Skip to main content

Susan Blackmore is not herself today (nor yesterday, or tomorrow)

In a discussion on Unbelievable?, she stated that there is no such thing as a self: just a collection of cells or atoms (so said she in a friendly debate with Charles Foster).

She also let it be known that she belongs to a humanist society (don't know the exact name).

My thought on that: it seems rather hard to be a humanist when you don't believe that human beings really exist.

Further point: how can we possess mathematical and scientific truths if these truths themselves have an identity and we don't? Is there one neuron that possesses one truth and another that possesses another? Do they share truths with each other? Or does one neuron possess one part of one truth and another neuron possess another part of the other truth? And if many neurons somehow work together to possess a truth and the neurons themselves constantly undergo change, how is it that the truth itself doesn't change slightly?

She criticizes the notion that there is an individual within us who knows, citing Daniel Dennett's theater of the inner mind (straw man argument) with approval. I would criticize that notion too, but I would add that bringing it up is a straw man, and inferring from this that there is no such thing as personal identity assumes that those are the only two alternatives available for our consideration.

Clearly, she thinks of the soul as an inner ghost: she is not aware that the first reason for positing a soul has to do not with immortality, but with bodily and temporal identity. And without that there is no continuous possession of truth.

Another angle: neurons must be just as much a fiction as the whole human body. So does one molecule possess a truth? a part of a truth? But aren't molecules undergoing all sorts of changes each moment? So does that mean that the truth possessed by them changes too? How can the possessor change while the possession doesn't... unless possession is something more than just a particular bodily state?

Still another angle: How is it that you and I possess the same truth?

Susan Blackmore practices Buddhism although she does not adhere to its beliefs. But she does agree that personal identity is illusory. Has it occurred to her that this denial is anti-science? For it would seem that if there no individual identity through time, then there can be no continuous possession of truth.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals  [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ].  Aquinas thus holds that it was not  all  death that entered the world through man's sin, but human  death.
Post a Comment
Read more