One of the points of contention between Kevin Winters, Blake Ostler, and myself with respect to reading Orson Pratt was in regards to the mind. As I've mentioned at various times, I see Orson Pratt arguing a basically Leibnizean view of minds. The only real significant difference is that Pratt rejects Leibniz' immaterial monads and makes them atoms within the universe. Of course that difference leads to significant differences in terms of implications. Consider, for example, duplicated minds. I think that for Pratt the ideal we seek for is a truly duplicated mind in which our mind and the mind of all other minds constituting our "body" are unified. Thus at any given time all are in the same state. (Actually Pratt allows for the time for information to flow - but that is at worst a temporal delay for duplication) Now Blake and Kevin, as I understand this, don't think Pratt argues this. They think that for Pratt mind is an emergent property and (presumably) we can't speak of the mind of the individual atoms. Rather we have emergence more akin to how modern cognitivists see mind emerging out of the brain. I think the key passages don't support this reading. I read Pratt as acknowledging emergent mental properties but that there is some fundamental mental properties and some fundamental mental substances.
Why bring all this up again? It seems a small matter except that my interest was struck by a recent paper by Nick Bostrom of Oxford University. "Brain Duplication and Mind Duplication" asks the question of whether two minds in the same state would entail a single experience or two experiences. I think this relevant for modern Mormonism in that various guises of panpsychism or positions bordering on it still are rather common. While some might understandably take Blake and Kevin's position that there is a unity of parts only in terms of the whole and never unity proper, others might adopt a position more in keeping with what I see Pratt arguing. It is important to note that the issue is not personal identity.
Now I confess many won't find this question nearly as interesting as I do. Yet I do find it intriguing to think through the logical issues. Can we ever truly duplicate minds? Perhaps only emergent properties can be duplicated and then they aren't truly duplicated as the property is technically of the system as a whole and not individual minds. i.e. maybe anger can't be a mental property of an individual atom but only of a collection of atoms. In that case, however, it seems to me that we once again move towards Blake's perspective.
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and Theology
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