If you could push a button and simply cease to exist, would you press it?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Ah, now i see why this poll is closing when it does. In the event of a Romney presidency....

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

landslide

that's amazingly high (the 44)

can lurkers FP themselves?

nah, if they don't post the button never appears. quality tactic, like finding those hiding spots in goldeneye imo

hoping button appears if Election Day thread isnt locked tonight

'hoping button' appears after obama wins imo

http://bluecollarphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Obama-Button-196x196.png

http://alliandgenine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/george_michael_choose_life-thumb-430x408.jpg

^ either that is a wax museum figure or I'm changing my vote to 'Yes'

His right hand blur suggests movement.

OK then a real human is putting his arms through the sleeves. That head is too uncanny.

Once upon a time there was a dualist. He believed that mind and matter are separate substances. Just how they interacted he did not pretend to know-this was one of the "mysteries" of life. But he was sure they were quite separate substances.

This dualist, unfortunately, led an unbearably painful life-not because of his philosophical beliefs, but for quite different reasons. And he had excellent empirical evidence that no respite was in sight for the rest of his life. He longed for nothing more than to die. But he was deterred from suicide by such reasons as: (1) he did not want to hurt other people by his death; (2) he was afraid suicide might be morally wrong; (3) he was afraid there might be an afterlife, and he did not want to risk the possibility of eternal punishment. So our poor dualist was quite desperate.

Then came the discovery of the miracle drug! Its effect on the taker was to annihilate the soul or mind entirely but to leave the body functioning exactly as before. Absolutely no observable change came over the taker; the body continued to act just as if it still had a soul. Not the closest friend or observer could possibly know that the taker had taken the drug, unless the taker informed him ...

To return to the story, our dualist was, of course, delighted! Now he could annihilate himself (his soul, that is) in a way not subject to any of the foregoing objections. And so, for the first time in years, he went to bed with a light heart, saying: "Tomorrow morning I will go down to the drugstore and get the drug. My days of suffering are over at last!" With these thoughts, he fell peacefully asleep.

Now at this point a curious thing happened. A friend of the dualist who knew about this drug, and who knew of the sufferings of the dualist, decided to put him out of his misery. So in the middle of the night, while the dualist was fast asleep, the friend quietly stole into the house and injected the drug into his veins. The next morning the body of the dualist awoke-without any soul indeed-and the first thing it did was to go to the drugstore to get the drug. He took it home and, before taking it, said, "Now I shall be released." So he took it and then waited the time interval in which it was supposed to work. At the end of the interval he angrily exclaimed: "Damn it, this stuff hasn't helped at all! I still obviously have a soul and am suffering as much as ever!"

Yes! Didn't I link that upthread in Google Books but was too lazy to type it out?

I did, just confirming I'm not crazy. Raymond Smullyan is a total bro

ah i missed it the first time

wow i love that, thanks for introducing me to this guy

i hate it! philosophical zombie by any other name, lousy intuition pumping, armchair introspeculating.

does soul equate to mind in the fable above? I'm confused.

i don't think it's a thought experiment, it's an exploratory parable

then again i'm not keen on dualism

I didn't like it much either.

so why didn' t he notice when he woke? shite.

Its effect on the taker was to annihilate the soul or mind entirely but to leave the body functioning exactly as before

even under substance dualism (which i'm not keen on either although from a materialist perspective my distinctions may be seen as hair splitting) this is not necessarily a coherent or meaningful proposition. Cf. "I have designed a computer virus that annhilates all electrical activity in the computer completely but leaves it functioning exactly as before."

and mind = soul? i dunno, i must be a triangulist or whatever

(3) he was afraid there might be an afterlife, and he did not want to risk the possibility of eternal punishment.

maybe shouldn't be popping Soulkillers imo

we ended up not breaking up btw but like two weeks later SANDY

...?

"test audiences didn't respond well to the soul dying so we brought in the writer of sex and pottery to rewrite the ending. the soul pulls through and it and the guy decide to stick together and weather the storm metaphorically and then there's an actual storm, geddit?"

Its effect on the taker was to annihilate the soul or mind entirely

Yet it sounds like this did not happen at all; false advertising? I mean I guess you could say the body just natural goes through existential crisis even if there is no soul, but it also makes it pretty clear that mind and soul should be considered the same thing here, why didn't he 'wake up' as a brain-dead vegetable?

that parable should have ended with "Makes you think."

I feel like a basic point of this story is being glossed over in the name of criticizing it.

If no one externally is supposed to be able to tell that the person took the soul annihilation serum and assuming that the serum works, why would the person who took it suddenly become happy and well-adjusted after taking it?

If you have problems with the idea of philosophical zombies or dualism, Smullyan is not the guy to argue with. He's positing them so that he can beat up on epiphenominalism, where most dualists who believe in science end up. He's on your side.

I don't understand how this pill erases your mind and yet you still have the faculties to think "Shit, this isn't working!"

It doesn't erase your mind - it erases your subjective experience. Your brain does its stuff but there's no one feeling "what it is like" to have experiences, neurons just fire and muscles contract. This is the crux, dualists believe that subjective experience is logically separable from objective accounts of the world.

Epiphenomenalism is one possible dualist position. In that view, we have subjective experiences that aren't accounted for by objective explanations of the world. But rather than say there's a magic ghost pulling the strings of the body, epiphenomenalism says that subjective experience is caused by the physical body, but has no effect on it.

Smullyan's thought experiment demonstrates why epiphenomenalism is unsatisfying if not outright incoherent.

honestly that is what I am really, really hoping death is like

The joke is that the soulless body does and says just what the the disappointed dualist would have done and said had the pill not worked.

Because the effect of the pill is that "absolutely no observable change came over the taker; the body continued to act just as if it still had a soul."

i'm really hoping death is not just having your consciousness suspended in a wooden box for all eternity.

So mind and subjective experience are two different things? Then what is mind, if not subjective experience?

If mind has nothing to do with subjective experience then why even take the pill at all?

Not to spoil the fun, but if the experience of annihilating one's soul was supposed to be fully detectable by the one who took the drug, why would the dualist, upon waking, not have noticed the effect of the drug injected during the night? And if the effect was not supposed to be detectable, why would the dualist have been disappointed in not detecting any effect?

The point is that it doesn't make sense, it's a reductio ad absurdum, but of a pretty absurd characterisation of dualism from the start. Will bow to lukas on who Smullyan's actual target is, but if it's epiphenomenalism why not say so?

Not to spoil the fun, but if the experience of annihilating one's soul was supposed to be fully detectable by the one who took the drug, why would the dualist, upon waking, not have noticed the effect of the drug injected during the night? And if the effect was not supposed to be detectable, why would the dualist have been disappointed in not detecting any effect?

The stated effect of the pill is that it leaves the body acting just as if it still had a soul, as though nothing had changed. So despite there being no mind/soul/consciousness there anymore, the soulless body acts out the same disappointment as the dualist naturally would have had the pill not had an effect.

Is there really a philosophical point to this story? It reads to me more like a joke than a parable. It isn't really a reductio against dualism, just a demonstration of a funny scenario that's consistent with dualism.

Version I found ends with "doesn't that make you think there's something wrong with dualism?"

Scratches chin, raises eyebrow

Dude was probably doing pretty good that one day after the injection but before the pilltake, maybe he just didnt notice

So mind and subjective experience are two different things? Then what is mind, if not subjective experience?

Imagine a sleepwalker in a totally dreamless sleep. Some sleepwalkers just get up and wander, but some can talk, listen, respond, etc. If you imagine a dreamless sleepwalker that can do everything a normal person can, you have a philosophical zombie - mind but no subjective experience.

if it's epiphenomenalism why not say so?

Well, I guess I'm inferring that it's epiphenomenalism that he's complaining about, because that's the version of dualism that operates the way he describes. If the story didn't happen in an epiphenomenal world, after taking the potion the body would act differently.