[Zell]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Once again, I am not talking about the identity of my mind; I am talking about my identity as a physical organism. Do you have an eliminative materialist theory of the body?

Incidentally, I've read a fair bit of Paul Churchland, and some of Patricia Churchland, and it's clear that what they are "eliminating" is not the fact that we have experiences; they are not, for example, denying that if I apply a blowtorch to your hand you will feel pain (as the Cartesians did, in relation to nonhuman animals). What they are "eliminating" is the propositional model of mind, or the idea that awareness as such not merely can be described in the form of propositions, but in fact is made up of propositions, so that, if I throw a toy mouse, I can say of my cat, "He knows that it's on the sofa," and suppose that there is something in his mind that literally says "it's on the sofa." But that model was never valid in the first place. It takes the grammatical form of human linguistic communication and hypostatizes it as an internal mental manipulation of internal objects; it assumes that anything that is conscious at all must be conscious in the form of propositions; and it treats the nervous system as if it existed to engage in cognition for its own sake, rather than existing to steer the body around, with cognition taking place as a means to doing so—which tells us a lot about the habits and culture of philosophers but not much about living organisms. If you look into current cognitive science you'll find that the idea of embodied consciousness—the idea that neural information processing is inherently and inescapably tied to bodily activity and functioning—is gaining increasing currency there.

Before we go into this discussion, which I think is rather irrelevant to the subject we are supposed to discuss, let's just get this out of the way: Do you think that an uploaded ghost can have a consciousness, thoughts, emotions and other mental states? (I assume you do, just want to check to be sure.)

Originally Posted by whswhs

As to how I draw the line, I think you're just coming up with a new version of the paradox of the heap. I don't have to be able to define a criterion with molecular precision to know that I am me and my cat is not me. I don't suppose you seriously are ever in any doubt as to who you are, or which body is yours, or whether something is part of your body or not; I think you're just engaged in the classic Cartesian exercise of inventing doubts.

Just because the problem is old doesn't mean it's irrelevant - you still seem to take Aristotle seriously, for example. Everyone knows of the whole Ship of Theseus thing and it is boring and it is done... but if we are to assume the existence of identity, it's also highly relevant to this discussion. If you can't tell me when one identity ends and another begins, all this will be based on hunches. I say that if it's meaningful to talk about identity, the ghost would have the same identity as the uploaded person since I don't see the current configuration of my body as "who I really am" (whatever that means) and you say that it wouldn't have the same identity because you see the current configuration of your body as "who you really are" (whatever that means) and then we can sort of sit and throw our hunches at each other for a few weeks. I would prefer if at least one of us felt some kind of intellectual progress.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Edit: And when you get done with this one, would you go back and respond to my point about the epistemic status of physical theory?

Once again I ask, what posts have I not responded to?