I've been reading Douglas Hofstadter's book, I Am a Strange Loop, lately, and wanted to take an idea of his off on a tangent. Dr. Hoftsadter is a Professor of Cognitive Science and writes about complex ideas in ways that laymen can understand, or at least get the gist of, by using analogies and contrived narratives. His books are great, and if I was stranded on a deserted island, given one book, I'd probably request his most famous work, GΓΆdel, Escher, Bach.

And if you happen to be Meta, Goji, SexyPiranha, or anyone else that likes stuff they post about, please do yourself a favor and purchase I Am a Strange Loop or GEB right now.

So anyways, Hofstadter cites a music critic that describes a piece of music as so complex that some people are just incapable of performing it, regardless of practice, because they lack a "large enough" soul. This guy's from the early 1900s so just play along. Hofstadter rolls with this idea, and expounds on it by describing people as having varying levels of "souledness", on some sort of scale, maybe from 0-100%, or maybe on a scale like an IQ. And by the way, we're not talking about the flimsy religious concept of the soul, we're talking about a legitimate aspect of humans that is often conflated with consciousness, personhood, humanity, etc. He is, after all, a cognitive scientist attempting to root out the workings of the human mind.

He talks about how at conception a human embryo has effective zero soul, and a grown, learned adult would have a level of souledness approaching the high end of averages for humans. But then you can lose souledness as you change, and goes on to say that the elderly or infirm, near the end of their life in a largely vegetative or dying state could be effectively at zero, too. Someone in the late stages of Alzheimer's would fall into this category. Once someone reaches a peak, around the end of their development (the human brain stops developing around age 28), it's not likely for their souledness to go much higher.

This might imply that he sees a person of high 'souledness' as being of a higher utility than a lower one, but he discusses the potential for a person of lower souledness to develop a high level than that other person. To clear it up, we'll use a two-year-old and a 22 year-old. The 22-year-old clearly has more of a soul than the two-year-old, but if I forced you to choose one to kill, you wouldn't immediately choose the two-year-old, or choose it at all. You may recognize the ability of a two-year-old to grow into a much better person than the 22-year-old, and that may give it a higher level of utility than the 22-year-old. We tend to think of utility as existing only in the present, when it should be viewed like a financial investment which fluctuates over time.

This thread isn't meant to ask a question (and frankly, I don't know what to ask). Just respond to what the previous paragraph gets you thinking about. If this sounds like a load of garbage, that's fine. This isn't a veiled discussion of abortion, though you can bring it up.

Sounds quite Nietzschean, I like it.

This is no time for brevity.

I can guarantee I'll have a response to this sometime within this century

Quote from: Meta Cognition on February 15, 2015, 02:36:10 PM

Quote from: HurtfulTurkey on February 15, 2015, 02:33:49 PM

Quote from: Meta Cognition on February 15, 2015, 01:54:06 PM

Sounds quite Nietzschean, I like it.

This is no time for brevity.

Your sentence was shorter than mine.

Technically untrue, both were six words.

Did you do that on purpose?

Gais pls

been meaning to read this one too. maybe after this super busy semester.