h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Jordan. {I am stupid. I am stupid}. How many sentences are within those curly brackets? There is one sentence type, but there are two sentence tokens. This is the semantics of 'identical' that Higgs referred to. Two identical sentences, or one sentence?

So how many persons are in that room? Can persons BE as identical as sentences? 'Two bodies but one person' seems implausible to me. Even siamese twins aren't one person. So our persons in the room are not each other. Hence, if one of them is me, the other can't be. And I see no reason to believe that if the one that is me is annihilated, the other somehow magically becomes me.

toxx - a fact is only a fact relative to some conceptual framework.

How do you go about sorting out a metaphilosophical conundrum? There's no court of appeal.

Noggin

The starting point is arbitrary, az, like the starting point of a circle. The concepts of space, time, mass and change come as a cluster of relations, not individually.

Noggin

Noggin. That's the joy of philosophy. Unlike science we don't have the court of appeal known as experimental observation.

But I notice you have raised a metametaphilosophical conundrum there. Perhaps that's the key to sorting these things out as in Tarski's theory of truth. But then, my brain was hurting even *before* I went to the pub!

toxx

Okay, so this guy is repairing his ship. One by one all the original timbers are replaced. At the same time this other guy is salvaging the discarded bits and building another boat with them. When they've both finished which is the "original" boat?

Noggin

"There's no problem, no matter how complex and obscure, which, when looked at in just the right way, does not become even more complex and obscure." Anderson's Theorem

Noggin. One of our local pubs was taken apart brick by brick and reassmembled in the USA. For me, that is the reassembled Red Lion. If they had built a replica on the origianal site, that would be the reconstructed Red Lion. I guess the 'original Red Lion' is no more.

I like the quote. Would that be Poul Anderson - the SF writer? I'm rather fond of Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crud".

You can't "believe" God is a fact; the two ideas, belief and knowledge are mutually exclusive, surely?

Sorry for that last posting, folks. I missed the fact that I came into this conversation very, very, very late on, so most of what I have raised has probably been said 13 times already.
Just a final note, though; if there is a God, what does God look like? My money's on Judi Dench in her "M" get - up.

Poul Anderson it is.

Belief and knowledge are both ascriptions, judgements about the likely validity of our mental models and the rules for their construction. X knows that God is a fact, Y knows that X believes that X knows that God is a fact.

Noggin

Could be late on, could be early days yet.

I came in at post 124 thinking I'd missed most of the fun. Ho hum.

Noggin

"There are similar people in the other main religions. I am thinking not only of those who join the armed forces, but also of those who declare themselves to be Islamic warriors, or who strap explosives to themselves and then walk into an oppressing country... We cannot understand them, and we are shocked by them, but they exist.

It is all sacrifice."

Is all sacrifice equally valid? Is the sacrifice which sets out to take others with you in order to achieve a specific spiritual or political aim, valid to the god to whom it is offered?

hi speff,

<>

I preferred the Marianne Faithful version of God in AbFab.

az

"There is no reliable evidence that early heathens or druids performed human sacrifice."

Hmm, depends how early. There is 11th century written evidence of mass human sacrifice at Uppsala in Sweden every nine years. There's also evidence in the 8th century Life of St Willibrot, Sidonius and Ibn Fadlan, again around the 10th century IIRC. One might hope this can be put in the same category as the comments of Diodorus and Posidonius on similar sacrifices by the druids.

"There is no reliable evidence that early heathens or druids performed human sacrifice."

Hmm, depends how early. There is 11th century written evidence of mass human sacrifice at Uppsala in Sweden every nine years. There's also evidence in the 8th century Life of St Willibrot, Sidonius and Ibn Fadlan, the latter around the 10th century IIRC. One might hope this can be put in the same category as the comments of Diodorus and Posidonius on similar sacrifices by the druids.

"There is no reliable evidence that early heathens or druids performed human sacrifice."

Hmm, depends how early. There is 11th century written evidence of mass human sacrifice at Uppsala in Sweden every nine years. There's also evidence in the 8th century Life of St Willibrot, Sidonius and Ibn Fadlan, the latter around the 10th century IIRC. One might hope this can be put in the same category as the comments of Diodorus and Posidonius on similar sacrifices by the druids.

Odd idea, Speff. Traditionally there is something called the tripartite analysis of knowledge. It is to the effect that knowledge is justified, true belief. Surely it is clear that if we know something we also believe it - so the concepts can't be mutually exclusive. Are you confusing belief with faith?

OK! I get it now, toxx.

Now... the two bodies in the room are identical, in same way as those two sentences. There are undeniably two things in that room, which are identical. But when you introduce the question 'which is me?' we have a different problem, because there is only one 'me' in the room. That's because 'me' and 'you' describe people with certain properties, and are themselves properties resulting from these other properties.

Consider: what defines you as yourself? Is it your hair, the cut of your jape, a collection of memories, some odd mannerisms? It's a combination of properties which you embody, or embodied, at some time or another. Since every physical property you possess is duplicated in the copy, your 'me-ness' is duplicated also.

Thus, we see that to the original, 'me' would mean itself. However, the copy will have the same idea about /itself/. But, most confusingly, since there is nothing to distinguish you both, your 'me-ness' is the same. You are, literally, the same 'me,' just as (for your sentences) each sentence is the same as the other sentence.

I think this is best described through analogy. Let's consider that every person, at a given moment, is simply a unique set of numbers between one and ten. Thus, at any one time you could be 1, 8, 5, 4, 6 and Noggin could be 1, 3, 7, 3, 5. I could be 0, 3, 6, 2, 8. Each number in these sequences represents the current state of some fundamental attribute of each of us. Now, there's a property for each person called 'bigness,' such that: -

Toxxin = 1, 8, 5, 4, 6; bigness = 18,546.
Noggin = 1, 3, 7, 3, 5; bigness = 13,735.
Jordan = 0, 3, 6, 2, 8; bigness = 3,628.

Thus, a person's bigness, at any given moment, will be different from anyone else's bigness providing that at least one of their attributes are different.

Now, we duplicate you for about the zillionth time. There's the original you and there's a copied you. You both have exactly the same attributes, and therefore the exact same bigness. At that point, the original's bigness is identical to the copy's bigness, and vice-versa.

Of course, given a short time your states would change, so that your bigness' would no longer be the same. But until the defining properties of bigness change, both are indistinguishable. You have the same present bigness and different potential future bignesses.

Now, if we substitute 'bigness' for 'me-ness' and those tiny sequences of numbers for a massive complex set of subtle yet important properties, my meaning should become clear.

/Was/ that clear?

- Jordan

"Of course, given a short time your states would change, so that your bigness' would no longer be the same. But until the defining properties of bigness change, both are indistinguishable. You have the same present bigness and different potential future bignesses."

But surely the change in properties takes place at the very moment any one perceives the others, and there is a 'thou' and 'I' experience?

Even were one to take something which is not self aware - e.g. a table - the experimenter would know which is the copy because it occupies a different space from the original. Of course, thereafter, the change in property would result from the different marks on the table arising from its different exposure to incidents. Philosophically, does this make a difference?

However, for the self aware being, surely the only disturbing thing about such copying is, to return to an earlier point in the discussion, the loss of uniqueness.

As mud, Jordan. No, I get the general idea in spite of your notational error. Surely zero doesn't lie in the sequence from 1 to 10!

> "A person is something that cannot be transported by informational
> means"

Is that it?

> Far from complete but an example of what you requested.

Me and my assumptions... here was I thinking you might have something useful to say. I was actually going to append a rider on my question along the lines of "... except by explicitly defining a person that way", but I rejected the idea as too patronising... my mistake again.

So, maybe you could describe the nature of this 'something that cannot be transported by informational means'. Why can't it be transported this way? What's it made of? How does it function? etc.