On 3/17/07, Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> There are factors creating a local measure, even if the Plenitude is
> > infinite and measureless. Although the chance that you will be you is
> > zero or almost zero if you consider the Plenitude as God's big lucky
> > dip, you have to be someone given that we are talking about observers,
> > and once you are that fantastically improbable person,
>
> In other words, "That's just the way it is.", which comports with my
> complaint that such theories are empty.
>
> Brent Meeker
>
> >it becomes a
> > certainty that you will remain him for as long as there are future
> > versions of him extant anywhere at all. Thus, the first person
> > perspective, necessarily from within the plenitude, makes a global
> > impossibility a local certainty.
> >
> > Stathis Papaioannou
If only one part of the possible actually exists, that isn't like being the
one person in a million who has to win the lottery, it is more like waking
up to find that money has miraculously appeared in your bedroom overnight
without there being any lottery. We could say "that's just the way it is",
but it could have been an infinite number of other ways as well. On the
other hand, if everything exists, it is no surprise that you and every other
particular thing exist. The only thing that needs ontological explanation is
the everything: why everything rather than something or nothing? If it were
possible that the reality we experience could be a simulation running on an
abstract machine in Platonia, that would be an answer to this question,
because the machine in Platonia can't not run. That's highly speculative, of
course: maybe the brain will turn out to be non-computational, or maybe
someone will come up with a formulation of computationalism which defeats
Putnam/Maudlin/Marchal type arguments, and we are back with a physical
Universe without ultimate explanation.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Fri Mar 16 2007 - 18:14:37 PDT