What is an example of a person in which that applies?

If the person can't comprehend what has been said clearly (i.e. supported by the context), then that person certainly can't understand its justification. — 180 Proof

In your head surely, the only space where being finite is not an attribute included in the concept of "human".

A circle is infinite and finite in different respects just like a Mandelbrot set has finite area but infinite perimeter. There is no respect in which humans are or can be infinite.

Right, I was expecting someone to point that out, and I'm hardly surprised that it was Banno. — wonderer1

"I was only pretending to be dumb hah! You got trolled!"

Keep working on it. You are 'finding' problems that aren't there, and you didn't recognize the problem that was there. — wonderer1

I did. Just because I did not translate it to logical operators it does not mean your argument was not seen as fallacious from the start. Do I need to put that into syllogisms as well before you claim it is not the case? Try working on not appearing silly on an anonymous forum.

Me asking "How do you know that?" is not genuine desire to learn I must add, it is curiosity at how you arrived at a conclusion that goes against basic philosophy.

As Banno pointed out, your argument does not follow.

It is the case that X. — wonderer1

My point of contention is this. How do you know that it is metaphysically impossible for you now and you before are not the same person? It is even physically possible for you not to be the same person: Last Thursdayism.

You said so: "However it isn't metaphysically possible ...← that the person who is posting as wonderer1 right now is not the same person as posted previously as wonderer1."

Seemingly, English is the only language that has trouble with the words "man" and "woman", which are two words that every language has. In that sense, even Amazonian languages of isolated tribes are "better".
Any other language that supposedly has trouble with them as well does not have it as a natural phenomenon of the language but as an ideological import from English — whose population likes to say that 2+2 can equal 5 and that "divisible" and "able to be divided" are not the same thing.

Let X = "The person who made that post as wonderer1 is the same person as the person who posted previously as wonderer1." — wonderer1

If you take the conclusion to be a premise, I can prove that God is in my backpack making waffles too.



Interesting. That would be the case of something physically possible but metaphysically impossible.

This parallels what I experience. I think you might underestimate the inner monologue. — hypericin

I do use internal monologue quite a bit. When I am having my "ADHD moments" (I am not diagnosed but everybody has those every now and then), the voice keeps going, and even forces my mouth to speak the words occasionally. But as I hinted, I only use internal monologue intentionally when there is a need or a desire to turn thoughts into words, which might help with clarity and memory especially when I move from one thought to another while needing to remember the previous. But when I just "need to think", I don't use words.

What is crazier about this is that, even for the people "graced" with having inner monologue, I cannot even see how that aids them in thinking besides when they need to prepare a speech (as something that will be spoken verbally, be it to a friend or to a room of executives). Words popping up in my mind do not help me connect the dots of different ideas, the glyph and its content are different things. For me, it is only when I summon the content (image) in my mind that I can finally think.

Thinking words for me is like reading a book but not imagining what is happening, you just repeat the words you read. It is only when I focus on what I am reading and follow along by imagining it that I can remember anything of what I read. But reading more than 30 pages for me in one sitting is quite exhausting when it comes to complex books like the Iliad or La Commedia. Maybe that explains how some people are able to read 200+ pages of classics in a day — they are not quite reading it.



This guy right here https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14847/are-words-more-than-their-symbols/

The relevant definition in Webster's is "something that is accepted, considered to be true, or held as an opinion". This to me doesn't entail subjective state. — hypericin

You sure?

I find it very hard to believe. But I can believe that there are differences in neural architecture such that for some people this qualia talk makes no sense. — hypericin

There is someone who made a thread yesterday or the day before explaining how he has no inner monologue and also cannot form images mentally.

"Infinite person" is a contradiction. Person already refers to one, while infinite refers to more than one.

I came across Kripke and a posteriori necessity in my brief reading on the topic before making this thread. While I find his ideas very interesting and convincing even, I think the thesis is a bit too recent to make any definitive claims on it as a layman.

Agreed, it seems that (1) does not allow for it while (2) does. I also thought of epiphenomenalism when thinking about this matter. I posted the thread to see what others had to say, as the internet gave lukewarm responses to it. But I kept the doubt in mind: is it not a matter of semantics even then? Because in epiphenomenalism, the mental changing the material is impossible within that metaphysics. But in epiphenomenalism, isn't the inability to change the material part of the definition of what is mental? And thus the mental changing the material becomes a logical contradiction within that metaphysics? Maybe that discussion ultimately boils down to some analytic X synthetic distinction, but I am eager to hear your take on it.

A metaphysical impossibility such as 'an infinite person' is logically possible, no? — 180 Proof

I am not sure what that means to be honest. Could you elaborate?


I guess it is true, depending on the philosopher, we will see metaphysics overlapping with either physical or logical. Some thinkers even deny metaphysics altogether. Some examples have been given in this thread, I think the epiphenomenalism one is interesting.

However it isn't metaphysically possible. — wonderer1

How so?

What OP is calling into question is whether the definition of p-zombies is even metaphysically possible, I believe. Most philosophers in fact believe they are mp impossible, philosophers of mind evenmoreso.

That is a good point. However, would a P-zombie have free will? I think not; in which case, a p-zombie could simply be programmed to reproduce, as those that did not reproduce did not pass their genes on.

For instance, ‘if I were a homosexual, I would want you to treat me as abnormal’ — Joshs

• You are not a homossexual
• You don't want people to treat you as abnormal

Right, but when, for example, you need to estimate in your head how many meters of fence you will use to cover a space in your yard, how do you go about that?

The basic question is this: are words more than their word-form? — NOS4A2

I am not sure what exactly is meant by that, but maybe you are hinting at the type-token distinction? For which I recommend reading https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-tokens/

Also, as a point of curiosity, if you don't have an inner monologue, how do you think? Typically people without an inner monologue also can't produce images in their mind's eyes, ¿is that your case too?

Could it be that the 'self' does exist but in a dynamic state, always changing but, for the most part, recognisable over time if you analyse in small enough increments of time — Daniel Duffy

That is a possibility. As suggested before, it could be that thing that undergoes change over time. But that adds a very big problem to it: where does it start and where does it end? If the distinguishing criteria of something is undergoing incremental changes, we can't say where it begins and where it ends, as nothing in this world is created or destroyed, only changed. Likewise, we go from right to left on the electromagnetic spectrum, starting from what we call orange, and we move bit by bit. At what point can we say we are no longer at orange and now at red? Surely, the border between red and purple would no longer be orange, but we have no definite answer for the border where orange turns not-orange.

An answer like that gives us a definition of soul/identity that has very loose borders.

This is more of a blogpost than an actual thread for discussion.

That's a bit of an over-generalisation, I feel — Wayfarer

I don't feel so. Since antiquity, even before Diocletianus, the Mediterranean world is split into West and East. This split was reinforced with the Great Schism into making these two synonym with Catholic and Orthodox respectively.

I mean, after all, the subject of the OP is 'reasons for believing in the permanence of the soul'. Who in secular culture even believes there is a soul? I know from long experience on this forum that the idea of the soul is not well-received here. — Wayfarer

In Western philosophy, "soul" is often used as a synonym with mind, reason, etc. I cleared that up a few times in the thread and in the very first line of OP. And personally, I don't even know what else "soul" could even mean — whether we (or religious people) attribute things like transmigration and permanence after bodily death to it is besides the point.




By soul I mean mind, reason (of an individual), consciousness, that which has subjective experience — as stated in the OP. Those are sufficiently synonymous in this context. As to energy, I only recognise two types: kinetic and potential.

No civilisation was ever built on forgoing suffering and pleasure, neither was any great theory of science formulated, or any great building built. I want power, I want money, I want knowledge, I want beautiful women, because it is in my nature just like the cat that, even when well fed, wants to hunt. Every youthful person has war in them because it is the human drive to wish to achieve things — then we grow old in mind and "make peace with things" not because we are somehow wiser but because we no longer have the power to change the things that ought to be changed. We are not pandas who are glad with sitting around and eating bamboo. To deny suffering is to spit on every drop of blood our ancestors bled.
If we want to deny that part of our nature, why don't we go ahead and deny the desire to drink water and to eat food?

but there seem traits which seem impossible to account for by those means — Wayfarer

Such as?

Furthermore, much of what shapes and influences us is not directly available to conscious awareness or introspection — Wayfarer

Right, we are not aware of everything that is going on in our brain.

issue with the question of agency and moral responsibility — Wayfarer

At no point were these two brought up simultaneously. You keep trying to push Indian religions because you personally subscribe to it/them, not because they are pertinent.

And I do not agree that western culture is materialistic or naturalistic, being that the west is catholic, only that it has this tendency.

The ultimate point is that English-speaking barbarians have nothing to do with Rome or Greece.

OP tried to prove otherwise by saying Yankland is connected to England and England is connected to Rome, which is obviously fallacious. Hope it is clear now :up:

That is fine but it has nothing to do with my point.

I would like to preface this by stating that I have been busy in these past weeks and even now I still am. I decided that this thread would be more conducive if I studied the topic a bit more. Ultimately I ended up researching process philosophy. The advantage of process philosophy is that ontology is not studied as focusing on substances, but instead focusing on operations (processes, duh).

Thus, in process philosophy, the soul (or mind or whatever you wanna call it) would be not the substances that stay through time but as an integrating process. This is in line with what jarva brought up, when he talked about how, in the context of Theseus ship, the object is that which undergoes change — of course, as I explained, that could be necessary but evidently it is not sufficient for identity, otherwise everything that undergoes change would be one, which might be ontologically true but not epistemically true.

In that view, what I propose is that the self could be characterised as a chain of experienced patterns that emerge subjective experience. In simpler language, the ‘self’ would be fluid, the union of many mental elements which grow (or decrease, in the case of dementia) through time, and often when we try to analyse (literally meaning untie) this process we end up atomising it in a given moment — and as someone brought up previously, some philosophers say this is a mistake based on objectifying the mind.
Consciousness then (or the soul etc) would start at birth or whenever we wanna say we first become conscious (mirror test?) and ends in death.

I believe that would work if time is continuous, however if time is discrete that would add some complications, as this “process” could be divided by virtue of itself being in time. If that would be the case, it seems that a process philosophy view of self would not be favourable against a substance view of self.

And if we have discrete time, the soul would be split temporally into several disconnected instants, each with its corresponding instantaneous mental state, and what connects them? Nothing, in the sense that a mental state only seems to be connected to a past state because it is born with the memory of that past. And why is it born with this memory? This would be a consequence of the material world and neurology, in which the brain conditions the mental state to have this memory, because the brains corresponding to the previous mental state and the current mental state have spatio-temporal continuity.

One may say that the idea of the “self” is materially false, but I would argue otherwise. Just because we cannot clearly define orange as separate from yellow and red, it does not mean orange is materially false, orange is very much real as science tells us.

These are some thoughts I have had after doing some (though not nearly enough) reading on related subjects. I am open and eager to clearly-explained criticisms and additions.

Isn't this topic the same that is addressed in some of the posts in "Reasons for believing in the permanence of the soul"? Even Theseus' ship is mentioned. Though this thread seems to focus on physical things instead of metaphysical, which I think is pointless when talking about identity.

Philosophy is always irrelevant until you make something useful out of it 200 years later.

Being honest is not a verb. It is a phrase, where being is the verb and honest is the adjective.

Is 'honest' a noun or a verb — YiRu Li

Honest is not a noun or verb. It is an adjective.

Honest does not a verb like "rage" does. I feel rage. I am raging. It is like 'calm' as in you can only say "I am honest". This is an English question more than philosophy.

But you're using the word 'thing' and 'existence' very imprecisely here. — Wayfarer

You say so but I don't see the explanation for such. The word is used as standard both in everything English and in philosophy: something that exists.

Surely I can reflect on myself, I can engage in reflection and analysis, but that is always something done by a subject, and the subject itself is never truly an object, as such, except for in the metaphorical sense of 'the object of enquiry'. We relate to the natural world and to others as objects of perception (although understanding of course that others are also subjects), but the 'I' who thus relates is not an object, but that to which or whom objects appear. — Wayfarer

That is fine and all. If you want to separate the "I" and say your memories of it are not equivalent to it, I would even go as far as to say that that it is accurate. But if it is the case, there is nothing to be evaluated besides physical objects, and so our view has to default to physicalism, and the self can then never be investigated.

I found the reference I was thinking of regarding Husserl's critique of Descartes' tendency to 'objectify' the mind, in the Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, edited by Dermot Moran. — Wayfarer

Thanks, it is indeed tangential to the OP, but it is something that I am personally interested in and I will look into it.

Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.

This is very interesting and I resonate with it. Relating to self-reference, consciousness can never fully account for itself just like a computer could never simulate itself. But I think it is possible for it to account for itself in parts, just like a computer can simulate itself in parts.

Can substance be further broken down into their constructive elements?
For example, bread is made of flour. Water is made of 2 hydrogen and 1 oxygen molecules.
What is res extensa made of? What is res cogitans made of? — Corvus

Descartes does not say anything about it. Those two would be fundamental, but both res cogitans and res extensa for him ultimately come from God, causally speaking.

Via the Latin ‘substantia’, as SEP also says. — Wayfarer

There is no via. English substance comes from French and it matches usía in meaning likely because of the way the equivalent word in other languages has been used in European philosophy. There is no "via Latin" for English. Albanian has 50% of its vocabulary actually coming from Latin. English is closer to 0%. English speakers have nothing to do with Romans. Nothing to do with Latin. Albanians, Lebanese, Algerians do.

Where is the etymology sourced from? It is completely wrong from foot to head. The Middle English word was substaunce, among other forms such as sobstance. Latin substantia does not mean "substance" (whatever that means, being a distortion of the French word), but being, content or support. As far as we can tell substantia was built straight from substo (instead of substans which is barely attested and does not have a separate meaning from its root verb), which does not mean "stand under".

You insist to talk about a culture that you have nothing to do with and spread misinformation about it. And since your reply barely relates to my rebuttal of your statements about Latin and Greek, here are some unrelated historically accurate Roman opinions instead:

I do not think you can expect any literary or musical talent from them (the captives from the wars in Britannia) — Cicero

And so, having reformed the army quite in the manner of a monarch, he (Hadrian) set out for Britain, and there he corrected many abuses and was the first to construct a wall, eighty miles in length, which was to separate the barbarians from the Romans. — Historia Augusta

nay, those over whom I rule are Britons, men that do not know how to till the soil or ply a trade, but are thoroughly versed in the art of war and hold all things in common, even children and wives, so that the latter possess the same dignity as the men. — Cassius Dio

And a bonus Aristotle quotation:

The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so that they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbors. — Politics

America's political system surely is based on European systems. Brazil, Mexico, Peru, all base their legal codes on the Napoleonic code, which is also the base of much of Europe. In that sense it is very much "Western", based on Roman customs, not on Eastern Jewish customs or Bantu customs.

As to Yankees, whose sovereignity lies more in international corporations and Israel, not in Vespucci's America, even if its law code is descendend from England (which is and has been a far cry from general European culture), it does not make it alike the English law. If I come from my parents and I look like them, I can still go all sorts of cosmetic surgeries in order to look unlike them. The same principle applies: genotype ≠ phenotype.

Even if the written law is 1:1 equal, it is not worth much, as that country constantly violates and reinterprets its own law. Where you have constitionally granted free speech but society is free to basically kill you if you happen to use a rude 6 letter word on twitter.

Stanford claims that English "substance" matches Ancient Greek usía in meaning, which might be the case. Not that Ancient Latin substantia matches usía in meaning, because it is not the case, even if the two words can overlap in meaning sometimes.

Latin is definitely not the source of any of the daily English lexicon except for the few words I mentioned, French is the source of almost everything productive in English today. English did not exist at the time of Ancient Latin. It is literally no different in quality than saying Akkadian is a source of the English language — completely anachronistic. There is no alternative.

In bold are the French words and morphemes.

I am trying to capture the meaning of ‘substance’ in philosophy as distinct from everyday use. — Wayfarer

That meaning of substance was the one that I have been using. You brought up in an earlier comment that Descartes is confusing the philosophical substance with the chemical substance, which is not something that we verify in his writings.

Later, Husserl points to the same issue in his Crisis of the Western Sciences. Whilst he admires Descartes’ genius for recognising the ineliminable ground of being in the Cogito, and wrote whole books on Cartesian Meditations, he faults him for conceiving of res cogitans as an objective existent, on par with other existents - I seem to recall him saying Descartes made it ‘a little fag-end of the world’, which naturally makes it seem an epiphenomenon from the materialist perspective. Again it is a flaw of reification which was identified first by Kant, and later by phenomenology and existentialism, but to see that requires something like a gestalt shift, a change in perspective. — Wayfarer

Now there is something that is interesting. Though it may seem a mistake to objectify the mind, as it is the mind that scans for objects, is it not valid when we talk about self-reflection, or rather, self-analysis? Descartes in his meditations talks about investigating what is this "thinking thing", which is him. Can the memories we have of our mind and/or experiences not be an object which will then be studied by the mind itself? Surely it is not the same thing as a physical body, like a stone, but we could argue that it could be seen as a thing that exists, hence why Descartes calls it a substance.

I am mindful of the fact that ‘substance’, in philosophy, is derived from the Latin translation of Aristotle’s word, ‘ouisia’, which is a form of the verb ‘to be’. The meaning of the Greek verb ‘to be’ is very difficult to define (there’s an excellent academic paper that was introduced here some years ago about this, Charles Kahn, The Greek Verb ‘To Be’ and the Problem of Being’ which can be downloaded from here. Also see The Meaning of Ousia in Plato.)

The Latin translators then used ‘substantia’, ‘that which stands under’, as the translation of ousia, and from there it became ‘substance’ in English. But as I’ve said, the term is nowadays nearly always thought to refer to some kind of stuff or thing (which is the meaning of ‘reification’, namely, to turn an abstraction into a thing. The root of that word is ‘res-‘, the Latin term for thing or object, and the basis of Descartes’ ‘res cogitans’, literally, ‘thinking thing’.) — Wayfarer

Essentĭa is the translation of οὐσία, for substantĭa it is based on ὑπόστασις.
As to the Greek language, I am very close to the nation that currently speaks this language, as far as someone who is not from there or naturalised can be, and I can assure Greeks can use the verb "to be" just fine. As to the definition of "being", that is not an issue with the Greek language but with Western philosophy in general.

The Latin translators then used ‘substantia’, ‘that which stands under’, as the translation of ousia, and from there it became ‘substance’ in English. — Wayfarer

There is this baffling trend of English speakers claiming their words come from Latin. None of their words come from Latin, except for some such as "mass" and "spend" that came from the Catholic usage of Latin during the early Middle Ages — when English proper did not exist yet, only its ancestor Anglo-Saxon. Words in English such as "essence", "beauty", and "communication" come from French, whose language is the superstrate base of English when the French conquered England in 1066. Ancient Romans, whose modern descendents of culture and blood are the Portuguese, Italians, French, Romanians, Rhaetic etc, never came in contact with the English because those did not even exist yet, it is anachronistic. Romans had contact with High Germans (ancestors of German speakers today), hence the actual Latin words like zelle and schreiben in modern German, and little contact with Low Germans like Saxons (who still exist today) and Franks (possibly the ancestors of modern Dutch). To exemplify, there is no such word "substance" in Latin, but if you check a French dictionary it is right there; that is where the English lexeme "substance" comes from.

And the root of the word is rē-, not res-, which does not exist.

I don't particularly care what words the people in the dis-United States of Cheeseburger use. They can call themselves West, East, Wakanda, Jupiter. Look, I don't understand but I respect their culture: "Everything is relative, words have no meaning, I am Italian because my great-great-great grandfather was from Corsica, man can mean woman and woman can mean man". I get it. They are just not European just like Haitians and Cambodians aren't. Though I would say that the Frenchness of Haitians and the Buddhism of Cambodians (with its Indo-Aryan roots) give them a flimsy connection to Europe.

Being factually established that they have less to do with Europe than a speck of dust flying in another star system — being that the speck of dust has nothing to do with Europe and its culture and history, while Yankees are the absolutely antithesis of it, 0 is closer to 1 than -1 is —, they have nothing to do with Rome or Greece. They should claim ancient Israel or Timbuktu as their cultural heritage instead, but they insist on talking about Rome and Greece as if its ancient inhabitants would have anything but disgust for them (that much is attested in ancient sources), promptly being sent to the slave market, possibly because their basic education is notoriously poor and it simply mimicks whatever is chosen as the basic history curriculum of England or France, whatever the source of inspiration was.

Call it what you will: "we are Jupiterakandweastern". It does not mean European. But I suppose someone would say that is what it means, as, to the "intellectuals" of that country, 2+2 can equal 5, A = A and A = not A.

The two necessitate each other at all times. — javra

Agreed.

Here, then, each different type of conscious being will have a different type of quality and magnitude of overall consciousness: hence the sperm's awareness of direction, for example, is of a different magnitude than the awareness of the embryo in utero, is of a different magnitude than the awareness of the birthed human being as a whole. — javra

I fully agree with that view of awareness. But in the sense of consciousness I use, it refers to subjective experience. I think most of us would agree that cells (and maybe embryos) do not have subjective experience. Thus, when even a cell has awareness, like we have awareness of light or heat, they don't have partake in the same experience as us.

As to the thread’s overall theme, were continuation of conscious being to occur subsequent to death—in this example, via reincarnations — javra

As a point of curiousity, this wasn't the subject originally, I did not think of reincarnation as I personally don't take it seriously as an idea, some users however brought it up along the discussion :sweat:

Because it is nonsense. Someone's brain producing hallucinations does not prove there is afterlife.

Category mistake? — Corvus

Not the case. Res cogitans and res extensa are two distinct things, yet they are both still substances.

But comparing stones (or other such objects) with minds (res cogitans) seems to me a egregious equivocation of the idea of substance. — Wayfarer

How so? Stones are res extensa, they are still substances. What definition of substance are you even using?

whereas Descartes model has two fundamentally different kinds of substance that are supposed to interact, but Descartes himself was never able to say how, and it's never been clarified since. — Wayfarer

That much is true, and it is a core problem of dualism. Not that physicalism does not have its problems either.

Yes, in the way they are both things (that exist) that are independent, but different types of substances, and those are the two he recognises: res cogitans, res extensa (mind-body dualism). The stone is used as an example just like the wax before in the second meditation. I don't wanna get into Aristotelian metaphysics, but Descartes is not confusing anything, he is using 'substance' in the metaphysical sense then telling us what substances there are — the mind and the body. Not substance as in hydrochloric acid, or water, or gold, or rubber.