The link below is to a pretty lame article alleging to provide evidence
about the existence of the soul. It's written by some idiot business
major named Matt Koschmann (not that I have anything against business
majors in general). It can be found all over the web, but there's a non-
PDF version of it at this address. I'd appreciate it if you all could
make specific comments about some of the many places where Koschmann
makes weak and/or downright laughable arguments. I'm sure you'll find
lots of examples. Anyway, I'll be talking to some folks on thursday who
really think that this is a fantastic article and some of you may think
of things to say about the article that I don't.

Here is the article:


http://antigop.50megs.com/koschmann.html


I'll end with this for now. We actually come to the core premise of his
article when he claims that "Science tells us that approximately every
seven to nine years, all the matter in your body at the atomic
level changes, including your brain".

The link below is to a pretty lame article alleging to provide evidence
about the existence of the soul. It's written by some idiot business
major named Matt Koschmann (not that I have anything against business
majors in general). It can be found all over the web, but there's a non-
PDF version of it at this address. I'd appreciate it if you all could
make specific comments about some of the many places where Koschmann
makes weak and/or downright laughable arguments. I'm sure you'll find
lots of examples. Anyway, I'll be talking to some folks on thursday who
really think that this is a fantastic article and some of you may think
of things to say about the article that I don't.

Here is the article:


http://antigop.50megs.com/koschmann.html

The link below is to a pretty lame article alleging to provide evidence
about the existence of the soul. It's written by some idiot business
major named Matt Koschmann (not that I have anything against business
majors in general). It can be found all over the web, but there's a non-
PDF version of it at this address. I'd appreciate it if you all could
make specific comments about some of the many places where Koschmann
makes weak and/or downright laughable arguments. I'm sure you'll find
lots of examples. Anyway, I'll be talking to some folks on thursday who
really think that this is a fantastic article and some of you may think
of things to say about the article that I don't.

Here is the article:


http://antigop.50megs.com/koschmann.html


Also note that toward the end he reverts to all out proselytising. You
may want to skip everything after the heading "The One Who Knows" if you
even make it that far. His arguments are bad enough without hearing his
Campus Crusade door-to-door preacher routine.

I'll get the ball rolling by making a few comments about things he says
right in the beginning.

You will note that he starts out playing reductionistic games, with silly
rhetorical games like asking, "Am I just a material being?composed simply
of a body, a brain, and a central nervous system". In this guy's case I
suspect that he's just the body and the nervous system without brain part
but that's a different story :).

Anyway, he continues to give short shrift to what he calls "physicalism"
so that he can get to what he obviously sees as the only other mutually
exclusive option -- dualism. Now, I know this guy is a business student,
but one would think that it would occur to him to at least call the other
position something like "physical monism", if he's going to contrast it
with "dualism". Then it might occur to him that there could be even more
options, like say non-physical monism, for example. But it's pretty
obvious by now that this guy isn't a careful thinker.

Here's another thing that obviously never occured to him. In his attempt
to paraphrase the physical monistic position he says, "If the matter
configured into your body ceases to be, then we would have to say that
you cease to be." That might sound ok, but actually, he had missed a
very crucial detail. By his own reductionistic definition his statement
would not be justifiable. After all, when most people die their bodies
don't wink out of existence. At the moment of death the body may be only
slightly different than it was the second before when it was alive. The
difference is that some system or systems within the material body ceased
to function in a necessary way. However, by his definition, a dead
person who was slowly decomposing would really not be that different than
a live person. I think that this is pretty good evidence that Matt
hasn't given any careful thought to the "physicalist" position.

I'll end with this for now. We actually come to the core premise of his
article when he claims that "Science tells us that approximately every
seven to nine years, all the matter in your body at the atomic
level changes, including your brain". If this premise turns out to be
without merit then many of his additional arguments in the rest of the
article fall apart. Now note that he has used a weasel word here.
Instead of saying that the matter is *replaced* he only says that it
"changes" in some physical way. Of course, considering that all cells in
the body need oxygen and nutrients to live probably most all cells
*change* in some physical way every day. The problem, of course, is
that we don't know that these changes have any fundamental significance
to relatively permanent features such as personality.

You will also note that Matt doesn't footnote this scientific "fact". He
appears to be basing it on a hodge podge of folk nostrums, perhaps going
all the way back to stories like the "ship of theseus", or "george
washington's axe". The modern "scientific" version of this usually says
that all matter in the body is replaced within X years. Of course, this
is actually not true of things like the brain, so I suspect that he
substituted the word "changed" to make it seem more defensible. One does
wonder, however, how Matt imagined that scientists determined that
absolutely every cell in the body gets changed. After all, if there were
some cell that somehow managed to not get replaced, changed, etc then his
silly little attack against his strawman version of physicalism would be
untenable.

He goes on to try to apply his alleged scientific principle, which is
actually just an immature understanding of the "law of identities" ad
nauseum. There are a huge number of other errors he makes through the
course of this article, but I'll stop here for now.

I look forward to comments from other people.