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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.

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