QED wrote:When I talked about continuity it was in relation to personality. I wanted to convey how the personality of an individual can be destroyed in a material accident. Loss of continuity here is due to a barrier presented by brain damage and a new personality emerges. Obviously no form of tunneling is taking place otherwise we would expect no change in personality. The prior personality is, as far as I can see, lost and is usurped by a new personality. What is the suggestion then? Is it that personality A tunnels out of the mind when it is usurped by personality B? That sounds like the "soul" of A goes off to heaven leaving the "soul" of B to go to hell. This would mean that "You" could go off to heaven or hell while your body is still walking around!
No, because the soul never took possession of the body to begin with. All that the "soul" means is that a metaphysical structure exemplified itself into the physical world by means of a physical process. For example, if a sunflower plant dies and rots, we don't say that the fibonacci sequence structure left the plant and went back to Platonia. The fibonacci sequence structure was never "in" the sunflower plant to begin with. Rather, the fibonacci sequence structure was exemplified by the plant, and when the plant died the instantiation process ceased as well. Similarly, when someone dies, their soul doesn't technically leave them as if it was inside the person as a kind of back-up metaphysical tape recorder. What "leaves" them is the identity that the body has with the soul.
In the case of brain damage, the person can no longer instantiate the soul of their former self, at least in full. The same situation could occur if we took a sunflower and damaged the plant's ability to produce the fibonacci sequence. Perhaps another sequence emerges as a result of the damage, and therefore the lifetime description of that flower consists of many sub-descriptions which are summed over the history of the flower. A botanist who is recording the final lifetime description of the flower will consider the original fibonacci sequence that was present, and put that as a major reason to consider this as a genuine sunflower despite the damage (i.e., the botanist will ignore the damage as evidence that this really wasn't a sunflower). Similarly, when God sums over the paths in our life--i.e., when trying to determine exactly what soul we instantiated, God will judge which paths must be cancelled out because they do not contribute to a proper description of "us."
QED wrote:Bringing up Quantum Tunneling, although a fascinating phenomenon, seems totally spurious to this matter. I have to wonder at the legitimacy of identifying non-classical behaviour in the Quantum domain and then using it to say "there -- see; physical reality isn't how we expect it to be -- it is possible for things to get through barriers, be non-local etc." I simply can't accept that a case has been made for these microscopic effects to be held up as examples of how macroscopic systems might behave -- not at room temperatures and pressures at any rate. Isn't it the case that the science is simply being stretched too far?
I think you misunderstand what I'm trying to say, QED. I'm not claiming that dying is a quantum tunneling event. What I'm claiming is that we know that the particle that undergoes quantum tunneling
is the same particle that existed prior to the tunneling event, therefore the logic of the universe allows for identity to continue past a physical discontinuity. The analogy of tunneling is to show that the objection is without foundation (i.e., the objection which tries to disprove discontinuous identity as possible).
