Dale did get picked up in Ayn Rand. so if you're in social media, go put your comments in that group

I think Kurzwiel's idea that we will be able to put our brain in silicon is overly optimistic. He does have a very interesting on what is "you" but, you would not be the same person if you have had a different body.

This may pose and interesting question in the future, but for now you are an integrated whole. You may be able to do without some parts of your body. But you cannot exist without your body or your mind.

Yes, but it is not obvious to Jeremy Bentham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bent... or to Auguste compte http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Auguste_Com...

This is so basic that it should not even have needed to be said.

hear hear

I think that we would all agree that someone has the right to sell (or give for the consideration of self-satisfaction, which is what our law currently allows) a kidney to someone else. (This is something that was 'you' but becomes 'them'. You have sold a portion of yourself.) I think we would agree that if you had your brain transferred into someone else's body, 'you' would still be the same. (And you could sell the 175 lbs of your old body as catfood, if you wanted to. It is still your possession...unless someone else's brain is transplanted into it. So now we have refined the 'body' down to being 'the brain'.) Now we come down to the corner case: the brain itself. If it were possible to replicate all of the information and connections that are in your brain into a silicon medium (not currently technically possible, but certainly imaginable)...then I think there would be 'two' of 'you': the 'you' that had the continuity still in the brain and the 'xerox you' in silicon. The 'xerox you' would be a mind that was separated from the body, but in a real sense, not as a mystical soul.

The xerox you would not own the flesh body, which would be still owned by the bio-brain, but xerox you would still own its 'silicon self'.

Thus I think that the mind and the body are potentially separable, and any discussion of self-ownership should take this into account.

Jan

Objectivist groups on FB are not posting it as too contraversial

I was pleasantly surprised by the article. I thought it was going to be a progressive smear-piece on the idea of self-ownership.

There is a world of difference between the right to life and self-ownership. Yes, self-ownership does raise the specter of slavery, but dropping that term and talking only about the right to life ignores the issue of slavery completely. Maybe it even tacitly allows for it.

I agree. The communists only need their stupid ideology. Often, arguments with really stupid, megalomaniacs end in either frustration, or you wanting to b!tch slap the hell out of them in a vain attempt to make them wise up.

A good essay, and a good point.

thanks No I am sure you are right. But we need a logical basis to argue from.

Wow. Deep. That was very insightful, but unfortunately, such logical arguments would fall on the deaf ears of communists in our courts and on crapitol hill.

And yet neither understand that one without the other is contradictory nor will they admit that either is a denial of individual freedom.

for clarification, these are Rand's words not dbs. I was getting excited there, for a moment :)

Yes, i think you have a good point. Rand called it the Mind Body Dichotomy. And of course they say the mind cannot be owned, but a disembodied mind is ghost.

Both [conservatives and liberals] hold the same premise—the mind-body dichotomy—but choose opposite sides of this lethal fallacy.

The conservatives want freedom to act in the material realm; they tend to oppose government control of production, of industry, of trade, of business, of physical goods, of material wealth. But they advocate government control of man’s spirit, i.e., man’s consciousness; they advocate the State’s right to impose censorship, to determine moral values, to create and enforce a governmental establishment of morality, to rule the intellect. The liberals want freedom to act in the spiritual realm; they oppose censorship, they oppose government control of ideas, of the arts, of the press, of education (note their concern with “academic freedom”). But they advocate government control of material production, of business, of employment, of wages, of profits, of all physical property—they advocate it all the way down to total expropriation.

khalling: I can follow db's reasoning and argument, but I wonder if the disagreement from many doesn't have to do with a definition or confusion over it; of self, I, me, etc., i.e. the entity of a man as a total sum deriving from his rational and reasoning mind exercising his life as one and as integral of body vs. the concept of self as a soul inhabiting a body as in religious belief systems. It's always struck me in discussions and debates about this issue that many have difficulty with integrating the concepts mind/I as non-separate from the biological entity, man. Others seem to believe primarily that mind/soul, the I of which they speak, exist in some dimension outside of the physical body, even arriving at concepts of 'You may own my body, but not my mind/heart/soul/spirit, etc.'

I think as long as some think af 'themselves' as separate from the lives of their bodies, they're never going to understand or accept the reality of self ownership.