At 13:50 +0200 30/07/2002, Lennart Nilsson wrote:
>How can an abstraction be felt?
This is not an easy question. Obviously, the more general
question "How can anything be felt?" is not easy too.
A related hard question is "How can an abstraction feel?".
My (short) answer was that from the "many"-philosophy point of view,
it is difficult to make a clear line between a very specialized abstract
type and a concrete token. I think this is related to Deutsch' "fungibility"
notion. When you ask people why they believe in tokens (particular, singular
instanciations of (abstract) types), in general they gives examples by
referring to a "concrete object" like "that chair", this house", etc.
But we know, both from QM and/or comp that such "object" corresponds to
an infinity of fungible incarnation of "putative object" which are really
more like a observer relative information pattern.
I would like to recommend in that setting the very interesting book
by Derek Parfit ,"Reasons and Persons" (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984), which
subject, I think, overlaps many threads in both the FOR and Everything lists.
Let me quote a rare but important passage where I *disagree* with Parfit.
The passage comes from the section 99, "Am I a Token or a Type?", page 296.
<<Consider fifty replicas of Greta Garbo as she was at the age of 30. These
would be well-described as different tokens of one person-type. As Williams
claims, if the object of love is the person-type, this is very different
from ordinary love. This would not be the kind of love which gives great
importance to a shared history.
If I lived in such a world, and I was one of a set of replicas, I might
regard myself as a token of a type. Might I instead regard myself as *the
type*? This would be a radical change. In one sense of the word `type', if
I was a person type, I could not possibly cease to exist. Even if there are
not now tokens of my person-type, there would still be this person type.
A person-type would survive even the destruction of the Universe. This is
because, in this sense, a type is an abstract entity, like a number. We could
not possibly regard ourselves as abstract entities.>>
This passage explains, imo, why Parfit, who really pushes the duplication
thought experiment very far, has not foreseen neither the comp indeterminacy,
nor the reversal. I don't think there is an absolute frontier between tokens
and types. A token is just a very specialized type relatively to some
distinguishing ability from the part of an observer. Something could be
abstract from some point of view and concrete from another. (In a category
theoretical approach an arrow "concrete ---> abstract" would be a forgetful
functors ?).
As you see I am searching a way to explain "why we don't need to run the
UD" without invoking the movie-graph argument or Maudlin's Olympia Machinery.
(see ref in my thesis).
There are plenty inspiring and intriguing thoughts in Parfit's book. I do not
like his use of the "reductionnist" term, but I share almost all his moral
and identity theories, despite the important,from the "(meta)physical" point of
view, difference alluded above.
Bruno
--
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Thu Aug 01 2002 - 07:06:39 PDT