X-Message-Number: 14913
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 01:38:13 +0100
From: Henri Kluytmans <>
Subject: Pizerism

-->Hi,

Again, in his last posting David Pizer assumes that some new and 
still unknown physical mechanisms are required to explain how 
the brain can generate consciousness :

>1.	The parts of a conscious process produce different *effects,*  then they
>do outside it.  This is axiomatic.  So there are some laws that describe
>the effects of matter in general and different, extended and more complete,
>laws (not yet understood) that would describe the effects of matter in a
>conscious process. 

<snip>

>Their problem, in a nutshell, is that the non-Pizerists use rules for
>describing non-physical things to describe physical things.

Uhh ? Can you give some concrete examples ?

Or are you referring to the scientific approach ?


>No one doubts that the person stepping out will have a personal existence,
>and most will not doubt that the person stepping out will "think" he/she is
>the other person, but the question is not what the person stepping out
>thinks, but rather what is the truth about the survival of the person
>stepping in? (Why we also need better epistemology).

Already the existance of this apparent "paradox" seems to imply that 
the informational viewpoint of identity is the correct one. Because 
using this last viewpoint there is no "paradox" ! 

When having two theories, and one of them having internal 
inconsistencies (i.e. paradoxes), not mention that it also 
requires the assumption of new and unknown physics theories 
whilst having no direct fundamental physics experiments(1) that 
seem to motivate such an assumption, while on the other hand 
the other theory has none of these, then it is rational to choose 
the second theory and dispose of the more complex and incomplete one.

( (1): experiments suggesting the requirement of new physics theories 
for explaining mechanisms inside the human brain )


<snip>

>be a difference between the two persons and that difference is what makes
>the two persons not the same person.  You do not have the same unique
>process feeling the identical memories in the two examples; so, you can not
>know that the two are the same person.

Of course two different persons are not the same person.
Using the "term" person here, only confuses everthing. I 
suggest not to compare "persons" but only *identities*.

I do claim that two frozen bodies with the exact identical 
chemical structure contain the same identity. When the bodies 
would be animated then of course, they would immidiately start 
to diverge. But of course, we "non-Pizerists" already mentioned 
this many, many times over.

Grtz,
>Hkl

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