Another Bad Argument for Magic
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- Опубликовано: 25 ноя 2023
- I came across a silly argument, that I have to assume is an attempt to prove some form of supernaturalism, on Twitter (yes, I still call it that -- Elon is OK with deadnaming). As all such arguments, it fails miserably.
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"Elon is okay with dead naming, so it's Twitter." BRB dying.
I wasn't expecting so perfect of a zinger only sixteen seconds in.
First of all, your "identity" isn't just "one" thing, it's the cumulation of A LOT of your own characteristics. And yes, it does change over time.
Secondly, the fact that there are so many cognitive disorders that literally alter a person's identity is 100% proof that a person's identity is 100% physical.
Identity gets 'ship of Theseus''d to hell and back. But I don't expect people who use this analogy to actually understand or, at least, accept it.
1. Imagine there is a heap of sand.
2. You can add sand to it or substract some off it, it is still a heap of sand.
3. Its identity as a heap of sand doesn't change in response to the physical changes.
Conclusion: There must exist a supernatual ideology of "a heap of sand".
You just reinvented Platonism! Congrats! I don't know why most intro philosophy classes still start with him.
Your identity is an *emergent property* of physical reality. How hard is this for some people to comprehend?
Exactly.
I find a lot of these people have a problem with the concept of an emergent property. They often claim to know what it means but really do not. You will never see an apologist bring up the concept. When brought up in arguments it is usually hand waved away (like they do not want to know what it means).
It isn't difficult to understand at all. It is a hard truth that people refuse to accept, because it precludes the concept of a soul or spirit that exists after the physical body ends.
@@tripolarmdisorder7696Bingo.
You will never be a real woman
During my brief stay in university, we had a psychology class, and the teacher was discussing how, in one sense, a child's personality is being created even _before_ the parents get started with the pregnancy. People might be planning ahead, thinking of what they want for their child, decorating the bedroom, thinking of names, planning on teaching the kid which sport or instrument to play, all that kind of stuff. The point was that _who_ someone is is a product of many factors during and even before their upbringing. Your whole past is what makes you who you are, all the way to the beginning of Time itself.
Some middle-aged Haitian man stood up and asked "At which point does the Soul(tm) enter the fetus?", which sounded even weirder in French with his accent. For the longest time I held that to be the dumbest question I ever heard. Some things *_never_* change.
I give a lot of credit to that teacher, by the way. The auditorium was full of chuckles and facepalms, and the teacher was clearly trying not to tell him to sit down and stop bothering the real students, opting instead for some vague word salad and a summary dismissal of the question, which satisfied the dunce (which, by itself, was grounds for him being kicked out of university if you ask me). I have no idea what business that guy had being in a child psychology class meant for teachers, but I pity his students if he never flunked out like he needed to.
Point is, "God" is just as responsible for your soul being you as Bigfoot is for stealing my car that I've never owned because I can't drive. Except, of course, that 'God' is a made-up concept that's taught to kids, so it still manages to have some effect in turning children into ignorance-worshiping sanctimonious jerks. But that's not _God_ so much as the stupid notion people label with that name.
As for _this_ dunce's three claims, your personality changes *_constantly_* as your past builds up more and more influencing factors on who you are. I'm not the same nice, kind, naive little twerp I was as a kid. The dunce needs to get slapped around with a Ship of Theseus a couple times.
Sullivan has a PhD in "philosophy" from a small catholic college (2463 undergrads last year) known us University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. As expected from a catholic school, it appears to specialize in religion more than education. Thus, it's likely his "philosophy" degree is actually a degree in christianity.
He also founded a martial arts school.
Thank you. No surprises there.
Professor in Jiu Jitsu? I don't think "professor" mean what Sullivan think it means.
@@jkausti6737There are styles of jiu jitsu/ju jutsu that use that terminology. It basically means "head instructor" or "founder of the style".
Yes, I got some definite "Dr. Kunt Hovind" vibes when reading the post by that "dr." 🙂
@@Martymer81 Didn't know that, not a wasted day when you learn something new.
Still nice to see you tear woo-woo a new one after all these years. I remember first finding you in the early WDPLaSS days and have been vibing along ever since.
Thomistic philosophy.
As in based on the works of Thomas Aquinas, and as such rooted deeply in Christian fundamentalism.
So yeah, essentially a crackpot.
Every apologist argument is some variation on something already said by Aquinas. They haven't had a new idea in centuries (except maybe William Paley and that fellow with the wager, the third most famous of people with the surname "Pascal(e)").
@@DavidSmith-vr1nb I love that they just keep using a thesaurus on the prime mover argument.
I think the core of the problem is that "identity" is left undefined. The argument implies that "identity" is a real tangible, property, separate from not only one's physical body (hence the "98% of your body changes over a year" comment), but form one's personality and instinctual nature (hence the "things about you change, but you are still you"). The problem is because it is undefined we don't even know if "identity" means the same thing consistently, let alone whether or not it's a real thing.
Essentially, the trying to answer the question of the ship of Theseus by saying the ship of Theseus must have a soul and that's why it's "identity" stays the same, instead of just, you know, It's the ship of Theseus because we call it the ship of Theseus. Identity doesn't have to be a real tangible thing in order to be a useful concept, like with the value of money. (I like to call these "imaginary properties".)
That make it a second equivocation in that «reasoning». One between the use of changing/unchanging between statements 1 and 2, and one within statement 1.
The stupidity becomes even more apparent when you change person to any kind of institution. There are companies that have existed for centuries that have had every worker in them replaced jet it's still the same company.
What a company is or what you are are social concepts. Not the result of any particular bit of physical reality but the interaction between many parts that we as humans can better understand by considering it a single thing.
Take the Roman Empire. It lasted at least 1000 years, changing its whole population, its political systems (several times), its capital, and even its major language and religion. What's more, several centuries later, it was resurrected from the dead, with yet another territory, population, and political system. Or look at the church. Or ... there are so many examples.
@@KaiHenningsen "its political systems (several times),"
And that was just in _one_ year!
Or close enough to, anyway. I'm not enough of a history buff to remember or bother checking, but I _do_ know the revolving door to Caesar's office had knives on it for a while.
It doesn't even have to be an institution, how about a heap of sand, a desert, a forest...... holy shit rivers!!! Those must be a nightmare to this guy.
Imagine a guy calling himself a polymath and not getting relentlessly bullied by colleagues.
There are people calling themselves polymaths. And then there are people being called polymaths by others. I suspect that like with the category of "stable geniuses", there is very little overlap between the two.
@@KaiHenningsen Astrophysics person chiming in to confirm. Among the people I've encountered, those that call themselves polymaths are blowhards, while those called polymaths by others are genuinely brilliant and very worth having a coffee with.
If you replace the muffler on a '65 Chevy, it's still a '65 Chevy. Sequentially replacing atoms in your body has the same effect. Strike one, magic believers.
Premise 1 is basically just a sneaky definition smuggled in.
"which im still gonna call twitter, because elon is okay with deadnaming" 💀💀💀💀
absolutely *savage*
Based
Bingo, glad he pointed it out because I was already reaching for the comment section after he said imma still call it that.
It's an eX Twitter, it has ceased to be.
@@carolinusTG- What were you going to say in the comment section?
There's a lot of things we don't know about consciousness or how it emerges, but what we do know kinda suggests that it emerges from physical properties.
We have plenty of documentation of people who've had their brains damaged in one way or another, and their behavior changes afterwards, which has given us plenty of information about what parts of the brain do what.
There's really not a lot of room to cram a soul into anymore, since your personality, your memories, your emotions, and all sensory experiences have roots in your brain.
Most of the atoms in our body get replaced over time by growth and repair, so we do change physically.
We keep learning every day, which alters our experience and our personality, so we do change mentally.
Soooo… the argument is “My Father’s Sword” applied to consciousness?
Thomistic Metaphysics appears to be based on the theological arguments of the Dominican friar, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).
He made a lot of unsupported assertions & opinions ("I think/feel it's so, therefore it's so,") about Christisn Theology & Aristotelian logic over 700 years ago. We've kind'a learned a few things since then making many of his various ideas range from merely wrong to utterly absurd...
His work has been severely criticized over the years, with Bertrand Russell basically kerb-stomping him in his writings.
Yup. Aquinas is the "genius" behind the original ontological argument, which basically boils down to "I can imagine there being a god, therefore there is". 🤦♂
Actually, Saint Thomas Aquinas rejected the Ontological argument. It was Saint Aselm of Canterbury who invented it.
@@johnburn8031D'oh! Saint A-something or Saint A-something... Got them mixed up, apparently.
It is still incredible that many people, in this age, believe in magic and imaginary beings. I mean, talking snakes, humans with wings, magic trees that talk and food that makes you sentient.
Angels are not humans with wings, they are FAR more horrifying than that, but I find the claim that "literally all across the globe priests transmute wine to human blood and wafers to human flesh on a weekly basis except in lab conditions" far more hilarious.
@@SnlDrako- I'm curious where the modern idea of angels as humanoids with wings came from. Yeah, people who have actually read the Bible understand that the presentation of angels is a fever dream and utterly terrifying.
@@NotGoodAtNamingThings Catholicism would be my bet. After all, how famous do you think Michelangelo would be if he had to sculpt a statue of a biblically accurate angel? And would anyone go see them? HELL NAH, we'd be running away. So, best guess is "Catholic leaders REALLY wanted their religion to spread so they censored everything so it would look more presentable instead of the drug-fueled haze of w-t-f'ery that was originally dreamt up".
I like to pretend that I believe in all that when I play D&D.
@@NotGoodAtNamingThings A fever dream ? More like stuff straight out of some drunken nightmare.
I miss your uploads. Awesome vid
So Thesius's ship has a soul!
An iron bar freshly made is still an iron bar after 2000 years buried in the ground! It may be completely different, but it is still the same "identity"! Is this the "my grandfather's axe" thing dug up again?
You don’t see the fella laugh very often, can’t blame him. I’d be sour too if I had his job
So, his objection to Heraclitus's River is that it's not the type of change he's talking about because you're still "you." But then I think that's a circular argument. He's saying that, while you do change, he's defining it as not a change in identity to support his claim that your identity doesn't change. For my part, I can't see what it means to "change identity" except for to change from some state I'm already in to a different state. I still go by the same name, but like you said, if I changed my name, he'd just say that's a trivial change that doesn't affect my identity. So, he's defined away anything about myself that could possibly change as "not counting."
Perhaps he wants to say I don't enter into a different body, but based on the way he views recycling atoms, that's also not true. Maybe he thinks it's somehow different if it doesn't happen all at once? I don't know, it's poorly explained, but I guess that would account for both the atom thing & the fact that he doesn't count gradual personality changes. Of course, we have to omit edge cases like people getting posttraumatic amnesia & completely constructing new identities that totally destroy his argument, like do those people not have souls or something? But let's forget about that.
It seems like he's implicitly assuming the very soul he wants to conclude. Because this whole line of reasoning doesn't really make sense unless you believe there's some mystical, unchanging essence of a person that's not affected by any other type of physical or psychological change. Which I don't. In daily situations, it's easier & more useful to simplify & say I've always been the same person, but you can't isolate any unchanging thing that is "my persona." My interests, opinions, concerns, likes, & dislikes are all subject to change, & no one would say any of those "are" me anyway. Even my memories warp over time, whether I realize it or not.
Now, one thing that would make sense is to say there's a biological system that produces a certain output & we can define that output as "myself" as long as it's coming from the same system, regardless of how much it changes. But he explicitly rejects that premise, so that doesn't work. After indicating that he refuses to accept any answer except for the soul, he somehow concludes that proves the soul.
But, then, if there IS this unchanging soul that's unaffected by physical reality, why does it really seem to change in response to physical reality? Why is nothing about our mental state constant if at least part of it comes from this unchanging soul that isn't bound to the brain? Why can everything you think of as yourself be changed by altering the brain if altering the brain doesn't change your true self since your true self is apparently not part of the material system? It's almost like the entire argument fails to describe reality from the beginning & is fatally flawed.
A few things could tear this argument apart.
1. A fourth dimensional view of identity. If every plank second of you were superimposed one on top of the other in a singular image that could be described as the definition of 'you' thus changes in physical reality would not be important, yet it is still physical reality that is the source of identity.
2. A causal view of identity. This one in particular seems super basic... Basicly says there isn't enough change from one moment to another to consider you a different person, so any distinction between 'you' from the past and 'you' from the present is a construct of your own design. It's kind of like how any biological classification beyond the species level is more or less a human invention also (although I guess we could reasonably guess that a single primordial cell and an elephant couldn't reproduce even if we can't test that in the present). This can be reinforced by the notion that any change in your identity is going to be caused by the 'you' of the past, even if its due to your reception of stimuli on a biological level. Physical change doesn't matter yet identity is still physical.
3. A consciousness view of identity. Again, super basic, but the fact that have one stream of consciousness is what makes you you. Sleep causes a hitch in that but sleep can just be seen as you (from a first person point of view) leaping into the future rather than being a break in consciousness. Of course someone like this would make the point that consciousness is not physical but of course... It is, it's caused by the brain. At the very least that would render this argument no more special than any other argument about the soul.
3. A
I've had the same broom for twenty years. I replaced the head three times and the handle twice.
The first counterexample that popped into my head was "The street map of the city remained the same throughout the year. All the roads were repaved during the year. Therefore the street map is not caused by the strips of asphalt."
Martymer delivering an intellectual asskicking on a monday morning is the right way to start the day. Cheers to you, Sir! You help make the world a better place.
From what I understand of Buddhist philosophy, the only constant to one's identity is the "continuity of I"; that is, the sense that "I" was a baby, then a child, a teen, a young adult, adult... etc and that I am existing the Present moment. So your awareness and your awareness of memory. This is what OP was trying to get to with "You remain you", but doesn't quite make it. But a sense or awareness of self isn't a soul or a tangible thing. It's just your mind. But your identity as a person includes more than just your mind... it's also your appearance and your personality, but as you pointed out, problems arise immediately: "You don't look like your photo ID from 10 years ago", "Stress has changed you", "I'm not a kid anymore" are all things that people have heard because they change. Identity as a whole relies on the perceptions of others (see how it dissolves away in cases of extreme isolation), but it works if you accept that a single awareness, a single mind, encompasses that specific spectrum of experience that makes up a "person".
OP's second premise is fine; everything changes over time. We don't have physics or time without it.
OP's conclusion is wrong, however. Even Buddhist philosophers recognize that expecting signs from the afterlife is vain. When they test for reincarnations, they can only test living people. But talking about reincarnation isn't the point of my comment, though. It's that the concept of a mind without a body to support it is absurd. If you destroy a brain or deprive it of oxygen until cell death, the "person" as you perceive it and the "continuity of I" within that body ceases. And that's not even getting into the complexities of severe brain damage causing personality changes.
The problem is that OP is clearly coming from a position of trying to prove that a soul, some permanent, unchanging, and independant thing that exists (without form or substance), and then working backwards.
Did he just try to Ship of Theseus a soul into existence?
He called himself a polymath. Definitely a crackpot, real polymaths are only viewed as such through the eyes of others.
Also they do not exist in the current world. They were possible 100+ years ago, but we've gained so much knowledge since that it is not possible anymore to be an expert in more than a couple of fields.
This is the argument that I think is quite good for proving Open Individualism.
Isn't that simply the ship of Theseus?
If the Doctor hasn't heard that one in his Philosophy classes, I have questions.
I agree, dead naming is ok so it shall forever be twitter 🥃🥃
This is at least a much more coherent version of this argument that other versions I’ve heard, but yeah, it just makes the problems even clearer.
Premise 2’s definition of change also makes premise 1’s use inconsistent. Identity is seated in the brain which will change by replacing atoms. Thus identity must change with time according to physical reality.
you could define identity as many things.
personality - well as covered, this changes.
a label - maybe identity is just the name we give ourselves, and it has no real physical meaning. same as the word 'chair' has no objective meaning, but we simply agree that chair like things will be called chairs, we could say that our own names and identities are just definitions to help us agree on who people are
consciousness - for this argument, this seems the most effective definition, as it is mysterious why our consciousness might remain continuous.
so, you might rewrite the argument better as something like:
P1) Our consciousness remains continuous over our lives.
P2) If consciousness is caused by physical reality, and all the components of that physical reality change (as in Ship of Theseus) then it cannot remain continous.
P3) All the components of our physical body (atoms) are eventually replaced.
C) Consciousness cannot be caused by physical reality.
I think this version is logically sound, but the premises are questionable.
P1: Well, it's hard to even know if our consciousness remains continuous. In any one moment, it feels this way, but you could imagine a world where a new copy of "you" was created which remembers everything about the previous copies (similar to the idea of the universe being created last Thursday) and this version of "you" would make decisions for the day only to be replaced with a new "instance" next day. Given our lack of understanding of consciousness, this may be hard to even define.
P2: This is simply not necessarily true at all, it's hard for us to really know. But if we think of consciousness as an emergent property or some sort of process, then it's reasonable to imagine it could remain continuous, same as how a computer program might keep running without error if we replaced each individual component of the computer.
Doctor Scott refers to himself as an autodidact and a "professor of jiu jitsu" in his bio so I doubt he has any kind of serious credentials.
Same place Kent Hovind got his PHD.
Being a black belt, myself, I know that some dojos use terms like "professor" instead of the traditional "sensei", so I didn't react to that.
@@Martymer81 Isn't a professor someone who teaches, But a Doctor should have a PHD from an accredited establishment?
@@dogwalker666 Yup.
I think I get what these people are trying to express. Their idea of a soul or whatever is basically the "camera" of a person, that which takes in all the visual and audio and other sensory data. Unless a person suffers a massive trauma that (and yes I know this is kinda hard to prove, just bear with me) installs a different camera into a person, the person will always be the same. Their soul concept is that whether you are 3 or 30 or 100 years old, all the data you gain via your senses goes through that same thing. Even if you make new memories or lose them, even if you act understandably very different across your stages of life, even if you *think* differently (and anyone can be expected to do so), that soul camera thing will always be the same. I guess it's basically a person's consciousness?
This is why it's hard to prove, if it can be proven at all. Am I the same person I was when I was 3 now that I am 33? Or was that someone else in control of my body when I was in kindergarten and I only have their memories? Does that even make a difference? I think that concept is the thing they are trying to express as never ever changing.
Every atom? Why do I get Theseus' Ship in my mind?
Much like Dr William Lane Craig this Dr probably just forgot the basic principles of logic because those are taught in the very first class on philosophy, something they no doubt forget long before they get into the doctorate part of their course.
Na, WLC remembers those quite well ... until it is better for his argument to not remember them. Or to say it differently, he knows he's peddling BS. But his income depends on "not knowing" it. (Also, he is on record that his own faith has nothing to do with the arguments he is famous for.)
1 consciousness is more of a process than an entity.
2 standard issue ship of Theseus.
3 doesn't really follow from the premises.
So, if I faithfully restore a historic building, it has a soul. If i tear it down and build something different it doesn't.
This reminds me of The Ship of Theseus.
The Dr. wrote he's a professor of jiu jitsu ... so it might be that.
If I write a book on a computer, then print out a copy on paper, it is still the same book. (In this case we mean book as the written information, not a physical object. Just to be clear) Changing the medium did not in any meaningful way change the nature of the book. However, what is interesting is that I may make a revision to that book. That is how people work. We are revised. We generally see even a revised book as the same book to some degree. But not the exact same book as it was first published. Why is it important to actually note which version of the book we are to talk about. So a human is both the same human as a kid as an adult, yet wildly different too.
Just because English is so crap in conveying this difference does not mean one can just equivocate everything. People do change but are also the same, and it is a matter of perspective. If we look at a person full existence, we can say they're the same person, because all later version inherit from the previous versions. But it is just untrue to claim that a person character does not change with time. Anyone that has been annoyed with actions of past selves, hopefully can relate. ;)
Your rationality levels are off the charts. Thank you for sharing. People get stuck in magical and mythical thinking and without folks like you, they'll die at that level of human development.
I have a house, and everyday I take one brick out and replace it with a new one. So according to Eric's logic, after some time and replacing enough bricks, it is no longer my house. I see.
This is the Teleport argument, Are you the same person who walks off the Transporter Pad.
Yes and no. The person walking off the transporter pad does not realize it's a copy. It knows everything the original that was destroyed knew and will think it is actually the original, even though it's a perfect copy.
If we define "you" as the specific arrangement of the specific particles making up the original body, then probably not unless those particles were physically transported to the other pad then reconstructed in the same way.
If we define "you" as the general culmination of the processes of the brain of the original body, then so long as the new body is carrying out the same kind of processes then yes, you are the same person.
@@D2Transphobia The problem with teleport in SciFi they transmit data and reform a copy on the receiver site, or may think and even feel like the original but it’s still a copy, The disassembly process is the part glossed over,
I personally think it is impossible for live matter wormhole technology is more possible.
I don't think any idealist would deny the existence of what we colloquially call physical. Just that our qualitative perceptions(phenomena) are representations rather than the thing in itself(noumena) which can't be exhaustively defined by quantanites alone bc they too are also fundamentally qualitative. So in that sense it would only deny its standalone(non-relational) existence.
That's Theseus ship paradox. A paradox as old as Philosophy... And according to Chomsky, from a cognitive point of view, the contradiction is that what seams true on our minds doesn't have to be true outside our minds. We think we have an identity, but that's just a mental construction. Identity is not a physical thing, and our bodies are.
There are other interpretations and solutions, but at the end, at the heart of the paradox is information theory, entropy, etc... (Basically the paradox confuses information with matter)
Thomistic: Followers of Thomas Aquinas.
Certainly we are more than our idea of self, our ego.
Weasels are remarkably tenacious predators, often killing prey more than five times their size.
The fallacy is: fallacy of division. "occurs when one reasons that something that is true for a whole must also be true of all or some of its parts." We are made of smaller parts and those smaller parts don't have "identity". Every elementary particle is identical to every other, every electron is the same as any other electron, any atom is the same as any other atom, and so on. While cells have some identity, cells are basically interchangeable. A neuron can be interchanged with any other neuron. The whole of me have "identity", the parts that I am made of don't have "identity" and thus you can replace every atom of me with "new" atoms but nothing would change. The argument would make sense if the atoms of my body would have my "identity" and thus replacing them would change my "identity". But atoms don't have "identity".
Indeed, but I don't see how this points out the problem of this particular argument. Physical reality also consists of parts. The fallacy lies in that he treats the two differently, when they are the same in the way that's actually relevant to the conclusion he wants to reach.
@@Martymer81 you are right
His doctorate is in Thinkology, awarded by the Universitatus Commiteeatum E Pluribus Unum.
Hmm, but isnt that the point? Arnt you, by resolving the contradiction and realising that they have to be two different categories of change just reiterating what they are saying? That there is something fundamentally different about the static physical components of somebody that can change almost without limit without destroying their identiy, and what makes them them.
I may be missing more context thats present in their follow up replies but it looks to me like a clumsy form of the ship of theseus argument?
Yes, it's the ship of Theseus, but he's basically saying:
1. Your identity is like the ship, and counts as unchanging, because it's still the same ship, it just comes in different states.
2. Physical reality is like the ship, and doesn't count as unchanging, because while it's still the same ship, it comes in different states.
3. Therefore physical reality is different than your identity, in a way that makes it impossible for the former to produce the latter.
The problem is that your identity and physical reality are the same in the sense that is relevant to the conclusion (they are both functions of time that take on different values for different time coordinates), so to reach the conclusion, what counts as change has to be different in 1 and 2. That's an equivocation fallacy.
This is just the Ship of Theseus.
Physical reality hasn't changed into something else, either. It's still physical reality.
That's my point, exactly. f(a) =/= f(b). It's still f! Nothing has changed! g(a) =/= g(b). Look! g has changed!!! 🤦♂
Argumentum ad TriggersBroomium. Le sigh.
I'll keep calling it Twitter because Elon hates it.
Ask them if the god in which they believe can change something's identity.
Actually to be honest with you I actually liked the Solo movie.
I belong to the school of Star Wars fans who hate all movies except the theatrical versions of original trilogy. ;)
@@Martymer81 do not forget the holiday special!
@@RalphH007So bad it's awesome.
@@Martymer81
I'm with you.
I don't know what kind of PhD that guy thinks he has but if he believes your personality and consciousness don't change over time, I guess he's still an infant. Unless it DOES change and adapt based on experiences, albeit slowly. What's the phrase they like to use so much, ah, yes, 'ship of Theseus', which they barely understand. Yes, the human consciousness IS a ship of Theseus as it changes bit by bit over time. Then it also gets defining moments (often traumatic) that further rapidly alter and change it. You're still "you", but not even close to the same "you" as you were before. Add to that, we DO know that the physical body and consciousness are connected. We have "consciousness altering medication". The hint is in the name. Whoa, would ya look at that, he got debunked. By a dude with zero medical knowledge beyond "hey this painkiller is good for headaches, this one for sore limbs". Whoever gave him that PhD should take it back.
this argument is *mind bogglingly* stupid.
It's a non-sequitur because the conclusion doesn't logically follow from the premises, and it's equivocation as you pointed out.
Also, the argument that personality is somehow completely separate form the body *completely* ignores all of neuroscience and even basic observable facts -- like the fact that people's personalities can *drastically* change based on their brain chemistry or even physical head trauma.
How would he argue about identity change in regards to brain damage?
Maybe 98% of my body changes per year (I have no idea if those numbers are correct, but clearly there must be some numbers for which this claim is correct, and the numbers really aren't important for the argument) - but it is *still my body* (or premise 2 would be wrong). So the body keeps its identity, too.
Another famous example of something that keeps its identity in spite of permanent change and body replacement is a river. What makes the identity of a river? Not even the exact river bed - rivers (even famous ones) have changed where they flow over time (until humans did their best to put a stop to it), such as the Yellow River. As Wikipedia describes it: _These changes could cause the river's mouth to shift as much as 480 km (300 mi), sometimes reaching the ocean to the north of Shandong Peninsula and sometimes to the south._ And yet, we think of it as the same river.
And that really is the important point here. _Identity_ is how we think about complicated systems of _stuff._ It is not an inherent property of these things, t is a property we assign.
If we, as a society, decided that adults are different people from non-adults (I could be wrong, but I think there have been societies like that - usually with some important ceremony or task to mark the transition), then people would no longer keep their identity from birth to grave. They would not even themselves think of it like that. Similarly, if we renamed the Yellow River every time it changed its course, it would no longer be the same river - because we decided to not think of it that way.
With complex systems, identity is what we define it to be. Nothing more, and nothing less.
That "caused by" in the conclusion messes up his logic's validity. Physical reality constantly changing doesn't mean that everything which is caused by physical reality is constantly changing too - maybe things caused by physical reality can be non-physical and never changing (as far as the logic knows). I can see the valid form he was going for though, he should have phrased it like this:
2) ALL of physical reality changes regularly.
3) Therefore identity over time is not part of physical reality.
Ah! There's also an equivocation between different usages of 'change' in p1 and p2. Good one Martymer!
You're right, it's a non-sequitur as well.
It is always mortally right to deadname twitter.
Dissociative identity disorder (if it exists) would be an issue for that logic. Which identity is the person’s “you”? How can their identity be constant when other identities exist and were created presumably after childhood trauma? The treatment is to merge identities so “you” obviously changes.
Premise 1. fails anyway, because mind is consequent to brain.
Of course you change personally. You don’t change into a new person. Like I will never change into my neighbour. However in the 80’s and early 90’s I would have identified as a Republican. Now I would rather die than be known as a Republican. Physically as a teenager and into my mid 20’s I was athletic, a long distance runner, and had a good body. Now I’m slightly over weight and can barely walk or be on my feet for more than an hour due to some chronic health issues. Yes you change.
The overall logic is also flawed: I have a bag of nuts and there's a razor on it too > The nuts are edible and in the bag >the razor is not edible = The razor is not in the bag. It is posible for things with different properties to exist together
1 so the rain is constant throughout the storm
2 raindrops fall to the ground and new ones form
3 rain is not dependent on physical ... whatever it said.
Funny that he doesn't present an argument, but suggests that by changing in itself, must introduce doubt into any prior held conceptions. “You must unlearn what you have learned.” Yoda was wrong.
Hey man,
We don't want your change, we're just checking your pockets for holes.
What even is your "identity"? Are we back at the ship of that greek guy again?
I have four words the creator of the argument doesn't know about: The Ship of Theseus. His basic argument has been explored and the consequences worked out long ago.
Meta physics is not under government standards. You can create and assign yourself any rank and status under meta-physics and you can't be held accountable. I could claim to have PHD in theoretical Meta-physics put a DR. in front of my name and the US government wouldn't do a thing about it. The only doctor I can't claim is a medical doctor, there are standards for that the government will enforce.
This is basically the same as those "proofs against athiesm" videos put out by Ponderpoints/Gray and demolished by Logicked, Sir Sic, etc.
Not "understanding" that consciousness is an emergent property of some kinds of systems is a lie at the mental level of "I don't want to believe it if I don't want to".
The rest is just misunderstanding 'the ship of theseus' debate and pretending it's magic.
Try to set up a debate with teal swan. That would be glorious to witness
I have to be honest. I don’t quite get the point of this “PhD carrier”. What does he want?
Sound important.
@@LigH_de Thanks! Well, that’s not helpful for us but pleasant for him. As long as he doesn’t push any anti-scientific propaganda, I don’t really mind.
Xitter (as in Xi Jinping) works for me. But in my view it's pretty much always been that.
It seems like you missed the point of the argument. I think what is being teased at is the issue of the continuity of consciousness. It's like how some people think a Star Trek transporter actually works-- you die and your body is eradicated every time you use the transporter, then it makes a nearly identical clone of you at the other end. The clone basically has implanted memories of a life it never actually lived. Is that sort of what is happening to us? Are we actually different people and persistence of consciousness is an illusion? If so, why would our brain go to the trouble of creating that illusion? We could probably function just fine without it.
3:32 based on what i know about biology (and i must admit that biology is not my strong suit), i'd say 98% is WAAAAY too high. 98% would include everything from the carbon atoms in all kinds of (semi-)solid structures, to the nitrogen atoms in all the proteins to the calcium atoms in the bones. yes, some atoms get replaced, but it's nowhere near 98%. not even close.
Also, identity =/= physical reality.
Magic! :D 🧙
The equivocation fallacy is used in virtually every argument for the 'existence' of a deity. In all of those arguments, subjective existence (AKA the belief that something is 'real') in the premises is equivocated with objective existence (AKA something that has verified objective empirical evidence to support it) in the conclusion. Such arguments never distinguish between two very different forms of existence, one that resides solely in the individual minds of believers, and one that is empirically evident to all. Arguments in American English are especially prone to equivocation because of the fact that we have so many words with multiple, often contradictory, meanings. Unfortunately I can't help but think that these equivocations are deliberate, meant to deceive the intended audience.
The good arguments for magic is that it's cool.
Twitter stays with that name until the links don't work.
Buy gold, bye!
After literally 2 seconds on google, thomism is a philosophical and theological stance. You can have a phd in theology. Thus, Dr. Scott MIGHT have a legit phd (as legit as any phd in theology or other highly ideologically motivated mumbojumbo [like genderstudies] can be). Granted, this doesn't mean that he HAS a phd in theology, for all we know, it could be something unrelated, like, radiology, and he just really likes catholic doctrine (thomism is the official framework for the catholics), or it could be that he just made it the fuck up.
I'm aware of this. The point is that a PhD in theology and PhD in philosophy are two different things.
thomistic philosopher:
Thomism is the philosophical and theological school which arose as a legacy of the work and thought of Thomas Aquinas
what other reason than apologetics this can even exist.
just other word for apologist.
Premise 1 is wrong. People change, man.
👍👍👍👍👍👍
If you made a video every time you found a silly argument on twitter, then you'd have to make a video every time you used twitter.
Good evaluation, in my opinion.
But his argument fails in more than one way. "physical reality changes." While that may be true, there are physical constants. So appealing to constants alone, doesn't not exclude something from physicality. His argument depended on the false assumption of some kind of exclusionary principle, that is both unsupported and demonstrably trivially false.
>has a problem with Elon deadnaming
>proceeds to dismantle a trans persons identity
Premise 1 is false. You do not remain "You" over time. Who you are changes. It changes a little bit all the time, and a lot over time. You are a radically different person from you as a baby, from you as a toddler, and probably even you as a teenager. The reason we don't consider Alex of 2 and Alex of 22 to be different people is because even though his personality has changed dramatically over 20 years and his body is completely different, he also interacted with other people. People that have known him and seen him grow up or grew up with him. This instance of "Alex" has been observed throughout those 20 years and people identify Alex as being this particular collection of atoms, not some random other collection. This is how identity works, it's based on observation. Arrangements of atoms that we can identify as a person don't just teleport around and morph at random, so we can be confident even if their personality changes, that arrangement of atoms is still the same arrangement. It changes over time, but that change is also part of "Alex". It's entirely possible to argue that Alex of 2 and Alex of 22 are 100% different people, that people don't persist over time because we are dynamic rather than static, and that identity is more or less arbitrary. As social creatures though, that would get annoying to juggle, so to simplify things we just look at a cluster of atoms and identify that as a singular person, object, animal, event, ect. The exact atoms may change, but the new atoms fill in the spots of the old atoms, they don't take whatever roles they feel like, so the pattern is consistent.
Premise 2, that one's correct. Stuff changes.
Premise 3, that doesn't follow. First of all, our identities DO change over time, everything does. Second, not everything in the universe DOES or WILL change. The universe will die when things stop changing. Or it'll shrink back into a singularity and a new universe will burst out, who's to say? Either way, you can't use our arbitrary labels of organization to justify magic.
He might have something of substance if he could show something actually unchanging that defined us, in a way that even implied what he wants it to. Without that unchanging something, his first premise is not established.
As it is, it looks more like shower thoughts about the law of identity, made into a fallacious and rather silly argument.
I'd say it like that - it's not an argument. It's a construct detached from reality. Underlying terms have no definitions provided, so It can mean anything. Because if it provided definitions, these definitions would be contested and ridiculed instead. And then problems with A is true, C is true, therefore B is somehow true?
Anyway, I will give a better argument for magic.
First definition - what is Magic. Magic is influencing reality through indirect means, by use of words and gestures, to produce certain desired effect. It can provide desired and duplicative effect with more than 80% efficiency (out of 10 works 8 times).
By that definition - magic exists and is actually used extensively. Propaganda is, by all accounts, arcane art. So is misdirection and planting false ideas. As long as it's deliberate, and done for other purpose. A charlatan wanting to attract followers? Magic. A salesman crafting false narrative to sell worthless things? Magic. So yeah... when I look at social media I see a lot of magicians throwing their spells of bullshit around. I thus believe in Magic and I have entire library worth of proof. Makes it entertaining when you read bullshit, and makes you more alert to it... since now that you know there are magicians around casting spells to reach in your wallet or get your attention...
Well, is he a crackpot or is he an apologist? What's the difference? He has some very impressive sounding titles and maybe his work uses some really long words. But apologists just don't or won't seem to be able to parse out the relevant information here. They want so very bad for their whole thing to seem academic and serious but none of them can lay out the basic facts that very easily and clearly show that doubting such a thing as a supernatural creator supreme being deity is absolutely 100% justified and actively believing in one is not. That doesn't prove there is or isn't a god. It doesn't matter. Doubt has to be able to take supremacy in the absence of very good physical evidence. That's the ONLY way one can be consistent. It simply HAS to be like that. If you accept things as true that do not have good solid physical evidence demonstrating it, it becomes chaos. I know apologists are going to say "But you believe in love. You believe in the wind. Electricity. blah blah blah.". No, that's A. not what I'm talking about at all and B. we clearly have evidence for those things. I'm talking about the purple nerve gas farting dragons. You better believe in them. If you don't, you're risking nerve gas inhalation. The a nerve gas dragonists say they don't exist but have they looked everywhere? If your apologetic is the same as one for a deliberate absurdity, it fails. It has to fail. Because you don't have that evidence. And when you accept those things, accepting anything else is just the same. They always want to talk about if you can prove god doesn't exist or why do you hate god or anything else. Anything. Who cares about that? Because they can't go to that simple little obvious place. Doubting is against their religion. And you can't have truth if you don't doubt.
There are good arguments for magic?