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Old April 7th 04, 07:25 AM
Elschlager
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Default A new book about sentience

On Tue, 06 Apr 2004 04:06:15 GMT, Matt Giwer
wrote:
Does the book define life and death so that stating there is no
difference means something?

I list A and B again, below. For myself, I see no difficulty in
interpreting them. B mentions "death" as in the "regular standard
death of the physical body". (A) talks about Aunt G's physical body
being "brought back to life," in the sense, that we would say, yes,
this is Aunt G - or at least most of us would. I would. The theorem
merely states that there is no difference between A and B. This is
contrary to our, or at least my, feeling that they are different.

It does happen that in theorems that are not totally formalized, we
must look a bit at the proof to see exactly what is being talked about
- are there any conditions that have not been made explicit, and so
on.

Every book must start somewhere. Surely there are other books that
delve far into what is "death", what is "life". This book does not.
It tries to pick out relevant characteristics of how we use those
words, and then builds from that. In other places in the book, there
are ideas for how to deal with the fact that whatever anyone says in
this area large area of investigation, it is problematic as to exactly
what is meant.

A). Ten years ago Aunt G was crogenically frozen at death, and a 190
years from today she will successfully be unfrozen and brought back
to life. She will indeed be successfully brought back to life 190
years from today. That is a given in case 1.

B) Here is the other situation. Aunt G died 10 years ago. It was a
"regular" death: there was no cyrogenesis or anything special.


----

Is the author Joss Whedon?

??????????

----

To me, your next comments seem to be expressing unhappiness with the
book using the word "soul". Why not "mind", or "person", or
"consciousness"? If you are unhappy with the word "soul", then
wherever you see it in the book, replace it with "mind".
In those parts where the book is analyzing, it uses these words
interchangeably. But maybe I should say a little as to why I included
the word "soul" in this list. First of all, it seems to me that in our
times, religion has been attacked beyond the border of reasonableness.
Second, for a religious person, the word "soul" is like "being" or
"consciousness" or "mind".

----

I wrote
(2) The book attempts to list characteristics or properties of
what we take to be mind (that is, soul, sentience, being,
consciousness, and so on).

You wrote
As [to the] above[, ] this is not scientific.

It is scientific because one thing science does is to list
characteristics of a phenomenon. Certainly science does much more than
this, but listing characteristics is one of the things it does.