Derek Parfit has died
dailynous.com
dailynous.com
I highly recommend Reasons and Persons: https://www.amazon.com/Reasons-Persons-Derek-Parfit/dp/01982...
Here's an illegal copy online, which can convince you how good his stuff is: http://chadpearce.com/home/BOOKS/161777473-Derek-Parfit-Reas...
The closing words:
"Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes."
Holy shit, this is brilliant. Wow. May you post more?
Not really. How is that an argument against souls?
Souls are not physical, nothing stops them from traveling to the new location of the body, or from being in more than one "place" at a time.
Souls are also not indivisible. When you have reincarnation plus resurrection of the dead, which body get the soul? Answer: All of them. They each get a soul, and all those souls are linked, and yet individual. (This also answers the question about heaven and a widow/er - which soul would they be with? Answer: Both, a soul can "exist" more than once at a time.)
A copy-transporter would just do the same thing, get a copy of the soul.
So no, not a brilliant argument.
See here http://www.torahcafe.com/rabbi-asher-crispe/time-travel-and-... for some more on the Jewish perspective on this.
By anyone. Once you entertain the concept of soul, then all the rest follows automatically. I don't see that someone non-religious could understand it any differently (other than not entertaining the concept of soul in the first place).
Besides, quantum teleportation notwithstanding, I'm not sure QM allows the reproduction of everything at once, which should be required to duplicate the entire pattern.
But you're misremembering as it's not an argument against souls, it's an argument about what constitutes identity. You'll notice the article about it on Wikipedia has no mention of the word 'soul':
There are other possible conclusions, mainly based on imposing some sort of special "no duplicate souls" rule - e.g. the original single soul continues to exist inside the two new Freds simultaneously, the original Fred had a soul but the two new Freds are soulless, etc.
Hmmm, I guess this argument is piquing my interest, maybe I should just go and read Parfit's work.
[1]: A nice EPUB: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=35E9FA954593C060F52...
[1] http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/1/3/14148208/dere... Quote from conclusion of third volume of On What Matters
The philosophy of personal identity is one of my favourite subjects in philosophy so his work came up a few times when studying that.
Worth reading up on some of his work if you like philosophy, alternatively there are a (few) videos on youtube mostly on moral philosophy IIRC.
I'd also recommend Mark Johnston's work on the topic. Human Beings (https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=jph... - behind a paywall, unfortunately) is a wonderful essay. And his book Surviving Death is a good example of creative contemporary philosophy that's actually fun to read.
PS -- If you want some truly excellent philosophical writing, give Thomas Nagel a read.
I wouldn't recommend him to anyone unless you're interested in the history of philosophy of science, and would like to be directly familiar with all major 20th-century philosophers in that space.
Contemporary philosophical discussion many times is like typical forum debates on the Internet about basic science - someone says something stupid and the others try to educate him, he don't get it and write his same stupidity again and again until everybody is tired to reply.
In the academic world this is called publish or perish: if you are a philosopher you should fear more from being forgotten than from proper and decisive falsification - so you just have to be loud, even if you are wrong. If you defend your wrongness skilfully you will have your followers anyway.
But I'm just simply don't interested in whether Nagel will get evolution eventually, or Putnam & Searle get computation sometime in the future* (just to provide another example)
* I thinking about their theory that a rock can implement any computation - if we provide proper mapping between the states, without taking into consideration the complexity of the mapping as part of the "computer" here. It is ok if someone doesn't get Kolmogorov but not clear why they should make a living from it, or at least why should I support it by buying and reading their books. ;)
>Putnam & Searle [don't] get computation
Putnam essentially invented the functionalist computationalist theory of mind that you are implicitly defending, so I'd say he probably understood it at least as well as you do. (He later changed his mind about its viability.)
More generally I wouldn't doubt Putnam's ability to grasp technical material. This is a guy who contributed the solution to one of Hilbert's problems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_tenth_problem).
>It is ok if someone doesn't get Kolmogorov
No-one has provided a solution to the rock problem in terms of Kolmogorov complexity. Scott Aaronson speculates that this notion might be helpful, but he doesn't work out the details. In fact it seems rather unlikely that his proposed solution would work, as the mapping from abstract computational states to the physical states of actually existing computers is also extremely complex, and not obviously any less complex than the mapping from these states to physical states of rocks, waterfalls or whatever. Since we can't actually specify any of the relevant mappings, it's very difficult to say for sure that they differ significantly in terms of Kolmogorov complexity.
The greatest feature of evolution that it makes teleology unnecessary. It can operate as a mindless/goalless algorithm. Of course evolution may be operated by someone/something with specific goals instead of pure chances, but thats just an unnecessary assumption until it proved - so we may employ Occam razor here until someone proves it. The possibility of design without a designer is one of the main point and contribution of the theory and it should be fully understood - even if if later turns out (which have not happened yet, and no sign for that happening beside metaphysical opinions...) that there was a designer.
> of actually existing computers is also extremely complex, and not obviously any less complex than the mapping from these states to physical states of rocks
You can't be serious: First map a Computer chess program states to human interpretable visualization to play chess against it And then do this with your rock.
First is mainly one-to-one mapping of digital signs to pixels by using a static table, the second is..., I'm not even sure how to inject my move into the states of the rock, but no idea either how to extract its response. You know why? There is simply no one to one mapping there. The states of a rock is a large bundle of everything without interpretation, the states of the chess program is CLEARLY more constrained - the proof is empirical: it CAN be implemented.
Like if you say that the set of all positive integers contains the solution of factorizing any large number. Of course it does: you just have to point to those numbers. ;) But how? All states are not the solution - selecting the proper states is the computation, and if those selection mechanism is in the mapping process then the mapping IS the computer.
That's what Nagel is disputing.
> Of course evolution may be operated by someone/something with specific goals instead of pure chances, but thats just an unnecessary assumption until it proved
Nagel isn't a theist or an ID advocate. The existence of such a designer isn't part the thesis of the book.
>First is mainly one-to-one mapping of digital signs to pixels by using a static table
I was talking about mapping to a physical state, not an abstract computational state. If you try to specify the relevant "digital signals" in physical rather than computational terms, you'll find that it's an impossibly complex task. Even individual transistors are enormously complex physical systems. We simply don't know whether the mapping to physical states would be significantly more complex in the case of the waterfall. If you're allowed to cheat by using more abstract states (e.g. "on" or "off" for each transistor), then you can equally well cheat in the case of the waterfall by giving names to disjunctions of physically distinct states.
>There is simply no one to one mapping there.
Not sure what you mean by this. If the rock has a sufficient number of possible physical states, then you certainly can specify a one-to-one mapping from chess states to rock states. It's true that this mapping will be difficult or impossible for humans to exploit. Rather obviously, that's because computers were designed in such a way that it's easy for humans to manipulate their states in certain ways, whereas rocks weren't.
Guess you can find it easily without much thinking, and then you will see I was right! ;)
We have many many evidence that random mutation is enough for describing the biological evolution on Earth. If the mutation is controlled by someone than it is done according to random distributions as far as we currently know. He should provide evidence if he thinks otherwise but he is not doing it and not qualified for it, thats only what I see.
That's what he does in the book. But Nagel isn't claiming to make any original contribution to biology or evolutionary theory. His main aim, as far as I can see, is to point out that the standard arguments for mutations being random are less strong than is usually thought. I don't think he claims to know whether or not mutations are in fact random, or what controls them if they are not.