mtraven comments on Which Parts Are "Me"? - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 October 2008 06:15PM

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Comment author: mtraven 23 October 2008 04:42:00AM 2 points [-]

Everything I am, is surely my brain; but I don't accept everything my brain does, as "me".
Such an awkwardly phrased and punctuated sentence is evidence of cognitive failure, or at least a hiccup. There's a fundamental mistake you are trying to paper over right at the start of this essay, which goes downhill from there.

Why are hardcore materialists, who presumably have no truck with Cartesian mind/body dualism, so eager to embrace brain/body dualism? Or software/hardware dualism?

So you start by restricting your self to your brain (at least, I think that's what that sentence means), and follow up by being obligated to lop off large chunks of that. Keep it up and you'll wind up as a ghost in the machine after all.

I'm afraid this seems like the opposite of Zen to me.