[ExI] Let's play What If.

Alan Grimes agrimes at speakeasy.net
Fri Nov 12 13:38:57 UTC 2010


chrome://messenger/locale/messengercompose/composeMsgs.properties:

> And Alan Grimes replied:

>> Because I'm a strict monist, I can't imagine any way
>> through which the two can be separated.

> As I've already pointed out, this 'monism' of yours
> seems to reject what other people have called
> 'property dualism', or the concept that objects have
> properties.  This concept is not an opinion, it's an
> established fact.  Nobody can rationally deny it.  

Most of the things that people call "properties" are actually artifacts
of human perception. Anything beyond what is strictly scientifically
detectable (such as the number of atoms in a substance) is nothing more
than something that a human imagines and then forces on the perception.
This gets to the Platonic theory of forms. What it means is that things
such as vases, speakers, symbols on calculator keys, can only exist in
the mind. In the world there is nothing but arrangements of mater which
may or may not closely resemble the form you choose to assert over it.

> To acknowledge that material objects have non-material
> (and non-mystical) properties is not really 'dualism'
> at all, it's materialism, and the materialistic view
> leads inexorably to the possibility of uploading, as
> recognised by most transhumanists.

Bullshit.

> Your statement above implies that you can't see any
> way that a dog and a bark can be separated.  I can
> think of dozens of ways, and I'm sure you can too if
> you try.

The sound of a bark is not technically a bark.

> The point is that it's these non-material (and
> non-mystical) properties that are important, not the
> dumb matter that exhibits them.

The dumb mater always overrules our stupid, ill-conceived notions about it.

> The thing that mystifies me is why the argument that
> two atoms of the same element are completely and
> utterly indistinguishable and interchangeable, isn't
> decisive in this discussion.  The fact that I've
> survived endless changes of material proves
> conslusively that I am not the matter that my body and
> brain are made from.  Why is this so hard to
> understand?

Non-sequiter because the routine replacement of some of your atoms at
some low rate is not evidence of anything whatsoever. It means nothing
more than that it is a natural function of your body is to replace some
of your atoms at some rate.

> Ben Zaiboc

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