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<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 2:52 PM, David Stockhoff <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dstockhoff@verizon.net">dstockhoff@verizon.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">I have to comment that this schema easily allows for the copying of persona/whatever by machines in the first place. I don't believe that machines could copy souls. Machines are the opposite of souls and could never capture them, I'd think. And there would be the theological implications. (Again, haven't heard from the Pope on this but I imagine he'd be pretty ticked off.)<br>
<br>Electromagnetic brainwave patterns, however, present no difficulty whatsoever. Scan'em in, scan'em out, put'em on a floppy. In fact, you'd have to work harder to convince me that any Wolfean characters actually have souls at all than that their psyches could not be replicated and merged.</blockquote>
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<div>That's basically all an Aristotelian or Thomistic soul is, though--a pattern. In Thomistic philosophy, humans <em>have </em>souls, but they <em>are </em>the unity of the soul and the body. Think of the soul as the sum total of all of your memories up to the present + your will, and that's basically a Thomistic soul. In theory, this could be copied--the copy would have an independent will and independent consciousness, but it would have, for a infintesimal moment, the same soul that you do.</div>
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<div>I can't say that this is Catholic orthodoxy, but it isn't heterodox either. It's a permitted philosophical viewpoint that merely requires a few other theological assumptions to salvage its orthodoxy, which someone like St. Thomas happily would grant (i.e., the soul is miraculously sustained after death for the particular judgment.) </div>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"><span id=""></span><br>------------------------------<br><br>Message: 3<br>Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:09:03 +0000<br>
From: Chris P <<a href="mailto:rasputin_@hotmail.com" target="_blank">rasputin_@hotmail.com</a>><br>Subject: Re: (urth) Babbie<br>To: <<a href="mailto:urth@lists.urth.net" target="_blank">urth@lists.urth.net</a>><br>
Message-ID: <BLU120-W5D3816582B130AD6CAA5286960@phx.gbl><br>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"<br><br><br><br>Part of this discussion started with some reflections on identity. I mentioned that there is a "simple" view where each self is a "soul", thought of as a (perhaps eternal) substance that undergoes various changes; it is a single, indivisible unit. There is also a "complex" view in which we think of the self as comprised as various components - your memories, your traits, your vital interests, etc. On this view I am only partially still the same person I was when I was in love with my college sweetheart: one is prone to say things like "I was a different person then." And if I think of myself as (mostly) a different person now than then, there are obviously varying degrees along the way. This is not as marginal or purely literary way of talking as it seems - it's part of why we have a statute of limitations, and why we are inclined to not hold an elderly adult responsible for things they did when they were a child. We referred in that discussion, roughly, to the collection of little pieces that make up such an identity as a "psyche".<br>
<br>Most of us waver back and forth between different ways of talking about personal identity without noticing it. Different situations make each seem much more relevant and true than the other. What makes James's (and possibly Wolfe's) theory a little hard to work with and keep a grip on is that it forces us to actually hold both views at once. That doesn't make it wrong, just that there are going to constantly be points of the text where you want to look at it either one way or the other but not both. So I have never been able to go much further with this theory, as good of a theory as I think it is.<br>
<br>My gut inclination, as an aside though, has always been that there is a point at which Horn has definitely left the combined entity (both psyche and soul, whichever way you want to look at it; though if you think of it as the psyche you could say that there are some remnants).
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