Lee wrote a fascinating autobiographical account concluding
>I'd be interested in anyone else's narrative of how they came to
>acquire their early, decisive beliefs.
I've already done this in my post somewhere in the archives where I descibed
how I lost my Christian faith, essentially over the Problem of Evil (though
a lot of other issues converged for me) while I was Vice-President of the
Evangelical Union on my campus.
If there is any doubt, I wish to make clear that I am also a scientific
materialist (among other positions I take, such as legal positivism).
However, I don't understand how scientific materialism is supposed to entail
what I understand to be the pattern theory of *identity*. Parfit, for
example, needs a lot more premises than scientific materialism to argue for
such a theory. Plenty of perfectly good materialists such as Bernard
Williams reject it. I think they are separate issues. Even if scientific
materialism is a necessary condition for a theory of identity such as
Parfit's, I don't think it is a sufficient condition.
Once again I'll ask people who have access to a good library with the
journal _Foundation_ to have a look at the special Australian issue which I
co-edited in mid-2000. This has the definitive article on people's
intuitions about all this, by Aubrey Townsend, a philosopher at Monash
University (entitled "Survival in Cyberspace").
Russell
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