Upcoming Watchmen Thought...
Okay, what with the movie coming out soon, there's something that always bothered me from the graphic novel, but I've never seen anybody else express, not even in that Watchmen and Philosophy book that came out a while back.... excuse me if this is a little spoilery.
Okay... so Dr. Manhattan, who is Dr. Jon Osterman after reconstructing his own body from the accident that obliterated his physical body, at one point says, "A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?"
So, he's expressing essentially a purely materialistic view of life, human and otherwise. One could quibble over the science here, even in terms of materialism... after all, a live body and a dead body will certainly shortly show some structural differences, one from ongoing metabolism and aging, the other from decomposition, and I'm sure most biologists would say that the essential difference between life and death lies not ithe bodily structure, but in the *processes* that are going on within that structure.
So, there are certainly quantifiable differences between life and death, such as whether your cells are metabolizing oxygen and food or not, is your heart beating, are the synapses in your brain firing, all that. Not least of course, it's quite observable whether, for example, somebody's even alive to argue about this issue with the good Doctor, or is dead and unable to speak... or able to press a button to bombard him with tachyons, or not, for another scenario.
But isn't there a more central contradiction here? Dr. Manhattan seems to be assuming that there is nothing to life beyond what he can observe of the atoms and molecules around him. Yet Dr. Manhattan himself only exists because when Dr. Jon Osterman had his body, including all those atoms and molecules, obliterated, his consciousness somehow persisted and was able, over time, to reconstruct his body and start interacting with the world again, this time with all sorts of amazing powers over the whole of material creation. We have no reason to believe that Osterman was unique among all human beings in having such a consciousness. Therefore, isn't Manhattan himself living proof that there's more to people than their material bodies? Isn't he in fact a demonstration of something rather like Cartesian dualism?
Of course, I suppose the belief that would logically follow in something rather like an immortal soul would not necessarily, in itself, change his rather cavalier attitude towards life and death. He might figure, if he was able to become such a self-made man after his 'death', why can't others do the same?
Okay... so Dr. Manhattan, who is Dr. Jon Osterman after reconstructing his own body from the accident that obliterated his physical body, at one point says, "A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?"
So, he's expressing essentially a purely materialistic view of life, human and otherwise. One could quibble over the science here, even in terms of materialism... after all, a live body and a dead body will certainly shortly show some structural differences, one from ongoing metabolism and aging, the other from decomposition, and I'm sure most biologists would say that the essential difference between life and death lies not ithe bodily structure, but in the *processes* that are going on within that structure.
So, there are certainly quantifiable differences between life and death, such as whether your cells are metabolizing oxygen and food or not, is your heart beating, are the synapses in your brain firing, all that. Not least of course, it's quite observable whether, for example, somebody's even alive to argue about this issue with the good Doctor, or is dead and unable to speak... or able to press a button to bombard him with tachyons, or not, for another scenario.
But isn't there a more central contradiction here? Dr. Manhattan seems to be assuming that there is nothing to life beyond what he can observe of the atoms and molecules around him. Yet Dr. Manhattan himself only exists because when Dr. Jon Osterman had his body, including all those atoms and molecules, obliterated, his consciousness somehow persisted and was able, over time, to reconstruct his body and start interacting with the world again, this time with all sorts of amazing powers over the whole of material creation. We have no reason to believe that Osterman was unique among all human beings in having such a consciousness. Therefore, isn't Manhattan himself living proof that there's more to people than their material bodies? Isn't he in fact a demonstration of something rather like Cartesian dualism?
Of course, I suppose the belief that would logically follow in something rather like an immortal soul would not necessarily, in itself, change his rather cavalier attitude towards life and death. He might figure, if he was able to become such a self-made man after his 'death', why can't others do the same?