On 7/10/2015 8:01 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 7 October 2015 at 19:50, Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au <mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>> wrote:On 7/10/2015 6:26 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:On 7 October 2015 at 16:59, Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au <mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>> wrote: On 7/10/2015 3:58 pm, Jason Resch wrote:On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 10:37 PM, Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au <mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>> 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.That similar things are similar is a tautology, and no verification is needed to see that it is true. You can argue that no copies exist anywhere in the multiverse, but you can't argue that IF copies exist THEN they would not be similar/ would not really exist/ would lack meaning.
Again, you are misrepresenting my position. If it is a copy, according to the discussed notion of a copy, then it is similar by construction. But this does not entail that any such copies exist.
No-one claimed that it did need empirical verification. It simply suffers from the defect of all tautologies -- it does not convey any real information about any state of affairs.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.Metaphysics is ruled out by logical positivism, but the claim that similar things are similar is an a priori statement, and does not require empirical verification.
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.As I said, the Copernican principle is not proved, but most astronomers probably believe it is true. If it is true and the universe is infinite, then infinite copies (or doppelgangers) of you and your environment down to any level of detail you specify exist. At the very least, this is not a ridiculous notion.
Neither is the contrary. So I have reservations about theories that are based on such speculations, and depend on such a raft of unsupported assumptions.
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