The way I see it is that we DO have to run the UD on a VERY specialized
machinery.......
:-) Lennart
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruno Marchal" <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
To: <Fabric-of-Reality.domain.name.hidden>; <everything-list.domain.name.hidden.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2002 4:01 PM
Subject: Am I a token or a type?
> 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 Sun Aug 04 2002 - 10:31:26 PDT