Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

Wayne, we can grant that Old Paul passes to New, for whatever reasons you say. We can also grant that Nicos passes to Thanos. But as Kael asked, succinctly, so what?

Is it not the case that everything looks exactly the same for everyone involved, under existential passage as under standard materialism?

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

The noted arguments against Old Paul's passage to New, including your own, are "unparsimonious" in comparison with essay reasoning. Mutually incompatible, too. So do those arguments all fall under Occam's Razor together?

I realize you and some others want to race ahead to existential passage and much else, and you'll do what you want. But while confusion afflicts interpretation of the Old/New Paul scenario in this forum, it seems foolish to race ahead.

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

Yes, but I'm saying: Let's grant everything you say. Let's say Nicos passes to Thanos. I'm asking you, is it not the case that even if we grant that this happens, nothing looks different to anyone involved, than it does under standard physicalism?

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

Wayne, this is the post I think you need to answer. We don't need to debate whether existential passage is possible. We even grant that it is true. But, as Kael notes:

Everything else is a distraction. Again, we don't need to debate whether EP is true. We grant it's true. It's the above post that cuts to the heart of the matter.

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

I'll pause a moment at "Yes."

I wonder how many others in forum now concur, or might concur after a pause for reflection.

Comments?

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

Hello wstewart. Thank you for posting here and sharing your material. It is certainly far better presented and argued than the nonsense we've been getting from Peacegirl in the other thread, but then you don't have her mental impairment to contend with. It does seem to be the same basic idea that her father struggled to express, though it's hard to be sure with Peacegirl still refusing to actually share her father's chapter.

I've read through chapters 8 & 9, though I'm afraid I don't find the argument convincing. Maybe you can help clarify a few things for me. In chapter 8 you cover memory, continuity, and subjectivity criteria for personal identity, concluding that all three have a corporeal basis. I have no problem with that conclusion, but which criterion do you actually endorse? The criteria of memory, body/brain continuity, and psychological continuity are standardly taken as competing accounts, yet you seem to endorse all three collectively without explaining how they relate to each other or which takes precedence when they conflict.

Before expressing my concerns with the argument for existential passage, I will briefly summarize what I take the argument to be saying. Please correct me if necessary. Your argument compares two cases, and argues that the same existential passage should be thought to occur in both. In the first case, Paul suffers an extreme stroke leaving the new post-stroke Paul unable to link back via memory or any other psychological link to his pre-stroke self, and yet it is argued that we can still see from an external perspective that the new Paul remains a continuation of the old pre-stroke Paul. In the second case Nicos dies, survived by his wife who then gives birth to his son Thanos, who is said to be the recipient of the consciousness of Thanos via the same existential passage across an unfelt time-gap as in the case of Paul.

In this passage you seem to be endorsing a memory criterion for personal identity and arguing that it has here failed for Paul, resulting in his replacement by a new Paul numerically distinct from the previous and effectively deceased Paul.

Yet here you seem to be endorsing a bodily continuity criterion for personal identity and arguing that whatever Paul himself may think, he has in fact survived the stroke passing from the old Paul to the new Paul as the numerically same person. You seem to be arguing that from the internal perspective of Paul personal identity has failed due to the stroke, and that from the external perspective personal identity has not failed at all. So which view, on your account, is actually correct? Is Paul the numerically same person after the stroke or not?

Here you seem to reject the second option above in favor of the first, claiming the breakdown of memory is sufficient to render post-stroke Paul a new person. But then there is no passage or link of any kind to be considered. Personal identity has failed. One person has ended, and a new person has begun. So where is the existential passage? What is the link between the two Pauls if it is not a link of personal identity? If they are different people, then how is it a continuation? What is it that is continuing?

Here you seem to reject the first option in favor of the second, claiming that the new Paul is a continuation of the old Paul, suggesting personal identity has not failed. The only way I can see of avoiding contradiction here between these conflicting views is to interpret you as claiming that identity for the person has failed, but that identity for the underlying consciousness (which was that person) has not failed but has instead continued as a new person. But to me this sounds like a distinction without a difference, as the person and the consciousness are just the one and the same. Why posit separate identity criteria for people and for consciousnesses? And what criterion justifies speaking of pre- and post-stroke Pauls as the same consciousness?


Moving on to the comparison between Paul's case and that of Nicos & Thanos, my chief concern with the argument for existential passage is that the only grounds present for Paul for maintaining personal identity (or consciousness identity) across the time-gap are clearly absent for Nicos. If we only judge Paul to have survived the stroke as the numerically same person (perhaps wrongly given the breakdown in psychological continuity) due to his bodily continuity, then this seems perfectly sufficient grounds for denying continued personal identity (or consciousness identity) between Nicos and Thanos where such continuity is absent.

If we adopt a memory/psychological continuity criterion, then personal identity clearly seems to fail for both cases. Yet if we adopt a brain/bodily continuity criterion, then personal identity holds for Paul but fails for Nicos/Thanos. And if you are speaking instead of survival of the numerically same consciousness but not of the person, then again the only grounds supporting this for Paul is bodily continuity which is absent for Nicos/Thanos. So what criterion of personal/consciousness identity are you appealing to in the case of Paul?

This part does not seem correct to me either. When Nicos has died, ending all possible criteria for personal identity, his subjective view does not differ from an objective view. There is no subjective view at all for Nicos, from either an internal or an external perspective. It doesn't exist to be compared with anything else. His self and subjectivity have ended. And if his subjectivity no longer exists then it doesn't need to find a new home.

When you say that Nicos has passed to Thanos, this sounds like a continuation of personal identity, but this can't be the case as you have said that "All three criteria of personal identity have now failed him." But then what is it that has passed on? Is the link one of identity over time of the underlying consciousness or subjectivity? If so, then what is your criterion for this, and why bother distinguishing this from the person?

To my mind, the first question here is never adequately answered, and the second bold part conflicts with the third. If there is a complete psychological break in thought, then why is it only a temporary break between parts of the same person or consciousness? According to the memory criterion, this complete break makes for two different people, so what is it that continues? What grounds are there for linking the pre- and post-stroke Pauls (as people or as consciousnesses) in any way at all other than by the bodily continuity which is not going to be present for the Nicos/Thanos case?

This passage makes little sense to me either. Personal identity cannot transition over a complete break in all three criteria that might be thought to compose it. But of course you speak rather of the experience of personal identity continuing - which raises the question of what justifies speaking of the one experience of personal identity as being numerically the same as another, and also of how numerically distinct people can share the numerically same subjectivity/experience of personal identity.

The only clue I can find is here:
But your argument is not linking universal subjectivity to itself, but rather linking particular loci of subjectivity - distinguished from other simultaneous subjective selves such as Casta - to each other over time. That is a link between particulars, and it requires a criterion of identity over time. Yet I don't see how this is a different question from that of personal identity which you seem to agree fails to hold, or what grounds there are for maintaining this identity of particular subjectivity over the unfelt time-gaps which will be present in both cases.

So other than purely verbally, as a mere choice of words, how does this existential passage differ from a case of one person and subjective self ending and another new person and subjective self beginning? What more are you doing other than choosing to call the new person and old person the 'same' consciousness/subjectivity?

Re: A revolution in thought
 

This is another bit I don't get. Given that there are no links of memory or psychological continuity, how is the passage subjective? It's not as if the passage will be experienced as such. So how does this 'subjective' passage differ in subjective terms from no passage at all?

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

I do not think you can call EP "true". Unless you also call the statement "All phenomena are caused by undetectable fairies who make everything work, for all intents and purposes, as if all phenomena are caused by different things" true.

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

Exactly. As Carl Sagan so aptly puts it in The Demon-Haunted World, "Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?"

Re: Does Old Paul pass to New?
 

The 'subjective state' would be equivalent to our conscious awarness of our surroundings and each person's awareness is their own and cannot be shared diredtly with others. One person can tell another person what they preceive, but that other person cannot directly receive the impulses to the brain that transmit these preceptions.

Or, are you suggesting some form of connection is possible from one brain directly to another brain?

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

By now you may have gathered that I'm a bit of an analogy addict - so here goes:

I have a computer I call Sam running a program - let's say the program is Microsoft Word.

There is a lightning strike that crashes the computer; not only does the program stop running, but there is some hardware damage: when I reboot the computer, any sounds played through the sound system are a bit crackly, and there are a few dead pixels on the display; nevertheless Sam does still work so I'm able to reload Microsoft Word and continue working.

Has anything passed from Old Sam to New Sam?

Same scenario, but I don't load Microsoft Word and instead run Microsoft Excel: now has anything passed from Old Sam to New Sam?

<hr>

A few weeks later I'm running Microsoft Word on my trusty Windows laptop that I've affectionately named 'Spiros'. The laptop dies, so I go out and buy a new one - but I decide to get an Apple MacBook this time instead of a PC: I name the new MacBook, 'Demitri'. I install the OSX version of Microsoft Word on Demitri and away I go...

Has anything passed from Spiros to Demitri? Would anything have passed if I run Safari on Demitri, instead of Word?

<hr>

I hope that my analogy helps to make clear my suspicion that the hidden topic here is dualism.

With PCs, the division between the hardware and the program that runs on that hardware is clear - when it comes to PCs everyone is a dualist. We are all able to agree that in the case of Old Sam and New Sam that the hardware is exactly the same (though slightly damaged) and that the program is exactly the same if we choose to load Word on New Sam, but different if we load Excel instead. With Spiros and Demitri, we say the hardware is different, but while the two versions of Word that run on the PCs are similar, nothing has passed from Spiros to Demitri, and it doesn't even look as though anything has passed from Spiros running Word to Demitri running Safari.

Now with PCs we have a mechanism - USB flash drives or writeable optical disks that allow us to transfer programs, plus the data used/displayed by those programs from one PC to another.

With humans, we don't, right now, have a (technological) mechanism to save/restore/transfer the 'program' (identity or consciousness). Some dualists believe that such a mechanism exists naturally or supernaturally and comes into effect during reincarnation.

My own position is that I don't believe a natural or supernatural means of transferring identity from one brain to another exists. I don't believe in dualism either.

I'm prepared to believe that a future technology might be able to record the contents of a brain somehow and somehow transfer those contents to another brain or create a working copy of the brain or even 'run' the contents on different hardware altogether - maybe in a silicon based computer.

I think some aspects of a person's identity and consciousness depend not just on the brain, but on other parts of their body. So unless the entire body could be copied (or accurately simulated) then I wouldn't expect the 'transferred' person to behave exactly like the original.

Re: Does Old Paul pass to New?
 

I am consciously unaware of the passage of time when I am asleep but as I have stated elsewhere my 'internal clock' keeps going and I will wake up when needed. Is this 'internal clock' stopped for people in coma? If any person, who has this facility to wake up automatically, experienced a coma and has their internal colck been disrupted? If so that would indicate that even internally the body was not aware of the passage of time 'Unfelt time-gap', however if the 'internal clock' was not disrupted the body continued to be aware of the passage of time, a 'felt time-gap'.

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

I am seeing that there is some confusion on this forum, but I do not see the argument against passage failing.

With Old to New Paul adding the "passage" adds complication rather than simplifying it. It would be simpler to just say that Old Paul becomes New Paul without anything passing between them. The body and brain are carried over in both casses, memories and experiences are lost in both cases, "passage" only adds complication to the process.

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

Are you sure this isn't a Peacegirl Sock, not wanting to move on to the next "discovery" till everyone agrees with the current "non-discovery"?

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

I"m granting it's "true" for the sake of argument. What I am asking Wayne to address -- and so far he has not -- is how existential passage, from the point of view of the subjects and outside observers, differs in any way from standard physicalism. Clearly, it does not; and so even if we grant it's "true" arguendo, it ends up, like ceptimus's postulated ceptinos, on the cutting room floor of Occham's metaphysical film editing studio.

Re: A revolution in thought
 

It doesn't. Nothing differs for anyone from the usual old, x is born and y dies. If Wayne thinks otherwise, please elucidate.

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

I can go along with this for now, any thing in question afterwards can be returned to. there doesn't need to be 100% agreement by everyone for the discussion to move on.

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

Synchretistic Heretic!

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

Show Off, You and your big 50 cent words. :doh:

I am embarresed for you. :blush:

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

And I have other reasons for pausing today. (Literal) crowbar work, etc. Will consider posts after. .

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

I'll see your Vivaldi and raise you a Tchaikovsky.

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

Oh, Please define the use of the 'crowbar'?

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

I wonder, is it a rusty crowbar?

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

I certainly hope so.

BTW, VBS wraped up today, how did your's go?

Re: Dar al-Hikma
 

That's it! If you die listening to a particular piece of music the next person born to that piece of music is you. That was easy, Next world changing problem?