4 ms·
Identity is not provable. A being cannot access anything beyond its own senses, so who says you aren't the only one of your kind, stuck in some kind of a VR set
by rhn_mk1 3y ago
Identity is not provable. A being cannot access anything beyond its own senses, so who says you aren't the only one of your kind, stuck in some kind of a VR set?
Heck, identity is not even right. Even twins with identical DNA are not identical. They might have some similar aspects, but similarity is not enough to rule out zombies.
- eternalban 3y agoThis is true. Note words "reasonable" & "assume" in my comment. [Also, identity of "composition", and "nature", not molecular identity.] (I remember having this conversation back in college; there were the three of us, a friend and his girlfriend. He was saying something along those lines, claiming us to be in his imagination. I told him I could prove he is wrong to his girlfriend, but alas he wouldn't be around to know.)
- rhn_mk1 3y agoIdentity of composition implies molecular identity :) Or some other kind of physical identity, if you happen to be made of something other than molecules (plasma?). The question of identity of nature is more interesting, but it's also hard to define. To address your other point, I don't think it's the flip side of the coin: a coin has two sides, and similarity is a continuum. Rejecting consciousness to "dissimilar" things would require that we can split "similarity" and "dissimilarity" and compare which dominates for a particular subject. I think it's more reasonable to see similarity as a continuum, and extend the assumption of - make it consciousness - to less and less similar subjects... And now we arrived at panpsychism.