Identifying the person in human persons

The Virus Afterlife - November 8, 2016
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What I read 
In "The Virus Afterlife", cartoonist Scott Adams has Dilbert invent an artificial soul since he can no evidence of any other soul that he might have (2016). Adams then has Dilbert explain to the worried co-worker that his soul won't be trapped on a single server because it's wrapped in a virus so that the physically dead Dilbert will still be able to move around.

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My response
I was looking for something very different to blog on as an example. The Dilbert cartoon meets the criteria: it's something I've recently read, which is in fact the only criterion for the source. The summary of this reading was a bit quicker than usual: there just aren't many words there to summarize.

Robot Must Reproduce
November 27, 2015

But once the literal ideas are done, that leaves the more interesting ideas behind this cartoon. Adams, as he has done in the past (for example in "Robot Must Reproduce"), is making fun in a gentle way of the common human error of thinking that we, the real us, is some sort of mini-person inside of us, but somehow not a physical thing. Western culture, under the error-prone inspiration of Christianity with all it's Middle Eastern mistakes has traditionally called this a soul, but there are no such things as souls, and just a few minutes critical thinking about the concept shows it to be seriously flawed. What is the soul? Where is the soul? Descartes, who was no fool, thought it was some sort of immaterial (spirit) substance that could not interact with the physical world, except through the human pituitary gland in the brain. At least Descartes realised that our brain is where we (I mean our concept of being us) is created. But he got almost everything else wrong. Either the soul can interact with the rest of the universe, including the non-soul part of us, or it cannot. If it can, that must be detectable. If it can't, its an irrelevance in which there can be no reason to believe. As Dilbert says, the evidence is precisely zero.

However, we don't need souls to explain ourselves: modern neuroscience, AI research and other fields are doing a lot today to help us better understand how our brains create our sensation of being a person, that is, our identity for ourselves and others. As I reading and reflecting on the readings in Unit 1 of Skillful, I also thought about these issues. Although it's not the most important to me the person who is Peter, my given identity is the certainly the most significant because the physical make up of my genes and environment fully determine all of my chosen and core identity, without exception. As the Dilbert cartoon from last November tells us, the human notion of free will is an illusion, as false as the common belief in souls. If anything, I think that the notion of free will is looks to be even more confused when we apply a little critical thinking to it. But is this a big problem for our concepts of personal identity? I don't think so.

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Reference

• Adams, S. (2016, November 8). The virus afterlife. Dilbert. Retrieved from http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-11-08