Rico Penguin

  I’ve been on a journey of sorts through my life, to prove to folks that likely nothing is black and white. Now honestly, could something like “How many people are you?” be that complicated of a question? I mean obviously, you are one person, I am one person, it seems so simple.

  Well lets go on a very short journey, through an entirely plausible series of events, merely limited by current medical technology. I’ll then ask a few simple questions and we’ll see how straight forward they are.

  For reasons unknown, Markus, has entered a hospital to have a peculiar surgery done. The hospital is going to cut Markus completely in half from tip of his head to his groin. The brain itself can survive as damaged as 50%, which means that a perfect cut with optimum tools and technology would leave two halves that only are limited by the organs that remain. We would need to either build or donate an extra heart and any other organs that are not perfectly split. Essentially the ‘open’ side would then be closed with a bionic enclosure. Nothing fancy, an apparatus that helps enclose both sides so that now we have two living halves that both function.

  My first question is a simple one. What would each side know? Would one side be able to speak and the other not? Does the brain store certain information in a raid between both halves? What would the halves say to one another?

  Perhaps some deeper more philosophical questions. Would the halves themselves feel one another? In theory if we have a soul we would be dealing with one entity that now experiences two separate sets of sensation. What metaphysical ramifications come from each not communicating with the other?

  Now I ask you. Given this situation that could quite easily happen with some small gains in the medical field. Is this just one person or two people? If you argue that it is one person, would you arrest one half if the other (unbeknownst to it) robbed a bank? If you didn’t arrest both of them then you are acknowledging that they are both separate people.

  But now we have a new question. At what point did we take one person and make them two? What was it that defines a person? Is it simply the bridge between the two hemispheres? Or is it merely how many functioning bodies are present. In the face of the split man you have taken one functioning body and made it into two with a few modifications.

  So that’s my conundrum. A problem that could be so easily fixed by just having a brain that does not operate when the hemispheres are disconnected from one another. This of course isn’t my finest work but the simple scenario and questions should keep folks busy which is what is important.

  Whenever a person of interest (generally coined ‘celebrity’) they are put under an unusually high level of excess and I feel unnecessary stress. One thing in particular is the idea of ‘thinking before you speak’. For the vast majority of people I do think there is a level of thought always joined with the act of communication it is something of a necessity. We all make mistakes in what we are saying, that is to say simply that occasionally we say orange when we meant to say carpool or something like that.

  What I don’t feel is fair however is to assume that words have power. Words are no different than currency, essentially all the money you own is only worth as much as you and your social region believe they are worth. There is also that whole exchange rate globally but for the most part a nation could ignore that and still function pretty well. All our words and the emotions we tie to them are entirely personal, there is no automatic response to any words. If there was telling a baby with a sweet tone to go fuck themselves would not elicit the same response as it does from anyone who has been ‘lectured’ or ‘indoctrinated’ into the local lingo. Indeed cursing is all in all just as harmless as discussing vegetable preferences.

  However we in a pretty sizeable amount give far far too much credit to words. What most recently elicited this train of thought was that “Special Olympics” comment of the President on the Tonight Show. He equated his bowling skills to something you would see in the Special Olympics, a simple enough example that produces a relatively vivid and likely consistent image amongst anyone who hears it.

  People are up in arms about how he should apologize and that while it would have been ok for him to say that before he was President it is not alright anymore. Which to me is highly confusing. If an action is not alright in one instance I would assume that it should either be wrong in all instances or be reexamined.

  A persons feelings about themselves, about their world, and about basically anything should not be so easily swayed by the simple speaking of others. This is akin to walking outside, feeling a cool breeze and killing yourself because of it. It’s a radical response to a relatively unimportant gesture. While of course these are all just personal opinion and suggestions it does pay to point out that my own personal life became easily exponentially easier to maintain once I stopped caring about the random banter of others.

  Words are wonderful in their artistic quality, but just as you shouldn’t stop eating or lose your self confidence when you see the Mona Lisa, you also shouldn’t be dropping proverbial bricks every time someone says something. Especially considering how often these responses end up being hypocritical. You can’t be treated fairly if everyone feels you need to be treated special. To put it simply, if you can make comments about anything you can make comments about everything. Anything less and we risk (and indeed do) begin enforcing slanted and almost exclusively hypocritical rulings on the realm and limitations of language.

Since the dawn of the first civilizations, and likely before, there was the question of how to most effectively govern. Whereas a migrating people can place distance between them and those they disagree with the nature of sedentary societies places us in the position of addressing problems and addressing them in the fairest possible manner. There have been no less than 50 globally recognized forms of governing bodies, each has attempted to address this problem, from Adhocracy to Timocracy the goal has been to provide the most efficient form of government. To provide the most appreciated environment with the least amount of resources and to cause the lowest possible levels of dissent amongst the citizens. Few things end a governing body quicker than a nation of unhappy citizens. The goal of this paper is to discuss one important problem, known as the Principle of Fairness, this is a problem of when actions or situations are just and likewise when all parties have officially recognized and agreed to the actions or situations. Likewise while discussing this issue it will establish some Locke’s and Nozick’s principles and show how they can be used in much broader ways than previously proposed.

The first important venture is to establish what exactly the Principle of Fairness is: If a group of persons (any number above 1) are engaged in a mutually beneficial, cooperative venture, which requires restrictions of their liberties , then all those who have submitted to the restrictions are entitled to the following benefits so as to make the agreement fair:

· All in the agreement must receive the benefits.

· All parties must be made better off by the entire deal.

· If the above two do not detail your interaction with the deal then the agreement has nothing to do with you.

· Finally you cannot be forced (or coerced in any manner) into the deal. IE. All parties must consent.

Some important conundrums need to be immediately addressed before moving on. Preconceived notions of right and wrong may need to be placed aside to freely examine this topic. It is possible to create a situation where slavery would fit into the above stipulations, which places those supporting it in a tough spot. I a set of guidelines can be treated in a manner where they become unjust then those guidelines require further detail and examination before they can be properly used in a civilization.

For example if a farmer has copious supplies of food while nearby citizens are on the brink of starvation the farmer could provide the citizens with a deal that they will sign on as slaves and work at the whims of the farmer. In return they will be fed when necessary so as to not die. In this example all parties agree fairly, each is better off by the deal, and there is no force or coercion involved in the deal. So in this way slavery can be a fair agreement in at the very least one case.

Secondly we must address the situation of justness, or justice, as these are topics that become highly subjective. For the sake of uniformity I will use the definition of justice in holdings defined by Nozick. It has three stages (or principles): Firstly is the principle of acquisition, for acquisition to be just it essentially must be gained from nature and be something nobody else has ever owned before. Likewise if using personal skills to convert a piece of nature you are establishing that it is yours, for example carpentry turns wood (a natural resource) into a structure (a personal good) this is a concept championed by Locke and is known as the "Theory of Property". Second is the principle of transfer which is just iff (if and only if) it is done voluntarily. This principle and all others used in this paper will assume a state of properly functioning cognition. Thirdly is the principle of rectification which requires the prompt repair of previous unjust acquisitions or transfers. Such as giving a merchant the money they undercharged you after a transaction.

Now that we’ve established a definition of justice, which while designed for transactions of goods, does well in all situations involving just interactions we can move on to the four most prominent definitions of consent.

· They honestly assert to everybody that they want to be in the deal.

OR

· Consent is when you accept the benefits in full knowledge of the deal.

OR

· By Enjoying the benefits they consent to the negatives.

OR

· They would rather be in the deal than not and they accept the benefits in full knowledge of the deal (In Layman’s; Only pay for the services you agree with).

The issue of honesty is one that is brought up both by Rawls in the "Theory of Justice" and by Nozick in "Anarchy, State, and Utopia." For Rawls it was covered by the hypothetical Original Position, in essence this places those establishing an agreement in a position of full cognitive range but removes their personal selfishness that leads to unequal distribution of essential resource (IE. Primary Goods). This paper will assume a similar position to show that even at a near best case scenario these systems may come up short.

There is a level of omniscience that is required for a being to earnestly assert a decision without unknowingly placing themselves in a position that they would not retrospectively have entered. It is not unusual for a person to enter into an agreement without realizing the full extent of their involvement in the deal. Be it from overlooking fine print in a contract or more reasonably being easily distracted.

For example, if there was a group of friends at a bar that decided they wanted to drink pitchers of beer for the rest of the night and that it would be best if all of them one after one another paid for a pitcher. This way for the cost of one pitcher (per person) they would get a return of five pitchers. On the surface this is a pretty fair trade. However in this agreement one of the people did not realize that they would have to pay for a pitcher. Perhaps they misunderstood or perhaps the decision for each person to pay was an implied cost of entering into the deal. By this definition of consent they have entered into the deal and have thus agreed to the position of purchasing a pitcher when it becomes their turn however equally so they appear to be a victim of circumstance.

Further still it could simply be a case of cultural differences. During a trip to Japan I decided that it would be nice of me to clean up the dining area after we ate. To a casual onlooker the response looked like I had beaten their first born. This was a simple case of cultural differences, whereas in the west it is implied that such a deed is a courteous act, in the east it can come off as insulting for the guest to clean the owners home.

This form of consent only functions properly in a position where absolutely nothing is implied, because humans are lacking omniscience all parts of the agreement must be laid out bluntly. Likewise this definition is victim of carelessness, accidental omissions can greatly affect the final decision of party members.

This problem is addressed by the second definition in which consent is only achieved when the member has not only asserted that they accept the deal but likewise they have accepted it with full knowledge of the deal. The goal here is to eliminate the necessity of an impossible trait (namely omniscience) by creating an agreement where all unmentioned information is superfluous to whether or not the member will agree to the decision.

Returning once more to the pub we look at the same situation but this time following the second definitions take on consent. This time it was made absolutely certain that everyone knew they would have to make a financial investment into the deal. They would buy in a clockwise order and continue until the end of the night. Everyone gives a very obvious form of consent such as verbal or written and the participation begins. What happens however when they reach the end of the night and one person has purchased less than anyone else? Or perhaps they go in such a manner that one person never buys one. In either case one member (at the very least) always comes out better than the rest of the group, they have all the gains of the investment, with less or none of the negatives.

This particular problem is merely a nuisance in these small numbers however the litigation required when dealing with millions of people could be nearly impossible. Indeed the most common form of this agreement, known as a loophole, is the cause of more than a billion dollars annually of lost income for the US government. Whenever a rule set does not work on the micro level and cannot function on the macro (or vice versa) it requires reworking.

Once again this problem is addressed by the third definition of consent. If a member enjoys the benefits they are consenting to the negatives, by consenting to the negatives one must assume that those negatives will befall them. So now the parties are honestly joining in the agreement, they are doing so with full knowledge of the deal, and finally they are doing so with full consent of the negatives of the deal. On first glance this appears to be a pretty solid deal. However just as the previous form of consent was weak depending on the size of the party, this particular formation is weak when examining it over a period of extended time.

Again at the pub we have a group that has agreed upon buying pitchers for the group, each has accepted that it will be a financial investment, and whenever someone doesn’t pay equally to the rest they start off the series of buys the next time the group returns. However the deal is made so that each is contractually bound to return to this setup every night for the next 5 years. There is absolutely no coercion and all members enter into the agreement with full understanding of the positives and negatives they will be receiving as a result of the deal. However a year or two into the deal one of the members has a change of heart. Let’s say that the member has recently become a parent and must be home (and sober) to properly take care of their child at night. At the point of original agreement they could very well have had no idea that they would be becoming a parent, they did not knowingly consent to a situation that they would soon have to break.

Indeed it is not at all uncommon for people to regret a decision after a certain amount of time under the ramifications of that agreement. Intuitively the new parent is more a victim of circumstance than an unjust or unfair dealer in the agreement. As before, a system that does not function properly in a reasonably present situation, such as the one outlined above, is not a system that should be adhered to. It should be examined and refined to more completely cover all possible outcomes and to produce the least amount of situations where someone is placed unknowingly into an unjust, unfair, or otherwise punishable position.

  To be continued and finished tomorrow. I just noticed that it was going on pretty long. I have to reach 4k words with this essay, it is currently 19 words below 2k. So this is going to be quite difficult without either having an epiphany or BSng…the latter of which I am not a big fan of doing.

  This is the last topic on Time Travel for quite sometime I promise. This has nothing to do with Fatalism because I feel I’ve already explained why its absolutely positively stupid (to me at the very least). This is instead how I figure time travel would actually work and why it would not or should not create paradoxes.

  I picture a time traveler as someone who can separate themselves from reality, if I’m to understand that the universe really does ‘vibrate’ in some fashion than perhaps the time traveler would vibrate in a opposing manner so as to ‘separate’ from reality. Next we have some sort of function, device, or means that we send time either into ‘fast forward’ or ‘rewind’. In the case of fast forward you send time as it is into an accelerated fashion, or at the very least an illusion of such caused by the beings separation from time and space (or at least this series of time and space) and they can pop in at a future point. They ceased to exist the moment they separated from the timeline physically, one would assume that all their friends and family would wonder where the hell they went.

  When going ‘back in time’ what literally would happen is that all things would do their inverse, exhales would become inhales, matter splicing would begin to rejoin and all motion in the universe would flip into reverse, genes would repaid, cancers would degrade, and time itself would literally begin to reverse. We’ll consider the point that you hit the rewind as point A and the point that you end up at as point B.

  All things between point A and B would cease to exist. Essentially these things have no longer happened, you could even go back in time and kill your parents, you are not bound by the laws that they must be alive for you to exist because you have separated from time and space to go back. In fact technically you haven’t been born yet (in the physical sense obviously you exist). All that would happen is that you would not be born again.

   One would assume that you would stop yourself from doing what you did so as to not make you cease to exist if they too jumped back in time (because in this new timeline you began existing the moment you popped back in, that was essentially your birth, so now you are part of time). If we were to assume that multiple people separated themselves from the universe and were in a parallel existence of some kind the traveling of past and present would only be exclusive, in the sense that you could either go back or forward and you could only stop at one point. Think of it like driving a car, no matter where everyone wants to go you all end up where the car stops (assuming nobody hops out) likewise hopping out of a car while moving is likely to end your life.

  I’d like to work this out further so I was wondering if people could ask some questions about certain functions so I could explain them. I’ve likely not explained something that is important because it seems obvious to me.

  There appears to me to be a great bit of confusion when looking into the term of freedom. Something I feel that should be addressed for future discussion. There will be certainly some subjectivity however I hope that it will be treated as objective as it can be . I will certainly try my best to keep it as objective as I can (which in itself is somewhat impossible given the conversation).

   This is a good visual example of what I’m about to explain. Think of the above image as describing the freedom of choice between two options given their outcome (assuming you know it). In particular while I’m not a fan of digging into religious discussions (mainly because it tends to get bitter even if you don’t want it to) but I feel a particular ‘choice’ is very useful for illustrating my point.

  For a choice to be free it must not, in the case of a fully and properly functional organism, contradict the very nature of self preservation. A praying mantis male may sacrifice its own being but it does so in an act to feed it female and to press on the likelihood that it’s seed/genes (and in essence its very being) will pass on. In many cases the actions an organism does that appear to contradict it’s natural inclination for survival are indeed actions that are required for such. Drinking from a stream that has a predator in them is a necessity where the danger of the predator does not outweigh the danger of dying of thirst.

  This is where the image comes into play. It works in a negative correlation (or sorts), the further you move in either direction (to the left towards option A or to the right for option B) the less likely the opposing option becomes. If you enter the red range of the Freedometer you have essentially left the realm of freedom. It’s not necessarily that once you pass 50% you are no longer free in all cases, I’m using the simplest example to help explain my point with the least amount of thought (so you can use your extra resources to expand the concept).

  In essence if you place a gazelle in the situation where it must drink or it will die, the odds of dying while drinking are outweighed, if they were not outweighed it would not do what it does. This is why some animals do indeed starve or dehydrate (I imagine there is a better term) to death, the odds of them being eaten far exceed the odds of them dying at the current moment. It’s a sad state of affairs.

  If you are presented with a ’simple choice’ one with two outcomes. You either believe in a single an entity, or you spend the eternity damned to a torturous nothingness. You are no longer provided a free choice, you are given an ultimatum. It is a choice only in the most literal of terms, but it is not free. In the case of an ultimatum you are placed in the extreme red zones, a point in which no properly thinking and functioning beings would choose the other option. Whenever you are placed in a position in which one of the options is not an option that the organism would choose it is no longer a choice and the illusion of freedom is the only freedom that is truly present.

  I am not sure if this has made anything more clear, but at the very least I’d hope that the next time someone reads about a ‘free choice’ that they remember the Freedometer and remember that at a certain point even a choice is not a choice.

  We’ll begin with a story, in (large) part inspired by Professor Markosian. At the beginning of our class on Wednesday we were presented with the following argument known as “The Argument from Conceivability.”

The Argument from Conceivability
(1) I can conceive of existing without my body.
(2) If (1), then it is possible for me to exist without my body.
(3) If it is possible for me to exist without my body, then I am not identical to my body.
(4) If I am not identical to my body, then Materialism is false.
––––––––––––––––––––––
(5) Materialism is false.

  What I failed to explain clearly was however explained perfectly by the professor. He argued that proposition 1 of the argument is flawed. We cannot conceive existing without our bodies, we just think we can. He used the following example which he dubbed “The Lois Lane Argument”. If you don’t know even vaguely who the following characters are…shame on you!

The Lois Lane Argument
(1) Lois can conceive of Superman existing without Clark Kent.
(2) If (1), then it is possible for Superman to exist without Clark Kent.
(3) If it is possible for Superman to exist without Clark Kent, then Superman is not identical to Clark Kent.
(4) If Superman is not identical to Clark Kent, then the Superman = Clark Kent theory is false.
––––––––––––––––––––––
(5) The Superman = Clark Kent theory is false.

  He followed this with a story which I’ll attempt to recreate. Say the Lois decided she in fact wanted to believe that both Clark Kent and Superman are different people, she would verify this belief with the following (somewhat morbid) idea. We are at the funeral of Clark Kent, he has been cremated and is most certainly gone. At this funeral Lois stands beside Superman looking at the Urn of Clark Kent.

  In this example she is not accomplishing the first proposition. She is not conceiving Superman existing without Clark Kent, they are one in the same, as she creates the thought she is placing Superman (who is Clark Kent) into the thought mistakenly assuming that he is a separate being. At least one person in the class argued that they could easily think of them as two different beings, which is true (they being the student) but I feel I know why.

  We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Superman and Clark Kent are a single entity. As Bill of Kill Bill said “Peter Parker was just Peter Parker before the Spider bit him. But Superman, he was always Superman, even beneath the guise of Clark Kent he is still Superman.” We know that they are the same entity and thusly with this information we can manipulate the scenario to create a situation where in fact they are different individuals.

  Lois however does not know. When she creates the scenario she is placing her Superman (who is Clark Kent) into the funeral looking at an Urn of himself. She is creating a paradox without even knowing that she has created a paradox. It is the fact that we know they are one in the same that gives us the power to separate them. Otherwise we cannot earnestly conceive it.

  Now what bothers me is the abuse of the concept of conceiving. You can indeed lie to yourself unknowingly, if you are adopted and do not know it you can earnestly believe that when you think of your biological father fighting (while using the image of your Adopted father) that it is the correct image when in fact the information you are using is false. Likewise for a while some fast food places primarily used a clay mineral for their shakes (which is why they didn’t call them milk shakes) you can imagine yourself drinking one of these and mistakenly believing it is primarily a dairy product where in fact it is a mineral based solution (the clay held its shape at room temperature much longer than a diary medium). We create illusions in our own fantasies because the information we are using is incorrect from the beginning.

  To clarify I have a strong belief that I will lay upon you all. I feel that ALL knowledge is either the product of your outside world or the product of previous information gathered from your outside world. Everything you know is manufactured from either outside stimulus or the stored information of previous outside stimulus. Likewise information carried over in your genes was stored there from your parents who either gathered there information from the outside world or from their parents genes caring it over and continuing on. It’s a constant pattern and is the entire reason we advance with our understanding of the world. We are literally building our understanding of the universe on top of previous understandings that we have about the universe. I think if you take a moment to think about it it’s pretty easy to see where I come to that bold conclusion. A Biologist can explain the transfer of base information across DNA far far far better than I can so ask them to clarify and not me.

  I am reminded of a story, that either I made up or heard from someone (I can’t tell these days too many stories), regardless of its source it still works pretty well. There is a man who walks upon the beach and see’s the corpse of a horse very near the dismembered horn of a narwhale. So close in fact that it looks as if the horn itself has fallen off of the very horse that lies there dead. The horse itself is in beautiful condition and seems to have fallen from (the conception) of heaven itself. This man happens to be a wonderful artist and goes home to draw what he felt had died upon that beach. He has know previous knowledge of narwhales, and thusly a magnificent new creature is born.

Painting by: Andy Mack 

  This man has indeed to the best of his abilities conceived of a horse with a horn using information he perceives to be true. He saw a fallen horse very near the horn that had no apparent source other than the horse. However he indeed wrong about what he is imagining. The imaginative figure is not ‘wrong’ just like there are no honest stupid questions, but in relation to reality it is indeed wrong. He thinks what he is imagining is what he saw dead upon that beach, he is entirely correct in thinking what he believes is true, he is however wrong in the fact that it is true. Much like Lois is wrong in believing that figure she is projecting in her thoughts is a figure that is separate of Superman. We however know that in both these situations what the reality is, thusly we can actually create a conception that is real.

  I may or may not have confused more people than I helped with that last example but at the very least I got to show a picture of a unicorn. So on with the discussion.

  There is one thing that is generally missing from conceived notions that are unintentional fallacies and that is specificity. Now forgive me if I use the word incorrectly but I feel that people will understand my meaning regardless (vernacular is amazing in that incorrectly using a word can still convey the same message as using the correct word for the message). I believe on surface glance that I can create images of amazingly vivid quality, in fact in my mind I can see dragons battling humans in this epic war with flames and death and maybe cheesecake. However once I attempt to get specifics, to look at that image and really scrutinize it, I find pieces fading. When I attempt to really honestly see that dragon’s face it starts to become a blur. Pieces fall off to accommodate more acuity. I believe this in part is the issue many people overlook when they think they can conceive something.

  Which leads us back to the original example. The idea is that someone can tell you a story about leaving your body, going to heaven, seeing the pearly gates, and meeting the gate keeper. If you can ‘perceive’ this then it is obviously possible, because we cannot perceive the impossible (by definition I’m sure). The idea being that if it is possible then Materialism cannot exist because Materialism says strictly that it is in no way possible.

  However in this situation you are not perceiving heaven, nor are you perceiving the experience of life after death. You are perceiving (I’ll start saying imagining cause its a quicker word for typing) a single concept of such. You are looking at an idea, not an actual thing. We can say that we can imagine an unstoppable force and an immovable object in the same existence, however in actuality these two things must be mutually exclusive. Because the results of their contact is incomprehensible…or more simply…unimaginable. However if we remain as vague as we possible can we can give the illusion of imagining. Which is a popular tactic in the metaphysics course I’m taking.

  It is the moment that you lose that specificity, that you have left the realm of true perception, and entered an illusionary sense of certainty. Now that we have reached this point I’ll quickly recap.

  I feel that all knowledge is based off either information gathered from the outside world, or previous information that was gathered from the outside world. This can be abstracted to include nitpicky things like two pieces of information previously gathered against one another but in the end it requires the outside world (you don’t create something from nothing). Secondly I feel that you can conceive something that you feel is what you are conceiving but it actually isn’t, which falls back upon the previous statement of the source of knowledge. Thirdly the introduction of ambiguity or vagueness (pick your favorite word) can create a false sense of certainty that leads to flimsy logic (or rather illogic).

  We enter now the next part of my experience. Today we began talking about another metaphysical philosophy called “Interactionism”. It quite simple goes as follows (information provided by Professor Markosian).

Interactionism: (i) People are composite objects. (ii) Each living person is composed of two parts: a mind and a body. (iii) The mind and body of a single person typically enter into two-way causal interaction.

  It’s essentially dualism with a new clause slapped on the end like trucker mud flaps. What it basically says is that we are a symbiosis of two entities, the physical self and the non-physical self. These two things interact in a causal two-way relationship. Essentially the mind communicates non-physically with your physical body and your body communicates physically with your non-physical brain (for some of you that last sentence just blew your brain into chunks for the rest let me continue to the argument). In the book the question is asked how on earth does a non-physical thing interact with a physical object. By the very natural laws that hold our universe together (well..they do something…haha) you can in no situation have a physical thing interact with a non physical object. It is an instance that is unimaginable, if you take a rather ambiguous look at it and merely allow it to happen it looks imaginable, but once again you are not actually imagining what you think you are (go back to Lois and maybe get a drink if you need a break).

  The Professor provided an equally persuasive argument in the direction of the body interacting with the mind that I feel will be a productive piece of information.

The No Interaction Argument
(1) Causal interaction between minds and bodies is inconceivable.
(2) If (1), then causal interaction between minds and bodies does not occur.
(3) If causal interaction between minds and bodies does not occur, then Interactionism is false.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
(4) Interactionism is false.

  Following this we had two major arguments, both were inherently flawed, the latter of which leads us back to the very first (I’d hope) sentence you read when you came to this particular thread: the topic header. The first argument was this. The brain (or mind) and the body interact in a fashion like Casper the friendly ghost, because as we all know he’s a good source of scientific information. Casper can will himself to be visible (a physical trait), can will himself to touch physical things (such as a Pepsi can), can will himself to no longer be visible or tangible (non physical traits), and he can even create mixtures of the two where part of him is intangible and part is tangible. The idea being that you can imagine your brain communicating with your mind/body and it makes perfect sense.

  I however think this returns us back to the Lois Lane situation. We are not in the situation of the outside entity, in the case of Lane and Kent we are outside observers looking in upon a concrete world with concrete limitations (as in there is no case where Kent is not Superman, as far as I know Superman is essentially the same guy in all the infinite DC universes even. He’s relatively consistent consistent compared to his comrades). We beyond a shadow of a doubt know what is true and false in the world of Superman, because we have direct access to the entities that created it: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Because of this we know beyond a shadow of a doubt (if one is to assume that neither of them are habitual liars) what is true and false in that universe and it is that concrete knowledge of that world that allows us to earnestly conceive of alterations to it. Unlike Lois who is naive to the unity of Kent and Superman, we know that they are the same entity, and thusly we can earnestly separate them. We have the chunks of outside information necessary to correctly fabricate the new possibility in our mind.

  Going back to Casper, we are in a position to posit that in Casper’s universe under all the known rules of that universe the intangible can communicate with the tangible. Keeping in mind that at no point does this information in any way negate our own reality or our own natural laws. Because that communication in no way breaks into our world, as I assume not one of the billions of people in the known history of humanity has ever had a real discussion with Casper over a Pepsi.

  The second argument actually upset me a bit. It was given by a classmate who felt that there is no reason to believe that an object must be physical to touch physical things or nonphysical to touch nonphysical things. There was no reasoning given, no example (although I think you know where I’m going with this) of a situation where this occurs, just a blatantly ambiguous statement. As I said before one can mistakenly assume they have overcome a problem by thinking of it ambiguously.

  This to me is a Pandora’s box of epic proportions which earnestly left me asking another student why she was even in college in the first place (for reasons outlined soon). If we are willing to accept something merely because we can what point is there to knowledge? It would appear to me if you are willing to posit that such reasoning is sound you are essentially accepting the following.

The God Problem (Version 2.0 now )

1. If God Exists all things are possible. 
2. Natural law cannot exist if all things are possible.
3. If (2), Nature (The outside world) does not exist.
4. If (3), We know nothing about the external world.
5. if (4), We know nothing.
————–
6. We Know Nothing. 

  If we exist is in a reality that does not exist (which is possible by proposition 1), then we can learn absolutely nothing (proposition 4), if that is the case then why go to college? Because if you can answer all of the questions in life with “God did it” then haven’t you already completed the equation? This is much like my unicorn story before, I don’t know if I heard it in a dream or from another person but.

“Anything that explains everything explains absolutely nothing.”

  If in fact God does exist, and if in fact this breaks ground to the idea that anything is possible (like Casper), it would appear to me that we place ourselves back into the original problem of the course. The problem of Skepticism.

The Brain In a Vat Hypothesis (BIVH): I am just a brain in a vat being fooled by alien scientists.

In Logical Form:

The Brain in a Vat Argument
(1) I don’t know that BIVH is false.
(2) If (1), then I don’t know anything about the external world.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
(3) I don’t know anything about the external world.

  It essentially places us in a universal Lois Lane situation, we believe that we understand the things around us because of the knowledge we believe to be true. However it is incorrect because the information we are using (information from our outside world) is from the very beginning a fallacy. We believe in any instance that the information we are using (even the information you are using at this moment to dispute my case) is real but in fact it is all an illusion.

  It just seems to me that you could have no case where God (or at the very least minds/souls) can exist in the natural world and interact with this natural world without completely negating the natural laws that hold the natural world together. It’s completely sane to say that Casper can sip a Pepsi within the universe he was created in, however I strongly question the legitimacy of thinking that Casper could (or does) reach into the our universe and sip Pepsi with us. You can’t have your cake and eat it to. (In the sense that once you eat it you no longer have it) I feel that too many people use ambiguity to accomplish that task. I hope that I wasn’t ambiguous, anyone who needs clarifications can leave a comment and I will clarify the problem .