“You have lived infinitely many lives in the past and will live infinitely many more in the future. While alive, you are embodied; in between lives, you exist as a disembodied soul.”
That which the pronoun “you” refers to in these sentences seems idiosyncratic. That doesn’t seem like me. Why should I think of it as me, this thing that has lived lives in the past that I have no awareness of and am not similar to, and will “have” many more lives in the future that will have no awareness of me or similarity to me? This just seems like abuse of terminology.
“I think the mind has three features that are hard to explain in physical terms:”
Are they easy to explain or explainable at all in non-physical terms? If these features remain unexplained by both theories, why choose the one with additional problems?
I feel like my response is a bit snide, but this argument seems to start in the middle, expecting me to accept premises that seem absurd.
Maybe i am playing a worse trick. My version of physicality is greedy. If you prove that there are aspects of reality that we were previously unaware of but that are needed to explain qualia etc. and do not consist of purely random chaos, i will just declare them a newly discovered aspect of physical reality.
"Upon death, you lose everything other than your soul."
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I think you could strip away so much of me that whatever remains won't be me anymore. It seems like some amount of memory is a core part of my identity and couldn't be stripped away without destroying me. Even in my wildest conscious experiences, I have not lost my grip on the English language. My internal monologue is always chattering away, always in English. On the other hand, I forget things all the time without losing my identity. Maybe I just haven't tried the right drugs, and if I did, I'd have experiences such that I'd say things like, "oh yeah, I totally forgot English that one time, but I was still me". On the other other hand, would the entity making such a claim still be me, or did that drug evict my soul and let my body embody a different soul?
"Can you give a parallel argument that people must exist in infinitely many spatial locations at any given time"
I'm no physicist, but I'd suggest running this by some. I have a sneaking suspicion that the weirdness of spacetime and relativity means that saying something must exist at an infinite number of times might imply that it will also sometimes exist in multiple locations simultaneously. For any two incarnations of a soul, there is probably some frame of reference where an observer would see both living their lives simultaneously. Perhaps you can avoid that by adopting some constraints on when reincarnation is allowed, but that in turn may push other boundaries, perhaps violating your assertion that your identity can't depend on something that's going to happen in the future.
"On my view, however, you never fundamentally create persons; you only cause a pre-existing soul to become embodied. If you refrain from reproducing, then, there will be souls who continue to be unconscious and disembodied, whom you could have rescued from that condition."
If time is infinite, it seems like a soul shouldn't care if it gets embodied once every thousand years or once every million years. The gaps between embodiments are indistinguishable from an unconscious disembodied soul's perspective, no matter how long they are.
"(it is metaphysically impossible for more than one person existing at a given time to both “be you”)"
Impossible? The Tines, Vernor Vinge's intelligent pack minded aliens in his novel "A Fire Upon the Deep", seem plausible enough. Each individual Tine is made up of a pack of (usually) four to six sub-sentient dog-like creatures (members), and they have enough redundancy to survive the loss and replacement of one of their constituent members. What it means for a soul to only be embodied in one place at a time is already murky under those circumstances, and it's not so hard to imagine increasing the redundancy so that each member contains a copy of the full Tine sentience. If the members stay in sync, you could argue each Tine is the whole pack as well as each of its members at the same time. Obviously, humans won't experience such a thing until we can upload and spread ourselves between multiple redundant servers, but nothing about multiple individuals simultaneously sharing a soul seems impossible to me as long as each individual sees the same input, runs the same processes, and produces the same outputs.
"Some reasons to think that you exist after death, albeit in a non-conscious, disembodied state:"
I'm on the same page for cases 1 and 2, but I think there is a big leap between those and cases 3 and 4. I’m not at all sure you are the same person while you have amnesia. Let’s consider something between cases 2 and 3. Call it case 2.5. Suppose when you go to sleep tonight, we wave a magic wand that both gives you total amnesia and prevents you from remembering the next week of your life. You fully recover your memories (except of the last week) at the end of the week. Do you exist as the same person during the amnesiac period? First consider what you are actually going to experience - from your perspective, you are going to go to sleep tonight and then wake up a week from now. If your phone didn’t tell you that you missed a week, you wouldn’t even know! I’d argue that this situation is basically the same as cases 1 and 2. During that blank week, you existed, but only in a temporarily non-conscious, disembodied state. So, who was wearing your body, living that week as an amnesiac? I have no idea, but it wasn’t you - you were busy being disembodied at the time! Back to cases 3 and 4, I can’t even imagine what the experience would be like, but it seems to me like you would be just as disembodied as you were in cases 1, 2, and 2.5. Maybe you’ll be reembodied in case 3 when enough of your memories return, but case 4 sounds like case 2.5 if it lasted for the rest of your life instead of just a week, so I think you’d be permanently disembodied. So ultimately, I agree you continue to exist in some sense while non-conscious, but until and unless I experience it for myself, I think that an amnesiac version of you is almost certainly not you.
Professor Huemer, I am a boundless admirer of your work. But I have a serious reservation about your latest posting. Can I remind you that in one your previous articles you took issue with those who profess to believe in God but who define God as Nature or Universal Consciousness or something like that? You point out that the word God is traditionally used to refer to a conscious supreme being who rules the world. So those who believe in "God is Nature" etc. are really atheists although they are reluctant to say so. I totally agree.
Now, I am compelled to agree with all the details in your recent posting. My only objection is that the word soul is traditionally used to refer to a CONSCIOUS entity that survives the death (destruction) of the physical body. According to Judeo-Christian doctrine, the soul must also have RECOLLECTION of its life in this world. This doctrine, cutting across all branches and sects, says that the destiny of the soul in the NEXT world depends on its conduct in THIS world. There must be some version of Heaven and Hell -- or whatever you want to call it. Without consciousness and recollection, this would make no sense whatever. So although I cannot challenge your view, to wit: IDENTITY survives physical death and will inhabit another body in the future, I cannot agree that we should call it a "soul". That's just not what the word means...at least as most folks understand it nowadays.
Can I elaborate? You are certainly correct when you point out that memory, as we currently understand it, depends on physical coding in the brain. So how can memory exist after destruction of the brain? Well, if you want to believe in the soul, then you are committed to the view that there exists a non-material backup of the encoded memory, and the soul -- a non-physical conscious entity -- has access to that backup. I am not aware that there is any philosophical problem about this. You have argued that the soul cannot have memory after death, but I don't recall your denying that the soul can be conscious.
The choice to disqualify non-bearded-guy gods from theism is an opinion, not a truth. It could be stated as an axiom in a logical system, but that doesn't make it true or even more true than theism that includes Spinozan concepts of god in nature.
This is thought-provoking, to be sure. But it also redirected me back to your defense of the RC, which I still find unconvincing, since the first two axioms you use to prove it are inconsistent with one another.
You make similar points (except the Bayesian "justification"), and share the underlying problem of the persistent multiplication of souls over time. Are some "reused" and others pulled out of a soul repository at each moment of conception?
“You have lived infinitely many lives in the past and will live infinitely many more in the future. While alive, you are embodied; in between lives, you exist as a disembodied soul.”
That which the pronoun “you” refers to in these sentences seems idiosyncratic. That doesn’t seem like me. Why should I think of it as me, this thing that has lived lives in the past that I have no awareness of and am not similar to, and will “have” many more lives in the future that will have no awareness of me or similarity to me? This just seems like abuse of terminology.
“I think the mind has three features that are hard to explain in physical terms:”
Are they easy to explain or explainable at all in non-physical terms? If these features remain unexplained by both theories, why choose the one with additional problems?
I feel like my response is a bit snide, but this argument seems to start in the middle, expecting me to accept premises that seem absurd.
Maybe i am playing a worse trick. My version of physicality is greedy. If you prove that there are aspects of reality that we were previously unaware of but that are needed to explain qualia etc. and do not consist of purely random chaos, i will just declare them a newly discovered aspect of physical reality.
This is quite tough material to grasp - could be a good book topic - think I’d need to be walked through the arguments/ objections very slowly.
"Upon death, you lose everything other than your soul."
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I think you could strip away so much of me that whatever remains won't be me anymore. It seems like some amount of memory is a core part of my identity and couldn't be stripped away without destroying me. Even in my wildest conscious experiences, I have not lost my grip on the English language. My internal monologue is always chattering away, always in English. On the other hand, I forget things all the time without losing my identity. Maybe I just haven't tried the right drugs, and if I did, I'd have experiences such that I'd say things like, "oh yeah, I totally forgot English that one time, but I was still me". On the other other hand, would the entity making such a claim still be me, or did that drug evict my soul and let my body embody a different soul?
"Can you give a parallel argument that people must exist in infinitely many spatial locations at any given time"
I'm no physicist, but I'd suggest running this by some. I have a sneaking suspicion that the weirdness of spacetime and relativity means that saying something must exist at an infinite number of times might imply that it will also sometimes exist in multiple locations simultaneously. For any two incarnations of a soul, there is probably some frame of reference where an observer would see both living their lives simultaneously. Perhaps you can avoid that by adopting some constraints on when reincarnation is allowed, but that in turn may push other boundaries, perhaps violating your assertion that your identity can't depend on something that's going to happen in the future.
"On my view, however, you never fundamentally create persons; you only cause a pre-existing soul to become embodied. If you refrain from reproducing, then, there will be souls who continue to be unconscious and disembodied, whom you could have rescued from that condition."
If time is infinite, it seems like a soul shouldn't care if it gets embodied once every thousand years or once every million years. The gaps between embodiments are indistinguishable from an unconscious disembodied soul's perspective, no matter how long they are.
"(it is metaphysically impossible for more than one person existing at a given time to both “be you”)"
Impossible? The Tines, Vernor Vinge's intelligent pack minded aliens in his novel "A Fire Upon the Deep", seem plausible enough. Each individual Tine is made up of a pack of (usually) four to six sub-sentient dog-like creatures (members), and they have enough redundancy to survive the loss and replacement of one of their constituent members. What it means for a soul to only be embodied in one place at a time is already murky under those circumstances, and it's not so hard to imagine increasing the redundancy so that each member contains a copy of the full Tine sentience. If the members stay in sync, you could argue each Tine is the whole pack as well as each of its members at the same time. Obviously, humans won't experience such a thing until we can upload and spread ourselves between multiple redundant servers, but nothing about multiple individuals simultaneously sharing a soul seems impossible to me as long as each individual sees the same input, runs the same processes, and produces the same outputs.
"Some reasons to think that you exist after death, albeit in a non-conscious, disembodied state:"
I'm on the same page for cases 1 and 2, but I think there is a big leap between those and cases 3 and 4. I’m not at all sure you are the same person while you have amnesia. Let’s consider something between cases 2 and 3. Call it case 2.5. Suppose when you go to sleep tonight, we wave a magic wand that both gives you total amnesia and prevents you from remembering the next week of your life. You fully recover your memories (except of the last week) at the end of the week. Do you exist as the same person during the amnesiac period? First consider what you are actually going to experience - from your perspective, you are going to go to sleep tonight and then wake up a week from now. If your phone didn’t tell you that you missed a week, you wouldn’t even know! I’d argue that this situation is basically the same as cases 1 and 2. During that blank week, you existed, but only in a temporarily non-conscious, disembodied state. So, who was wearing your body, living that week as an amnesiac? I have no idea, but it wasn’t you - you were busy being disembodied at the time! Back to cases 3 and 4, I can’t even imagine what the experience would be like, but it seems to me like you would be just as disembodied as you were in cases 1, 2, and 2.5. Maybe you’ll be reembodied in case 3 when enough of your memories return, but case 4 sounds like case 2.5 if it lasted for the rest of your life instead of just a week, so I think you’d be permanently disembodied. So ultimately, I agree you continue to exist in some sense while non-conscious, but until and unless I experience it for myself, I think that an amnesiac version of you is almost certainly not you.
Professor Huemer, I am a boundless admirer of your work. But I have a serious reservation about your latest posting. Can I remind you that in one your previous articles you took issue with those who profess to believe in God but who define God as Nature or Universal Consciousness or something like that? You point out that the word God is traditionally used to refer to a conscious supreme being who rules the world. So those who believe in "God is Nature" etc. are really atheists although they are reluctant to say so. I totally agree.
Now, I am compelled to agree with all the details in your recent posting. My only objection is that the word soul is traditionally used to refer to a CONSCIOUS entity that survives the death (destruction) of the physical body. According to Judeo-Christian doctrine, the soul must also have RECOLLECTION of its life in this world. This doctrine, cutting across all branches and sects, says that the destiny of the soul in the NEXT world depends on its conduct in THIS world. There must be some version of Heaven and Hell -- or whatever you want to call it. Without consciousness and recollection, this would make no sense whatever. So although I cannot challenge your view, to wit: IDENTITY survives physical death and will inhabit another body in the future, I cannot agree that we should call it a "soul". That's just not what the word means...at least as most folks understand it nowadays.
Can I elaborate? You are certainly correct when you point out that memory, as we currently understand it, depends on physical coding in the brain. So how can memory exist after destruction of the brain? Well, if you want to believe in the soul, then you are committed to the view that there exists a non-material backup of the encoded memory, and the soul -- a non-physical conscious entity -- has access to that backup. I am not aware that there is any philosophical problem about this. You have argued that the soul cannot have memory after death, but I don't recall your denying that the soul can be conscious.
I would appreciate your thoughts on this.
Laurin Lewis
The choice to disqualify non-bearded-guy gods from theism is an opinion, not a truth. It could be stated as an axiom in a logical system, but that doesn't make it true or even more true than theism that includes Spinozan concepts of god in nature.
This is thought-provoking, to be sure. But it also redirected me back to your defense of the RC, which I still find unconvincing, since the first two axioms you use to prove it are inconsistent with one another.
Might be a good time to review: https://www.plato-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-Monadology-1714-by-Gottfried-Wilhelm-LEIBNIZ-1646-1716.pdf
You make similar points (except the Bayesian "justification"), and share the underlying problem of the persistent multiplication of souls over time. Are some "reused" and others pulled out of a soul repository at each moment of conception?