From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Nov 01 2002 - 13:49:02 MST
Lee Corbin wrote:
> > "Two people who think differently about the same subject at
> > the same time must be two different people."
>
> Without waiting to see how Jef answered, I will say, of course,
> that indeed they can be the same person.
And of course I consider your answer to be irrational nonsense.
By the way, I hope and expect that you know better than to think I am
attacking you rather than your arguments, as some here seem to think. I am
not calling your arguments irrational in order to insult you. I am
disagreeing with you because I think your arguments are strictly irrational
in a very formal way. I hope you understand the difference.
Also, just to clear the air, in a previous message I used capital letters
for emphasis, for example when I wrote "IDENTITY is a pointer to SELF, as in
SELF-IDENTITY." From your angry response I think you must have perceived my
use of capitals to be a form of shouting. However I was not angry or
shouting. I was using capitals rather than asterisks as a means of
emphasizing the logical formality of my words.
> You repeatedly deny that you are the same person from moment
> to moment. You cling to this in desperation, it seems to me,
> almost as if it were some kind of definition with you.
No, it is simply what I believe about the nature of human personality. Has
been for a long time.
> Yet you go about day after day, month after month, being pretty
> much the same person in your own mind and in daily life. Doesn't
> this conflict trouble you at all?
Not at all, and I'm glad you mentioned this.
I do not know if you read my messages to Dan F or to you on this subject,
but I consider personality/identity to persist through time only in a manner
analagous to that by which a whirlpool persists through time as it flows
down the surface of a river. The whirlpool's form and substance changes
constantly moment by moment, such that no two consecutive snapshots would
bear the same image or image the same molecules. Yet while observing its
movement through time as it flows downstream we are given the impression
that it is indeed something continuous and persistent. This impression is
due to our intelligence -- the human mind is a powerful pattern-seeking
device. It has also been of great use to us, in evolutionary terms, to think
of personality as fixed even if it not so in reality.
For these reasons above it is I believe philosophically incorrect to think
of personality/identity as a fixed object that "survives" through time, even
if it is pragmatically useful to consider it as such. Problems arise when we
start to believe our pragmatic approximations of reality, which is I believe
exactly what you are doing.
-gts
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