Things that make you think

[Wudang]

Dancing David in this post (http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&postid=1870234240#post1870234240) gave an interesting analogy about a blind man that made me think about a few things.
Similarly there's an analogy about a mechanic with an artificial arm working on a car. Is the artificial arm part of the organism manipulating the environment or part of the environment that the organism is manipulating?
What analogies or hypothetical questions have got you thinking?

[Wudang]

Good grief, replying to my own post!
What I'm thinking about are boundary conditions - where do you draw the line?

[neutrino_cannon]

I'm reminded of the example of a wooden ship which has panels replaced every so often, until all the original material has been replaced.

Is it still the same ship?

[Wudang]

Yes, or the brush that has lasted for x years. Of course it's had n new handles and y new heads but it's still the same brush.

[epepke]

That's only half the thinking.

The other half, and I think the more important, is thinking about what these categorizations (the same ship/brush/etc.) tell us about how the brain works. One of the mistakes that philosophers often make is confusing conceptualizations of reality with reality itself, but your brain is also part of reality, and how it relates to the rest of the stuff in reality.

[neutrino_cannon]

Any analysis of how we react to anything would uncover underlying truths of how that lump of (mostly) lipids behind our eyes does its thing.

Another problem is the boarders between species/subspecies. Those are hard to determine, and far more blurred than our system of taxonomy would lead one to believe.

It's remarkable subjective in fact.

[metropolis_part_one]

I'm reminded of the example of a wooden ship which has panels replaced every so often, until all the original material has been replaced.

Is it still the same ship?

That example can be applied to humans. After a period of so many years (I can't remember exactly how many), every atom in your body will have been replaced by a new one. Are you the same person?

[The Don]

I think it's all about where YOU draw the line.

If the mechanic is comfortable with her prosthesis then she will consider it to be part of her body, if she is not then she will view it as a tool. You sometimes hear speortspeople say that the bat/club/ball felt like part of their own body.

With the brush analogy, it depends how emotionally attached you are to the brush. If you are, then you will consider it to be the same brush, if not then you'll recognise that it is entirely different.

It's like in sport. My favourite football (soccer) team has changed players, coach, stadium, sponsor and owner over the past 20 years yet I see them as the same team. My favourite hockey team did the same, but as I'm less attached emotionally then I stopped supporting them - turned out it was the players rather than the team to which I had an attachment.

IMO there is no objective way of defining any of this

[Wudang]

Originally posted by The Don
IMO there is no objective way of defining any of this

Fair enough, but I was less looking for resolutions of the above than for similar examples that helped you clarify how you thought about certain things.
I'm not explaining myself well, am I? :(

[jimmygun]

In regard to the boat and replacing the parts, what if I rented you the new parts that you need. At what point does the boat become mine? If all the original parts are replaced by rental parts, do I get ownership of the whole boat?

[Upchurch]

Originally posted by metropolis_part_one

That example can be applied to humans. After a period of so many years (I can't remember exactly how many), every atom in your body will have been replaced by a new one. Are you the same person? Actually, I think the only part of the body that is regularly replaced is the skin (and hair, I suppose) and I think that happens something like every seven years or so.

[DVFinn]

After a period of so many years (I can't remember exactly how many), every atom in your body will have been replaced by a new one. Are you the same person?

Then why do I still have my tattoo's?

[Iamme]

DVFinn---Ya. I too have heard that every cell in your body is replaced about every 7 years. Upchurch must be right. Otherwise, DVFinn...I guess your tattoo should have disappeared.
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The person who said, "What goes up, must come down"...must have been born before they invented spacecraft.

Is the air in the sky, the same air in the sky? My previous comment made me think about this. If air is a gas that rose to the stratosphere...then you could suppose at some time that it would come down, because the air out there is still under the force of earth's gravitational pull. So is there some form of recycling going on?...where it returns to the ground, and fresh air goes up there? Or, is the air that is up there, the same air that's been up there for the last number of millenias?...and that there is some other force that counteracts gravity, that keeps it up there? (Sort of like how bouyancy keeps objects afloat in water...balloons afloat in the air...or whatever.

[Yahweh]

Originally posted by neutrino_cannon
I'm reminded of the example of a wooden ship which has panels replaced every so often, until all the original material has been replaced.

Is it still the same ship?
Only if you wish upon a star... and wish really really hard...

[Iamme]

I'm pretty sure that if you turn on a light, for just the most split of a second, and then turn it off...that the light will continue to travel without having to be pushed along by the light behind it. That said...when you turn on light, it has to travel somewhere. Where does it go? Well, it will be absorbed by some materials. if it misses all material, I suppose it could zip out into space.

Now suppose you wanted to see if you could trap the light. I thought of something interesting. What if you had two mirrors facing each other. What if you shone a light into the one mirror at a perfect straight-on angle. Would the light bounce back and forth between the mirrors for some great time period? Or, if you shone the light into the one mirror at a teeeeny angle (so that the flashlight itself would not interfere with the beam). And the mirror was very wide. In either case...would the beam of light still be there, so that you could jump inbetween the mirrors and have the beam fly into your eye, after a certain length of time?

Or...we know that certain materials reflect light very well without absorbing it. That said...why couldn't you line a jar with something like chrome or mirror material. Then, shine light in the jar and 'bottle it'. Why can't you do that? You almost know that ain't goona work. But why wouldn't it? Where would the light go? (note, the lid/cover ALSO must be reflective.) You would think that you could take that jar into a dark closet and open it up, and light would come out.

Which now has me thinking of trying to bottle a fart. I suppose you COLD bottle that odor in an air-tight jar...couldn't you? Could you imagine someone building a new building with a cornerstone where they place a time capsule inside...with a jar of bottled up fart? :D

[Marquis de Carabas]

Similarly there's an analogy about a mechanic with an artificial arm working on a car. Is the artificial arm part of the organism manipulating the environment or part of the environment that the organism is manipulating?

I'd recommend you read Dawkins' The Extended Phenotype for a pretty good consideration of this type of thing.

[T'ai Chi]

Originally posted by DVFinn

Then why do I still have my tattoo's?

I don't think all atoms of your body get replaced. :)

Someone said it depends on where you draw the line. I think the question is is there a line?

[Yahweh]

Originally posted by DVFinn
Then why do I still have my tattoo's?
If the atoms from a tattoo get replaced with same kind of atoms, it shouldnt remove the tattoo...

[/vague]

Edited to correct typo...

[Dancing David]

Things that make me think:

Mecrutio's question: How do I know that I am not a p-zombie?

What gets me wondering is just simple stuff
like photons, like the ones in our sun, they are generated deep inside the sun and take like a million years to reach the surface, and then they whizz through space for millions and millions of years, and then I can be just fortunate enough to see one. Wow.

Every atom in body , unless there is some lithium in me that is from the big bang, has been generated in the death of a star. Wow.

What about those freaking quarks, they drive me nuts, you get them close together and they are free to move, pull them apsrt and they loose that freedom, it is like the whole universe pushes on them. And why the heck are they ractional, that is so cool, definite commitee decision at the creation.

And what about inertia, I mean what the heck is it?

[The Don]

Originally posted by Yahweh

If the atoms from a tattoo get replaced with same kind of atoms, it shouldnt remove the tattoo...

[/vague]

Edited to correct typo...

The ink is between the epidermis (which is sloughed off on a regular basis) and the dermis (which is very stable). Tattoos can "smudge" over a long time.

Link here

http://people.howstuffworks.com/tattoo4.htm

[ceo_esq]

Originally posted by Wudang
Similarly there's an analogy about a mechanic with an artificial arm working on a car. Is the artificial arm part of the organism manipulating the environment or part of the environment that the organism is manipulating?I would think the artificial arm qualifies as a tool, which in my view is a category of thing occupying the boundary between organism and environment.

[DVFinn]

I worked in a tattoo shop for several years and I'm familiar with why it persists despite the normal shedding of skin cells. I brought it up only to make a point about the notion that all the atoms in the human body are regularly replaced.

It has that nonsensical ring to it. It sounds feasable that your tissues might all be replaced over time, but what biological process would replace the ink in the tattoos with identical molecules in the same position?

I'm fairly certain the whole idea of all your atoms being replaced is garbage. Certainly many tissues are being constantly replaced, but the atom thing is something you usually hear from new age types.

I have no evidence one way or the other, so I stand ready to be corrected.

[DVFinn]

Or...we know that certain materials reflect light very well without absorbing it. That said...why couldn't you line a jar with something like chrome or mirror material. Then, shine light in the jar and 'bottle it'. Why can't you do that? You almost know that ain't goona work. But why wouldn't it? Where would the light go? (note, the lid/cover ALSO must be reflective.) You would think that you could take that jar into a dark closet and open it up, and light would come out.

Lamme,

There actually is something to what you are suggesting, however it is not so simple as trapping light in a container which is 100% reflective. As I remember there need to be a quantity of "black bodies" involved which will absord and release the photons. I am only a casual physics enthusiast so please don't ask me to explain as I don't claim to fully understand the concept. I'm fairly certain I came across this in reading something about Planck's work.

[SkepticalScience]

Lamme,

I think you need to factor in heat. The light beam might bounce around, but i am pretty sure that each bounce would release some heat, and over timer, there won't be the light beam. And since light travel at . . . .well, the seed of light, it will release heat super fast. So you shouldn't see it at all.

But I am not a physicist, but that makes sense to me.