Thinking in Text

Porcorn is a practical movie snack. First, it stops you from having to go to the toilet during the movie (even if you've drunk half a large Coke). The salt in the popcorn absorbs the excess water in your body, as it does in potato chips. Second, unlike potato chips, popcorn is a quiet food to eat during a movie, not making any loud, obnoxious crunchy movies to obscure the dialogue.

One can classify human thinking into four basic types. Imagine a grid of four squares. The left column is the theory column and the right column is the practice column. The top row is the theory row and the bottom row is the practice row. Now number the four squares from one to four, from left to right and from top to bottom. This gives you the four different types of thinking. Type one thinking is theory-to-theory. This type is exemplified by pure mathematics and, in some forms, philosophy. It begins with pure theoretical principles, and derive further principles from them. Type two thinking is theory-to-practice. This type is exemplified by engineering and applied mathematics. It starts with pure theoretical principles, and uses them to derive practical aims. Type three thinking is practice-to-theory. This type is exemplified by empirical science. Empirical science starts with observations of the world, from which hypotheses, and eventually theories, are formed. Type four...

I think that there should be open source philosophy. A person can have a particular view presented on a web page. There can be a form on the bottom of the page that allows you to post an objection. A list of approved objections can be listed at the bottom of the page, and you can click on a button on any of those objections to post a reply. You can also post a neutral comment, and there could be a different message format for that as well. Essentially, it would enable me to have an essay posted to a website that people could link to. That is the only way to get the page listed in Google in a lasting way.

We should consider our introduction to the paper. It does not seem enough simply to say, "We are going to consider what makes a person the same person over time. But the problem with this question is that it is ambiguous." This formulation does not indicate to the lay reader why this question is interesting in the first place. Tip 4 states: Do not expect the reader to fill in gaps in your reasoning, even if you know they have read the same things you have. Write as if you were trying to explain things to one of your friends who is not taking the class. You might even test this by having a friend read the first draft. What makes this question interesting to me is that it is essentially a matter of life and death. Right now, people assume in various cyberpunk novels that people can be copied. They think that it is okay for their current bodies to die if they have backed themselves up. I need to tell them that it is not okay. I would never consent to being killed even if I ...

I have now written nine entries on the metaphysics of personal identity. I had a brainstorm last night that gave me enough information to write a proper paper on the subject now. When I am finished, I shall supply a link to it from this blog. I have written an outline for the paper. I wanted to get a concept of what word length people would expect from a work of this nature. I would imagine that there would be a maximum of ten thousand words for the paper, but a thousand words seems a little short. That's as much space as I would devote to a single blog entry. I did a Google search on "philosophical paper word length". The top-ranked page belonged to the University of South Carolina College of Liberal Arts Department of Philosophy. It was a list of tips for writing a short philosophy paper, and it merely said that: Length should not be a problem if you choose a good (and tractable) issue that interests you and compels you to explore what it involves. Well, this ...

Re-reading yesterday's section, I think you do well up to the point where you ask what is mind. I don't really think that mind is brain viewed from the inside. Little pieces of your brain can get replaced over time, but we would not say that little pieces of your mind ever get replaced. You touch on this subject in your penultimate paragraph. I therefore think that mind supervenes over the brain. No computer backup is something over which the same token of the mind could supervene. What if you slowly split the consciousness in two over the two different mediums? Half your consciousness could supervene over brain processes. Half could supervene over computer processes. We can assume that phenomenologically, you could not tell the difference between this condition of consciousness and the way it normally is. We could imagine this process continuing until your consciousness was fully supervening over the computer. I think that that would be a legitimate transference. The wa...

You have had quite a philosophical journey in the last few days. I'm still not sure that it all hangs together properly, so I will recapitulate it here. You directed your attention to the question of what makes a person the same person over time. You identified what you took to be a source of confusion with this question. It is type/token ambiguity in what is considered to be the same thing. You can definitely say that a backed-up and restored person are the same type of person. But they are two different tokens of the same type. The question of what makes a person the same person over time is therefore not really one question, but two. What makes a type of person the same type of person over time, and what makes a token of person the same token over time. The former question is the easier one to answer. Continuity is what makes any type of thing the same type over time. In this case, the basic argument made in the Altered Carbon series is that continuity of consciousnes...

There is a difficulty in the previous section. You said that it is a logical impossibility for two different token-stages to coexist at the same time. But what if you move one of the token-stages back in time? It's the basic science-fictional scenario where you go back in time and meet yourself. What I would argue is that in this instance, you have to conclude that both token-stages belong to the same token. After all, you already believe that you are you over the whole period of time if you don't go back in time. So how can you conclude that you cease to be you over the whole period of time just because you go back in time to meet yourself? Surely the difference of going back in time is not metaphysically relevant. And if you decide that two different token-stages can exist at the same time, then you go down a slippery slope. What is to stop the backed-up and restored token-stages from existing at the same time as well? You have already decided that the differences of content ...

There is a difficulty in the previous section, although it may be surmountable. You said that matter/energy was not being conserved in the back-up and restoration process. But I can see a possible way that that notion might be challenged. Let us first consider the normal situation of a person transferring himself over time. Just about every molecule in our body is replaced many times over in the course of a human lifetime. So what is it that is actually being conserved in the process of this transference? Some molecules obviously "become" officially part of the human body over time. Others officially become separate. So the matter/energy that we actually consider to be our bodies is something that is constantly changing, just as our memories are. We need an account of conservation that is sophisticated enough to withstand these changes. Yet it must still able to resist the back-up and restoration process. What is it that content replacement performed by the body has, but ...

There is a difficulty in the previous section. You said that continuity over time is a sufficient condition for transference, but I can think of a counterexample to this. Let us go back to the example of the backed-up and restored humans. Now suppose that the restored human's body is merely a clone of the backed-up human's body. This provides ample continuity over time between two different person-stages. But one would never conclude from this that both person-stages must belong to the same token of person. Okay, from this, I think I can infer a necessary condition for the transference of tokens. It is conservation of matter and energy. Notice that this happens to be a scientific principle of matter/energy transference in general--that the matter/energy is conserved in the process. Matter/energy is conserved in the special-place example. But it is not conserved in the backed-up and restored humans example. In the special-place example, the overall amount of matter/energy in...

In the previous section, we asked what makes a token the same token over time. We decided that it was spatio-temporal transference that marked the passage of the same token over time. To test these intuitions, we set up a thought experiment of a special place in the room. If one moved anything onto this place, then that thing would vanish from that place. Then, ten seconds later, a thing would appear at the other end of the room. All of its observed properties would be identical to the ones of the thing that disappeared at the special place in the room. We first imagined this happening with a chair, and then with a person. We postulated that the person on the other end would talk about how much fun it was to travel across the room in that way. In this case, the two different person-stages lack spatio-temporal contiguity. On the other hand, they do contain continuity. We can therefore conclude, as discussed previously, that the two person-stages belong to the same type of person...

In the previous section, we asked what made a person the same person over time. We did not make the customary distinction, at least initially, between persons and non-persons. We preferred to make the distinction between types and tokens. In this respect, we concluded that what makes a type the same type over time is continuity. We decided that continuity theories can explain what makes a type the same type over time. They cannot, however, explain what makes a token the same token over time. This naturally enough raises the question of what does make a token the same token over time. When we answer this question we will have two different accounts of identity over time: one for types and one for tokens. This will put us in a better position to judge whether we are our type or our token. In this section, I will explore the issue of what makes a token the same token over time.   The first and most obvious question to ask seems to be, how can you tell which token you are? Again, I...

In the previous section, we considered the metaphysics of personal identity. We asked what makes a person the same person over time. The example with which we illustrated this question was the process of restoring humans from backups. The source novels for this example were Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Altered Carbon and Broken Angels . We decided, based on this example, that there was type/token ambiguity in the word "same". We can definitely say that the backed-up human and the restored human are the same type of person. But they are two different tokens of the same type. The question therefore becomes: which are you, your token or your type? We can have two different hypotheses, one in which you are your token, and the other in which you are your type. I shall now consider both hypotheses separately for the sake of analysis.   We can now return to the question of what makes a person the same person over time. I argue that light is shed on this question by drawi...

I have recently read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Altered Carbon . Both books had enormously entertaining stories. But they both relied on a metaphysics of personal identity that I found dubious to say the least.      Both books employ the idea that it will eventually be possible to digitize human consciousness. When this occurs, we can keep a full backup of ourselves on a device like a computer chip. That way, whenever our physical body dies, our consciousness will still be preserved on the chip. From there, it can be downloaded into a fresh body. Altered Carbon is named after the medium in which human consciousness is digitized. The process by which this consciousness gets downloaded into a fresh body is known as "re-sleeving". Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom preserves human lives by a similar method. People can make backups of their consciousness onto a computer as often as they like. That way, if they ever die, a clone of them can be made immedi...

I have often been a fan of science fiction at various times of my life. Most recently I have read: Jennifer Government; Pattern Recognition ; and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom . I am currently reading Altered Carbon . I believe that I have seen enough science fiction now to make a general observation, which probably includes much fantasy: There are people who have great ideas and people who are great writers. Unfortunately, they're usually not the same person. Neuromancer might have single-handedly created the cyperpunk genre. But I can remember almost nothing about the book except how boring it was. William Gibson may be a visionary in sci-fi circles, but his books are just not very readable. I just finished reading Pattern Recognition and it was a very slow, plodding effort. He relies for descriptive atmosphere on the overuse of brand names and technical jargon. For example, our heroine doesn't suffer from jet lag, she suffers from "disrupted circadian r...

I am building up a compendium of new concepts from reading science fiction that is more fresh: 1.Ad-hocracy; 2.Transhumanism; and 3.Reputation Economy are the ones I currently find most intriguing, and Down and Out has all three of them. One interesting thing that happened in today’s reading had to do with the reputation economy. The society in Down and Out is called The Bitchun Society. The basic fiscal unit of the Bitchun Society’s reputation economy is the Whuffie. The main character, Julian, lost so many Whuffies that he went to his runabout one day and found it had gone. Somebody else could simply make more popular use of his car than he could. He or she had consequently simply gotten into the car and driven away in it. Intriguingly, this seems to indicate that in the Bitchun Society, there is no private ownership. Anybody can confiscate one’s property at any time if one’s Whuffie score does not merit its use. Similarly, Julian went to enter his hotel room only to disc...

I remember my original intuitions after I had argued with the hypocrites . I was at that time very persuaded by Peter Singer's theory of utilitarianism. The theory was both very much in the mainstream of modern ethical reasoning, and highly consonant with the intuitions of students. However--and this is very important--if that's morality, then few if any people would take it seriously. We may pay lip-service to it, even with righteous anger. But don't expect us to obey it, at least not to the extent that it would involve any significant self-sacrifice. That depressed me no end. As a practical person, I did not see the point in studying ethics if I was not going to follow through with its practical consequences. I did not want to be a hypocrite. It seemed to me that it would have to be more rational for me to study something that would be more practical. Back then, I remembered thinking in terms of morality and permissibility--in the way that abortion could be moral but perm...

It somehow seems important simply to keep up entries here. Let this be the direction, if any, that my thought takes. I have finished reading Jennifer Government and have lent it to a friend. Rotten Guatemalan from Alabama USofA on Amazon.com says "Read it and lend it to a friend. They'll appreciate it." so I guess I've done the right thing. =P I liked it so much that I also bought and have started reading Syrup , his one other novel. It's gooood. In some ways, I like it better than Government , just because he seems wittier when not engaging in fantastic speculation. The focus goes more on his satire then, which is his strong point. He has a keen sense of the absurd, and is full of witty and inventive digs at his subject matter of expertise, marketing. In some ways, I would like to be an author of fiction. At least, I always thought that, if only I could do it, it would be such an easy way for me to make a living. I'm always writing. But I have no int...

I have been getting sick of writing about philosophy lately. I just don't find that I have anything to say. I've lost interest in what I've already said, to be able to collate it into some paper or series of papers. Part of the problem is definitely that I tend to think that truth is simply uncontentious in the first place. If something is true, it generally isn't very interesting, and if it is interesting, then it tends simply not to be true. Over the past few months I wrote much about ethics that interested me, but I fear that to that extent it simply has not been true. The notion that a real moral is a more and a real ethics is an ethos is interesting, but I don't see how it could be true. The analogies between social progress and Kuhnian science were also interesting. But at the end of the day, they just didn't seem to be independently plausible. I can't believe what I'm hearing. What about the free will problem, or deontology versus consequentia...

I have finally finished Terror and Liberalism . It only took me ten days from the time that I bought it, and it was well worth it. I now know quite a lot more about the philosophy of Al Qaeda, although it is a fairly banal form of totalitarianism. But at least I understand our enemy more now than I did before I started reading the book. Or do I? Paul Berman describes Al Qaeda as simply a pathological mass movement, which cannot be given a rational explanation. This leads one to the question of whether evil itself can be given a rational explanation. This question, however, only occurs to me because I know of a book that addresses it directly. I have seen it in the bookstore now many times, Evil in Modern Thought , by Susan Neiman. This, then, has become my book for this week, and I am currently reading it with avid interest. I am already intrigued by her argument in the introduction. She begins by discussing the theist version of the problem of evil, which we all learned in fir...