memla

Once again you're missing the point. Nobody here agreed or disagreed with you about the nature of persons. What everyone is claiming is that you're simply espousing a position withing philosophy, which may or may not be true, and requires a philosophical argument, and you're pretending that the case has been closed by neuroscience. Hell, even the "No True Scotsman" is a fallacy identified by a philosopher in a domain of informal logic, which is a branch of philosophy.

So you don't care what python should or should not do, but you think that python should not break your mailing list?

He didn't ask you whether there are accurate rules for distinguishing between felines and other families, he specifically and precisely asked you if you can deduce those rules from the illusion! It's the same inference you were trying to make about the nature of the self. Read more carefully.

Yes, you will have to draw that line and some other distinctions, and that is exactly his point. Determining what is a good, useful definition that all rational participants can agree to, and clearing all other conceptual baggage before the discussion can even get off the ground is (just a small) task of philosophy. It does not belong to (neuro)science, and therefore if that task needs to be performed, as you admit, it follows that (neuro)science is not sufficient to determine the "nature of the person", contrary to what you originally claimed.

This might be an interesting read. Also the comments about Krauss on that blog are useful because Krauss is representative of many contemporary scientists. http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/...

You should be careful with this grand pronunciations about what scientist have discovered, given that your last sentence doesn't have much to do with anything that precedes it. A "sense of self" is not the same thing as the "self". Nor does association/correlation of the self with brain regions imply identity between those two things.

To take one example, philosophers have been more than instrumental in the development of logic, especially [informal logic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_logic#History). Don't want to get into a discussion on whether logic is itself a branch of philosophy.

Actually, according to the philpapers surveys most philosophers are moral realists. Of course, that means that they believe that at least some moral statements are true independent of what anyone thinks about them, not that "nature cares what our thoughts are" (whatever that means). And i think everyone would do well to explore the position seriously.

Right, but Facebook supposedly receives 1 billion new comments + a couple billion likes + a couple hundred million status updates daily, and is probably the largest photo sharing site on the net. Twitter gets about 200 million tweets daily and Reddit has 250 million comments total. Disqus is not much larger than Reddit.

So, since most people here are suggesting Python or Ruby, what real world example can we provide that compares to Facebook in order to make sure that these languages would perform better than PHP?

Neither Twitter, nor Reddit or Disqus are exactly the most stable and performant sites out there. So?

I would say that quick and dirty comparisons like this are meaningless.

This comment of yours is also nothing but thoughts and ideas. What's your point?