On 7/10/2015 6:26 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 7 October 2015 at 16:59, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 7/10/2015 3:58 pm, Jason Resch wrote:
On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 10:37 PM, Bruce Kellett
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Is a particular mind a natural type? Or is it only the generic
'mind' that is a natural type? Maybe the particular mind is only
a token of the generic type 'mind', not a type in its own right.
You beg the question in your analysis.
You postulate some unknown difference between your distant
doppelgangers that makes them not the same (despite being defined
as the same (physically, organizationally, materially,
computationally)). Stathis and I merely reject your theory that
there is some unknown difference that makes a difference.
I am merely objecting to your tendency to create your preferred
results by definition. You *define* the distant persons to be
identical, without providing any way in which that claim could
ever be checked. It is not that I say that they are different, I
say that you have no basis for your claim that they are identical.
And without being able to establish the existence of identical
brain configurations, and identical conscious states, then your
theory is only a matter of your definitions. And you cannot
determine what is real by definition.
You seem to believe that verification of similarity is needed in order
for the statement that similar things are similar to have meaning,
The statement that similar things are similar is a tautology. I am
asking for some justification of any claim that two given things are
similar. Basically, to make such a claim, one has to compare the
objects. Such comparisons are impossible in principle for many of the
cases under discussion here.
which is a strange way to think. Even the logical positivists allowed
the validity of a priori statements.
I am not sure that I know what you are trying to say here. Positivism is
based on the notion that theoretical statements only make sense in terms
of the underlying observational statements. Positivism is, therefore,
often characterized by ruling out metaphysics, since that cannot
normally be reduced to observational statements. Logical positivism took
this further and attempted to argue that all talk of unobservables is
merely metaphorical, and not truly scientific. So I don't understand
your statement about a priori statements.
I have given good reason to believe that there are, in fact, no
exact copies of us, or our world, in the whole multiverse. No one
has been able to offer even the outline of a proof that there are,
so I am content to say that there are none. Prove me wrong if you
want to disagree.
You have speculated that the universe is non-uniform, and that you
believe we are not one of the structures that repeats infinitely.
There is no good reason to believe these things, and I suspect most
cosmologists believe in the Copernican principle, even though it has
not been proven.
The Copernician, or Cosmological, principle is really about the observed
universe. We have one data point when we seek to talk about other
universes, so any such talk is inherently highly speculative. Any
speculative conclusions are, inevitably, very sensitive to the input
assumptions. I am doing no more than pointing out that the assumptions
you wish to make are without independent evidence, so you should not be
anything like as dogmatic about the conclusions you wish to draw.
Bruce
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