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gjm comments on HP:MOR and the Radio Fallacy - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think what Harry's says here is, or at least ought to be, a kind of shorthand for a closely related and much stronger argument.
It isn't just that brain damage can take away your mental abilities. It's that particular kinds of brain damage can take away particular mental abilities, and there's a consistent correlation between the damage to the brain and the damage to the mind.
Suppose I show you a box, and you talk to it and it talks back. You might indeed hypothesize that what's in the box is a radio, and there's a person somewhere else with whom you're communicating. But now suppose that you open up the box and remove one electronic component, and the person "at the other end" still talks to you but can no longer remember the names of any vegetables. Then you remove another component, and now they t-t-talk w-with a t-t-t-terrible st-st-st-stutter and keep pausing oddly in the middle of sentences. Another, and they punctuate all their sentences with pointless outbursts of profanity.
And I have some more of these boxes, and it turns out that they all respond in similar ways to similar kinds of damage.
How much of this does it take before you regard this as very, very powerful evidence that the mind you're talking with is implemented by the electronics in the box?
I endorse this refinement. What brain damage demonstrates is not dependency of talking on the brain, but that the complex computations of thought can be damaged in internal detail by damaging a specific brain part, whereupon its outputs to other parts of thought are damaged. This is strong evidence that the brain is doing the internal computations of thought; it is part of the inner process producing thoughts. The radio hypothesis, in which the output is produced elsewhere and received, decisively fails at that point.
We could suppose that you had a hundred soul-parts, all of which can only communicate with each other through brain-area radio transceivers which receive a call from one soul-part, and then retransmit it to another. But leaving out the epicycleness of this idea, the degree to which it contradicts the intuitive notion of a soul, and its, if you'll pardon the phrase, sheer stupidity, the end result would still be that destroying the brain leaves the soul incapable of thought. You're not likely to find a remotely reasonable hypothesis, even in the Methodsverse where magic abounds, by which the internal parts of a thinking computation can be damaged by damaging the brain, and yet removing the whole brain leaves the soul capable of internal thinking.
I kind of liked one of the HPMOR recursive fanfics which played with this since in the Methodsverse wizards continued to be able to think even when their brain was replaced with that of a cat.
If I remember right in that fic the blood-purists maintained that only wizards had souls and that the thing they used to prove it was by feeding polyjuice to a non-wizard who would lose their own personality in favor of the body they were copying for the duration of the potions effects. (not having a magical soul with which to maintain their thought patterns when their physical brain was changed)
Why not? Letting a brain decompose kills the "thinking computation", while cryonizing it supposedly does not.
Similarly, damaging a living brain may damage the attached soul, while death of a reasonably intact brain could be interpreted as a detachment of a reasonably intact soul.
Taboo death
A perfect taboo. In the literal non lesswrong sense.
Sure. "Last breath".
Are you supposing that oxygenating a human's blood without the use of lungs would result in the loss of their soul?
I think you will find that the only way to exclude such hypothetical possibilities is to define death as sufficient brain damage (although I suppose you could define it as cessation of neural activity if you don't mind the possibility of dead people coming back to life; that would still result in a very large proportion of souls being damaged)
Sure, but they'll get it back (and lose 30 IQ points and a whole bunch of cool) if cursed by gypsies.
We are not talking about anything real-world, remember. The original setting:
SRI's Shakey would be justified in its dualism.
Has your hypothesis that thought remains possible after the whole brain has been removed, in fact, been tested?
EDIT: I read your post as meaning that the "fact" that thought remains possible after a brain has been removed [to be cryo-frozen, for instance] was evidence against a soul.
And particular damage to a radio receiver distorts the received signal in particular ways. So that argument isn't much help.
I don't understand. Did you read the rest of what I wrote, where I gave some specific examples of the kind of damage we're talking about? (Note: they weren't intended to be neurologically perfectly accurate.) Do you not agree that if you had a device that produced such effects when damaged, it would be grossly unreasonable to think it was a radio rather than an AI?
[EDITED to add: Of course I agree that there are situations, quite different from what we see in the real world, that could also -- just barely -- be described by saying "particular kinds of damage to the brain produce particular kinds of apparent damage to the mind", but where that would not be very strong evidence that the mind is implemented by the brain. For instance, you damage one bit of the brain and the person's voice goes squeaky; you damage another and all the consonants go away. What's different about the real world is that particular kinds of brain damage have particular semantic signatures; they are bound up with the content of what's being thought or said.
It's still consistent with all this that the mind isn't implemented only by the brain. If every aspect of human thought required cooperation between the brain and the soul, you could still get the sort of thing we actually observe. But let's distinguish between "there are some theories of souls that are consistent, at least in principle, with these observations" and "these observations do not constitute a good reason not to believe in souls". The former is probably true, the latter not.]
Well, the question is, do the specific effects of damage look more like the effects that the "radio receiver" hypothesis would predict, or the ones that the "electronic brain" hypothesis would predict?
There is a big difference between an audio distortion and a semantic distortion. The radio-receiver hypothesis predicts that we can introduce audio distortion, but not that we can make the voice stop talking about vegetables. If we can only get the former sort of effect, then we are messing with a device that didn't understand vegetables in the first place; it did not contain any circuitry whose patterns correlated with facts about vegetables, only with radio and audio signal processing; the knowledge of vegetables was elsewhere. If we can get the latter sort of effect, then the device did have some patterns that had to do with vegetables.
This also applies to my piano analogy. Remove the middle C string, and you'll hear silence wherever there's supposed to be a middle C. Remove the dampers, and the piano will sound like the sustain pedal is constantly held down. Tune each G# string a semitone higher, and you'll hear an A wherever a G# is supposed to be.
That doesn't seem at all similar. The brain is, in this analogy, more like an instrument where if you remove one string it still works for most things but will no longer let you play anything by Mozart, and if you remove another everything comes out syncopated, and if you remove another then you can still play everything but all rubato disappears so that rhythms become metronomic. See also my reply to billswift.