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From: [e-mail] (Cosma Shalizi)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,sci.philosophy.meta,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Free Will and Soul/Body Dualism - VERY LONG INDEED
Date: 24 Jan 1993 01:15:00 GMT
Organization: Campus Crusade for Cthulhu (Berkeley Tentacle)
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"May God, if there is one, save my soul, if I have one." - Voltaire

This is far too long, and has neither the logical nor the rhetorical force
to redeem itself. If I sit on it any more, however, it will probably never
get done. My apologies.
I will call "voluntarism" the doctrine that free will exists, and "invol-
untarism" the doctrine that it does not. This is, perhaps, confusing, but
far less so than the books I've seen which use "libertarianism" instead.

DEREK DESCARTES OR RENE ABBOTT?

    In addition to our purely corporeal "mechanistic brain," says Derek Abbott,
we have an incorporeal "soul," which produces a "will function" that inter-
feres with (or determines) the behavior of the mechanistic brain (DA1). Of
course, the idea isn't Derek's, but Rene Descartes's. (This is an accusation
of ignorance, not plagarism.) What Derek says in DA4 - "[the] soul pervades
your whole body, it has the potential to communicate with and monitor every
atom," tempts me to brand him an Epicurean, but that would be cruel and
pointless (see, however, Book III of _De Rerum Natura_).
In CS1 I mentioned some difficulties about the soul/brain interaction -
* If momentum and energy are conserved, the original Cartesian version is
  impossible (see Russell, 1945, pp. 561-3, or Dennett, 1991, pp. 33-39).
* How does the soul deal with the problems arising from the large numbers
  of atoms involved in all brain activities?
* Why do souls only take interest in certain plains apes, while certain chem-
  ical processes are taking place in them, and not anything else?
    Derek's solution to the conservation problem was to postulate that the
soul can take up energy and momentum into itself; the large number problem
was attacked by an appeal to chaos; and the non-presence of a soul in the
geode on my desk by a mixed strategy of "What makes you think it doesn't [have
a soul]?" (DA2, admittedly with a ":-)") and "These lower forms are not suf-
ficent to animate the spirit" (DA2)*. DA4 explains what the lower forms have
an insufficency of: "[A rock] is insufficiently complex for the spirit to
express itself."
    The spirit energy/momentum idea has some interesting consequences, because
it means we can apply physics to the soul. Derek in DA4 concurs: "We may be
able to do all kinds of physics on it [i.e., on the soul] once the instruments
become accurate enough." This is sensible; claims that the soul has energy
and momentum, and that physics is inapplicable, are obviously special pleading,
and probably logically absurd.
    By hypothesis, the soul has energy and momentum; therefore it has a 4-
momentum; therefore it has an invariant mass. If this rest mass is zero, then
soul must move at the speed of light in all reference frames. This presents
difficulties in the way of maintain contact with the body. (Traditionalists
might maintain that, while matter is "in space" _and_ "in time," the soul
is "in" time alone; to speak of it moving at the speed of light, or any other
speed, is an error. Even if this distinction can survive relativity, how does
something which is not "in space" have a momentum?) If it has a non-zero rest
mass, though, then we have a material substance after all, acting like any
other. Derek describes not a spirit proper at all, but a new sort of matter,
the spawn of an unholy union between D. D. Homes and James Clerk Maxwell (an
image inspired, I confess, by John Sladek's _Black Aura_). This does not help
the cause of voluntarism especially.

THE SOUL TRAP - AN ASIDE

    The idea that something could be _too simple_ for a soul to express
itself is - at least to me - odd. Souls that express themselves through
tinkering with the mechanistic world ought to find simple systems _easier_
to handle than ones with oodles of parts to worry about (see "Nyikos and the
Ineffable Cray," below, for more on this "worrying"). In a finely-tuned
version of the Schrodinger's Cat experiment, a soul would only have to know
about and fiddle with _one_ atom to express itself. Running the cat, much
less the experimenter, is a far more demanding job. If we want to catch souls
in action, we ought to look for very simple, very unstable situations, where
small changes can produce big results. If familiar chaotic systems are too
big and bulky for souls, no doubt we could devise ones they can handle, and
look for deviations from the expected probabilities. Surely it is not
entirely coincidental that the Greeks used the same word (psyche) for "soul"
and "butterfly"?

NYIKOS AND THE INEFFABLE CRAY

     In PN1, Peter Nyikos, commenting on CS2, wrote

         [T]he purely determinstic brain may be a fiction,
    because of quantum indeterminism whose outcomes may in
    turn be influenced by "soul" or "spirit," yet it is  a
    choice between outcomes  each  of  which was  possible
    even without the  influences  of  a soul... The choice
    between two possible QM effects might not have to take
    any measurable amount of energy.

     I see no reason why the choice need take any energy at all, and with that
modification, find this a much better theory than Derek's. It does not lead to
absurdities like calculating the soul's Hamiltonian or its spin eigenstates;
it does not gut physics wholesale; it is, in fact, a fine theory, and I attack
it with real regret.
     First: It could well be untestable. Unless free wills consistently choose
outcomes which would be improbable if the brain was left to itself, there would
be no way to see them in action. Voluntarism would look just like involuntar-
ism. (The appropriate response to this is, "So what? Falisifiability ain't
all it's cracked up to be.")
     Second: It does not make the large number problem go away. Nyikos had
some words about this as well. After quoting me going on about how difficult
it would be for the soul to keep track of all the "key" atoms to twiddle, and
the others which must not be allowed to interfere, and so on, he wrote,

         Why do you  think  the  soul  views  the  atoms  as
    individuals. We see whole  persons,  not  the individual
    atoms. We see red or blue, not the lengths of  the waves
    that produce these sensations in us. We hear music,  not
    different frequencies of sound waves. Your account is as
    though one  were asking how  a  violinist keeps track of
    all the overtones produced by his instrument. It is like
    expecting Leonard Bernstein to  be  an expert in Fourier
    analysis.

     I seem to have been unclear. I never meant to say that the soul is
_conscious_ of the atomic positions, state variables, computations, et cetera.
But _something_ deals with different wavelengths of light, and frequencies of
sound, and identifying those colored blobs as Uncle Vikram, and even the
aerodynamics involved in throwing a frisbee. Mr. Bernstein may not know Fourier
analysis, but his nervous system does.
     In all these cases, we know what does the unconscious grunt work - bits
of nervous tissue. ("Nervous tissue" is an odd image, but let it pass.) If the
soul works by isolating a few key atoms in the brain and picking what state
they collapse to, _some_ process must identify those atoms; figure out what
states they need to be in; and keep other parts of the brain from messing up
this arrangement. The case is similar if the soul is trying to tamper with the
wavefunction of the brain as a whole, or any selected portion thereof. (I can't
tell from Nyikos' post which option he was advocating; perhaps, sensibly, he
kept his options open.)
     This process cannot take place in the brain itself. There is no "unused
room" for the task, and the brain as a whole is neither big enough nor fast
enough. This implies that the soul can somehow call upon immense computational
power from outside the brain, which seems to be used only for the messy
details of implementing free will. This is not logically impossible, of
course, but it seems unlikely. Note that I'm not saying the "ineffable Cray"
needs to be anything like one of _our_ computers in its "innards." A six-year-
old, an abacus and a PC are all very different, but if working properly they
all give the same answer to "4+6=?"

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE PINEAL GLAND

     As I read them, in both Nyikos's and Derek's formulations, the soul is
conscious - another role for the soul will be discussed below. Presumably, my
soul's stream of consciousness is _my_ stream of consciousness - the alter-
native needs a close shave with Occam's Razor if ever anything did. Regardless,
the soul has a big problem: How does it communicate with the material world?
They have said (more or less) how it imposes its free will on matter, but how
does it learn about the world? I will try to show that any answer to this
question tends to either absurdity or idealism, if not both. Idealism is not
logically impossible - or if it is, no one knows how. But it is, for most of
us, a very distasteful thing, and I hope to be forgiven for placing more trust
in rocks than the soul.
     The soul might, I suppose, have sense-data and other information (such
as?) simply _presented_ to it, with no gathering mechanisms. (In speaking about
the mechanisms of the soul, I do _not_ mean machines strictu sensu, but
entities, presumably spiritual, which are subservient to the conscious soul
and do its dirty work.) If this is so, we have no reason whatsoever to think
that the external world exists, let alone material objects.
     The soul could have its own sensory mechanisms, in parallel with those
of the mechanistic brain. No doubt with sufficient ingenuity one could explain
away the "right hand hot, left hand cold" demonstration, and spiritual blind-
spots might be just an unfortunate coincidence. Asking spiritual eyes to see
everything yellow when my physical body has jaundice is a bit much, however -
even if we postulate a spiritual liver.
     So it would appear that the soul relies on the physical senses. But how?
Neural activity is merely some chemical changes in a "bloated sack of proto-
plasm" (in the words of the poet), and we aren't conscious of _that_. There
must be an intermediary, non-material mechanism - call it the interpreter. One
part of it turns information about brain activity into sensations, and we can
let that remain a black box. But another part must actually _get_ that
information, and _that_ is the puzzling part. It can't exchange energy, because
that drops us right back into Derek's hole, and this rules out all the normal
ways of gathering information. If every physical particle (wavicle?) had a
spiritual counterpart, perhaps the interpreter could get what it needs from
them; but this makes every physical particle, along with the interpreter, quite
superfluous, and lands us back in the quagmire of idealism. We return to this
swamp, again, if we claim information simply _appears_ to the interpreter.
Perhaps there is an escape from this, but it's _ugly_. Why bother with these
elaborate and frequently wrong physical senses when appearantly the inter-
preter has quite subtle psychial ones? Perhaps the soul is an argument
_against_ creationism...

     The soul's troubles are not over once it _has_ information; there are
plenty left.
     The biggest is the free will's lack of freedom. The soul is limited by
what the brain could, if left to itself, do. This prevents many absurdities,
e.g., speaking fluent Sumerian through an act of will alone. The price is a
loss of freedom of action. If the right things are done to my brain - by
drugs, disease, Ned the nefarious neurosurgeon, etc. - my soul might not
have the option of doing the right thing. Learning, habituation, etc. -
_the_normal_operation_of_the_brain_ - might achieve the same thing. By working
the way it does, the brain limits the soul's choices - perhaps to one. (This
has nothing to do with the "corruption" of the soul. A person might be habit-
uated into involuntary sainthood.) Perhaps this will be taken into account on
the Last Day, but neither Calvin, nor Mohammed, nor Augustine make me
optimistic.
     In fact, the brain seems to determine the options the soul thinks it has -
it takes a fair degree of brain-disordering to make us _attempt_ to fly or
speak an unknown language by will-power, as opposed to _wishing_ we could.
Ignoring quibbles about strait-jackets and such, you could always turn to the
nearest available human and begin trying to choke him/her - that is, dis-
counting your nervous system for the moment, there was no reason your body
couldn't preform those actions. Fortunately, it almost never occurs to you
to do this. (Notice I say this with the Net safely between us. Not that I
mistrust _you_, but there are some truly weird people hanging around.) So how
truly can we say you were "free" to throttle your math teacher when he marked
you down for thinking the integrand of sin x is cos x? How about when he gave
you a perfect score on the next exam? After all, it _wasn't_an_option_.
    The point of those two paragraphs is this: Even if we grant the soul the
power of choosing between the physically available options, it is far from
clear that there _are_ meaningfully distinct options available.
    There is also what I like to call the "split soul syndrome" to consider.
While differences between the hemispheres of the brain are exaggerated in many
popular (i.e. trashy) accounts, the two hemispheres of some split brain
patients _do_ appear to be conscious of different things, and even to
express different preferences - which means, under the current theory, that
they must have different souls. Perhaps the soul splits in two when the corpus
callosum is cut? If so, do these bifurcations happen only along the corpus
callosum, or elsewhere as well? How small must a piece of brain be before
it can no longer harbor a soul - and what happens if, through some miracle,
these bits of brain get re-attached? And how on Earth does one reconcile
the soul with the existence of multiple personality disorder, and its cure?
(I refrain with difficulty from discussing the theological implications.)

     The soul has suffered a tragic decline. As William Burroughs put it in
_The Western Lands_, "The Egyptians say you've got seven souls - fourteen if
you're Pharoh" (from memory). Aristotlte was so impressed by the fact he could
do arithmetic he concluded humans have one more soul than animals, which muddle
along with only two, poor beasts. This "intellectual" or "rational" soul did
sums and philosophy. (See Russell (1945), pp. 169-72.) For a long time we
thought that everything mental was "in" the soul, but now "We all know that
memory may be obliterated by an injury to the brain, that a virtuous person may
be rendered vicious by encephalitis lethargica, and that a clever child can
be turned into an idiot by lack of iodine" (Russell (1957), p.90; cf. any
introductory book on psychology or neurology). Even the soul's utility as an
explanation for consciousness is being attacked (see, primarily, Dennett
(1991), and Ryle (1949), Johnson-Laird and Calvin (1989) and (1990) as well.)
If this last citadel falls, the only job left to the soul will be injecting
free will into our streams of consciousness - somehow. (One imagines quandries
being dropped into a little black box with "Free Will" stenciled on the side,
and decisions popping out the other end.) Since Ryle (1949) has thoroughly
discredited volitions, this will take a good deal of subtlety - and will
still face the problems of data gathering, limitations of freedom, etc.

PURPOSEFUL BEHAVIOR AND THE FABLE OF LARS AND PENAS

     Derek asks how something so complex and unpredictable that it cannot
know its own future behavior could have goals and purposes. Indeed, in DA4 he
goes into Social Darwinist rhapsodies: "We visulaize ideas and we set out to
achieve them. We are competitive, we achieve and win. If what you are saying
is true, then we should really all be uncreative defeatists and say, `there's
no point in making any effort as I don't really know what I'm doing and every-
thing is predetermined anyway.' But this is clearly not the case. Just look
out of your window and see what civilization has achieved." We infer that Derek
is not living on the streets of Calcutta - but this isn't the time for _those_
jeremiads.
     Note that Derek uses "should" in the third sentence in the sense of
"would," not "ought." This is a non sequitur if ever there was one. I am
tempted to leave it at that, but some explanation seems in order. I beg leave,
O Kings and Queens, to illustrate with a fable.
     Once upon a time there was a bimetallic thermostat - an old friend to
an electrical engineer like Derek. Our (at least my) natural inclination is to
say that it "tries" to keep itself "comfortable," neither too hot nor too cold.
This strikes even me as an abuse of the language, but clearly feedback,
negative or positive, is some sort of kin to purposive behavior. In any case,
we don't really give a fried resistor about the thermostat.
     No, the fable is really about a house - or rather, the computer in the
house, to which, once upon a time, were connected the thermostats, the drapes,
the windows, the furnace, the doors, the air conditioner, the oven, the power
plant, etc. (Yes, a power plant. There's a fission pile in the back yard. Humor
me, I have plutonium left over.) Lars (that being the name of the computer) was
programmed to keep the temperature and humidity within certain ranges, to have
light on the plants and keep them from wilting, not use more than so much
power to run the house, etc., etc. Lars was unable to predict the series of
its future actions, because no one had bothered to program it to do so. (And,
indeed, we might seem "free" because we have no way of telling what we are
going to do.)
     Another computer, however, named Penas, was brought in to do
this, and it, too, failed. In the first place, it could not predict the future
external events (like changes in the weather) that Lars would have to deal
with (and neither can we). In the second place, the process of deciding how
a goal (Keep the begonias from wilting!) was to be implemented (Water them,
add fertilizer, open the drapes) was too complex for it to simulate. (And, in
evolutionary terms, probably useless as well. Calvin (1990) describes how the
brain could use "Darwin Machines" for everything from throwing rocks to com-
posing sentences and music. Calvin (1989) is presumably more focused on this
theme, but I haven't been able to get hold of it.) In the third place, Penas
did not understand all the ways Lars' actions could interact with each other
and the environment to demand new actions - e.g., it didn't realize that
running the fission pile would warm up the vicinity, or that opening the
windows while it was raining would lead to mildew on the rugs.
     Was this purposeful behavior? I don't presume to say, but it defnitely
_seemed_ like it, especially when Lars was given the ability to plan, to
"think": "That is a dead light-bulb. Have the robot remove it first, then check
its type, then throw it away, then get another of the same type from the
basement..." Or, "The house is too hot. Cool it. The air conditioner is not
turning on. Examine its parts. There is a pound of lint stuck in the works.
Remove it..." Why did Lars take apart the air conditioner? To fix it, so it
could cool the house. What caused Lars to take apart the air conditioner?
Some electrons moving from one place to another.

THE PROGRAMMING OF MR. DEREK ABBOTT

     When Derek asked _how_ something lacking free will could claim it, Frank
Adams replied quite simply in FA1. "I can easily write a compute prgroam," he
wrote, "which, when executed, insisits it has free will. Do you think this
means that it does?" Derek's response, in DA3, was "In the case of the computer
program _you_ programmed it to make it say that it had free will. But.... [sic]
who programmed me to say that I have free will?" Despite my pointing out in
CS3 that a) the argument from design is out of place and b) Adams proved what
was already clear, that a claim of free will does not establish its existence,
in DA4 Derek gave us this gem:

    But _you_ pgorammed the computer to say it had free will.
    What programmed me to say _I_ have free will?
    My free will?
    Ergo, QED.

     Derek's Latin is beyond redemption, but he should see that his own
theory of the soul allows an unfree entity to claim free will. His soul,
after all, merely interferes with a physical, mechanical brain, deciding which
of several possible things it does. Surely, then, a soul-less (i.e., de-
animated) but living (i.e., animate) human body is not impossible. Sad though
the de-animate's lot is, it would be able to learn the _behaviors_ of
society as well as one of us; its brain, which does the learning, is not
damaged. It would learn to speak, and might even learn enough philosophy
to become indignant - or _act_ indignant, if you prefer - when its free will
was questioned.
     It might be objected that the body cannot learn such complicated behaviors
without the soul. (I don't see why not - but anything for argument's sake.)
What would happen, though, if, after mastering those complexities, your soul
was disconnected from your body? In the words of an English scientist whose
name eludes me, "Why think when you can do the experiment?" Let us make an
appointment with `Izra'il, the archangel of death, and the greatest expert
on the separation of soul and body. Do not be alarmed - we will make it
quite clear that the divorce is to be amicable and temporary. He may feel this
out of character, but (we shall point out), it is all to the advancement of
science and the greater glory of God.
     If he finds increasing the glory of an infinitely perfect Being a reason-
able goal, and preforms this service for us - what then? (Let `Izra'il, or a
subordinate cherub, erase your body's memory of its deanimation.) Your body
does not crumple up in a heap. It acts much as it normally would, perhaps a
trifle eccentric (or not, depending on how much the soul skewed probabilities),
but ot so eccentric as to deny its free will. That, after all, is something
deeply ingrained in you, something of which you are intuitively certain.
     But then, how do we answer Derek's question? (You can put your body back
on now.) What _has_ programmed him? It is tempting to say, "Nothing - Derek
is the snow between the channels of the mind," but that's really not true.
Things _have_ programmed him. They include:
    * Some 46 chromosomes, product of a 3.5 billion year ecummenical
    collaboration between the Rev. Malthus and Father Mendel
    * Nine months (more or less) of chemicals from his mother in the womb
    * His food and other environmental chemicals
    * About two decades (probably not more than three and almost certainly
    not less than one) of sensory input, some of it encoding quite
    abstract information
    * The instruction and example of parents, teachers, peers, passers-by
    and other featherless bipeds.
No doubt this list could be elaborated, but why bother? They wouldn't get
much credit if he'd turned out well, so it's unfair to blame them when he's
a blithering ass - which isn't, mercifully, _all_ the time.

MORALLY BANKRUPT TOASTERS

     Thus spate Derek in DA4, which called itself DA3:

    DA2: If free will is only an illusion, then you are not responsible
    for murder. Hence morally bankrupt.
    CS2: True enough, as you're using the words, but only in the same sense
    that a toaster which electrocutes someone is "morally bankrupt."
    Normally the phrase implies that you are a Bad Person because you
    could, in other circumstances, be morally solvent. Ther determinist
    (or strictly indeterminist) position says such other circumstances
    are impossible.
    DA3: So Cozzi, you are nothing more than a toaster. That explains
    everything :-). In fact, whenver you think of a brilliant idea, you
    cannot even applaud yourself for being clever, because it was only
    the predetermined movement of atoms in your brain that gave you the
    idea. So you are only as creative as a toaster. [Derek goes on to say
    he is a toaster with six slots in his head. This, alas, must be false:
    household appliances do not, yet, have Net access.]

     This is odious, and shall be disposed of quickly. Whether we like invol-
untarism or not - I don't, for what it's worth - has nothing to do with whether
or not it is true. In ordinary matters, we try to find the truth without
prejudice; one who refuses to believe in leprosy because it is horrible, or
love because it is not; is at best stupid and at worst mad. Not doing likewise
on speculative matters is morally dubious and an intellectual disgrace. Better
to be a toaster, than to be guilty of such hubris.

SAVING THE PHENOMENA

     No one, I think, disputes that, at first blush, we _seem_ to have free
will. And, also at first blush, free will seems incompatible with our knowledge
of how the universe works. This was not a problem in the days when magnetic
attraction could be explained by hordes of gods in lumps of iron, but the
universe of Demokritos, much less those of Newton or Dirac, is a far less
hospitable place for voluntarism.
     One approach is to deny the science which seems to preclude free will.
This is not a trivial task, as those who undertake it are attempting to
wriggle out from unger a weight of knowledge that has been building since
before Imhotep. Few, in these degenerate days, have the audacity to ask
questions like "Is there in fact such a thing as inorganic Nature?" and
conclude "Probably not" (see Stove (1991), pp. 130-1), and this cripples them.
Another approach is to claim that science _gives_ us free will on a platter.
The vitalists, quantum mystics, chaotophiliacs, etc., who have infested the
soft dark underbelly of the modern mind since, at least, Bergson do not
merit serious consideration. (They would not even merit mention were they not
so common.) But Penrose, also, thinks that free will and many other goodies
will bubble up out of quantum gravity. He may be right; he is a much
smarter man and a much better physicist than I, and I cannot follow his
arguments. (His early chapters, however, are models of lucidity, and I
recommend the ones on quantum mechanics to Derek especially.)
     Some try to save free will be redefining it, much as Hegel redefined
liberty as the right to obey the police. This procedure has one merit: It can
save face.
     Ryle (1949) argues in Chapter 4 that there is no incompatability between
physical mechanism and mental freedom. He offers (pp. 76-77) the analogy of
a game of chess - every move made conforms rigidly to immutable laws, but those
laws do not determine the course of the game. Or, again, a sentence in full
accord with all the rules of English grammar is not _determined_ by those
rules. Perhaps because I have never beaten a computer at chess and write
horribly, I cannot bring myself to agree, but felt this idea should be offered
up to the net for consideration.
     I have said at some length why I consider the substance-dualistic position
at best unlikely.
     What is left is the view that free will is _only_ an appearance. Spinoza:
"Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and
desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and
desire." We have an understandable horror of being _controlled_, but Ned the
nefarious neurosurgeon does not exist. There is no one pulling our strings
and cackling at us - or, if there is, He ought to be ashamed of Himself. All
of us who are not mad accept limits on what we can do, and if those limits are
narrower - much narrower - than we thought - there is nothing to be done.

BUT IF THERE IS NO SOUL, WHAT AM I?

    I do not know. I have been reading my old poems, and they were
written by somebody else. Yet I am that selfsame person; or, if I am not,
who is? If no one is, when did he die - when he finished this poem, or that
one, or the next day, or the end of that month? Was it murder, or suicide, or
natural causes? But if _I_ am _he_, what prevents me from becoming _you_ - if
indeed I cannot? Is it memory? I can count the times I recalled the past during
the course of a day on my fingers at its end, and someone else's might have
done as well; or no ones, if I became amnesiac. Is it, then, just habit? Am I
no more than my accumulated tics, tremors, tell-tale gestures, turns of phrase?
Is putting my keys in my right pocket each morning as much _me_ as my love?
How could it be? And how could it be _less_? Both are strong; both came without
my willing them, without my thinking about them; and if anything, the first
will outlast the last. And is not love, too, a habit - or rather a bundle of
them? I have _fallen into_ the habits of happiness in her company, and of pain
when she is hurt.
    But where does this leave _me_? I acquired some of these habits, and
had some of them pressed upon me - yet if I _am_ my habits, who was it that got
them, and therefore had them not? And when I loose them - as I have lost the
habits of picking my nose, and of integrating sin x into cos x, and of staying
awake in class - do I die? If _they_ are _me_, after all, whatever lacks them
is _not_ me. If my body acquired your habits, and yours mine, would we have
exchanged bodies - or would our bodies have exchanged tics? If our bodies
shared _exactly_ the same habits, would one person have two bodies? Or would
we still, somehow, have two people?
    On the other hand, saying, "I am my soul; or rather, _a_ soul,
the one right _there_" seems to help not at all. What is a soul doing with a
hand, or two of them, or a body? How is it that things can happen to its body
to make a soul feel estranged from it former selves? If the soul is changing,
does it make sense to speak of the infant and the sage she grows into, or
the villain before his conversion and the saint afterewards, as being the same
soul? Yet if the soul is unchanging, everything interesting, all the diff-
erences that make differences - drooling toddler with dirty diapers or learned
and emminently house-broken safe? vicious criminal or beatific saint? -
everything we care about in a person is really about their body, and the soul
is a metaphysical appendix.
    Anemones and roses flow from the mouth of "Earth" in Botticelli's
_Primavera_. If a perfect copy was made, of the same materials, would it be the
same painting? If the copyist removed the anmeones and roses, what then?
Earth is not Dali's invisible bust of Voltaire, but how close to the one can
the other come before ceasing to be its original self? I dislike all the
answers, and find ignorance even more irritating.

    Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
    In Real Life: [e-mail]
23 December 1992-16 January 1993

Hit "n" now to avoid the bibliography...

*: "All [!] I mean by `animate [the spirit]' is the process of transferring the
free choice of the spirit into actions in the material world" (DA4). Hegel
is grinning up from Hell, while Vergil whirls in his urn... Incidentally,
Derek, I've always though violets were _violet_, not _blue_, but have been
wrong on these sorts of things before...

NETOGRAPHY

Abbott, Derek ([e-mail])
  DA1 = <[e-mail]>
  DA2 = <1992Dec2.072250.28853@ etc.>
  DA3 = <1992Dec7.00153.19130@ etc.>
  DA4 = <1992Dec10.012116.14502@ etc.>
Adams, Frank ([e-mail])
  FA1 = <[e-mail]>
Holmes, M. Randall ([e-mail])
  RH1 = <[e-mail]>
Nyikos, Peter ([e-mail])
  PN1 = <[e-mail]>
Shalizi, Cosma - your humble narrator ([e-mail])
  CS1 = <[e-mail]>
  CS2 = article number lost
  CS3 = <[e-mail]>
  CS4 = this, I guess

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Calvin, William. 1989. The Cerebreal Symphony
    1990. The Ascent of Mind
Dennett, Daniel. 1991. Consciousness Explained
Johnson-Laird, Philip. 1980-something. The Computer and the Mind.
    (My copy is temporarily misplaced, so I can't give the date.)
Russell, Bertrand Arthur William. 1945. A History of Western Philosophy
    1957. Why I Am NOT A Christian
Ryle, Gilbert. 1949. The Concept of Mind
Stove, David. 1991. The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies
--
"I'd love to hold you/ I'd love to kiss you/ I ain't got time for that now."
-Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
"Death needs Time for what it kills to grow in."
-William S. Burroughs, "Ah Pook is Here"