Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> there are lots of holes in that argument

There’s holes in all kinds of things people believe. If you’re talking about actual belief systems then you can’t assume rational actors and logical thinking. Philosophy really doesn’t have the tools to explain what’s going on. We’re in the realm of psychology / neuroscience.

> to assume that cessation of the latter must entail the cessation of the former

Mind uploading blurs the line between life and afterlife because it wasn’t conceived of when those ideas were created.

IMO the conceptual framework that created the idea of a material world is really a delineation between magic rituals / religion and what people actually observed. The wacky nature of the observable universe is really orthogonal to the initial differentiation to the point where I think people would still talk about the material world in terms of things like fate and reincarnation even if spells worked.




> There’s holes in all kinds of things people believe. If you’re talking about actual belief systems then you can’t assume rational actors and logical thinking. Philosophy really doesn’t have the tools to explain what’s going on. We’re in the realm of psychology / neuroscience.

No doubt the average person's beliefs are full of holes, but education in philosophy and logic can make one aware of those holes, aware of one's hidden assumptions, the heretofore unconsidered alternatives to one's positions. I question whether psychology or neuroscience can offer us the same things.

> Mind uploading blurs the line between life and afterlife because it wasn’t conceived of when those ideas were created.

Nobody knows whether mind uploading is really possible. It is a purely speculative technology, its development could be centuries or millennia away, if it ever is developed at all. I also think its philosophical significance is overrated, since in principle it is just as compatible with idealism or dualism as it is with materialism.

> IMO the conceptual framework that created the idea of a material world is really a delineation between magic rituals / religion and what people actually observed.

I disagree. Most non-materialist arguments have as their starting point epistemology, not anything to do with magic, rituals or religion. Should our ontology straightforwardly mirror our epistemology (i.e. a first-person perspective is epistemologically fundamental and hence should also be ontologically fundamentally)–or invert it?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: