From: lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (lincoln carr)
Subject: Re: Simulated Brain
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 20:59:56 GMT

In article <burt.720913842@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca> burt@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca (Burt Voorhees) writes:
>
>It is logical only in that it is an identity, and the question of identity
>is at the core of the metaphysical foundations of logic.  It's a mistake
>to put logic as prior to identity.  Logic is the tool that we use in order
>to be precise about our thinking about identity, but it did not create
>identity.  Cat's existed, for example, before there was ever a word for
>cat.
>

I would argue that you don't know that as surely as you think you do.
Certainty is a very nebulous thing.  You perceive the phenomena, not
noumena, that you associate with the word "cat" and, because of
certain a priori assumptions that human beings make, you assume that
it must have existed prior to your perception of it and your
assignment of the word "cat" to it.  I am not saying that your
reasoning is faulty.  I am merely saying that your claim in no way
refutes my assertion that we have very little knowledge of a noumenal
"I," although we have all kinds of phenomena that we associate with
the term "I."

>>What would you want the "I" to be?  A noumenal soul?  Even if it were,
>>we could never have any knowledge of the fact, so, what's the point?
>
>This is just the second of Gorgias' sophisms:
>  1)  Nothing exists.
>  2))  Even if anything did exist, we could never know about it.
>  3)  Even if somebody could know about it they could never
>communicate their knowledge.
>

It is not sophistic in the least to say that we have no knowledge of
noumena.  In fact, it frees one of many dubious assertions that are
completely outside the scope of human experience, e.g., "I am certain
that I have an everlasting soul."  While I sure hope that I do, and
may even have some small amount of "faith" in this, I would never
assert it as being within the scope of human experience.  Also, it is
certainly not sophistic to realize that nothing survives hyperbolical
doubt except perhaps "cogito ergo sum," which may, in fact, be our
only knowledge of something noumenal.

>There are, of course, different meanings which can be given to the word I.
>If you want to give it the meaning of a personal pronoun, so that when I
>use it it refers to my particular ego/body complex with its own personal
>history then that's one thing, and the question of whether or not this I
>exists as an entity rather thn being just the result of some psychosomatic
>process is an interesting one.  On the other hand, one can use the term
>in the sense of pure identity in awareness of its own existence.  That
>seems to be the I that you refer to as just a logical construct, but
>I would suggest that that I must have existed prior to logic, and indeed
>that logic would not have been possible without it.
>bv
>

Again, the only reason that you believe that you existed prior to the
perception of your own existence is that you are using certain "built
in" assumptions of human reasoning, e.g., "This is here now, it must
have been here 2 seconds ago."  


-- 
Lincoln R. Carr, Computer Scientist-Philosopher    lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu
"Treat all rational autonomous moral agents, whether in the form of yourself
or another, never as means solely, but always as ends in themselves."
                  Immanuel Kant, from "Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals"
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy