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Furcas comments on HP:MOR and the Radio Fallacy - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (57)
The radio analogy is bad because of the first person point of view.
The radio == the external behavior of the person, and you == the soul, right?
Damaging the brain doesn't just affect the external behavior of the person, it also affects the person's thinking, i.e. the person itself. Therefore, the brain isn't just a receptor for a signal, as the radio is, it's the thing doing the thinking.
That's certainly true, but I'm not sure it matters.
One could replace the radio receiver/transmitter analogy with an algorithm-specification/algorithm-implementation analogy, for example, without significantly affecting the argument. Is the hardware the thing doing the thinking? Well, yes, in that when we destroy the hardware we prevent the thinking. But, no, in that even after we destroy the hardware we can recover the thinking by implementing the algorithm on other hardware.
Generally speaking, I think it's better to address the argument being implied by a metaphor than to address weaknesses of the metaphor itself. See also "steel-manning."
That's a completely different concept of 'soul', one that I doubt anyone who says, "I believe in the existence of souls" actually has in mind. People who believe in souls believe they are their soul, not that they are their brain and that their brain implements soul-code.
It's generally a good idea to try to understand what people actually believe, rather than what you think they should believe.
I agree with you that most people who believe in souls identify with their souls rather than their brains, and it's not clear to me how any of what I said changes depending on whether people identify with their souls or their brains. But I'm also not strongly committed to this particular metaphor; if you have one you prefer, or have a different formulation of the argument in question you'd prefer to use that doesn't depend on metaphor at all, I'm happy to use that as well.
It is certainly a good idea, but it is not always easy to determine what people believe. On the present topic, they believe quite a variety of things, many of them extremely unclear. Why do you assume that if brains implemented soul-code as you describe, someone would think it was the brain that was them, rather than the soul-code? The view that brains implement soul-code and that the soul-code is the real person sounds to me like a not implausible interpretation of much of what Plato says about souls.