Probabilities of reincarnation?

That's precisely the Ship of Theseus paradox. The only way I see out of it is to behave conventionally, while remaining skeptical about the entity-hood of it.

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InfraBlue wrote:

I don't think that "person" is abstract at all.

That sentence is treating "person" abstractly.

InfraBlue wrote:

It's a problem when people don't know how to treat others as who they are presently, not as who they were in the past. When I was a preadolescent kid my grandmother hadn't seen me since I was just past being a toddler. She treated me as if I were still at that age.

I'm not talking about making any changes to the conventional way of treating people. I'm talking about the strict analytical sense. The harder you look for something that you can put your finger on and say that it's a person's self, the harder it gets to find anything specific.

InfraBlue wrote:

Life. The fact that they're alive and living and being that process called "person."

And this mental act requires reification. "Life" is not concrete. The being at any given time is, but it requires thinking abstractly to get "life." The being at any given time is that bundle (Hume) of processes, but it requires abstraction to get "person" or "self." When that abstraction is treated as a genuine entity, that's reification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_theory

I thought setting the word 'cogito' apart would indicate the argument. Perhaps I was wrong.

In this regard you're like Frank and his agnosticism, leading it around by the hand and rejecting arguments that fall outside of his circumscriptions.

More like when you dismiss other definitions of the terms under discussion to fit your argument.

Whew.
For a minute there I thought you thought.
Well.
At any rate, you appear to have escaped.
And the paradox, like Escher's art, is simply a curiosity.
We can't live our lives on the moibus strip.

The sentence is treating "person" abstractly, "person"--or would you prefer "a person,"/"persons"--isn't/aren't abstractions.

You are not going to get your answer in the strict analytical sense. The closest you'll get to an answer is through the conventional/practical sense.

What mental act are you referring to? The definition that I've given for "person?"

The end result of a process, to you, isn't "concrete?" To say that "a bundle of perceptions," as Hume put it, isn't "self"/"person" in a "concrete" way is merely a logomachy.

It becomes absurd when one makes a logical leap and decides that "self," "person," "life" are reifications because one can't wrap their head around them "strictly analytically" speaking, willfully oblivious to the evidence before one.

You're leading the argument around with your narrow restrictions and closed definitions, and you reject whatever falls outside of these. In this regard you're like Frank and his agnosticism, leading it around by the hand and rejecting arguments that fall outside of his circumscriptions.

Dismissing it as a curiosity doesn't do anything to support the claim for Self or Spirit, though. The Ship of Theseus paradox is a useful tool for demonstrating the self-contradictory nature of that claim.

I use to have what I considered to be a nice analogy about the body. Isn't it like every seven years all our cells have been replaced by new cells? If they are all new cells how can you even call your body the same?

Here is my analogy. Let's say you have a porcelain vase. You also have a special hammer that allows you to break perfectly nice chunks off of it without shattering the whole thing. Then you take new clay and fill in the missing chunk so it blends in perfectly with the same, color, texture and appearance. After seven years of breaking off chunks and replacing them. The entire vase get's replaced with new clay. How can you consider the old vase and the new vase the same vase? You can't, the only thing that would assume they are the same was the slow process of replacing the chunks.

Well that is exactly how our bodies behave. Every seven years every cell has been replaced at least once. How can you call it the same body if it has been completely replaced?

FBM wrote:

InfraBlue wrote:

I don't think that "person" is abstract at all.

That sentence is treating "person" abstractly.

The sentence is treating "person" abstractly, "person"--or would you prefer "a person,"/"persons"--isn't/aren't abstractions.

FBM wrote:

InfraBlue wrote:

It's a problem when people don't know how to treat others as who they are presently, not as who they were in the past. When I was a preadolescent kid my grandmother hadn't seen me since I was just past being a toddler. She treated me as if I were still at that age.

I'm not talking about making any changes to the conventional way of treating people. I'm talking about the strict analytical sense. The harder you look for something that you can put your finger on and say that it's a person's self, the harder it gets to find anything specific.

You are not going to get your answer in the strict analytical sense. The closest you'll get to an answer is through the conventional/practical sense.

FBM wrote:

InfraBlue wrote:

Life. The fact that they're alive and living and being that process called "person."

And this mental act requires reification. "Life" is not concrete. The being at any given time is, but it requires thinking abstractly to get "life." The being at any given time is that bundle (Hume) of processes, but it requires abstraction to get "person" or "self." When that abstraction is treated as a genuine entity, that's reification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_theory

What mental act are you referring to? The definition that I've given for "person?"

The end result of a process, to you, isn't "concrete?" To say that "a bundle of perceptions," as Hume put it, isn't "self"/"person" in a "concrete" way is merely a logomachy.

It becomes absurd when one makes a logical leap and decides that "self," "person," "life" are reifications because one can't wrap their head around them "strictly analytically" speaking, willfully oblivious to the evidence before one.

You're leading the argument around with your narrow restrictions and closed definitions, and you reject whatever falls outside of these. In this regard you're like Frank and his agnosticism, leading it around by the hand and rejecting arguments that fall outside of his circumscriptions.

Krumple wrote:

I use to have what I considered to be a nice analogy about the body. Isn't it like every seven years all our cells have been replaced by new cells? If they are all new cells how can you even call your body the same?

Here is my analogy. Let's say you have a porcelain vase. You also have a special hammer that allows you to break perfectly nice chunks off of it without shattering the whole thing. Then you take new clay and fill in the missing chunk so it blends in perfectly with the same, color, texture and appearance. After seven years of breaking off chunks and replacing them. The entire vase get's replaced with new clay. How can you consider the old vase and the new vase the same vase? You can't, the only thing that would assume they are the same was the slow process of replacing the chunks.

Well that is exactly how our bodies behave. Every seven years every cell has been replaced at least once. How can you call it the same body if it has been completely replaced?

Yep. I know you're interested in Buddhism. Did you know that the Buddha said something to the effect that, of all the things that make up a human, the body comes the closest to being a Self, as it changes the slowest. But, like you say, even that is totally replaced every 7 years. Thoughts, memories, perceptions, sensations, feelings, etc, come and go much more quickly.

All conditioned things are impermanent. This is what the Buddha taught.