← Back to Concept Indexmind-body-problem
The author contrasts humans with tomatoes to highlight the absence of consciousness or soul in plants, emphasizing the ethical implications of this distinction.
2 chapters across 2 books
Chapter 1 On SomIs and Their Sizes <b^ f^ fb^ Soul-Shards V_>/iNIE gloomy day in early 1991, a couple of months after my father died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents' house, and my mother, looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father taken perhaps fifteen years earlier, said to me, with a note of despair, "What meaning does that photograph have? None at all. It's just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It's useless." The bleakness of my mother's grief-drenched remark set my head spinning because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not quite know how to express to her the way I felt the photograph should be considered. After a few minutes of emotional pondering — soul-searching, quite literally — I hit upon an analogy that I felt could convey to my mother my point of view, and which I hoped might lend her at least a tiny degree of consolation. What I said to her was along the following lines. "In the living room we have a book of the Chopin etudes for piano. All of its pages are just pieces of paper with dark marks on them, just as two- dimensional and flat and foldable as the photograph of Dad — and yet, think of the powerful effect that they have had on people all over the world for 150 years now. Thanks to those black marks on those flat sheets of paper, untold thousands of people have collectively spent millions of hours moving their fingers over the keyboards of pianos in complicated patterns, producing sounds that give them indescribable pleasure and a sense of great meaning. Those pianists in turn have conveyed to many millions of listeners, including you and me, the profound emodons that churned in Frederic Chopin's heart, thus affording all of us some pardal access toThe chapter opens with a poignant reflection on the meaning of a photograph of the author's deceased father, using an analogy to Chopin's piano etudes to argue that physical objects can serve as 'soul-shards' that preserve and convey fragments of a person's inner life. It then transitions into a personal ethical exploration of the author's evolving attitudes toward animals and vegetarianism, sparked by a traumatic experience in a physiology lab and a transformative encounter with Roald Dahl's story 'Pig,' which vividly depicts the slaughterhouse process and challenges the reader's perception of meat consumption.
Full TextThis chapter introduces the central philosophical questions about the nature of self, consciousness, and the soul through a thought experiment involving a Teleclone Mark IV teleporter. It explores the paradox of personal identity by questioning whether the person who steps into the teleporter and the one who emerges are the same individual, raising doubts about continuity of self despite physical and temporal changes. The chapter sets the stage for a broader inquiry into mind, selfhood, and the metaphysical puzzles surrounding what it means to be 'I.'