Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 23 Jun 2015, at 03:31, Bruce Kellett wrote:
But in my opinion, Bruno's definition is too narrow, and self-serving.
The closest continuer theory as discussed in the philosophical
literature on personal identity is much broader. It takes account of
all features of a person -- memories, bodily features, environment,
causal connections, values, temperament, personality, skills, etc,
etc. The definition of a 'person' is seen as irreducibly
multi-dimensional. Of course, that means that one must define a metric
across those dimensions in order to determine what is 'closest'. The
metric is not absolutely specified by the theory, and I think it can,
in fact, be flexible, in that one weighting of factors might be more
appropriate in one setting than in another.
I study the consequence of not having infinitely many non computable
relations of that type.
The question is whether in your reductionist pursuit of simplicity you
might not have gone too far, and lost some essential aspects of the
subject under discussion. I quote Einstein:
"These fundamental concepts and postulates, which cannot be further
reduced logically, form the essential part of a theory, which reason
cannot touch. It is the grand object of all theory to make these
irreducible elements as simple and as few in number as possible, without
having to renounce the adequate representation of any empirical content
whatever." (Einstein, 'On the Method of Theoretical Physics', Herbert
Spencer Lecture, Oxford, June 1933.)
Often paraphrased as: "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler."
My argument is that you have simplified away some essential elements of
personal identity. You are, of course, entitled to make any assumptions
and definitions you like in developing your theory. But if you simplify
away essential elements of the subject matter -- in this instance,
persons -- you cannot expect the end results of your deliberations to
have any relevance to the real people of this world. So 'comp' is
irrelevant to reality because it is an oversimplification: it discards
essential elements of its subject matter. A person is more than just a
disembodied consciousness, even if one could make any sense of such a
concept.
Bruce
What you say here is no threat for the very weak comp hypothesis studied.
The point is that one should capture as much of the notion of personal
identity that we use everyday as is possible. In particular, it should
take account of those difficult cases where memory is lost or impaired
in one way or another. Bruno's definition is just too restrictive to
be of any use in the real world.
I use the standard definitions in both UDA and in its translation in
arithmetic.
Also avoid expression "real world" because that is a notion that we
cannot take for granted when working in this subject.
Bruno
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