that decisively distinguished it from all those common ordinary incidents, I agree that I might reasonably conclude that it was of an unprecedented character.
@Jason: It's question-begging for those who don't take it as a datum, which is everyone who hasn't been infected by bad philosophy. :) If you dispute it - or the person who called himself "Vinny" a few minutes ago does - then I have no proof that you're wrong. But let's put it this way: it at least seems as obvious to me as anything could be, except perhaps that 1+1 = 2 and that a triangle has three sides, that I'm numerically the same person as the person of the same name who started playing chess several decades ago in the western United States. It would take spectacularly good evidence to overturn this, and to my mind the thesis of real personal identity is immeasurably more plausible than naturalism - especially since the latter is self-refuting.
Regarding the arrangement of atoms: I'm not claiming that if someone's atoms (or cells) change, they should be *treated* as a different person. I'm saying that if materialism (naturalism, physicalism) were true, then they would *be* a different person, at least when enough of the parts changed, whether we cared to treat them that way or not. As a legal fiction, the car whose parts are replaced one at a time still belongs to the original owner. In reality, it's not the original car; if anything is, it would be a car rebuilt of the original parts.
@Dennis,
What I would like to see is a clarification of what you mean when you say you are "numerically the same person." I understand that you assert this and see it as obvious, but I don't even know what you're asserting! You distinguish between a person being treated as a different person and a person actually being a different person, but I think the latter concept is completely vacuous. What would it mean for this claim not to be true? (i.e. what would it mean for a person to be the same in all the senses I have specified but not "actually the same"). There is no sense in which it adds anything to our understanding of the world no matter how forcefully you insist that you really, really are the same person as 10 years ago. When you insist, "Not only do I share memories, abilities, goals, with my past self - and not only do I wish to be held responsible for the actions of my past self - but I really really am metaphysically the same entity as my past self" it seems to me like if someone insisted, "Not only is a triangle a polygon with three sides, every triangle also possesses the pure essence of all triangles." The second clause is just meaningless babble.
I think materialism is true and I think that if you replaced my neurons one by one but maintained all of the structural features of my brain then I would be the same person in every relevant sense, because the only sense of sameness which is relevant or meaningful in this context is the normative one, and if all my memories, learned abilities, goals, etc... were intact, it seems obvious to me that I would still expect people who cared about me before to still care about me, and I would still care about the well-being of my future self. You might say, "If materialism is true, you wouldn't really be the same person because you would be composed of different parts." To which I would respond, "Perhaps in your sense I wouldn't 'really be' the same person, but who cares? You're just defining 'really be the same' in such a way that it is only possible with an immaterial soul. I agree that I am not the same in that sense, but this in no way impacts any positive or normative judgment that I or anyone else could make. It is just a semantic assertion."
What I mean by asking if I'm numerically the same person over time is this: is the person at t1 and the person at t2 literally the same person? How many things are there? If one, then we have identity, numerical sameness - the same one thing in each case. If two, then not.
This is distinct from similarity based on some sort of spatio-temporal and/or psychological continuity. I might think it's terrible that I cease to exist and someone just like will come into being in seven years, or I might find it fascinating and wish him the best. But it isn't *me*.
You seemed to suggest that this was somehow a mysterious idea, but I don't see why. If you recall Star Trek, for instance, think of the process of "beaming" a person from one place to another. Let's say you get beamed from one spot to another. I take it you find this idea unproblematic. (Let's assume it's technologically possible; at this point, obviously, it's not.) Fine. Now suppose the transporter malfunctions and there are two of "you". Which one is you? They can't both be you, because if A is identical to C and B is identical C, then A and B must be identical as well. But they're not - they're two different persons. So they can't both be identical to you, but then there's no good reason to think that either is identical to you. Now, imagine one of them is immediately killed by some alien, so that just one survives. We would all treat the survivor as you, even though there's at the very least a 50% chance that it's not you.
So who cares? Well, it doesn't really matter if anyone cares - there's still the truth of the matter even if no one does. But in such a case, it's clear that you should care - there's at least a 50% chance that you're dead!
As to the question of what affirming identity adds to our descriptions, I'm happy to clarify. I don't think it adds anything per se, at least as I'm understanding you. Rather, it's what makes the descriptions possible. It's not that being identical to my "earlier self" adds something to having memories and the rest. It's that I don't have an earlier self unless I'm identical to the earlier person. There was an earlier self, but it wasn't mine, wasn't me. They're not my memories unless it was me. To call those memories mine and to say that it was my earlier self implies that there is one and the same person involved. And since neither materialism nor psychological continuity theories can account for this, and an immaterial soul can, this is a good reason, all things being equal, to affirm the latter.
I think your example helps clarify things somewhat. You ask how many people there would be if the transporter malfunctioned and created two copies where previously one had existed. I would say there are in that instant two identical people, both identical to the previous self, which are going forward distinct persons. You ask which one is "you" and say they can't both be you. I disagree. They are both as much you as your self five minutes from now is your present self. The two copies are identical for an instant but distinct people going forward because they will be exposed to different external stimuli, and because their brains will not communicate in the way that we associate with a single person (I include this latter caveat because - for example - if you entered a transporter, and each half of your brain ended up in a separate body but the communicative relationships between the two halves were preserved, then you would still be a single person, just in two bodies). If one is killed there is not a 50% chance that "I" have been killed. There is a 100% chance that one of the two future versions of me was killed, and a 100% chance that the other one is still alive. You might ask, "What would this feel like from the inside?" It would feel like walking into a transporter, emerging and having a copy of yourself next to you - and it would feel this way for both people and they would both equally and rightly claim that the person who entered the transporter is their past self. You seem to think there is a logical contradiction in the account I have just given, but I don't see it.
Again, it seems to me that describing the entity that existed 10 years ago and developed into me as my earlier "self" is completely unproblematic in the materialist worldview. In the materialist worldview, I agree that I am not saying that I'm metaphysically identical, or that I share an immaterial soul, or that I'm really the same in whatever essential sense. When I refer to my earlier self, I'm just referring to the being that existed 10 years ago that shares a lot of normatively relevant things in common with my current self and developed into my current self. I do agree that the fact that there is a single being that I can call my earlier self is not a logical necessity in the materialist worldview, it's just an empirical fact about our world. One could imagine a fantastical world in which this was not the case. For example, if we lived for 10 years then our brains were taken apart and recombined with the brains of 5 other people to form a new functioning brain that combined memories and abilities from those five people (presuming this were possible). Imagine this process of growth and recombination is repeated many times. You're right that in such a world any given being wouldn't have a single earlier self 10 years ago. Instead, they could refer to their several earlier selves which each bear a certain relationship to them but are not the same. So perhaps you're objecting to the fact that in the materialist worldview it is logically possible that organisms could develop in such a way that it is meaningless to speak of a single earlier self? I think this is possible, it's just not the world we live in.
My response of "who cares" was unnecessarily glib. What I was trying to say is that asserting that I am really, truly and essentially the same person as my past self over and above any psychological or physical or normative relationship seems to me to be literally meaningless. It's not the kind of claim that can be true or false any more than "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" can be true or false. This is why I ask you to give an example of what it would mean if your claim were false. Doing so would at least demonstrate that it is a claim with content.
(N.B. I've slightly updated this comment - hopefully for the better.)
It seems to me you're misunderstanding my view for whatever reason, whether due to a flaw in my exposition or some assumptions you're making about what I mean based on some previous discussions of what a soul is supposed to be or do. In this context, what it's supposed to do is quite simple: it's doing the work I'm arguing that psychological and physical processes can't; namely, ground personal identity through time. You might think it's unnecessary to posit an immaterial entity to do that work, but I don't see how you can deem it meaningless in the sense of lacking content.
Back to your rejoinder on the transporter example. It seems to me that the claim that they are both you, at least for an instant, is false; here's why. First of all, identity is necessary, not contingent. If A is identical to B, then it's necessarily identical to B. That is to say, if "two" things are really one, then anything that's true of one is true of the "other", and it must be that way (otherwise, something can have contradictory properties).
But that's clearly not the case in the transporter example: one of them can die in the next instant while the other remains alive. One can become Jason-A and the other Jason-B. One can become a grandmaster, while the other becomes a lowly FM. (And so on.) So they're not in fact identical, even in that first instant, and so they can't both be identical to pre-transporter you, either.
Note: they could be exactly similar, but similarity is not identity. Two copies of the same book are two distinct objects, even if they are qualitatively alike. That's fine for books, but it's not good enough for personal identity. My loved ones are not replicas, and I'm interested in my own future, not that of someone a whole lot like me.
Looks like we've worn everyone else out! :)
ha, it appears we have :) (and don't worry, I understand this discussion may have to be ended by fiat at some point in favor of chess content)
I recognize that the language of grounding personal identity through time is not your invention and that many philosophers past and present believe that such phrases express something meaningful and important. I honestly don't see what it could be (and I'm not just trying to play devil's advocate here). Let me try to illustrate by giving a version of your claim which I think is meaningful and explaining why I reject it - you can then clarify how close this is to what you had in mind.
Suppose tomorrow I became a brain in a vat, living out the remainder of my life in the matrix. I could imagine that within the matrix your thought experiment occurs so that two copies of my matrix avatar are created by a transporter, but only one of these continues to be operated by my brain in a vat. The other is operated by someone else's brain in some other vat. In this example, I would certainly admit that only one of them is really me. The brain in the vat is still a materialist analogue of what you have in mind. So let's suppose instead that there is an unobservable and ineffable dimension in which pure thought originates from unchanging "anchors" and that our brains in this world are in a sense just transmitters through which decisions originating in the "thought" dimension are converted into actions. This theory does not seem vacuous to me - in such a world, each of us might be identified with a single anchor in the thought-world and this unchanging anchor is arguably among the most important things binding our past and future selves.
I think there is a serious objection to the anchor view which I tried to articulate in my original post - we have good reason to think our brains are not merely transmitters or holding vessels for some intelligence which operates through our brain. I claim that empirically the evidence indicates that all human behavior can eventually be explained according to the laws of physics and biology given the way that the features of our brain respond to external stimuli. This would not be true if our brain were like a radio transmitter, and I think it would not be consistent with any theory in which our thoughts somehow originated outside our brain. If we were living in the matrix and our actual choices were made by something outside the matrix we would observe behaviors which were not explicable just by our brains response to stimuli in the observable world. We would be at a loss to explain why Mario kept hitting his head on the block above him if we confined ourself to causal explanations starting in the Mushroom Kingdom. But in our world, I don't think we observe any such behaviors.
Returning then to the transporter example, in your view (if I understand it correctly), if two entities emerge from the transporter claiming to be Jason, only one of them is really the continuation of me which shares my metaphysical anchor. The other is observably identical but essentially different. I presume that in your view you would acknowledge that we have no way to tell who shares my soul, so that in fact you would agree that my friends and family should act *as if* my claim was correct that both of them are equally continuations of me. I would then say that one of two things are true: if your view implies that our metaphysical anchor has causal efficacy in the world, this should create observable differences in the way that the ensouled Jason and the replica Jason respond to external stimuli. If your view does not imply even that, then again, I just don't see how you're saying anything meaningful. Supposing your claim is true: what would be different if it were false? Would our subjective experience of the world differ? Something observable? Something normative? Would some logical inferences we commonly make be invalid (as if say, modus ponens were false)? If nothing would be different, what does it mean to say that your claim is true?
I'm afraid I don't understand your last paragraph, and in several respects. One way, which may not be terribly important, is that I can't tell if you think my transporter example presumes souls. (If so, that's incorrect: it's intended as a reductio against materialism. If a person = their brain structure, then a transporter case where the structure is taken and reconstituted somewhere else should preserve personal identity. But given the contradictions in the multiple transporter case, personal identity cannot be maintained, and therefore the claim that a person = their brain structure is false.)
Second, and this isn't meant as an objection but an admission of confusion, I don't understand what the supposed dilemma is. If we're assuming my view in the scenario rather than yours, then if we have two people there then they both have souls. No soul, no person. If you're asking me to envision a soulless replica and ask how it differs from actual-Jason, I'm not sure what to say. This isn't because I think pseudo-Jason will behave like the actual person, but because I'm not even sure it's metaphysically possible. Maybe it would behave "normally" for a few seconds and then collapse in a confused-looking heap, like a normal person suffering a severe stroke.
Relatedly and returning to an earlier discussion, I don't believe the brain is like a radio transmitter (or rather, a radio receiver, or both). Just as one doesn't look through one's eyes to see as if looking out the window, I don't believe the soul is a homunculus getting input from the Chinese room. But on my view, which is consistent with some major versions of dualism like Aquinas's (I wouldn't classify myself as a Thomist, but on this point his model seems pretty close to my own) the brain isn't what's aware any more than the eyes are what see. As things are, the mind is out of business without a properly functioning brain, but that doesn't make the brain identical to the mind.
I'm not sure whether your account of the transporter case presumes "souls", but it does presume a notion of identity which I reject. When I say, "20 years ago I learned to play chess", you take this to mean something different then if I were to say, "20 years ago the entity which existed at that time and eventually developed into me learned to play chess." You think the first statement captures an important intuition we have that we are identical with our past selves, while the second statement regards our past self as a kind of stranger, almost as if our only relationship with that self is having observed it from afar in our memory.
I disagree: I don't think it adds anything to the second statement to say we are identical with our past self in the sense you propose and in fact, I think it mistakenly implies that there is some categorical property called personal identity when in fact there are a continuum of entities, and the notion of similarity you describe is more appropriate. Your view seems to commit you to the claim that if we change a person's brain one neuron at a time, there is a point at which a discontinuous metaphysical change occurs: something like, when we change 50.00001% of the neurons, the person's identity suddenly changes and they are no longer the same person. This view is completely inconsistent with our intuition which suggests that each of the selves that are just 1 neuron apart are nearly indistinguishable. Each one is a tiny bit different from the previous one, but there is no point at which we suddenly transform from being the same person to being a different one, there are just gradual changes which accumulate and the selves which are more neurons apart are more different.
So I reject that there is any contradiction in the materialist view of the transporter case because I reject that the notion of identity that you propose is relevant. On the materialist view, the present and future selves share goals, memories, etc... This is equally true of both entities which emerge from the transporter and they are both equally future versions of the self that entered the transporter. I agree that they are not identical to the self which entered the transporter in the sense you propose, but what I don't see is why that sense of identity is relevant to anything since it is not a predictive empirical theory, nor is it necessary for our normative judgments, nor is it a mathematical or logical principal. Are there other examples you can give of claims that are true or false but fit in none of these categories? (ideally claims that a materialist would also accept are true or false!) The dilemma I was proposing in the transporter case was that if you reject the view that the soul has some causal power in the world, then you need to explain what kind of claim you are making. You say the notion of similarity is fine for books but not good enough for your loved ones or yourself - but not good enough for what? (I initially took this to mean not good enough to justify treating them the way you think they ought to be treated, but you've since clarified that you are not making a normative claim).
Regarding the analogy: brain:awareness :: eye:seeing. The analogy here is a little confusing because "seeing" and "awareness" both have subjective components. When I try to interpret this analogy, I keep arriving back at something like the radio transmitter/receiver view. While the eye is necessary for seeing, an eye alone is pretty useless, it can only see when it has the brain to process the input it receives. So you would then argue that the brain alone is pretty useless, it can only generate awareness when it has something like an immaterial soul to process the input it receives through the brain? Is that what you are claiming? Or am I taking the analogy too literally?
haha, guys please! stop talking about numerical identity, matrix, brains in vats etc :)
I think this is why philosophy has a bad rep ... its too wordy, vague, and invokes too much thats too far from our reality...
I also try and avoid using too many metaphors when arguing, it can change the context too much sometimes.
I bet all of us have totally different ideas about what we're talking about above...
But lets get back to the point...
Im not saying empirical science is perfect, but I think its as close as we get to clear thinking.
The beauty, for me, of the scientific method is it ignores and doesnt care about "things we cannot verify with our senses/consciousness".
When I realized that in highschool it was a beautiful moment... superstitions fall away...
Of course we dont "know everything", far from it... but we trust our senses (in an alert way) and only focus on whats "knowable" and hence practical.
The problem, Ill say it again, with the "immaterial soul" is ... (the same as with gods, "brain's in vats", fairies, ogers, angels, afterlife), we dont know because its untestable with the tools we have (5 senses, and our consciousness)... so it doesnt matter, it should be irrelevent....
You cant show that an "imaterial thing is causing the brain to work"
It could be an "imaterial elephant's invisible earing on my left shoulder" thats my "soul", its totally non-sensical to talk about such things...
@cramnic: You're disinvited from this conversation until and unless you address the basic argument that was given already: the thesis that the only things that are sensible or relevant are those which can be tested with the five senses is not itself the product of testing by the five senses. There is no science or observation that reveals this - it's simply self-refuting. It's like writing or saying in English that one cannot communicate in English. Further, as noted above, there is no science or observation that confirms even slightly that the universe is more than five minutes old or that scientific laws will hold true tomorrow. We assume that both points are true - rightly so! - but there is no non-question-begging observation that shows it. In short, you can pretend to be philosophy-free and to be a hard-nosed empiricist, but you're not. No one but an utter skeptic is.
This doesn't prove that souls or God or other immaterial entities exist, but they can't be ruled out by just *claiming*, sans argument, that a crude empiricism is true. So be like a good scientist and investigate, rather than acting like the churchmen of Galileo's day who refused to look through the telescope because they "knew" the answer already.
@Jason:
We don't seem to be making progress, because it seems we disagree at a fundamental level. It seems to me that one and the same person continues to exist from birth to death, and in a pretty absolute way and not merely as a legal or practical fiction. That it's good enough that a book continues to exist in the way you suggest is hardly sufficient for persons - don't *you* want to be alive in 7 years? I don't see any reason to think, on your view, that it's me who will be alive in seven years rather than someone like me. Human beings have a first-person existence. My interest in my life isn't so much a matter of thinking that it's wonderful for the world that Dennis Monokroussos exist. Hopefully it's not something the world regrets, but I'm interested because it's *my* life, because he is me.
If I meet person X at a chess tournament, it doesn't matter to *me*, insofar as I'm his chess opponent, whether he is the same person as "he" was 7 years ago, but it would to him! And it would be depressing to think that my wife died early in my marriage and I was married to one of her descendants - or at least it would be depressing until I realized that I had died as well. You get the picture.
So that's part of why I think it matters. It also seems to me obvious - not infallibly so, but with a pretty high degree of confidence - that I am strictly identical to my self from 7, 14, 21 etc. years ago, and I think all of us have this same intuition, pre-philosophically. I don't believe it because it's an empirical theory or because it's useful for making normative judgments (though it may be). I don't believe there's a monitor in front of me for those reasons either, and don't expect that you're any different in that respect. We believe the latter because it's overwhelmingly obvious, and the former has that feel as well! That doesn't guarantee its truth, but I think it puts a very high burden of proof on an opposing theory.
Back to the transporter...or perhaps a more useful scenario. If I understand you correctly, you agree with me that neither B nor C (those coming out of the transporter) is identical to A in my sense, but think that both share goals and memories with A. Goals, maybe; but memories? This isn't clear. Suppose you tell me about one of your adventures and describe it in such great detail that I have as clear an image of it as you do. Shortly afterwards, I suffer a knock on my head and have amnesia, and in the process of regaining my self-concept take your story as a memory, as something that happened to me rather than someone else. Is it in fact a memory? No - it didn't happen to me. Something's feeling like a memory is not sufficient for its being one. Among the necessary conditions is that the experience happened to the person in question.
This time, imagine that some future scientist scans your brain and creates a duplicate, which is then embodied in a body that's also qualitiatively just like yours. (We'll call the new person J2. Note that in all these hypotheticals I'm assuming materialism.) Is this J2's memory? I'm inclined to say no - obviously no, at that. He wasn't there. It happened to you, not him. (This example suffices to refute the claim that brain structure is what makes a person that person. Clearly it's not sufficient, and it isn't necessary, either - someone could suffer some brain damage and remain the same person, even if with some impairment.) From J2's point of view, he's you, but in fact he's not. You are! Would you just shrug your shoulders and ask what difference it makes, or what empirical difference there would be between his actions and yours? Would it be permissible for the scientists to kill you and have J2 take your place? Do you think your parents or wife or other loved ones, if informed of the results, would say "Jason vs. J2, there's no difference!"?
@Dennis,
I certainly agree that we disagree at a fundamental level! - I disagree that our ordinary experience of the world lends credence to your view over mine because I think it only makes sense to say that you and your wife are constantly "dying" under the presumption that your view is correct (e.g. to me, "dying" means that my memories, goals, learned abilities are all permanently lost, and this certainly doesn't happen over 7 years or even a lifetime without serious brain-damage). I certainly do want to exist in 7 years, but I don't think this makes sense as a categorical claim, I think that to the extent that an entity with my goals, memories, personal characteristics and abilities exists in 7 years, that's all anyone could ask for and all it is meaningful to say.
In the example you give, when you ask, "Is this J2's memory?" I would say, "Absolutely yes!" In fact, once my brain has been duplicated, J2 is as much me as me! Now J2 may or may not be under the illusion that these things happened to his brain *while it was in his present body*. If he believed that, J2 would be mistaken and J1 would be correct. But all of the important things that define me would also be present in J2. I also agree that J1 being killed immediately after this procedure would not be as bad as murder in our usual world. If 5 minutes after J2 were created J1 were killed, it would be morally more like giving someone a knock on the head that gave them temporary amnesia - 5 minutes of J1's life would be lost forever - then permanently erasing my brain from the world. Everything depends on how recently my brain has been backed up (I would be frightened either way, but much less frightened if I knew I had a fresh backup!). But importantly, I take myself to be making a normative and psychological claim here, not a metaphysical one - I still dispute your claim that there is a way "It really is" on such questions. There is a way subjective experience is, and a way we choose to treat each other in light of our normative commitments, and a way the world looks empirically but that's it. (I know you've shown admirable restraint in not insisting we stop immediately so I can read "The Nature of Necessity" from cover to cover among others, but I'll mention a relevant book anyway: the short science fiction novel "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" describes fairly well how I think different sorts of "murder" would be regarded in a world where you could backup your brain).
I do agree that on the particular question of murder, your account is more in line with most people's intuitions then mine (I think this is largely because our intuitions have developed in a world where nothing remotely resembling this technology existed, and perhaps people accustomed to playing video games where you can save your progress would be more inclined to agree with me!). Again though, I think your view clashes strongly with our intuition in the case where the neurons in your brain are taken out 1 by 1 and replaced with functioning neurons that keep you alive but lack any of your memories, goals, abilities etc... We both agree that once your whole brain is replaced you are a different person or dead, but I would say this happens gradually, while you seem committed to the view that there is a single neuron-substitute where you go from being the original ensouled person to someone else with a different soul (or perhaps with no soul).
What these examples illustrate is that some of our strong intuitions about this subject will have to change if these technologies are developed. So how are we to adjudicate? I don't think there is a metaphysical fact of the matter here. Someone could go along operating in the world as if your view were true, as if everyone had an unchanging metaphysical anchor. In our present world, this makes little difference. In a science fiction world, you might find yourself alienated from your friend who was revived from his backup after a (temporarily) fatal accident, and you might insist that it is an important question whether some entity has the same soul as an earlier entity once they have been through a transporter, or had part of their brain replaced with a mechanical enhancement, etc... I think people who lived in that world and were accustomed to these things would just come to look at you with bemusement if you continued to ask these questions. They can't prove that your assertions are wrong, but they don't accomplish anything. It would be like someone who tried to figure out which bad people were actually possessed by devils. If you insist on saying that someone is possessed by the devil, we can't prove you wrong, but we can assert that (empirically) nothing productive comes from spending time asking this question.
I think all of this comes back to the meta-question of what it means for a metaphysical claim of the sort you propose to be true. As far as I can tell, the evidence you're offering for this is your subjective belief is that if a perfect electronic backup of your brain were made (D2) and then D1 were to die, you just feel very strongly that you have stopped existing and will never exist again and only a copy of you exists. But I don't see how you can even have an intuition about this sort of thing. If someone asserted to you that they feel very strongly that every time they go to sleep in the morning they cease to exist and that the next morning an exact copy of them wakes up and lives for a day until they go to sleep, I don't think they're saying something that can be evaluated as true or false. How could one make such an evaluation? What could they possibly be feeling that would justify such a belief apart from any related psychological or normative claims they might be making?
Jason,
OK, I think the time has come for us to draw the line under our discussion, or it's at least getting pretty close. It has been interesting and we've made progress in developing the discussion, but it doesn't look like we'll get any closer to a resolution. If you're willing to call J2 you, really you and not a mere replica that's distinct from you, then I'm not sure what else I can say! It's a complete denial of the first-person perspective and violates the law of non-contradiction. (If either J1 or J2 is killed and the other lives, then Jason is both alive and dead, and likewise for any other property you choose.)
Here's another difficulty: Suppose J1 and J2 continue to exist and have very different experiences and lives. You said earlier - much earlier, about the transporter case - that they will go on to be distinct persons. Suppose it happens: why wouldn't J2 (the duplicate) be you and you (J1) turn out to be someone else in that case? It would seem obvious that J1 was you before the duplication, was you at the moment of its completion, and continued to be you afterward as well. But if J2 is really and truly and fully you, then on what possible basis can we affirm that J1 is still you after the experiences split? And if you're will to bite this enormous bullet and say sure, J2 is the "real" Jason, then here's another scenario for you: suppose that J2 never really existed, and that your life continued exactly as J1's did. Then there's no physical or experiential difference between Jason (the unduplicated you) and J1, but in one possible world Jason is Jason and in the other J1 isn't Jason. I say no thanks to such an ontology!
One clarification: my view is that all the neuronal replacement in the world makes no difference at all to who I am (though it can make a colossal difference to the quality of my existence). Those thought experiments are only a problem (or so I claim) for materialism. The soul serves in part as a substrate, so the change in my cells, neurons and the rest don't change me from one person into another.
Next, I don't think see any problem for my view or its intuitions when thinking about video games. A video game (meaning the activity, not the software itself) is an event, not a substance, so it's not surprising that its identity conditions are (very) different.
Finally, on your last set of questions, I agree that there isn't any test you can perform to evaluate whether you're the same person "you" were the night before or if you're a new person. It's not an objection, though, as it's confusing epistemology and ontology. My argument has been that if one assumes that one is the same person over time, then we have an argument against materialism and for a soul. That isn't affected even if we can't prove that someone really is the same person over time.
But this doesn't mean that there's no reason to think it. The mere possibility that there's a brand-new person every morning doesn't give me any reason to think it's true or anywhere near as plausible as the view that I've endured from birth or conception. There's no empirical test to prove that the world didn't start five minutes ago, or ten minutes ago, or ten minutes and one second ago, or ten minutes, and 1.1 seconds ago, or 10:01.11 minutes ago, etc., There are an infinite number of possibilities there, and if they're equiprobable then there's a zero probability that the world began to exist, say, from 3 to 6 billion years ago. But we have no reason to accept this purely skeptical hypothesis, and I don't see why the advocate of the soul is in a worse situation. It seems to him that he has existed through the years and has no inclination to think otherwise. Therefore, in the absence of a strong argument to the contrary, and not mere assertion of counter-possibility, it's appropriate for him to continue in that belief.
P.S. It's not a bad thing to read Naming and Necessity! :)
I agree, I will try to keep any further posts briefer than the previous one, so at least our discussion should terminate in a finite number of posts (perhaps my next post could have an even more ambitious goal!). I think I've inadvertently used two confusingly similar thought experiments meant to demonstrate completely different points: In "Scenario A", all of my neurons are replaced but all of the structural features of my brain remain intact, so that in my view, I am the same person although you think saying I am the same person requires more than this. In "Scenario B", the parts of my brain are replaced 1 by 1 with functioning neurons which DO NOT preserve the structural features of my brain. Let's say my brain is gradually replaced with someone else's brain. I think that we both agree that once your entire brain is replaced with someone else's brain, you are physically dead - or at least - no longer the same person (your immortal soul may persist). My claim is that Scenario B is problematic for your view because it implies that at some point there is a sharp discontinuity where replacing a single neuron causes the soul associated with that brain to disappear or to change into a different soul. But our intuition suggests there is no sharp discontinuity, only gradual, almost imperceptible changes which accumulate.
I don't think I've denied the first-person perspective and I certainly don't think I've violated the law of non-contradiction! Here is something I am NOT saying that you might suspect me of saying: J2 is created from J1. From J1's perspective, he is sitting and looking at J2, who was created from him 30 seconds ago. J1 is killed. I am NOT saying that somehow J1's "Cartesian theater" instantaneously transfers to J2, so his conscious experience continues uninterrupted. From J1's perspective, his consciousness ceases. What I'm saying is that this is no more worrying for him than if he went to sleep drunk knowing that a future version of him would have some memory loss - in both cases, what matters is that something very similar to him continues to exist and that is all we can ask for when we talk about our future selves. I'm also NOT saying that J2 is the real Jason if and only if J1 is killed. Either way, they are both equally continuations of J0, and they become less and less similar to one another as time passes. All of the apparent contradictions disappear if you drop the assumption that there is one essential "Jason" that must exist at each moment in time.
You seem to think that the intuition you have about personal identity over time reflects a necessary condition about the world - I think the fact that you have this intuition reflects a contingent historical accident about the way the world is today. One could imagine an race of intelligent alien beings which continuously merged and separated with one another throughout adulthood (in fact, I can even imagine a future human society something like this if our brains were downloaded into computers). In such a society, I don't think the idea of souls would even be considered. Instead there would be different organisms which were formed by combining many different consciousnesses to form a new consciousness - at various times pieces might break off and go their own way, but these pieces might not be the same pieces which combined to form the consciousness in the first place. It is more difficult for me to give an account of what this would feel like from the first-person for a given entity at a given time since I've never experienced anything like it, but I suspect that in such a world notions of identity like the one you advocate for would not be live hypotheses.
Finally, I agree that the skeptical hypotheses you propose are not of equal probability with the claim that the world is as old as it looks, since those hypotheses would all require that something about the universe was tricking us - this is logically possible but less parsimonious than taking things at face value. I don't think the claim about the soul is taking things at face value though: I think you're attaching metaphysical baggage to several psychological and normative intuitions. I agree that I have a very strong intuition that it is reasonable to care about my future self and that my future self bears a relationship to me that is very different from even my close friends - but I just don't share your intuition that my future self is identical in the sense you propose.
Off to fireworks, have a great holiday!
>>>"the thesis that the only things that are sensible or relevant are those which can be tested with the five senses is not itself the product of testing by the five senses."
I would say it is, "science is the product of testing by the five senses and consciousness."
"Science" evolved as an experiment (humans wanted to find things out, good "tools" (ie analytical thinking, experiments, statistics) that worked and produced good results were added to the tool kit, and the tools which didnt work and led to bad results (thinking such as: superstitious, bad logic, false correlations) were discarded and protected against in the methods of science)
Every scientific experiment is "also an experiment of the method of science". (there have been a few, and we have results)
Remember science never "100% prooves" anything, its pragmatic, it says we've carried out 1000s of our best designed tests and it "looks like this is the case according to our reality, senses and consciousness."
(but lets carry on testing anyway, just in case we find an exception etc )
>>>"there is no science or observation that confirms even slightly that the universe is more than five minutes old"
>>>" or that scientific laws will hold true tomorrow."
I never understood where this kind of stuff comes from...
If we simply treat every day as an experiement, we have built up a good case it "probably wont all collapse tomorrow".
Its simply emperical verification.
Again science is not magic, it doesnt tell the future, it doesnt pretend to like religion, its the best humans can do with our senses and consciousness.
Regarding your last point... I dont think you can call the above crude, or I dont know how you can compare that to the "churchment of Galileo'a time"
In my view the problem with that numerical identity arguement is you'd have to understand exactly how the brain works 100% first before you can start invoking the need for extra immaterial things...
I think Ill leave it at that, beacause we're getting no where as well :)
Id be interested to read a response, but this one will be my last..
cramnic: Religion and philosophy aren't "magic" either - that's the sort of thing people say when they've only read critics of religion and philosophy, generally critics who themselves are mostly familiar with other authors who are critics of religion and philosophy, etc.
So once again: the thesis that only empirically verifiable statements are meaningful is not an empirically verifiable statement. Show me the verification. And note that it's an all-or-nothing claim - it claims to know, with 100% certainty, that certain sorts of things simply aren't meaningful. In other words, it's not science, it's (bad) philosophy. The question isn't whether one is going to do philosophy or avoid it, it's whether they're going to their philosophizing well or badly.
One particular point: the point of my remark about scientific laws holding in the future was not that science doesn't offer a 100% guarantee of how things will be. (Indeed, given quantum indeterminacy, if nothing else, that's something that can't be done.) Rather, the claim that scientific laws will continue to hold in the future is not a scientific result; it's an assumption we all make. (Reasonably!) You seem to offer as a suggestion that in the past, the future has resembled the past, so it's a good assumption. The problem with that reply is that it's question-begging here. How do we know that in the future, the future will be like the past? What was true of past futures may not be true of future futures, and we have no empirical evidence at all about what future futures will be like.
The moral of this story is not that we should be skeptics, but that we shouldn't pretend that our knowledge is solely based on a crude empiricism.
Jason,
Brevity is an admirable goal, but I'm afraid you didn't succeed, and I doubt I'll do any better myself. But I'll try!
I'm not sure what the function of your Scenarios A and B is. I was offering scenarios in that general area to object to materialist views, and when doing so I therefore assumed the non-existence of souls. If you're asking what I think in such cases, when applied to individuals with souls, my reply is that I don't care how many neurons are replaced or how quickly the replacement occurs. It will be extremely important to the life of the people involved, but it has no relevance to my view of personal identity. The persistence of the soul is both necessary and sufficient for personal identity in my view, though not sufficient for a well-functioning life.
I'm too tired to reply to your second paragraph now. Re: paragraph 3, I don't think my intuitions about personal identity are necessary or necessarily true - in fact, I've denied that a couple of times. What I think is that it's the default view, which has a strong presumption in its favor. Strong, but not absolute: I have no in-principle objection to a potentially decisive counter-argument, though it would have to meet a very high evidential and/or logical standard to succeed. As for the hypothetical society you suggest, I'm not sure that it's metaphysically possible - the example might be question-begging in the context of our debate. But even if it's granted, it seems to me that their intuitions about what's going on would be wrong. What is true, ex hypothesi, is that the content of people's consciousness (third-person perspective) may be merged, but that doesn't mean it's their consciousness (first-person perspective) that survives.
There's someone there, you know - you can pinch yourself if you're not sure!
Let me try to get you to clarify your response to Scenario B before you finish responding. Presume your view of souls / personal identity is correct. I start with a person D1. He has a soul. I also have the brain of a completely different person, D2. I construct a mapping between the brain of D1 and D2. Using this mapping, I replace a single neuron in D1's brain with the corresponding neuron from D2's brain (let's just assume that the entity always remains alive and functioning after each such replacement). This creates a new brain, brain-D1a. I believe you are committed to one of the following two views: either the entity with brain-D1a is still person D1 - that is, the brain is connected to the same soul, or the entity with brain-D1a is a different person (that is, the brain is connected to a different soul). If we repeat the procedure, I think you have to take one of those two positions at every stage. When D1's brain is entirely replaced by D2's brain, I think you would agree that it is no longer the brain of the original person, D1 - is that right? I think you would also acknowledge that a monotonicity property holds: if the brain after a certain number of neuron substitutes ceases to be D1, then it wouldn't go back to being D1 after even more neurons are substituted out. These properties imply that there is a single neuron substitute at some point when the brain goes from being associated with the soul D1 to no longer being D1. Do you agree with that claim?
While we're at it, another question for clarification: would you hesitate to enter a transporter if the technology existed out of fear that none of the beings which emerge will actually be you? (let's assume there is a small chance it will produce two copies of you, but no chance it will produce 0 copies). Or is it your view that if two copies of you are produced, at least one of them will continue to be you?
Also, before you respond to my second paragraph from the earlier post, let me offer a possible amendment. Thinking this over more, I'm unsure about the badness of killing J1 once the copy J2 is created - in particular, I'm unsure whether the wrongness of murder is primarily the fact that the being which is murdered is deprived of its future (if this claim is accepted, I think my original interpretation is correct). I claim above that killing J1 would be like knocking someone on the head and giving them temporary amnesia since at least J2 would persist. I do think that J1 and J2 post-duplication are both equally continuations of J1 (with the exception that J2 may have false beliefs about his current body). However, I think it's also consistent with my account to say something like, "Killing J1 or J2 is a grave wrong even though a future self would exist because the act of killing a conscious being is wrong apart from whether that being is denied a future." I'm not sure if this is a reasonable position or not, so let me amend my above statement to the conditional claim, "If the wrongness of killing J1 comes from depriving J1 of its future, then killing J1 would be like knocking someone on the head and giving them temporary amnesia provided the duplicate J2 existed from a few minutes earlier."
Jason, I'm not sure I'm following your first paragraph, because I suspect that your terminology might be a little careless. Sometimes you use D1/D2 to refer to a person, but later in the paragraph you seem to use D1/D2 to refer to a brain (e.g. "if the brain after a certain number of neuron substitutes ceases to be D1..."). Maybe if you think brains are people, you can use those terms interchangeably, but since on my view they're not they shouldn't be conflated. At any rate, I assure you once again that it makes no difference to my view of personal identity how brain bits are swapped out. When D1 has his original brain, he's D1. When his brain is half-swapped with D2's, he's D1. When his brain is completely replaced by D2's brain, he's D1. When his brain and D2's brain both get scooped out for cannibal ice cream and his head is empty, he's D1. (Dead, but D1, assuming that the soul continues to exist.) Okay? :)
I don't believe a transporter makes copies of me, because persons are particulars and not universals. I will be dead, a qualitatively identical body will take its place somewhere else, and unless souls are emergent phenomena (not my view, but I'm not 100% sure it's impossible) or unless God decides to create one on the spot, one most likely find something that almost immediately fails to behave in recognizably human ways.
I hasten to add that the persons-are-particulars consideration isn't my only reason for rejecting the claim that the transporter makes copies of me. That was more of a semantic point, akin to Socrates joking with his followers that they could bury him anywhere they wanted if they could catch him - meaning that what they wanted, in his view, was to bury his remains, not him. Another big reason why the transporter won't copy me is because my soul isn't a physical object, so the job is above its pay grade.
Jason,
Life has gotten too busy to continue the thread, but maybe we can resume it at some point (either on here or by email). There's obviously much more that can be said, including in response to your last set of questions about my own view. My view of the nature and interaction of the soul is more Aristotelian/Thomistic than Cartesian; that is, its interaction occurs throughout the body and isn't limited to the brain (or even more narrowly, to the pineal gland). So you might ask what would happen if, somehow, you could split the entire organism into two halves: would there be two people, and if so, which if either is the original? My view can probably be surmised from things I've already written, which is that there are two possibilities:
1. (Based on a non-emergent soul) At most one half would survive in any meaningful sense, and that's the original person.
2. (Based on an emergent soul) Both halves might survive, but I have no idea who would be the original, if anyone.
My leaning is towards the first option.
Back to your view. It seems to me that you deny that later selves are identical to the earlier ones, but think it's fine: "what matters is that something very similar to him [an earlier self] continues to exist and that is all we can ask for when we talk about our future selves." That makes your view logically consistent, yes, but wildly counter-intuitive and not, I would say, "all we can ask for". Not even close. I want to survive and achieve my projects; I'm not interested in someone rather like me, except in the vague way I would care for "humanity" in the abstract.
Indeed, I doubt your situation is any different, outside the philosophy chat box. If your later selves aren't you in the strict sense, then why do anything long-term for them rather than for someone else? Is it just that you can't help pretend that person is you? (Okay, don't answer this, it will never end....)
I'll reply here to your latest posts but I agree with you at least about life getting busy! I'd be happy to continue our discussion either here or over email - either way, I am definitely on board with adopting a slower pace of response (if you respond here but take more than a week, shoot me an email too since I don't have it set up to notify me of additional posts). It took some real self-control to avoid looking at your response all day so I could get some work done, as this is apparently a rather addictive topic to think about!
I'll start by replying just to the first paragraph of your first post, as I think getting you to clarify this point may help me respond better to several other interesting issues you raise. I apologize for my sloppiness in terminology - I'll again try to restate my Scenario B in light of your clarification. I understand your position that the physical status of D1's brain has no bearing on D1's existence as a person. What I am concerned with is the question of when a brain is associated with a particular person. That is, when D1 is alive and functioning normally, you presumably believe that there is a special relationship between D1's brain and the person D1 that does not exist between a completely different person D2's brain and the person D1 (this is why it is meaningful to even say that it is D1's brain). I'm concerned with the question of when this special relationship ceases and what the consequences are when it does both subjectively for the person D1 and objectively to an outside observer.
Let me describe what happens in my view (in this paragraph I'll use your terminology, then in the next, I'll clarify what I think that terminology misses): if we started with D1's brain, and gradually replaced one neuron at a time, then subjectively the person D1 would experience very gradual changes. First, he might lose some of his memories, or his memories might be replaced by memories belonging to D2 (or D2's brain - I'm not sure which has memories in your view). Next, he might lose some of his abilities or these abilities might be replaced by abilities belonging to D2. At the end of this series of gradual changes, person D1's subjective experience would have become in every way identical to D2's subjective experience. If D1's experience was initially that of a cheery old man and D2's that of a depressed teenager, then at the end of the transformation, D1 would feel like a depressed teenager.
In fact, in my view it is not even really meaningful to say, "D1 would feel like D2" since there is no more D1, just D2. It is more accurate to say that the person D1 gradually faded away as his brain was replaced since "D1" just refers to the brain we started with. Subjectively, I think there is no discontinuity - we start with an entity that feels like it is D1, and that entity gradually comes to feel like it is D2. Normatively, D1 would view such a procedure as akin to being murdered, as his goals, memories, ambitions and learned abilities would no longer exist. To an outside observer, as D1's brain was replaced with D2's brain, the behavior of that brain in its body became less and less like D1's behavior and more and more like D2's behavior.
Now, can you give me an account of what would happen in your view if we started with D1's brain and gradually replaced it neuron by neuron with D2's brain? What would this be like from the person D1's perspective? What would it be like to an outside observer? At each stage in this procedure, what would be the relationship between the person D1 and the brain in question? Is the relationship between the brain and the soul and binary operation - i.e. the soul is either "attached" or "not attached" - or can souls have degrees of association with a particular brain? Can more than one soul be associated with a single brain at the same time?
Hi Jason,
I'd prefer to draw this discussion to a close, in part because I'll always be tempted to return to it as long as it's open. So I'll answer your questions, offer a comment, and call it the end.
Starting with the comment, I don't think your view represents materialist orthodoxy, at least not as I understand it. Neurons do what they do not so much in a standalone way as in virtue of their connections, so if you're just replacing one neuron at a time I don't think anything will happen at all, psychologically.
But maybe I'm wrong, and if you can re-establish not only the foreign neuron but all its connections, then maybe, at least at the end of the day, D1's psychology will be qualitatively like D2's. Indeed, if I were a materialist, I would be tempted to say that D1 ceased to exist and that D2's body is now D1's. (At least one sort of materialist would say that. Others wouldn't - I'll leave that debate to them.)
On my own view, the psychological story and the way things appear to others could very well be just as they would to a materialist. People suffer from brain damage due to injury and chemical abuse in the real world, and it causes personality changes - this is already evident and no dualist denies it. My interest in the discussion is a metaphysical one only: I'm not worried about who D is like, I'm worried about who D *is*. It's possible for D1 on both a dualist and a materialist view to suffer all sorts of damage, memory loss, personality change, etc. What I've tried to argue in the earlier posts is that the leg up the dualist has is that a person persists through change (including the humdrum change of everyday life), and that this is not the case for the materialist. As far as I can tell, you grant this but don't think it's a problem. I disagree, and have tried to show why this strikes me as implausible, and that's about all that can be done.
As for what I think will happen in the latest scenario: D1 will continue to exist, and will try to incorporate the foreign neurons into its life, roughly analogous to the way we turn food into our bodies; we don't become cow-human hybrids when we eat burgers. (I think materialists would want to say the same thing.) Little bits of D2's soul don't come over with its brain, aiming to achieve a hostile takeover. In some sort of super-extreme case, e.g. cutting D1 and D2 in half and attaching them together, I have no idea what would happen, but this doesn't strike me as a genuine problem for my view. It might be like conjoined twins fighting for one mouth - beats me. The only position I'd rule out is that there's some sort of soul merger, though it may be possible that if the two brain hemispheres can integrate the resulting psychology would be a hybrid. That doesn't require some sort of soul merger to explain it, though. If someone could open my brain and rewire the neurons of my right hemisphere to mirror someone else's right hemisphere, it wouldn't generate a brand new soul. (Again, think Aristotle/Aquinas: the soul is the organized organizer of the body and brain, not the brain's shadow government.)
It was interesting, but no more posts, please!
I can't resist one last clarification and summation, but I promise after this - whether you choose to reply or not - no more posts on the topic on pain of having nothing remotely similar to me continue to exist in the future!
The main defense you offer for the metaphysical position you take is that it captures something important about what it is like subjectively to think about the past and the future. My claim is that this intuition has no evidential value about anything metaphysical. It is an intuition that I claim would fade if we lived in different circumstances. You feel it is very obvious that it is not enough to have a duplicate of your brain persist into the future - that this would not really be "you" - but if you had grown up in a society where people routinely "backed up" their brain before embarking on a dangerous task and reuploaded it into a new body if their old brain were destroyed, you would not have this intuition. Your family members would not regard the new entity as an imposter or a duplicate, they would regard it as you. The continuation of you after an accident would not regard itself as a copy or descendent, but as a future version of the past you. Now you might answer, "Well, it doesn't matter what people think, it matters what's true!" But it *does* matter what people think because that intuition is the only evidence you offer in favor of your position! If that intuition doesn't "track the metaphysical truth" but instead tracks the contingent empirical question of whether sufficiently close duplicates actually do exist, then it provides no evidential basis for your claim.
You are ambivalent about whether your view has any empirical implications. You suggest above the possibility that an entity that emerged from a transporter might behave in ways that fail to be recognizably human even if its brain were an exact copy. More generally, the question is whether - if we could create an entity with an identical brain to your own - it would also behave in the same way. Your hypothesis that it would not is a *scientific* claim and a scientific claim rejected by the vast majority of scientists working in relevant fields because of the evidence suggesting that all human behavior is explicable given the interaction of the physical features of the brain (and in some cases the nervous system) with the external world. Your view implies that there are somehow exceptions to this (you at least reject the now laughable claim that these exceptions arise through the soul's interaction with the pinial gland). But what could these exceptions look like? What behaviors are they? I think you're making a scientific claim here that most scientists reject and that evidence continues to mount against the more we understand about the brain. Your hypothesis here is meaningful - I just think it's false.
Now, you might retreat from the possibility your view has empirical consequences of any sort - you could articulate a version of your view that implies nothing about behavior no matter what experiments we conduct, nothing about subjective experience and nothing normative. This is where my thought experiment with D1 and D2 is relevant. As I've made clear in earlier posts - I agree with the view that consciousness arises via the structural connections between neurons - the idea of my example was just to suppose that one can construct a mapping between the features of one D1's brain and D2's brain and gradually replace the former with the latter while keeping the organism alive - I agree that this mapping would not be such that there is literally a corresponding neuron in D2's brain for each neuron in D1's brain. The point of that example was to demonstrate that if your view really doesn't have empirical consequences, then it just leads you to make vacuous assertions. If I gradually replace D1's brain entirely with D2's brain, you could keep insisting that in fact, it's still the person D1, he's just behaving exactly like D2. But this insistence doesn't mean anything! It's no more valid than if I said that the souls of my friend Chris and David switched overnight so that the unchanging anchor of "Chris" now acted through David's body and brain while the unchanging anchor of David now acted through Chris's body and brain. Neither of these even rise to the level of skeptical hypotheses (we can imagine a world in which we would discover we were living in the matrix, or obtain good evidence that the past prior to 10 years ago was fabricated): this kind of claim cannot be evaluated as true or false in any sense.
Finally, I understand also that dualism is a view with a philosophical pedigree and that there are other arguments for dualism besides the appeal to intuition you suggest here. Currently, I believe a small minority of professional philosophers are dualist (I can't find the exact survey question, but I think I recall something like 27%) and I haven't seen this number for neuroscientists but I suspect it is considerably lower. I predict this number will decline over the next 30-50 years, as neuroscientists learn more about the brain and those versions of dualism with any empirical content become less defensible. I think the best evidence in favor of my view is not that I find the arguments compelling, but that while the majority of the general public believe a soul exists, the majority of people with relevant specialized knowledge (philosophers and neuroscientists) agree with me. What really matters is the causal impact of knowledge on belief (as opposed to selection due to atheists being more interested in neuroscience and philosophy than theists or something of that sort), so I could certainly be swayed if you could find a study which suggested that upon becoming philosophers or neuroscientists, people shifted their beliefs towards dualism. I think the existing evidence suggests this is unlikely.
It would have been better, or at least kinder, to have refrained. That said, I feel your pain! Anyway, the "no more" policy will henceforth be enforced in draconian fashion.
On intuition: There are two issues you seem to be conflating. There's my (innocent until proven guilty, or so I've argued) intuition that I am numerically the same person as the younger adult, teenager, child, etc. of the same name. For this, I have offered no further support than the intuition itself, though I don't think it's therefore a weak point. The fact that you can invent a story which is far from clearly possible, claim that in that story people's intuitions will be different (this isn't obvious to me either), and then suggest that because we would presumably believe otherwise in such a world our intuitions to the contrary in this one carry little weight strikes me as overly optimistic, to put it mildly. Not impossible, but certainly not an epistemic par with the default position.
Anyway, that's one issue. The second issue, which I think you're conflating, is the claim that in such a world what results when person1 dies and "his" mental states are downloaded afresh is the same person. Here my objections don't rely on the previous paragraph's intuition at all. Maybe my intuition that I'm the same person as the 6 year old of the same name is completely false. All the same, it strikes me as entirely clear that that person (pointing at someone) is not identical to this other one pointing elsewhere, even if their mental states are identical. For this I've provided quite a few arguments through the thread, and haven't seen a rebuttal aside from what amounts to a big "who cares?" Well, I do, and I suspect that if these sci-fi scenarios were even remotely possible, you wouldn't be in any hurry to risk your own life just because someone would would think he was you could continue to live a life like yours.
Anyway, these two issues are distinct. It's possible for me to be right about the second and wrong about the first; if that were so, then personal identity in the strict sense would not obtain.
Regarding empirical consequences: I'm not interested in unsupported scientific conjectures or polls of philosophers. If there's some actual evidence or good arguments, then great, fantastic. One problem with extrapolating from current brain science is that if dualism is true, there aren't any un-souled brains to serve as a test basis. The sample is already "contaminated". But this too is all much of a muchness: while I think some versions of dualism do have empirical consequences, though testing them may not be so simple, the discussion is primarily an ontological one. To dismiss an ontological claim because it doesn't deliver empirical results is a little like blaming dogs for not meowing. It's not what they're supposed to do.
Two final points, not of terrible importance to the philosophical topic but perhaps of sociological and historical interest. First (1A, that is), that neuroscientists don't generally become dualists isn't terribly surprising for a couple of reasons. The first is the one I already mentioned; namely, one isn't led to dualism (or away from it either) by a general inspection of the physical phenomena. So there's no obvious reason why that would happen. Second (1B), in most of the "hard" sciences there's a general presumption of physicalism, and this for a combination of reasons - some that are quite understandable, historically, and some that are lousy. But whether good or bad, the cultural presumption in those circles is extremely strong, and that helps to insure something approaching lockstep agreement on such matters.
Second (the historical point), while I disagree with Descartes' version of dualism on a number of grounds, his pineal gland solution wasn't "laughable". (And my rejection of the pineal gland "solution" shouldn't have been portrayed as some sort of grudging concession to sanity on my part, either. While I do disagree with what we might call the "orthodox" ontology of most neuroscientists, that's precisely the point: I'm disagreeing with them about ontology - about metaphysics, not about any actual scientific results they've produced. Science in general and neuroscience in particular is fascinating to me and I take it quite seriously. [If I didn't care about it, I wouldn't have read works like Christoph Koch's enormous and pretty technical The Quest for Consciousness from cover to cover.] Scientism, on the other hand, I find laughable. It bears the same relationship to good philosophical thinking that the flat earth theory bears to good science.) Certainly Descartes was wrong, but it was a pretty reasonable bit of thinking on his part. It wasn't that he just decided in the abstract, thinking about his navel one day, that the pineal gland would be a swell place for mind-body interaction to occur. Rather, his thought, roughly was that given the duplication of most brain structures, it would be odd if the interface between the mind and the brain happened at some asymmetrical point. So he picked a unique, central structure as the locus of interaction to avoid that difficulty. False? Sure, but sensible, and about as good a guess as was possible at the time.