(Maybe it will sink in on one repetition)

Excellent, so after 3 pages, you've arrived at the response Willow was able to formulate immediately. (See above)

Can I assume that you think concepts are physical?

Yes, of course. I'm a physicalist.

And people who aren't physicalists will likely think that concepts are nonphysical.

The word "concept" itself doesn't suggest either.

Re the other comment, I'm not going to assume that for whatever ridiculous reason, you believe that the word "concept" necessarily implies an ontological commitment re physical/nonphysical.

Great, concepts are physical. And they're real too right?

Let's get back to that in one minute. Do you agree that the word "concept" doesn't imply an ontological commitment on the physical/nonphysical issue? I want to resolve what we were talking about first.

If you respond right away, I'll be gone for about 10-15 minutes. Be back then.

Sure, that's fair and I'll admit it was too strong to say based simply on the physical/conceptual opposition that you were in disagreement with the quote. However, based on what little I know of your viewpoint, it's a big - tho perhaps not insuperable - stumbling block that you'd need to carefully address.

Sure, that's fair and I'll admit it was too strong to say based simply on the physical/conceptual opposition that you were in disagreement with the quote. However, based on what little I know of your viewpoint, it's a big - tho perhaps not insuperable - stumbling block that you'd need to carefully address. — csalisbury

Okay, but the mere mention of something being "conceptual" doesn't at all suggest an ontological commitment. Dualists are going to probably see concepts as being nonphysical, and physicalists are going to see concepts as being physical. Neither position matters for talking about concepts in a functional context however.

Anyway, okay re "real." It depends on whether you're asking in more of the colloquial sense, so that you're simply asking if something obtains or occurs however it does, or whether you're asking in the stricter philosophical sense, so that you're more or less asking if something is objective or mind-indepedent.

In the colloquial sense, yes, of course concepts are real. In the stricter sense, no they're not real, which is just to say that they're not objective or mind-independent.

That's fair, I agree with most of that.

One quick question before delving in: Do you think animals have personal identity? Or just humans?

Well, I think that humans are animals first off. But re "non-human animals," I'm fairly agnostic on that, though I'm fine assuming that non-human animals who have brains that are pretty close to our own have mentalities that are pretty close to our own. That would diminish as brains differ more strongly (as we consider different species).

My point is you are now (as of the post I initially responded to) rejecting the idea of physical minds a priori. You immediately read the concept of personal existence as inconsistent with a mind that was wholly physical.

For a while you were going along quite nicely, until you got to the meat and bones, where upon you began asking questions that assume substance dualism at the base. Ones which reject that personal identity is consistent with a wholly physical existence.

When Terrapin spoke about the distinction between identity in existence (the different existing person of each moment) and some distinctions of logic (the unity of meaning expessed by some states of the world--e.g. an individual over time), you accused him of missing the point. As if unity of personal identity meant someone's existence was not entirely physical.

He did not ignore the question. You rejected his answer without consideration. Certainly, it was not the clearest or most eloquent answer. As a non-eliminative materialist, he doesn't make enough a distinction between the existence of experiences and brains to make his position obvious (he sounds mostly like a reductionist), but your response was shallow one which did not even make an attempt to consider what he was talking about.

I made no dualist assumptions in my early conversation. If one believes that "identity" does not persist over time (which is a quote verbatim) then the term "personal identity" is quite clearly an explanandum not an explanans - I gave him the chance to explain how this works, and he cited four factors. I raised concerns over how well they work (by reference to the torture though experiment) and he ignored all four responses (except to ask me how an torturer is causally related to an anguished "brain state.") Nowhere did I say his view was a priori wrong. In fact, I took great pains not to do this.

Now I did say that if one believes that identity does not persist over time, then personal identity is either not a subset of identity or is incoherent. Again this was in response to "identity does not persist over time." If he meant, simply, that things do not remain indiscernible over time, and so are not identical in one limited sense of the term 'identity', then it would have been prudent not to have said, simply, "identity does not persist over time."

( & btw I'm not even a dualist!)

I do agree humans are animals, I worded the question poorly. Would you say that a turtle remain the same turtle throughout its life?

First, you never brought up personal identity per se, and I was never talking about that (until I realized that maybe you were conflating the two, then I brought it up just to point out the conflation).

I pointed out that (logical) identity is not the only thing someone might be concerned with re your example.

Re just addressing one thing, yeah, I was starting the one-point-at-a-time approach so that stuff wouldn't get overlooked. Then YOU dropped it when I made it clear that your objections had nothing to do with the idea of connections between Alex @T1 and Alex @T2 (I asked you what your example had to do with that, and you said "nothing")--but that was what I was talking about.

Does a turtle remain the same turtle throughout it's life? — csalisbury

"The same turtle" is an abstraction that hinges on what an individual requires to consider something the same x at two different times. Or in other words, there aren't correct or incorrect, factual answers to such questions. It's a question about how individuals conceive of this.

X is the same turtle to S just in case x at time T1 and x' at T2 meet S's criteria to call it "the same turtle." X isn't the same turtle to U just in case x at T1 and x' at T2 do not meet U's criteria to call it "the same turtle."

Re just addressing one thing, yeah, I was starting the one-point-at-a-time approach so that stuff wouldn't get overlooked. Then YOU dropped it when I made it clear that your objections had nothing to do with the idea of connections between Alex @T1 and Alex @T2 (I asked you what your example had to do with that, and you said "nothing")--but that was what I was talking about. — terrapin

I already explained this. I explained it in the post you're referencing:

You cited causality as a way of understanding why T1 Alex has good reason to be nervous about T2 Alex's suffering. Since the executioner is also causally responsible for T2 Alex's anguish, yet has no reason himself to worry about suffering that anguish, then pointing to causality doesn't explain why T1 alex's anxiety is justified. — me

& I have already addressed the confusion over "good reason" in my long break-down post.