Because of my long-standing interest in arguments for and against the existence of a nonphysical soul, mind, or spirit (I’m decidely in the ‘against’ camp), I’m happy whenever I run across a new argument to consider. One such argument comes from Joshua Rasmussen, professor of philosophy at Baylor University.
He describes it in the video above. The basic idea is that there are more logically possible thoughts than there are physical states available to represent them, which means that the mind cannot be physical, or at least not solely physical.
I think the argument fails, but I’ll save my explanation for the comment section.
I am underwhelmed by that argument.
The biggest problem with his argument is that he’s asking the wrong question. He’s basically asking
The answer is yes, and he takes that as proof of his thesis. But the question he should be asking is
There are many logically possible thoughts that are not humanly possible. For instance, consider a set consisting of a trillion numbers, selected randomly. One logically possible thought about that set is
…with each of the numbers named explicitly. No human can have that thought. It’s logically possible, but not humanly possible. There are many other thoughts like it.
What Rasmussen needs to do is to somehow quantify the set of humanly possible thoughts and show that it exceeds the set of available physical states. He hasn’t done so.