A lot of people straightforwardly believe that minds are magic: that our decision making is not simply the result of electricity and biochemistry in neurons and synapses in the brain, but at the core is the product of an immortal soul. This, of course, I reject. But it seems to me that a lot of people who ostensibly do not believe this still seem to unconsciously have something like an immortal soul in their model of the world.
I first noticed this when trying to discuss cryonics with people. “Dead is dead”, they would say, “what on Earth makes you think you can resurrect the dead?” Talk of “resurrection” implies that cryonics is making a magical claim, and this idea arises because death itself is understood to be magical and therefore reversible only by magic. If you understand that…
A lot of people straightforwardly believe that minds are magic: that our decision making is not simply the result of electricity and biochemistry in neurons and synapses in the brain, but at the core is the product of an immortal soul. This, of course, I reject. But it seems to me that a lot of people who ostensibly do not believe this still seem to unconsciously have something like an immortal soul in their model of the world.
I first noticed this when trying to discuss cryonics with people. “Dead is dead”, they would say, “what on Earth makes you think you can resurrect the dead?” Talk of “resurrection” implies that cryonics is making a magical claim, and this idea arises because death itself is understood to be magical and therefore reversible only by magic. If you understand that brains are machines, you can infer that there is no moment that the soul leaves the body; death is a process through which ultimately the information stored in the brain that makes memory and personality is permanently destroyed, and cryonics attempts to halt that process.
It arises in discussions of criminal culpability. We say Phineas Gage was not responsible for his bad behaviour, because it was the result of a railroad spike through his skull, and then forgive another because of their bad genetic heritage and a third because of their upbringing; but ultimately such an an account of culpability is trying to figure out whether there is mens rea in the immortal soul. As Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen argue, such a system cannot survive our increasing understanding of the causes of behaviour.
And it arises in discussion of AGI, where people seem to want to discuss whether a machine can truly be intelligent, or conscious, or a moral patient, as if we didn’t already have the existence proof that we are precisely such machines.
In practice this blog has not mostly been about this topic but about whatever I happen to be thinking about. But rejecting dualism, and looking for surprising consequences like the above which follow from that, has shaped how I see the world so much that I could not resist it as a title.
Published by Paul Crowley
I’m Paul Crowley aka “ciphergoth”, a cryptographer and programmer living in the Santa Cruz mountains, California. See also my Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/ciphergoth View more posts