Harry notes that we can see that mind function depends on brain function. Take a chunk out of a brain, the mind associated with it doesn’t work so well. Harry notes the insanity of thinking that taking away all the brain chunks leaves you with a working mind.
You object
This is a surprisingly common fallacy. Just because X depends on Y, it doesn’t follow that X depends on nothing but Y. A phenomenon may involve more than just its most obvious failure point.
X = Mind. Y = Brain Chunks. Let X depend on Brain Chunks and Soul and Astral Flubber. If your mind is dependent on all of them for proper operation, then you can’t speak when all your brain chunks are gone. End of story. You can play epiphenomenal games and argue that “yes, but you still have Soul and Astral Flubber.” But who cares? All mind function is lost. I may “have” eternal and indestructible Astral Flubber, but what good does it do me?
Harry is clearly arguing against continued function after physical destruction, not against “having” a big pile of epiphenomenal astral hand bags, full of epiphenomenal astral stuff. He was hoping for functional minds after death, and noted how foolish that was.
No logical fallacy involved. Nothing to see here, move along.
Thanks, that’s helpful. Two (related) possible replies for the afterlife believer:
(1) The Y-component is replaceable: brains play the Y role while we’re alive, but we get some kind of replacement device in the afterlife (which qualifies as “us”, rather than a “replica of us”, due to persisting soul identity).
(2) The brain is only needed for physical expressions of mentality (“talking”, etc.), and we revert to purely non-physical mental functioning in the afterlife.
These are silly views, of course, but I’m not yet convinced that the existence of brain damage makes them any more so than they were to begin with. (They seem pretty natural developments of the substance dualist view, rather than big bullets they have to bite.)
Did these fundamentally arbitrary assertions get more stupid? That’s an angel dancing on the head of a pin argument.
Notice that those weren’t the assertions before we learned about brains. The mind was a spirit/soul mysteriously trapped in a physical body. Then we started poking around in brains, and finding that the mind didn’t seem to work so well when bad things happened to the brain. So minds retreat to epiphenomenalism. Then they can retreat in time, and only actually do anything after you’re no longer alive, and no one can see anything actually happening.
So, yes, the original theory of the soul got less likely after we learned about brains, but your new theory of the soul, specifically crafted to avoid contradiction with the new evidence, might not have.
God, souls, immaterial minds, elan vital, essences, etc., are all a bunch of cockroaches, always scurrying back into the darkness, retreating from the expanding light of evidence. How many retreats do we need to see before we’re convinced they will never be able to stand their ground?
I anticipated the “functional swap at death” argument, as it was the logical next rampart to retreat behind, but thought it was pointless to say anything about it. I think we’ve learned by now that the chase never ends. I could just as well say that your mind will continue only if you had duck within a week of your death, and the Spirit of the Duck was within you to transfer the function of your mind to live out the rest of eternity in a lamp post. That’s a spiritual lamp post, of course. We can’t actually see the the lamp post, you silly goose. Or should I say, silly duck?
We really need a clear and concise statement for the rejection of the infinite class of arbitrary assertions consistent with all currently known data.
Notice that those weren’t the assertions before we learned about brains.
The first was an assertion before we knew more about brains. Richard Carrier in particular believes that this is pretty much what Paul and early Christians believed 1,2; that you need to be given a new body in the resurrection in order to have life after your normal body is destroyed. According to Carrier and others it wasn’t an uncommon belief that humans gained another better body spiritual body at the resurrection. Spiritual body in this case doesn’t mean non-physical, but instead is to be interpreted as the element which the heavenly bodies are made from.
If you are interested in reading more about it, I have other books to recommend on the subject. I do agree with you however that these possible replies are stupid.
There are different variations. The Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in immaterial souls separate from the body. All life occurs as a material body. They get rid of hell too. Rather sensible, I think.
I couldn’t quite tell from your comments whether you’re referring to people with similar beliefs to the Witnesses, or people who say you have a soul, but it (waits around? exists but has no sensation?) until God gives it a shiny new body.
I assume there are all conceivable permutations of when/where/how/if souls exist, and I don’t have a stand on whether the first Christians believed in immaterial souls or not. Maybe some did, some didn’t? Truth be told, I was thinking about a thousand years back, by which time I believe an immaterial soul was taken as given through most of Christendom. Mind body dualism seems to go a long ways back with animism, ghosts, and spirits. What do you have to say about the general history of materialism versus dualism?
It is similar to the Witnesses as far as your description goes, though I am not very familiar with JW’s beliefs to comment further on the similarities.
My only point was that this is an old idea (that you need a body to function and that you get given a new body of some wondrous sort upon death), and not one contrived as an escape from the physicalists death blow. The debate is over and done for me, and I as you see the moves of the dualist as always failing to substantiate the additional substance.
(2) The brain is only needed for physical expressions of mentality (“talking”, etc.), and we revert to purely non-physical mental functioning in the afterlife.
These are silly views, of course, but I’m not yet convinced that the existence of brain damage makes them any more so than they were to begin with.
It seems the considerations in gjm’s comment actively tear (2) to shreds.
Are you agreeing, then, that X=mind and Y=brain chunks? That’s surprising to me. I would have thought that X was all of the relevant behaviors—walking, talking, breathing, playing games, writing on internet forums, … I didn’t think you would want an identity thesis between Mind and Some Class of Behaviors. Maybe I’m thinking about this wrong, but I thought for soul-ish theories, the mind just was the soul. And then you get a causal picture (for interactionists, anyway) that looks like Soul --> Brain --> Intelligent Behaviors.
X = Mind. Y = Brain Chunks. Let X depend on Brain Chunks and Soul and Astral Flubber. If your mind is dependent on all of them for proper operation, then you can’t speak when all your brain chunks are gone. End of story. You can play epiphenomenal games and argue that “yes, but you still have Soul and Astral Flubber.” But who cares? All mind function is lost. I may “have” eternal and indestructible Astral Flubber, but what good does it do me?
This only follows if the impact from the Soul and Astral Flubber.is negligible. You could see a situation where it wasn’t purely epiphenomenal and where tests could be made to verify that. For example, one could make an extremely detailed emulation of the brain, and if it then became apparent that that was failing at a variety of different levels, that would be evidence for Astral Flubber or the Soul having a direct impact on the wetspace version.
First, just the obvious “my simulation doesn’t work” does not imply Soul or Astral Flubber exists or that it does something. The more reasonable interpretation is that your simulation sucks.
This only follows if the impact from the Soul and Astral Flubber.negligible.
No, it doesn’t. Both could have great impact when combined with a brain, but take away the brain, and you have no function. Harry wanted the continued function of the mind after physical destruction of the body. Even if the mind dependency is Brain AND Astral Flubber, brain gone means mind gone. Astral Flubber has not shown the capability to replace the function of brain chunks, so why would we expect it to replace the function of all the chunks together?
First, just the obvious “my simulation doesn’t work” does not imply Soul or Astral Flubber exists or that it does something. The more reasonable interpretation is that your simulation sucks.
For the initial simulations yes. If for example humans spent fifty years making more and more detailed simulations and they still didn’t work, and there was no sign that they were improving at all, the existence of some really weird new physics shouldn’t be discounted at that point.
No, it doesn’t. Both could have great impact when combined with a brain, but take away the brain, and you have no function. Harry wanted the continued function of the mind after physical destruction of the body. Even if the mind dependency is Brain AND Astral Flubber, brain gone means mind gone.
This seems like a much stronger point. The evidence shows that Astral Flubber is at least not sufficient, and the brain is really doing almost everything that matters.
Let’s walk through this slowly.
Harry notes that we can see that mind function depends on brain function. Take a chunk out of a brain, the mind associated with it doesn’t work so well. Harry notes the insanity of thinking that taking away all the brain chunks leaves you with a working mind.
You object
X = Mind. Y = Brain Chunks. Let X depend on Brain Chunks and Soul and Astral Flubber. If your mind is dependent on all of them for proper operation, then you can’t speak when all your brain chunks are gone. End of story. You can play epiphenomenal games and argue that “yes, but you still have Soul and Astral Flubber.” But who cares? All mind function is lost. I may “have” eternal and indestructible Astral Flubber, but what good does it do me?
Harry is clearly arguing against continued function after physical destruction, not against “having” a big pile of epiphenomenal astral hand bags, full of epiphenomenal astral stuff. He was hoping for functional minds after death, and noted how foolish that was.
No logical fallacy involved. Nothing to see here, move along.
Thanks, that’s helpful. Two (related) possible replies for the afterlife believer:
(1) The Y-component is replaceable: brains play the Y role while we’re alive, but we get some kind of replacement device in the afterlife (which qualifies as “us”, rather than a “replica of us”, due to persisting soul identity).
(2) The brain is only needed for physical expressions of mentality (“talking”, etc.), and we revert to purely non-physical mental functioning in the afterlife.
These are silly views, of course, but I’m not yet convinced that the existence of brain damage makes them any more so than they were to begin with. (They seem pretty natural developments of the substance dualist view, rather than big bullets they have to bite.)
Did these fundamentally arbitrary assertions get more stupid? That’s an angel dancing on the head of a pin argument.
Notice that those weren’t the assertions before we learned about brains. The mind was a spirit/soul mysteriously trapped in a physical body. Then we started poking around in brains, and finding that the mind didn’t seem to work so well when bad things happened to the brain. So minds retreat to epiphenomenalism. Then they can retreat in time, and only actually do anything after you’re no longer alive, and no one can see anything actually happening.
So, yes, the original theory of the soul got less likely after we learned about brains, but your new theory of the soul, specifically crafted to avoid contradiction with the new evidence, might not have.
God, souls, immaterial minds, elan vital, essences, etc., are all a bunch of cockroaches, always scurrying back into the darkness, retreating from the expanding light of evidence. How many retreats do we need to see before we’re convinced they will never be able to stand their ground?
I anticipated the “functional swap at death” argument, as it was the logical next rampart to retreat behind, but thought it was pointless to say anything about it. I think we’ve learned by now that the chase never ends. I could just as well say that your mind will continue only if you had duck within a week of your death, and the Spirit of the Duck was within you to transfer the function of your mind to live out the rest of eternity in a lamp post. That’s a spiritual lamp post, of course. We can’t actually see the the lamp post, you silly goose. Or should I say, silly duck?
We really need a clear and concise statement for the rejection of the infinite class of arbitrary assertions consistent with all currently known data.
The first was an assertion before we knew more about brains. Richard Carrier in particular believes that this is pretty much what Paul and early Christians believed 1,2; that you need to be given a new body in the resurrection in order to have life after your normal body is destroyed. According to Carrier and others it wasn’t an uncommon belief that humans gained another better body spiritual body at the resurrection. Spiritual body in this case doesn’t mean non-physical, but instead is to be interpreted as the element which the heavenly bodies are made from.
If you are interested in reading more about it, I have other books to recommend on the subject. I do agree with you however that these possible replies are stupid.
There are different variations. The Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in immaterial souls separate from the body. All life occurs as a material body. They get rid of hell too. Rather sensible, I think.
I couldn’t quite tell from your comments whether you’re referring to people with similar beliefs to the Witnesses, or people who say you have a soul, but it (waits around? exists but has no sensation?) until God gives it a shiny new body.
I assume there are all conceivable permutations of when/where/how/if souls exist, and I don’t have a stand on whether the first Christians believed in immaterial souls or not. Maybe some did, some didn’t? Truth be told, I was thinking about a thousand years back, by which time I believe an immaterial soul was taken as given through most of Christendom. Mind body dualism seems to go a long ways back with animism, ghosts, and spirits. What do you have to say about the general history of materialism versus dualism?
It is similar to the Witnesses as far as your description goes, though I am not very familiar with JW’s beliefs to comment further on the similarities.
My only point was that this is an old idea (that you need a body to function and that you get given a new body of some wondrous sort upon death), and not one contrived as an escape from the physicalists death blow. The debate is over and done for me, and I as you see the moves of the dualist as always failing to substantiate the additional substance.
It seems the considerations in gjm’s comment actively tear (2) to shreds.
Are you agreeing, then, that X=mind and Y=brain chunks? That’s surprising to me. I would have thought that X was all of the relevant behaviors—walking, talking, breathing, playing games, writing on internet forums, … I didn’t think you would want an identity thesis between Mind and Some Class of Behaviors. Maybe I’m thinking about this wrong, but I thought for soul-ish theories, the mind just was the soul. And then you get a causal picture (for interactionists, anyway) that looks like Soul --> Brain --> Intelligent Behaviors.
This only follows if the impact from the Soul and Astral Flubber.is negligible. You could see a situation where it wasn’t purely epiphenomenal and where tests could be made to verify that. For example, one could make an extremely detailed emulation of the brain, and if it then became apparent that that was failing at a variety of different levels, that would be evidence for Astral Flubber or the Soul having a direct impact on the wetspace version.
First, just the obvious “my simulation doesn’t work” does not imply Soul or Astral Flubber exists or that it does something. The more reasonable interpretation is that your simulation sucks.
No, it doesn’t. Both could have great impact when combined with a brain, but take away the brain, and you have no function. Harry wanted the continued function of the mind after physical destruction of the body. Even if the mind dependency is Brain AND Astral Flubber, brain gone means mind gone. Astral Flubber has not shown the capability to replace the function of brain chunks, so why would we expect it to replace the function of all the chunks together?
For the initial simulations yes. If for example humans spent fifty years making more and more detailed simulations and they still didn’t work, and there was no sign that they were improving at all, the existence of some really weird new physics shouldn’t be discounted at that point.
This seems like a much stronger point. The evidence shows that Astral Flubber is at least not sufficient, and the brain is really doing almost everything that matters.