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Article 7508 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: burt@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca (Burt Voorhees)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Simulated Brain
Message-ID: <burt.720913842@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca>
Date: 4 Nov 92 21:50:42 GMT
References: <burt.720426490@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca> <m94oTB1w165w@CODEWKS.nacj
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>In article <m94oTB1w165w@CODEWKS.nacjack.gen.nz> system@CODEWKS.nacjack.gen.nz
 (Wayne McDougall) writes:
>>burt@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca (Burt Voorhees) writes:
>>
>>> I would say that this persistent sense of identity across
>>> multiple states of being, and even across multiple
>>> personalities, could be explained easily in terms
>>> of an assumed a priori consciousness which has the
>>> capacity of intentional identification with structures
>>> in an individuals mind.
>>>bv

>>Just me being annoying again. How do you know there is a persistent
>>state of identity? You have no contact with these other states of
>>being. You only have historical knowledge, and you would need to make
>>all sorts of assumptions about the reliability of that knowledge.
>>It may be an inevitable consequence of the wiring in the human brain
>>that we falsely perceive continutity of identity in ourselves, when in
>>fact no such continuity exists.


>The "I," being an a priori precursor to human experience, "exists" in
>the same way that numbers "exist."  When I say that the number "2"
>exists, I don't mean, like Plato is thought to have believed, that
>there is a big marble TWO somewhere.

I doubt that Plato ever believed this.

>  It is merely a logical entity.

It is logical only in that it is an identity, and the question of identity
is at the core of the metaphysical foundations of logic.  It's a mistake
to put logic as prior to identity.  Logic is the tool that we use in order
to be precise about our thinking about identity, but it did not create
identity.  Cat's existed, for example, before there was ever a word for
cat.

>What would you want the "I" to be?  A noumenal soul?  Even if it were,
>we could never have any knowledge of the fact, so, what's the point?

This is just the second of Gorgias' sophisms:
  1)  Nothing exists.
  2))  Even if anything did exist, we could never know about it.
  3)  Even if somebody could know about it they could never
communicate their knowledge.

There are, of course, different meanings which can be given to the word I.
If you want to give it the meaning of a personal pronoun, so that when I
use it it refers to my particular ego/body complex with its own personal
history then that's one thing, and the question of whether or not this I
exists as an entity rather thn being just the result of some psychosomatic
process is an interesting one.  On the other hand, one can use the term
in the sense of pure identity in awareness of its own existence.  That
seems to be the I that you refer to as just a logical construct, but
I would suggest that that I must have existed prior to logic, and indeed
that logic would not have been possible without it.
bv


>-- 
>Lincoln R. Carr, Computer Scientist-Philosopher    lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.ed
u
>"Treat all rational autonomous moral agents, whether in the form of yourself
>or another, never as means solely, but always as ends in themselves."
>                  Immanuel Kant, from "Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
"


