From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Oct 29 2002 - 22:29:47 MST
It has many times occurred to me that if I could
go back to 1966 and start all over thinking about
identity, the simplest and best alternative would
be to convert to some fundamentalist religion
like Christianity.
All the intractable paradoxes of who and what we are
would disappear in a flash. It would easily be seen
that God dispenses unforgeable serial numbers for each
soul He creates. All our intuitions would readily
line up behind this fact instead of being constantly
opposed to the facts.
Had I known at age 18 what an obsession this was
to shortly become, I surely would have opted for
this solution, which looks to be so much more in
accordance with Occam's Razor. Instead of the
virtually insoluble paradoxes and dilemmas, one
would have just *one* peculiar new assumption,
namely that souls (and God) exist.
But there is a strong analogy between that "simpler"
view and the Copenhagen interpretation in physics.
Yes, both make life so much easier: one saves on
universes, the other saves on dilemmas. The fatal
flaw in each, however, is that *no* justification
for such an extra and dangerous assumption exists.
Just as the collapse of the wave function is surely
a myth, so is the soul, and we cannot *believe* myths.
So we are simply stuck, in both situations, struggling
to make sense of a universe whose rules this planet
did not evolve us to understand.
Lee
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