In the spirit of your (excellent) new post, I’ll attack all the weak points of your argument at once:
You define “soul” as:
the presence of something, let’s call it a soul, that makes people worthwhile
This definition doesn’t give souls any of their normal properties, like being the seat of subjective experience, or allowing free will, or surviving bodily death. That’s fine, but we need to be on the look-out in case these meanings sneak in as connotations later on. (In particular, the “Zombies” sequence doesn’t talk about moral worth, but does talk about subjective experience, so its application here isn’t straight forward. Do you believe that a simulation of a human would have subjective experience?)
“Souls” don’t provide any change in anticipation. You haven’t provided any mechanism by which other people having souls causes me to think that those other people have moral worth. Furthermore it seems that my belief that others have moral worth can be fully explained by my genes and my upbringing.
You haven’t stated any evidence for the claim that computer programs can’t have moral value, and this isn’t intuitively obvious to me.
You’ve produced a dichotomy between two very unlikely hypotheses. I think the correct answer in this case isn’t to believe the least unlikely hypothesis, but is instead to assume that the answer is some third option you haven’t thought of yet. For instance you could say “I withhold judgement on the existence of souls and the nature of moral worth until I understand the nature of subjective experience”.
The existence of souls as you’ve defined them doesn’t imply theism. Not even slightly. (EDIT: Your argument goes: ‘By the “Zombies” sequence, simulations are concious. By assumption, simulations have no moral worth. Therefore concious does not imply moral worth. Call whatever does imply moral worth a soul. Souls exist, therefore theism.’ The jump between the penultimate and the ultimate step is entirely powered by connotations of the word “soul”, and is therefore invalid.)
Also you say this:
I’ve been considering the possibility that there is exactly one soul in the universe (since there’s no reason to consider souls to propagate along the time axis of spacetime in any classical sense), but that’s a low-probability hypothesis for now.
(I’m sorry if what I say next offends you.) This sounds like one of those arguments clever people come up with to justify some previously decided conclusion. It looks like you’ve just picked a nice sounding theory out of hypothesis space without nearly enough evidence to support it. It would be a real shame if your mind became tangled up like an Escher painting because you were too good at thinking up clever arguments.
In the spirit of your (excellent) new post, I’ll attack all the weak points of your argument at once:
You define “soul” as:
This definition doesn’t give souls any of their normal properties, like being the seat of subjective experience, or allowing free will, or surviving bodily death. That’s fine, but we need to be on the look-out in case these meanings sneak in as connotations later on. (In particular, the “Zombies” sequence doesn’t talk about moral worth, but does talk about subjective experience, so its application here isn’t straight forward. Do you believe that a simulation of a human would have subjective experience?)
“Souls” don’t provide any change in anticipation. You haven’t provided any mechanism by which other people having souls causes me to think that those other people have moral worth. Furthermore it seems that my belief that others have moral worth can be fully explained by my genes and my upbringing.
You haven’t stated any evidence for the claim that computer programs can’t have moral value, and this isn’t intuitively obvious to me.
You’ve produced a dichotomy between two very unlikely hypotheses. I think the correct answer in this case isn’t to believe the least unlikely hypothesis, but is instead to assume that the answer is some third option you haven’t thought of yet. For instance you could say “I withhold judgement on the existence of souls and the nature of moral worth until I understand the nature of subjective experience”.
The existence of souls as you’ve defined them doesn’t imply theism. Not even slightly. (EDIT: Your argument goes: ‘By the “Zombies” sequence, simulations are concious. By assumption, simulations have no moral worth. Therefore concious does not imply moral worth. Call whatever does imply moral worth a soul. Souls exist, therefore theism.’ The jump between the penultimate and the ultimate step is entirely powered by connotations of the word “soul”, and is therefore invalid.)
Also you say this:
(I’m sorry if what I say next offends you.) This sounds like one of those arguments clever people come up with to justify some previously decided conclusion. It looks like you’ve just picked a nice sounding theory out of hypothesis space without nearly enough evidence to support it. It would be a real shame if your mind became tangled up like an Escher painting because you were too good at thinking up clever arguments.