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Derek Parfit has died (dailynous.com)
106 points by bauta on Jan 2, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 38 comments



I hate most philosophy, but I read Parfit's technical Reasons and Persons and genuinely enjoyed it. Did you ever think teleporters could be the basis for an argument against souls? Parfit thought so. Plus, his writing is optimized for being understandable -- no flowery bullshit. You don't need any special knowledge to appreciate his work.

I highly recommend Reasons and Persons: https://www.amazon.com/Reasons-Persons-Derek-Parfit/dp/01982...

Here's an illegal copy online, which can convince you how good his stuff is: http://chadpearce.com/home/BOOKS/161777473-Derek-Parfit-Reas...

The closing words:

"Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes."


I'm glad you enjoyed him and I'm sad he's gone.

But you're misremembering as it's not an argument against souls, it's an argument about what constitutes identity. You'll notice the article about it on Wikipedia has no mention of the word 'soul':

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox


I was also going to point out that often misunderstanding about Derek Parfit. He is also misunderstood similar to Soren Kierkegaard. The argument for self and against Emmanuel Kant are not anti-Super Natural.


It's not "anti-Super Natural" per se, but he is against a separately-existing entity. Why Ulysse Carion yesterday is the same person as Ulysse Carion today is much like why France yesterday is the same country as France today. Personal identity is much like "national" identity -- it's not a very profound connection, just a high degree of correlation and continuity.


Right, and which I'd argue has even more profound implications given the definition of 'soul' - as opposed to identity - is so squishy as to be meaningless.


check http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1 it touches on this :)


I don't think that the Teletransportation Paradox particularly proves or disproves the existence of souls. If Fred has no soul, and if Fred becomes Fred-A and Fred-B at a distinct moment in time (thanks to a teleporter that can copy, not just print / scan / fax :P ), then neither Fred-A nor Fred-B have souls. If Fred does have a soul, and if Fred becomes Fred-A and Fred-B at a distinct moment in time, then the most logical conclusion IMHO is that Fred's soul also becomes soul-A and soul-B at that same moment in time. Sort of like branching in version control!

There are other possible conclusions, mainly based on imposing some sort of special "no duplicate souls" rule - e.g. the original single soul continues to exist inside the two new Freds simultaneously, the original Fred had a soul but the two new Freds are soulless, etc.

Hmmm, I guess this argument is piquing my interest, maybe I should just go and read Parfit's work.


If you speak to Christians who believe in souls (not philosophers or Jewish theologians, who have boundless capacities for mental contortions), they'll agree that teleportation/copying is problematic to the idea of souls. Who goes to heaven in these situations?


It goes deeper than just souls. Even if you don't believe in souls, what do you think it means about identity? What part of you is 'you' (as in, the consciousness you define as yourself)? If you try to limit it to something to bash religious people you're missing the bigger picture.


I'm not trying to use Parfit to bash religion -- I just chose this particular example. For the average person, souls are more interesting than Mere Addition or mixing your brain with Greta Garbo's. The fact that many have been goaded into replying (and hopefully many more are silently reading Parfit) seems to confirm this.


I believe what's really problematic is the absence of teleporters or person copiers...


Did you ever think teleporters could be the basis for an argument against souls?

Holy shit, this is brilliant. Wow. May you post more?


> Holy shit, this is brilliant.

Not really. How is that an argument against souls?

Souls are not physical, nothing stops them from traveling to the new location of the body, or from being in more than one "place" at a time.

Souls are also not indivisible. When you have reincarnation plus resurrection of the dead, which body get the soul? Answer: All of them. They each get a soul, and all those souls are linked, and yet individual. (This also answers the question about heaven and a widow/er - which soul would they be with? Answer: Both, a soul can "exist" more than once at a time.)

A copy-transporter would just do the same thing, get a copy of the soul.

So no, not a brilliant argument.

See here http://www.torahcafe.com/rabbi-asher-crispe/time-travel-and-... for some more on the Jewish perspective on this.


I've taken a rather non-traditional view that 'soul' is what people in the past used refer to as the 'program' that runs in our brain. So being copied by a hypothetical teleporter is no obstacle here.

Besides, quantum teleportation notwithstanding, I'm not sure QM allows the reproduction of everything at once, which should be required to duplicate the entire pattern.


I just find it brilliant. You dont and thats OK. But Im not looking to debate religion. I do appreciate you posting your argument because it shows how my comment might be interpreted by a religious person (Im not religious). As someone who aims to communicate better, your comment is valuable feedback.


> might be interpreted by a religious person

By anyone. Once you entertain the concept of soul, then all the rest follows automatically. I don't see that someone non-religious could understand it any differently (other than not entertaining the concept of soul in the first place).


Good feedback, thx.


(Note: Just finished watching it, and despite the title, the linked video does not actually touch on this topic. Sorry for the irrelevant link.)


I think someone downvoted you, because your comment could be read (uncharitably) as snide, rather than earnest. I don't have anything else re: Parfit to offer, but some more information should be findable with Google.


Its real awe. Blew my mind. Ill make sure to research Parfit more, thanks.


Just finished a seminar with him last semester - couldn't have asked for a better and more charitable teacher. His gentle temperament really shined in his effort to understand all the nuance of his students' counterarguments. The world lost a truly brilliant mind.


I like Parfit's writing. His two most important books are probably Reasons and Persons and On What Matters. In On What Matters,[1] he suggests a new ethical theory which is a synthesis of consequentialism, Kantian deontology, and social contract theory.

[1]: A nice EPUB: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=35E9FA954593C060F52...


Philosophy is useful for study because it helps us organize our thought processes and reasoning, with a rigor that one wouldn't otherwise hold themselves to. This is probably why philosophy majors are sought for employment, because the degree signals good critical thinking skills.


It is unfortunate that it takes his passing for me to be exposed to his work - however the last hour of familiarising myself with the broad strokes has concluded with the purchase of his first book.


"Some of us ask how much of our wealth we rich people ought to give to these poorest people. But that question wrongly assumes that our wealth is ours to give. This wealth is legally ours. But these poorest people have much stronger moral claims to some of this wealth. We ought to transfer to these people, in ways that I mention in a note, at least ten per cent of what we earn." [1]

[1] http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/1/3/14148208/dere... Quote from conclusion of third volume of On What Matters


May he RIP.

The philosophy of personal identity is one of my favourite subjects in philosophy so his work came up a few times when studying that.

Worth reading up on some of his work if you like philosophy, alternatively there are a (few) videos on youtube mostly on moral philosophy IIRC.


What are the best things you've read about personal identity?


Here's a good starting point: https://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Conte...

I'd also recommend Mark Johnston's work on the topic. Human Beings (https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=jph... - behind a paywall, unfortunately) is a wonderful essay. And his book Surviving Death is a good example of creative contemporary philosophy that's actually fun to read.


Ah, the "Repugnant Conclusion" guy. I last read his writing decades ago, and remember finding it pedantic and less than inspiring, though better than the "infinite variations on the trolley problem" moral-intuition-diddling. Still, I'm glad to hear he was a good teacher, and sad to learn of his passing.

PS -- If you want some truly excellent philosophical writing, give Thomas Nagel a read.


Nagel is the philosopher who argued that mechanistic or materialist explanations for evolution are not sufficient and that they must have some kind of teleological underpinning. This willingness to rely on "magical" forces that he can't expand upon underpins Nagel's work.

I wouldn't recommend him to anyone unless you're interested in the history of philosophy of science, and would like to be directly familiar with all major 20th-century philosophers in that space.


Nagel's work is well worth reading. It's not good to only read people who agree with your world view.


I feel a lot of times that many modern philosophers simply not qualified enough in natural sciences. I've read Mind & Cosmos but gave up halfway: Nagel simply does not get evolution.

Contemporary philosophical discussion many times is like typical forum debates on the Internet about basic science - someone says something stupid and the others try to educate him, he don't get it and write his same stupidity again and again until everybody is tired to reply.

In the academic world this is called publish or perish: if you are a philosopher you should fear more from being forgotten than from proper and decisive falsification - so you just have to be loud, even if you are wrong. If you defend your wrongness skilfully you will have your followers anyway.

But I'm just simply don't interested in whether Nagel will get evolution eventually, or Putnam & Searle get computation sometime in the future* (just to provide another example)

* I thinking about their theory that a rock can implement any computation - if we provide proper mapping between the states, without taking into consideration the complexity of the mapping as part of the "computer" here. It is ok if someone doesn't get Kolmogorov but not clear why they should make a living from it, or at least why should I support it by buying and reading their books. ;)


You don't make any specific criticisms of Nagel's work, so I can't say anything on that point, except that I didn't see any misunderstandings of evolution in the book.

>Putnam & Searle [don't] get computation

Putnam essentially invented the functionalist computationalist theory of mind that you are implicitly defending, so I'd say he probably understood it at least as well as you do. (He later changed his mind about its viability.)

More generally I wouldn't doubt Putnam's ability to grasp technical material. This is a guy who contributed the solution to one of Hilbert's problems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_tenth_problem).

>It is ok if someone doesn't get Kolmogorov

No-one has provided a solution to the rock problem in terms of Kolmogorov complexity. Scott Aaronson speculates that this notion might be helpful, but he doesn't work out the details. In fact it seems rather unlikely that his proposed solution would work, as the mapping from abstract computational states to the physical states of actually existing computers is also extremely complex, and not obviously any less complex than the mapping from these states to physical states of rocks, waterfalls or whatever. Since we can't actually specify any of the relevant mappings, it's very difficult to say for sure that they differ significantly in terms of Kolmogorov complexity.


> I didn't see any misunderstandings of evolution in the book

The greatest feature of evolution that it makes teleology unnecessary. It can operate as a mindless/goalless algorithm. Of course evolution may be operated by someone/something with specific goals instead of pure chances, but thats just an unnecessary assumption until it proved - so we may employ Occam razor here until someone proves it. The possibility of design without a designer is one of the main point and contribution of the theory and it should be fully understood - even if if later turns out (which have not happened yet, and no sign for that happening beside metaphysical opinions...) that there was a designer.

> of actually existing computers is also extremely complex, and not obviously any less complex than the mapping from these states to physical states of rocks

You can't be serious: First map a Computer chess program states to human interpretable visualization to play chess against it And then do this with your rock.

First is mainly one-to-one mapping of digital signs to pixels by using a static table, the second is..., I'm not even sure how to inject my move into the states of the rock, but no idea either how to extract its response. You know why? There is simply no one to one mapping there. The states of a rock is a large bundle of everything without interpretation, the states of the chess program is CLEARLY more constrained - the proof is empirical: it CAN be implemented.

Like if you say that the set of all positive integers contains the solution of factorizing any large number. Of course it does: you just have to point to those numbers. ;) But how? All states are not the solution - selecting the proper states is the computation, and if those selection mechanism is in the mapping process then the mapping IS the computer.


>The greatest feature of evolution that it makes teleology unnecessary.

That's what Nagel is disputing.

> Of course evolution may be operated by someone/something with specific goals instead of pure chances, but thats just an unnecessary assumption until it proved

Nagel isn't a theist or an ID advocate. The existence of such a designer isn't part the thesis of the book.

>First is mainly one-to-one mapping of digital signs to pixels by using a static table

I was talking about mapping to a physical state, not an abstract computational state. If you try to specify the relevant "digital signals" in physical rather than computational terms, you'll find that it's an impossibly complex task. Even individual transistors are enormously complex physical systems. We simply don't know whether the mapping to physical states would be significantly more complex in the case of the waterfall. If you're allowed to cheat by using more abstract states (e.g. "on" or "off" for each transistor), then you can equally well cheat in the case of the waterfall by giving names to disjunctions of physically distinct states.

>There is simply no one to one mapping there.

Not sure what you mean by this. If the rock has a sufficient number of possible physical states, then you certainly can specify a one-to-one mapping from chess states to rock states. It's true that this mapping will be difficult or impossible for humans to exploit. Rather obviously, that's because computers were designed in such a way that it's easy for humans to manipulate their states in certain ways, whereas rocks weren't.


> That's what Nagel is disputing

We have many many evidence that random mutation is enough for describing the biological evolution on Earth. If the mutation is controlled by someone than it is done according to random distributions as far as we currently know. He should provide evidence if he thinks otherwise but he is not doing it and not qualified for it, thats only what I see.


>He should provide evidence if he thinks otherwise

That's what he does in the book. But Nagel isn't claiming to make any original contribution to biology or evolutionary theory. His main aim, as far as I can see, is to point out that the standard arguments for mutations being random are less strong than is usually thought. I don't think he claims to know whether or not mutations are in fact random, or what controls them if they are not.


Ah we don't need this discussion. The rigth answer is in The Library of Babel of Borges.

Guess you can find it easily without much thinking, and then you will see I was right! ;)




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