X-Message-Number: 25189
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 12:58:29 -0800
Subject: And for the last e-mail of the day (4 post limit)...
From: <>

Dear Brook:

[snip]

"When one talks of survival, it is reminiscent of talk of a 
metaphysical 'soul'."

No. I'm talking about the brain. Other people may be talking about 
'patterns', which are a kind of metaphysical soul, but I am talking 
strictly about grey matter.

[snip]

You wrote:

"That like all inanimate objects, we too are just a collection of 
matter and energy that changes over time. You can compare a former 
self to a later self and point out similarities but to speak of 
survival of those similarities is a bad usage of the word."

No. It is proper to speak of survival of a set of properties. In 
the case of brains, the property most important to me is my 
subjective inner life, but of course other properties are also 
important to lesser (but very high) degrees, such as my memories 
and personality.

You wrote:

"This approach leads to the following answers to the following 
thought 
experiments:"

I will comment on this individually.

You wrote:

"When you sleep and then awake, do you survive? No. You awaken 
later in time and slightly changed."

That's absurd. Before you can ask such a question, you need to 
define what you mean by 'you'.

The most important thing about 'me' is the part of me that 
experiences qualia---and clearly, my experiencer survives sleep, 
since at no point during sleep does my experiencer cease to exist 
(indeed, this would require massive brain damage of a type that 
would assure I didn't wake up again in the morning).

You wrote:

"If you use a Star Trek transporter to beam yourself somewhere, do 
you survive?"

No, not in the most fundamental sense of the word 'you'. You are a 
brain. If you destroy the brain, creating a copy won't help.

You wrote:

"And so on... basically, no, you never survive, you just change and 
move through time like all the other matter and energy in the 
universe."

This is predicated on a bad definition of 'you' which no one would 
ever embrace. I have clearly defined what I mean by the 'self' on 
many occassions, and my survival arguments depend on this 
definition.

You can't just plug an arbitrary (and in this case, bad) definition 
of 'you' into my arguments and expect them to make sense.

[snip]

Best Regards,

Richard B. R.

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