Rationality Quotes June 2013

Thomas

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Linguistic traditions force us to think of body and mind as separate and distinct entities. Everyday notions like free will and moral responsibility contain underlying contradictions. Language also uses definitions and forms of the verb to be in ways that force us to think of classes of things as clearly defined (Is a fetus a human being or not?), when in fact every classification scheme has fuzzy boundaries and continuous gradations.

--Thomas M Georges, Digital Soul, 2004, p. 14

I don't have a pithy parallel quote from Korzybski to put alongside this (pithiness was not his style), but the ideas here are exactly in accordance with Korzybski on "elementalism" (treating as separate and distinct entities things that are not, including body vs. mind), over/under defined terms (verbal definitions lacking extensionality), reification of categories, and the rejection of the is of identity.

0simplicio13y

I don't know that I'd recommend thinking of body and mind as identical (as in identity theory in phil mind). The proper relation is probably better thought of as instantiation of a mind by a brain, in a similar way to how transistors instantiate addition and subtraction. It matters because if you think mind=brain then you may come to some silly philosophical conclusions, like that a mind that does exactly what yours does (in terms of inputs and outputs to the rest of the body) but, say, runs on silicon, is "not the same mind" or "not a real mind."

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