(March 25, 2015 at 9:16 am)JuliaL Wrote: ...while Joe is asleep, Joe isn't Joe …the split…where Joe either can or can't find the word for chicken when shown a chicken depending on which eye it is shown to….[or] with dissociative identity disorder where Joe comes and goes and gets replaced by Ralph or Fred.
Indeed. Your examples all present interesting problems. Approaching these sorts of problems from a nominalist position, like you do, produces many paradoxes. I think one would first have to distinguish to what kind of universal does the particular instance, Joe, belong. It would seem to me Joe remains in essence human, and the personal ego identity, Joe, comes from accidental features.
(March 25, 2015 at 9:16 am)JuliaL Wrote: … the thing that corresponds to Joe is the set of organized brain states which, by social convention, is recognized as 'Joe' when it is seen and recognized as 'Joe.I guess that position kinda undermines the idea that Joe’s, or anyone else’s’, life can have meaning since Joe is nothing more than an arbitrary boundary between one socially determined* collection of material permutations and the rest of the material world.
(March 25, 2015 at 9:16 am)JuliaL Wrote: …Self-aware neural networks are pretty easy to make…at that point, philosophers discussing qualia, like those learned physicians who advocated the 'miasma theory' for the cause of cholera will have to shut up and die off.I think you bite off more than you can chew. The problems of qualia and intentionality would still remain unresolved. Besides, neo-Scholasticism doesn’t have the same kind of mind-body problem as modern analytic or continental philosophy.
*Which begs the question since the notion of a distinct social group is also an arbitrary boundary.
