The way I see it is that we DO have to run the UD on a VERY specialized machinery.......
:-) Lennart ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruno Marchal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2002 4:01 PM Subject: Am I a token or a type? > At 13:50 +0200 30/07/2002, Lennart Nilsson wrote: > > >How can an abstraction be felt? > > This is not an easy question. Obviously, the more general > question "How can anything be felt?" is not easy too. > A related hard question is "How can an abstraction feel?". > > My (short) answer was that from the "many"-philosophy point of view, > it is difficult to make a clear line between a very specialized abstract > type and a concrete token. I think this is related to Deutsch' "fungibility" > notion. When you ask people why they believe in tokens (particular, singular > instanciations of (abstract) types), in general they gives examples by > referring to a "concrete object" like "that chair", this house", etc. > But we know, both from QM and/or comp that such "object" corresponds to > an infinity of fungible incarnation of "putative object" which are really > more like a observer relative information pattern. > > I would like to recommend in that setting the very interesting book > by Derek Parfit ,"Reasons and Persons" (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984), which > subject, I think, overlaps many threads in both the FOR and Everything lists. > > Let me quote a rare but important passage where I *disagree* with Parfit. > The passage comes from the section 99, "Am I a Token or a Type?", page 296. > > <<Consider fifty replicas of Greta Garbo as she was at the age of 30. These > would be well-described as different tokens of one person-type. As Williams > claims, if the object of love is the person-type, this is very different > from ordinary love. This would not be the kind of love which gives great > importance to a shared history. > If I lived in such a world, and I was one of a set of replicas, I might > regard myself as a token of a type. Might I instead regard myself as *the > type*? This would be a radical change. In one sense of the word `type', if > I was a person type, I could not possibly cease to exist. Even if there are > not now tokens of my person-type, there would still be this person type. > A person-type would survive even the destruction of the Universe. This is > because, in this sense, a type is an abstract entity, like a number. We could > not possibly regard ourselves as abstract entities.>> > > This passage explains, imo, why Parfit, who really pushes the duplication > thought experiment very far, has not foreseen neither the comp indeterminacy, > nor the reversal. I don't think there is an absolute frontier between tokens > and types. A token is just a very specialized type relatively to some > distinguishing ability from the part of an observer. Something could be > abstract from some point of view and concrete from another. (In a category > theoretical approach an arrow "concrete ---> abstract" would be a forgetful > functors ?). > > As you see I am searching a way to explain "why we don't need to run the > UD" without invoking the movie-graph argument or Maudlin's Olympia Machinery. > (see ref in my thesis). > > There are plenty inspiring and intriguing thoughts in Parfit's book. I do not > like his use of the "reductionnist" term, but I share almost all his moral > and identity theories, despite the important,from the "(meta)physical" point of > view, difference alluded above. > > Bruno > -- > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ >