Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Enforcement mechanisms are not a requirement of law -- law is fundamentally about classification, not enforcement.

That is not how the word is used in describing human societies. And the human social institution is the primary meaning of the word. Any use of it for inanimate nature is metaphorical.

Bill Stoddard

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That is not how the word is used in describing human societies. And the human social institution is the primary meaning of the word. Any use of it for inanimate nature is metaphorical.

Can we take "obeys physical laws" to be replaced by "has characteristic properties and behaviors" and continue?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That is not how the word is used in describing human societies.

Sure it is. We distinguish between law and enforcement of law all the time. Law defines what will be enforced, it does not actually enforce.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by whswhs

What I think is real is that physical things have natures. That is, each physical thing can be in various states, and in each state and under each set of environmental influences, it can assume a next state and a next relationship to its environment (which I imagine you will recognize from the theory of finite state automata). And of course those states and those relationships are not entities, and a nature is not an entity; states and natures are in entities, and relationships are between entities. Erhnam's terminology confuses "entity" with "existent."

Of course I don't need to convince you that the physical includes more than just the material, I recall you defending the realness of space between the planets.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I am not my experience. You keep appealing to states of consciousness as if they were primary. Consciousness is secondary; physical existence is primary.

Isn't a ghost's purpose to be a simulation of consciousness rather than a simulation of physical existence?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Sure it is. We distinguish between law and enforcement of law all the time. Law defines what will be enforced, it does not actually enforce.

If law is never enforced, then it isn't law.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Isn't a ghost's purpose to be a simulation of consciousness rather than a simulation of physical existence?

If I don't exist, I can't be conscious. Conscious beings = physical beings that have the function of consciousness.

And the value of consciousness comes from its being consciousness of reality—that is, from its intentionality, to use the philosophical term. If an entity has the consciousness of being me, but it is not really me but a simulation of me running on a computer, and it doesn't know that, then its consciousness is not consciousness of reality; if it does know that, and it shares my beliefs and my model of reality, then it is not going to regard itself as me.

And I expect it's going to be rather frustrated. Embodiment is an important aspect of life for me. I can imagine that those of you who imagine that you would die in your organic bodies, and wake up in a cybernetic body or a virtual reality, might think it worthwhile to survive even in that attenuated form. To me the choice is not one of surviving or not—I'll be dead either way—but of creating an analog of me that will be trapped for a long time in something akin to the Norse hell.

But even setting that point aside, the key for me is that we're talking about a simulation of me; that is, about a copy. The process is not continued survival; it's reproduction.

Bill Stoddard

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Isn't a ghost's purpose to be a simulation of consciousness rather than a simulation of physical existence?

I thought it was to emulate the outputs of the person's brain.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Can we take "obeys physical laws" to be replaced by "has characteristic properties and behaviors" and continue?

Sure. That avoids the fallacy of hypostatization.

Bill Stoddard

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That seems to say that if we did not exist, or if we did not describe things, or if there are things we have not yet discovered, that those things have no properties. So, for example, there are planets in other solar systems, but until we started discovering them, none of those planets had a mass or an orbital period or a mean temperature or anything like that; there are microorganisms, but until Leeuwenhoek looked through his microscope, they had no size or shape or structure. That just sounds weird.

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that the objects exist (independently of our minds) and do whatever objects do. And that what we call properties are words we have for referring to ways we think of and categorize the objects. Our words don't influence the existence of objects. Microorganisms exist and function as is their nature regardless of whether we know of them or think of them.

Size doesn't exist. Objects exist. We can use our concepts to describe objects, to a less or greater degree of accuracy, and size is one of our ways of describing an object. It's a description used by humans; it's not part of the object itself.

I think that Aristotelian materialism avoids the problems of other sorts of materialism, in that it lets us say that there are no pure forms; every form is the form of some material entity—and conversely, there is no matter without form. But the form is real.

That's a bit different from how Buridan explains it in Summulae de Dialectica, which is where I'm getting my understanding of Aristotle's view on properties.

I think it makes more sense the way he describes it, where he's talking about quiddity rather than forms. I like what you wrote about objects having natures, but I think that still stretches the language. They operate (function? act?) as is their nature. To say that they have a nature seems to imply that the nature is a separate thing from what they are, but I don't think that's the case. The "nature" is the totality of their being. It's not some separable thing, like a doll's head.

That is, individual human beings exist primarily; but attributes such as humanity or animality exist secondarily, in human beings, and not on their own.

The way Buridan explains that is by saying that there are different senses of the word 'property' that can easily be confused with one another. Which is still the case in English, obviously, where the problem has spread to the word 'existence' too. Probably in large part due to mathematicians spreading the Platonic notion that numbers exist.

I think that Aristotelian materialism avoids the problems of other sorts of materialism, in that it lets us say that there are no pure forms; every form is the form of some material entity—and conversely, there is no matter without form. But the form is real.

I don't know what problems you're alluding to here. Which materialists say that there are pure forms?

I blank out completely when you start talking about forms. I'm not able to interpret what you might mean by that. Form, pure forms, material forms. I don't know what any of it is supposed to mean. It seems like trying to fit understanding of the world into Platonic language which isn't suited to describing reality.