Well my self is also embodied in my actual flesh. I am my scars and gut flora and muscles and genetic predispositions.
My self isn’t even fully contained in my body! My self is also in my living space and my family and my friends and my coworkers and all my other social connections. I am I because of everything and everyone around me.
And I am also my historical and material context, what makes me “me” can’t be separated from my class position within this epoch of capitalism.
But those, too, can be simulated as more data points. I really don’t think there’s anything that can’t be represented as data.
Fully on board the ontic structural realism and extended cognition bus. Just pointing out that it absolutely is a metaphysical position, and that giving arguments for it is doing metaphysics.
Fair. Metaphysics actually seems to be a fuzzy term: it can mean studying the relationship between mind and matter i.e. what I’m doing (although really I’m saying that “mind” can not be separated from matter, they are the same thing) and speculation about scientifically unanswerable questions i.e. beyond physics. I only mean to say that there’s nothing nonphyiscal or immaterial about the self. It can be contained and explained purely through materialism.
I agree entirely; philosophy of science is philosophy enough, to paraphrase Quine. If you haven’t read it (and are interested in some pretty hard-core contemporary philosophical elucidation of this stuff), you might enjoy James Ladyman’s book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized.
Well my self is also embodied in my actual flesh. I am my scars and gut flora and muscles and genetic predispositions.
My self isn’t even fully contained in my body! My self is also in my living space and my family and my friends and my coworkers and all my other social connections. I am I because of everything and everyone around me.
And I am also my historical and material context, what makes me “me” can’t be separated from my class position within this epoch of capitalism.
But those, too, can be simulated as more data points. I really don’t think there’s anything that can’t be represented as data.
Fully on board the ontic structural realism and extended cognition bus. Just pointing out that it absolutely is a metaphysical position, and that giving arguments for it is doing metaphysics.
Fair. Metaphysics actually seems to be a fuzzy term: it can mean studying the relationship between mind and matter i.e. what I’m doing (although really I’m saying that “mind” can not be separated from matter, they are the same thing) and speculation about scientifically unanswerable questions i.e. beyond physics. I only mean to say that there’s nothing nonphyiscal or immaterial about the self. It can be contained and explained purely through materialism.
I agree entirely; philosophy of science is philosophy enough, to paraphrase Quine. If you haven’t read it (and are interested in some pretty hard-core contemporary philosophical elucidation of this stuff), you might enjoy James Ladyman’s book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized.