[extropy-chat] Detectives and red herrings (was Survival tangent)

[Heartland]

> Jeffrey [wrote]:
> "Personally, I'm not ready to reject Slawomir's ideas and conceptions. But, in
> this particular example, I agree with you Lee. That the intricate weave of
> *consciousness* of a person can effectively "exist" at two places simultaneously.

Lee:
"Right, Jeffrey, but we'll still have to convince Heartland   :-)    I love pincer
attacks.  John Clark is coming at him from the north while we hammer
away from the west"

No worries, mate. I've got the mini-nukes set up along the perimeter. Besides, it's
apparent that virtually no one can even locate the continent I'm on, let alone can
identify which buildings to bomb. But I'll say this. Few months ago Jeffrey was
able to send an EMP that seriously disrupted my defense systems for few minutes.
The shockwaves were being felt long after the incident. That was by far the
closest I came to having "a problem". As for Clark, he continues to bomb the hell
out of some imaginary ghost town in some parallel universe. :-)

----

Lee, I believe that now I have a full comprehension of what you've been saying.
Taking also into account Jef Allbright's recent proposal of "agency" as a
determinant of personal identity finally gives me the complete picture of all the
points of view in this debate. So, let's zoom out to see the big picture of what 
we've got
so far.

At this meta-level the philosophers of personal identity implicitly or explicitly
answer this single fundamental question: "What defines a person?" The task of
answering this question is usually being undertaken, as it should, in the spirit of
reductionism. But despite agreement on the choice of investigative tools, the
philosophers of PI still find different suspects responsible for the essence of
what a person is. How can this happen? Well, sometimes these detectives grab the
first thing they find that *might* be responsible for that "essence" and stop
there. But, as in all good mystery novels, the first suspects are rarely guilty. It
turns out that some detectives are also mystery novel writers and are skilled at
identifying "red herrings". Instead, they dig deeper, gather more evidence, spend
years on trying to understand the motive and finally find some other guy with even
less alibi then the previous suspect. But there are also those detectives who never
close the case as long as there's a shadow of a doubt that someone else might be
responsible.   ;-)

Philosophers searching for the essence of what a person really is follow the 
reductive process that initially goes something like this:

Things->Body->Brain

But then, someone like Lee Corbin comes along and claims this is not enough and
extends the process:

Things->Body->Brain->Pattern->VBMs

But then, Jef Allbright comes along and says this is not enough/correct and decides
to extend this process further still until it looks like this:

Things->Body->Brain->Pattern->VBMs->Agency

Meanwhile, I look at both of these reductive processes and can't help but comment:
"You've already missed a crucial exit and are heading for an inevitable dead end."
Here's my version of the reductive process:

Things->Body->Brain->Mind->Process->Presence

At this moment you, dear reader, are probably asking yourself: "What the hell is
Presence?" Well, the short version is that it's an "instance of awareness,
perception, sensation, etc". I might provide more details if there's enough
demand. I know from experience that these ideas are quite hard to
convey since it requires the reader that he think in 4-D *and* abandon the habit of
thinking that Person=VMBs, among other things. The most important thing to realize
is that Presence supervenes on the physical. I want to make sure this is clear
right from the start to counter knee-jerk accusations of promoting existence of
"souls". There are no souls, okay? (That goes especially for you, John K Clark.)

---

Lee:
"But I'm claiming (along with several other people here) that while
there are two instances, two minds, two brains, there is only one
person.  What is a person?  I'm going to be arguing against Jef
Albright shortly, but to me it's values, beliefs, and memories, which
someone began to call VBM or something here not long ago."

Right, *to you* a person is equivalent to a specific collection of VBMs.
Apparently, Jef and I don't share this view for the same exact reasons (so I'd be
happy to outsource arguing with you about this to Jef :-)) even though Jef's value
of "X" in "person reduces to X" is not the same value of my "X".

(Incidentally, if I thought that any person reduced to VBMs I would have no
problems embracing "The Luckiest Person in the Universe" scenario described in Max
More's "The Diachronic Self").


Lee:
"Yes, but the concept of *person* that you dispute includes the
proposition that you are the same person you were ten years ago
even though we are speaking of two minds, two brains, two
spatial locations, and two temporal locations. But still *one* person."

Well, that's the thing. You have a different referent for "person"; a different
value of X in "Person=X".

Slawomir