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From: esk@wucs.UUCP (Eric Kaylor)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Software, 'meat', and *you*
Message-ID: <525@wucs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 30-Nov-84 12:18:49 EST
Article-I.D.: wucs.525
Posted: Fri Nov 30 12:18:49 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Dec-84 20:25:05 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: Washington U. in St. Louis, CS Dept.
Lines: 34

[]
From: mwm@ea.UUCP	( Now, read the last line from me carefully: "I hope to be uploaded to
> *something* ... ." Key word: "something." I claim that "I" can function on
> other hardware, be it meat, silicon, plasma, or whatever. [I also claim I
> can *prove* that that can happen, barring dualism!] Therefore, I can change
> "bodies" - so I am not a body, any more than I am a house. Both are things
> that "I" temporarily make use of. 

Well, actually I hope you're right, but here's why I think you're not.
I don't think you can endure on any type of hardware except "meat".  The
reason is that your mental life is bound up with the type of activity that
occurs in the brain, and this may be relevantly different from the type of
activity in a silicon chip.  My view is called "type-type materialism" 
(because it holds that each type of mental event is identical with a type
of physical ("material") event), and you can find a defense of it in a
recent (Je? 84) issue of the philosophical journal *Synthese*.

I do not even grant that *you* could endure on different hardware even of
the "meat" variety, though I do grant -- what is just as good -- that the
resulting person of putting "your software" into "new hardware" might as
well be you for all practical purposes, though strictly speaking it would
not be you.  "All practical purposes" here includes the implication that,
though strictly speaking such a transfer would be the end of *you*, this
would not constitute a reason for you not to do it.
           ______
           |    |    |o.	" ... and when I die
    |\     |    |    |		and when I'm gone
    |     o|   o|    |		there'll be 
   o|   	     		one child born to carry on ..."

				--Paul V. Torek, ihnp4!wucs!wucec1!pvt1047
Please send any mail directly to this address, not the sender's.  Thanks.