HP:MOR and the Radio Fallacy

RichardChappell

No plot spoilers here, just wanted to flag a bit of poor reasoning that shows up in Chapter 39:

I shouldn't have believed it even for all of thirty seconds! Because if people had souls there wouldn't be any such thing as brain damage, if your soul could go on speaking after your whole brain was gone, how could damage to the left cerebral hemisphere take away your ability to talk?

This is a surprisingly common fallacy. Just because X depends on Y, it doesn't follow that X depends on nothing but Y. A phenomenon may involve more than just its most obvious failure point.

To illustrate: Suppose I'm trapped in a box, and my only way to communicate with the outside world is via radio communication. Someone on the other end argues that I don't really exist -- "There's no person beyond the radio receiver, for if there was then there wouldn't be any such thing as damaged radios!" Pretty silly, huh? But people say this kind of thing in defense of physicalism all the time.

(N.B. This is not to defend the existence of souls. It's just to point out that this particular argument against them is invalid.)

No plot spoilers here, just wanted to flag a bit of poor reasoning that shows up in Chapter 39:

I shouldn't have believed it even for all of thirty seconds! Because if people had souls there wouldn't be any such thing as brain damage, if your soul could go on speaking after your whole brain was gone, how could damage to the left cerebral hemisphere take away your ability to talk?

This is a surprisingly common fallacy. Just because X depends on Y, it doesn't follow that X depends on nothing but Y. A phenomenon may involve more than just its most obvious failure point.

(N.B. This is not to defend the existence of souls. It's just to point out that this particular argument against them is invalid.)

X = Mind. Y = Brain Chunks. Let X depend on Brain Chunks and Soul and Astral Flubber. If your mind is dependent on all of them for proper operation, then you can't speak when all your brain chunks are gone. End of story. You can play epiphenomenal games and argue that "yes, but you still have Soul and Astral Flubber." But who cares? All mind function is lost. I may "have" eternal and indestructible Astral Flubber, but what good does it do me?

This only follows if the impact from the Soul and Astral Flubber.is negligible. You could see a situation where it wasn't purely epiphenomenal and where tests could be made to verify that. For example, one could make an extremely detailed emulation of the brain, and if it then became apparent that that was failing at a variety of different levels, that would be evidence for Astral Flubber or the Soul having a direct impact on the wetspace version.

First, just the obvious "my simulation doesn't work" does not imply Soul or Astral Flubber exists or that it does something. The more reasonable interpretation is that your simulation sucks.

This only follows if the impact from the Soul and Astral Flubber.negligible.

No, it doesn't. Both could have great impact when combined with a brain, but take away the brain, and you have no function. Harry wanted the continued function of the mind after physical destruction of the body. Even if the mind dependency is Brain AND Astral Flubber, brain gone me... (read more)

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HP:MOR and the Radio Fallacy

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HP:MOR and the Radio Fallacy

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