Posted by Noctillucent on July 19, 19101 at 23:21:09:
In Reply to: Who are you? posted by John Tchoe on July 19, 19101 at 14:10:22:
So if I understand you correctly, your “self” is a specific set of atoms that is presently your brain. When these atoms change, your “self” will be no more, but (presumably) be replaced by another “self”, someone as distinct from your “self” as is the “self” in the duplicate brain.
There are a couple of things to consider here, and which raise serious questions as to how reasonable this is.
First, consider the probability that the atoms specific to your “self” should come together in the very same brain AND form a highly specific configuration AND do so at this particular moment in time.
Do you have any idea what the odds are of that happening? It would likely take a supercomputer to work out the probability and reams of paper to write out the decimal places. That it should happen even once in a quadrillion universes is fantastically remote. Needless to say, you are a lucky man!
Second, the atoms in your brain are mindless bits of matter. They don’t “know” you consciously exist. How can they? Being mindless, they don’t know anything at all. It therefore makes no possible difference to the atoms what kind of thoughts they produce, or, indeed, that they produce any thoughts at all.
Why is this remarkable? Consider the following:
Imagine a collection of a hundred million insects. Some have black wings, some have white wings. The insects busily go about their business. Then something very strange begins to happen. Unbeknownst to the insects, the colors of their collective wings begin to spell out a sentence. It reads:
“Thetis fell at the Battle of Marathon.”
Is this sentence believable? If its cause is a mindless activity oblivious to it’s abstract meaning, then obviously not. That it should exist at all is incredible enough, but that it should also be objectively true would confound reason itself.
Likewise, if consciousness is but the activity of mindless atoms, why should we trust what consciousness tells us? Reason would say it can’t possibly be trusted. And if we can’t reasonably trust it, on what grounds can we believe that atoms are objectively real, since it is only by consciousness that we come to know of atoms in the first place --or of a physical brain, a physical body, or a physical universe.
In other words, no theory of the mind is believable if it makes unbelievable evidence for that theory.
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