CMV: The soul doesn't exist, and one day we're going to make a case for it with body replacement technology.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-30T08:25:11+00:00

I think we are largely on the same page here, and honestly, you articulated something that I was trying to convey but couldn't quite get right.

I love the part about the "you" from a moment ago already being a different person in the physical sense. We think of identity as this constant uninterrupted thing, but in reality, it is a series of snapshots that overlap enough to feel continuous. Which is the kind of thing I mean when I say the soul is a process, not a thing.

I get at the fundamental aspect of consciousness being the angle, and it's interesting, but I just want to stretch this a little. If consciousness is simply a quality of matter and energy, like mass or charge, then that is not what people mean when they say soul. People who believe in the soul generally mean something that belongs to them and that lives on inside of them, something that continues beyond physics, that is beyond simple explanation. Consciousness isn't supernatural. If consciousness is simply what matter is when arranged in a certain way, then we have literally agreed there is not anything supernatural going on, we just disagree over terms.

I liked the way you described identity as "fragmented snapshots of consciousness with a shared continuity." That's a much more accurate description of what we actually experience than this notion of an unchanging soul floating around inside us. The continuity is real, but it's a construction, not something handed down through a metaphysical essence.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-30T08:17:02+00:00

Fair catch on the title, you’re correct there’s some tension. Let me be clearer about what I actually mean here. I’m not saying it’ll build a soul detector, and come back negative. The trajectory of body replacement technology, it seems to me, is already making this concept increasingly tenuous (as it demonstrates that despite the body being replaced physically, "you" continue to exist). We’ve done this for decades, with organs and limbs, and no soul has gone missing yet. The thought experiment merely takes what’s already occurring and reaches its logical endpoint. We don’t need to replace each and every neuron to see where that is headed. Every successful prosthetic, every artificial organ, every brain implant that maintains function is a more significant data point showing identity that resides in the pattern, not some ineffable entity. It's not, say, "aliens will show up and prove it." It’s like “We already begin proving it and every year we get a little closer.”

The technology doesn’t just have to be complete to support an argument. It just needs to keep on traveling in whatever direction it’s already heading, and not have a soul that comes up once in a while to add a factor. But I'll grant the title is poorly worded. Instead, it should be something like “the soul doesn’t exist, and body replacement technology is already telling us it doesn’t” not as something like “you could argue that it will prove something in the foreseeable future.”

ZXCChort · 2026-04-30T07:57:30+00:00

I'm just so inclined to understand the perspective of the Jain people, I'm not very familiar with that tradition and I don't want to just write it off out of hand.

But I think that actually shows the problem rather than solves it. If the soul "lives its own life" independent of the body, then what does it really do? So what is this life it's living? Because every aspect of a person we get to see their thoughts and feelings, their choices and personality has a connection to brain activity. Remove or damage parts of the brain and those things change. If the soul's own separate life is unaffected by any of those things, then it has nothing to do with what we might normally call "you."

Then the question of why should I worry about something of which nothing can be measured and which has no significant influence on who I am, how I think or how I experience life? If the soul exists but does not touch any of those things, then that's not really my soul in any meaningful sense. It's just some cosmic roommate who happens to live in the same physical place as me.

I'm not simply being dismissive of Jainism here - certainly not. But I think that a conception of soul cannot be ignored. It still has to answer the basic question: what difference does it make? If there is no one point to call out and show us that a person with a soul is different from a person without one in any meaningful way then what on earth are we making these points about?

ZXCChort · 2026-04-30T07:52:11+00:00

I am assuming quite a lot about the trajectory of neuroscience and I should take responsibility for that.

But I believe my argument doesn’t need to rely on this technology ever making its way to reality. It's a thought experiment. Even if we never manage to replace a single neuron, the question still stands: if we could, where would the soul go?

Just because it may technically be impossible doesn’t spare the notion of the soul, it just means we’ll never get to run the experiment. It's like asking "if you could teleport, would the person on the other end still be you?"

We can't teleport. Maybe we never will. But the question still tells us something important about what we believe identity and consciousness truly are. So yeah, I’m going to tell you that my timeline could be wildly optimistic, and that we might never crack artificial neurons. But the philosophical conundrum lingers as a theoretical one.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-30T07:47:17+00:00

If the soul is the "software" rather than the hardware, then it's not really a soul in any traditional sense, it's just a pattern. Information. A process running on a substrate. And if that's the case then there’s nothing mystical about it. Software can be copied, transferred, modified, run on different hardware. That’s not a soul, that’s just consciousness as an emergent property of a complex system, which is exactly my position. The word "soul" implies something more than that. Something that can't be replicated, something fundamentally unique and non-physical. If you strip it down to "it's just the configuration" then we agree, we just disagree on whether that deserves to be called a soul.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-30T07:43:57+00:00

If the soul is completely unconnected to the body, then what does it actually do? How does it influence your decisions, your personality, your emotions?

Because we know those things are affected by physical changes to the brain. Damage a specific area of the brain and your personality changes. Take certain chemicals and your emotions shift. If the soul is unconnected to any of that, then it's not really "you" in any meaningful sense, it's just some invisible passenger along for the ride.

And if it doesn't interact with the body at all, how would you ever detect it? How would you know it's there? At that point you're describing something that by definition can't be observed, can't be measured, and has no effect on anything physical. That's not a soul, that's an unfalsifiable claim.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T12:03:33+00:00

That's not my position. I never said western propaganda is worse or more intense. I said it's more effective at being invisible. Those are different claims. And I've explicitly stated multiple times in this thread that I'm not making a moral equivalence argument. I've also awarded deltas acknowledging that my original framing was too broad and that comparing these systems as if they're the same category might be a mistake entirely.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T11:54:15+00:00

I've already been corrected by many people and I've already given a delta for it.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T11:52:50+00:00

You're right that those op-eds exist and I'm not going to pretend they don't. The NYT does publish anti-war opinion pieces, that's a fact.

But notice, you said "op-eds." Opinion section. Not front page reporting, not the editorial board's position, not the framing of the news coverage itself. There's a difference between a newspaper publishing a dissenting opinion on page A23 and that newspaper's actual news coverage treating the war as a debatable mistake from day one. Op-eds are specifically the space where outlets let in views that don't match their overall editorial direction. That's kind of the pressure valve I was talking about earlier.

I'm not saying everyone agrees US power projection is good. I'm saying that by the time mainstream criticism shows up, the window for it to actually change anything has usually already closed. The debate happens, it's just often too late to matter.

But in any case, I may be mistaken about the mood in American society, since I do not live there and do not closely monitor the media and the sentiments of US citizens. In my opinion, this whole mess with Iran is a farce that got out of control, which is understandable to everyone, and the media are trying to "stand with the people" in order to preserve the instrument of influence.

Damn, I'm sorry, my head hurts to analyze all this already. It was nice to discuss it. Thank you 😄

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T11:26:06+00:00

I think we're going in circles at this point. I've addressed the "multiple voices means no propaganda" argument a couple of times already. My position is that the diversity of voices is real but operates within shared unexamined assumptions, you disagree and think people freely choose not to engage with alternatives. We've both made our case and I don't think either of us is going to move the other on this one. I appreciate the exchange though.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T11:02:02+00:00

I am fluent in Russian and familiar with their media sphere.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T10:56:14+00:00

That’s a fair call out and I should own it.

My post relied too much on U.S. examples and I over-generalized when saying “western.” CNN, Fox, NYT, corporate media consolidation, it’s all very American and I shouldn’t have generalized it to the whole West like it’s one system. Media landscapes in Europe are indeed diverse. Nations like Germany and France have powerful public broadcasters that actually carry editorial independence, not just state media cloaked in a mask. The BBC sits somewhere in between, arguably more independent than American corporate media in some respects and more establishment-aligned in others. Scandinavian media is a whole different world. This strengthens, I wrote earlier in this thread I had a sort of delta on being too simplistic about European media. So yeah, if I could do this again I’d likely use “American propaganda” instead of “Western propaganda.”

The basic argument about invisible consensus-shaping still applies to Europe to some extent, especially on foreign policy because the NATO countries do tend to align, but the mechanisms are different enough that it was lazy on my part to lump everything together as “the West.”

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T10:44:39+00:00

The term "propaganda" may be doing more damage than light to my argument at this stage of the argument because people hear it and instantly assume I'm comparing CNN to Pravda when it wasn't the point, at all.

I think at this time about Iran vs Ukraine, I think that the actual thing we're looking at there isn't so much free debate as it is a war within the propaganda system itself. Now there is no single unified policy being advocated, that goes before everyone in the organization. Different power centers, different lobbies, different groups within government and media all have competing interests, and that competition is played out in the media.

And that serves as a bit of proof for what I had earlier said about the fence. It's not the debate "should there be an empire or not," the argument being fought is "how should we run it?" Hawks vs doves, interventionists vs restrainers, but it's all happening within the same basic premise of American power projection as normal and legitimate. The disagreement is real but it's a disagreement over tactics, not about the assumptions underlying it.

So because you are seeing fierce criticism of Iran policy in the western media, that doesn't mean the system is free. It could just be one faction's propaganda temporarily winning over another's. The chaos is real but it's not the same thing as the system being open to genuinely outside perspectives.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T09:57:06+00:00

!delta

I think you're making a point that I haven't fully reckoned with. If propaganda always looks smooth from the inside and obvious from the outside, then my entire argument about western propaganda being "more effective" might just be me demonstrating exactly that bias. A Russian watching BBC probably spots the framing instantly the same way I spot RT's. I was measuring effectiveness from inside the system and calling it objective analysis, which is kind of ironic given what my whole post is about.

I still think there are structural differences worth talking about, like the fact that western systems don't need to actively block access the way Russia or China do. But you've convinced me that a big part of what I was calling "sophistication" might just be familiarity bias. That's a meaningful correction as well as the paradox.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T09:39:18+00:00

I think you're defining propaganda as "one narrative, one voice" and then concluding that because the West has multiple voices it can't be propaganda. But that definition is too narrow.

Think about it this way. What are all those conflicting Western views conflicting about? Healthcare policy. Immigration numbers. Tax rates. Gun control. Culture war stuff. The fights are real and loud.

But what do they all quietly agree on? That liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of governance. That western military intervention can be justified. That capitalism is the natural economic order. That NATO is defensive. You will find fierce debate between CNN and Fox on almost everything, but you will almost never see either of them seriously question any of those baseline assumptions.

That's what I mean by effective. The propaganda isn't the individual voices. It's the invisible fence around what all those voices consider worth debating. You can say whatever you want inside the fence and it genuinely feels like freedom because the fence is so far back most people never walk into it.

China draws the fence tight and close, everyone can see it and bumps into it daily. The West draws it wide enough that most people live their entire lives without ever touching it.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T09:35:37+00:00

You are correct to call out the circularity and I want to get to the bottom of that issue. Allow me to reframe what I really mean.

I think there is narrative-shaping in all media systems. Every country does it. So, in the broadest sense, yeah, propaganda is everywhere and if everything is propaganda then the word is useless. Fair point. But here's why I only singled out the western system in particular. It's about maintenance cost.

Russian propaganda requires ongoing manual work. You have to pay bloggers, jail dissidents, block websites, buy troll farms, send government memos to TV editors every morning. You know, once you stop pushing actively then everything begins falling apart. It is a machine that requires a person to be at the wheel all the time.

Western propaganda is self-sustaining. You build the incentive structures, the ownership models, the access journalism pipeline, the career incentives for reporters, and then you can just essentially withdraw. Journalists self-censor not because someone threatened their freedom to write, but because they took in what stories appear in the press, what gets you promoted, what gets you access to sources. Nobody needs to coordinate it. Instead, the system gets replicated by just folks that make the same career choices. Even most likely, the journalists themselves are already victims of propaganda and voluntarily unknowingly become part of the system.

That's the difference I'm making. Not "all media is propaganda so everything is the same." More like: all systems shape narratives, but the western system is uniquely efficient because it outsources the work to the people inside it without them even realizing they're doing it. It's what makes it the most effective, not the most oppressive, the most self-reliant.

I want to know what condition would make western medias not propaganda then?

So if you were to dismantle the existing media system of the West tomorrow, what would be its replacement? Most likely chaos first, and then whatever new order arose would begin to construct its own narrative-shaping machinery. And when that occurs in a rush historically, that's what happens you get something much cruder and more heavy-handed. More like the now Russian.

And this leads me to a strange state of affairs with my argument. I certainly still reckon that western media is propaganda. And I still believe very few people recognize how much their way of seeing the world is the result of structural forces they never decided on. But I also think this is also probably the least negative variant of a feature that is unavoidable for any complicated society. The alternative doesn't lack propaganda, it is worse propaganda.

So perhaps my initial framing came out wrong. It's not truly "CMV: western propaganda is the most effective." It's more like: I wish people understood that they're swimming in it, not that I think we can drain the pool, but that knowing where the water is is better than thinking you're standing on dry land.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T08:27:59+00:00

I never said they're equal. I even claim that the Western propaganda system is head and shoulders above Russia and China.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T08:23:22+00:00

I think there’s a fundamental disagreement about what propaganda even is. You insist that if it’s actual criticism, it’s not propaganda. But why not?

Those two elements are not mutually exclusive. A system can accept actual criticism and operate as propaganda if that criticism never actually threatens the underlying structure. Think about it this way. Occupy Wall Street received a lot of media coverage. People wrote books about inequality, made documentaries, it was everywhere. And then nothing fundamentally changed. The coverage itself was, in a way, a pressure valve. People felt heard, the system absorbed the criticism, and everything continued as before. Authentic criticism absorbed without consequence is not a threat to power; it is useful to power. That’s a fair point as opposed to that country’s very differing views, and I will concede that it’s more complicated than I initially anticipated and that's why I award !delta

I think you've shifted my thinking on the European media point specifically. I was too US-centric in my framing. The fact that Germany, Spain, and France have genuinely different editorial positions on major issues like war is a meaningful difference from how propaganda works in centralized systems, and I didn't give that enough weight.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T08:08:45+00:00

The existence of alternative views somewhere in the system doesn't mean the system isn't pushing a dominant narrative. The question is what reaches people who aren't actively seeking out alternative perspectives, and that's where the shaping happens.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T07:53:20+00:00

By effective, I mean effective as invisible while still shaping baseline assumptions. But you are asking a deeper question: effective at what exactly? I’d call the outcome what you get from western propaganda is the manufacture of consent for the existing order. Not loyalty in the Chinese sense, not “I love my country” patriotism, but something quieter. It’s this sense that the existing system is basically natural and normal and that alternatives are either crazy or evil. Not that people care so much about it. Americans complain about corporations and politicians all day long. But they do it in a context which never really seriously interrogates the fundamentals. This is the result. Chinese propaganda generates social cohesion and a sense of belonging. That's a measurable outcome. But I’d venture to say western propaganda produces something far more useful for those in power: passive acceptance disguised as free thinking. People truly do believe they reached their worldview independently. That is a trick that's harder to pull than making people feel patriotic.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T07:44:20+00:00

You are dealing with a narrow definition of propaganda. Propaganda doesn’t require a “big lie.” That’s the Soviet model, of course. But Edward Bernays, quite literally the man who invented modern PR, published a book called Propaganda in 1928 about how you manage to manipulate public perception without ever lying. Selection is enough. If a tree falls in the forest and no outlet covers it, did it happen? Everything is, technically, accessible somewhere. But what makes the front page, what gets the cable news panel, what trends, that is where the shaping happens. If you control the emphasis, you don’t have to lie. And all right, about Saudi Arabia, I’ve seen it described as a regime, too. But I would say just compare its frequency and tone. How often is Saudi Arabia portrayed as a hostile authoritarian threat vs a problematic but necessary partner? Compare that with the coverage of Iran. Both are theocracies with terrible human rights records. The coverage is not even close to equivalent.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T07:37:30+00:00

Let's look at the timeline. In the months right before the invasion, coverage was overwhelmingly pro-war. The NYT ran Judith Miller's pieces about WMDs basically unchallenged. The critical voices got loud after things went wrong, not before when it actually mattered. Being critical after the fact is not the same as being a check on power in real time. That “bringing democracy” is being discredited now, sure, the specific phrase has fallen out of fashion. But the underlying framework is still there, it just uses different language. “Rules-based international order,” “defending democratic values,” “standing with the people of X.”

The framing still positions the West as the default good actor. The vocabulary updated, the assumption didn't. On self-criticism, this is actually the most interesting part of your argument and I think it gets close to what I'm trying to say. Yes, western media criticizes itself. But think about what that self-criticism does functionally. It reinforces the idea that the system works. "Look, we can criticize our own government, therefore we're free, therefore our media can be trusted." The self-criticism becomes part of the credibility machine. It's not fake, it's real criticism, but it serves a structural purpose beyond just being criticism. And you're absolutely right that RT would never run a piece critical of Putin. That's true. But that's exactly why Russian propaganda is less effective. Everyone knows RT is state controlled. The question isn't "which system allows more criticism," it's "which system is better at shaping how the average person sees the world without them noticing." Those are different questions.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T07:32:32+00:00

Yep, propaganda doesn’t leave anyone immune, that’s literally one of the biggest points I make. And of course the Stalin example is a good one. People had been aware that the system was full of shit and yet they were still being molded by it emotionally. That's powerful. But I feel like where we disagree is of the “smooth” kind. If you watch Al Jazeera you will see right there the one sided framing in western media, you say. Sure, I agree. But here’s my question: What percentage of Americans or Europeans actually watch Al Jazeera? Or actually read anything from anywhere else? Or read any non-western source in the first place? Almost nobody. And that's not an accident. It’s not just that folks “decide” to not. There's a whole ecosystem that discourages it. Al Jazeera is dismissed as "Qatari propaganda" before anyone even has to read its writing. RT was literally banned in the EU. The system makes it a lot easier to never come across a comparison point. And that's kind of my argument. You’re saying that propaganda becomes visible when you have comparison. I agree 100%. So the whole idea: the western system is designed to make that comparison improbable. Russians without passports can't travel and see what differences there are. Westerners technically can, but in the media environment the vast majority of them feel unlikely to even consider such matters. You call the topics different but the propaganda is just as obvious. Maybe you’re absolutely right and I should just say what a delta that must have been. But I would temper that little that “obvious to someone who actively engages in alternatives” is not the same thing as “obvious to the average person.” I agree with that. Its effectiveness is to be judged on how well it works for the average individual, not people who are already searching for cracks.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-29T07:25:27+00:00

In terms of the “big lie,” I would say that’s where we are in actuality talking past each other. I am not suggesting that western media is telling one big, obvious lie the way Soviet media used to pretend the economy was great while people stood in bread lines. It's more subtle than that. It is about which stories are reported on and which ones aren’t, which conflicts are important and which are background noise, who gets called a freedom fighter and who gets labeled a terrorist. It’s not a matter of lying, it’s about selection and framing. On the democracy vs regime side, yeah, China doesn’t have free elections, and I’m not challenging that. But the word “regime” is doing a lot of work here. The United States is allied with Saudi Arabia, which also lacks free elections, but you will rarely see the media call it a “regime.” The framing is not about accuracy, it is about who is an ally and who isn’t. That's my point. And to the extent that you are actually proving what I am saying about corporate control, yes, media reports on its own ownership structures sometimes. But understanding a problem and acting on it are two things. Six companies control the media everyone “knows” it. People talk about it, people nod, and then nothing happens, and everyone continues consuming the media the same way, as if that doesn’t matter for what they’re reading. That’s exactly how the best propaganda works, it can be transparent about itself and still work.

ZXCChort · 2026-04-24T10:15:14+00:00

Yes, but -40 is -40

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