JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
You might be taking the analogy too far, but you're touching on an important subject anyway.
The analogy might be strained here because when we say a car has the property of going 60 mph, the point we're trying to get across is not that it's going some specific speed, but rather that it's doing something that makes no sense to think of as divided, apportioned, or individualized. So certainly we can say that one car is going fast and another car is going slow, but the property we're really pointing to is that each car is moving under its own power. The precise speed at which it's moving is mostly a red herring as far as the analogy goes, and I'll talk more later about a hierarchy of specificity. We don't divide the concept of self-propelled motion and say that its occcurrence in each car is magically different from case to case -- from car to car or from day to day.
And for a car, the property of self-propulsion is an emergent property. We observe it only when all the constituent parts of the car are composed properly. When a car is properly composed, it can exhibit the emergent property of propelling itself -- as you note, at various speeds. The varying speed is not important. The key concept is that one properly composed car doesn't exhibit a qualitatively different observation of self-propulsion than another properly-composed car. It's silly to think that there's something radically at variance in observing self-propelled motion just because two cars are doing it.
Sure, we can quibble over the process that gives rise to that property, especially since automotive engineering provides us with many radically different processes. But we do best when we confine the analogy to the thought experiment of identically-reproduced organisms. So if I replicate some VW exactly, what difference is there that one goes one speed and the other goes slightly faster or slower? Maybe this will help: I'm taking delivery next month of a Tesla electric car to supplement my Otto-cycle gasoline car. I can speak at length about either the variable-frequency AC induction motor or the Otto-cycle internal combustion engine. But what's important is that there's no difference in the observable property of "going 60 mph" depending on whether I'm driving my Tesla or my Audi. We can observe the property without being correct (or even speculating about) what process gives rise to it.
That's where the plot thickens.
How do I reconcile what I just wrote above with what MRC_Hans wrote a few posts previously?
MRC_Hans said:
Is self-awareness unique? I say no. In my view this is a vestige of Jabba's conversion of the argument, but not one we need to hastily sweep out the door without looking more closely at the view.
For his purposes Jabba has attempted to formulate the soul as "whatever reincarnationists say returns." Leaving aside that "reincarnationists" casts a broad net, we can say that Jabba has, from time to time, posted excerpts from popular literature that let us conclude he means a formulation of reincarnation that's not incompatible with animism and that it is really animism to which he wants to refer. In that formula there would be a soul that migrates from body to body, and may conceivably exist separately in some form without being incarnated. It's not far off from classic dualism, if you prefer. In that formulation, relying upon claims made by its believers, we would have to say that the soul is the seat of memory. Otherwise how could they purport memories of past incarnations?
We have used words like "conscious" and "self-aware" in their various parts of speech to indicate what we believe is the observation at work here -- the data we're going to run through our statistical inference and see how it jiggles some relative probabilities. In my opinion we've been far too lax in our usage of these terms, in ways that give Jabba opportunity to co-opt them to mean a soul as he defines it. E is the fact that Jabba exists and that he is self-aware, or conscious of his own existence. It may include the fact of metacognition, to which Jabba sometimes alludes.
But I'd say we haven't been very consistent on what E really means in terms of self-awareness, consciousness, or (dare I use another word) identity. We haven't been entirely consistent in describing E's relationship to sensation, cognition, and memory. For example, we build many machines that we can endow with sensation, cognition, and memory, but we don't say that they are conscious or self-aware. Psychology, biology, and philosophy approach these questions from different perspectives and therefore arrive at different answers. It's important to look at those answers, because one of the ways Jabba's trying to win dishonestly is by loading up E with all sorts of speculative answers. This appears to be his strategy in any debate: load the definitions and initial conditions such that victory is assured without a fight.
When Jabba's critics allow that accumulated knowledge, stored memories, and the like should be included as part of E, it's with an intuitively good reason. If we want to isolate everything that's unique about a person, those are things to which we would inevitably turn. Rather than "a particular self-awareness," which is grammatically and philosophically awkward, we can say that each person has a distinct identity. It is ostensibly composed of years of accumulated knowledge and experience, and manifests itself most readily in differences in individual behavior when faced with identical stimulus.
But then this is akin to letting the properties of each individual car bleed over into a mere observation and saying that each individual car exhibits a qualitatively different version of "going 60 mph" based on its engineering, or even upon its paint scheme and upholstery. Jabba easily conflates E = Jabba exists and has a sense of identity with E = Jabba exists and has a sense of identity composed of these particular elements. And we pretty much let him, which I don't think we should continue to do. It's one of the ways he pretends he's not committing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. He says the former but means the latter.
We like playing-card examples. Take a standard poker deck and draw a card -- any card. That card will have a rank indicated by a number or a letter. It will also have a suit indicated by a symbol and a semi-redundant color. "Has a suit" is a statement of property. "Has a rank" is a statement of property. If you forgot to remove the jokers and drew one of those, you'd have a card that lacked either of those properties, but is still a card. "Is a three" defines the card's rank in a more specific way than simply "has a rank." You can draw another card that may also be a three, in which case the property "is a three" is equivalent and indistinguishable from card to card across the suits. If you're playing baccarat and all you need is a three, then any three will do. There's not "a particular three" according to the rules of that game. Similar with suits. The ace of spades and the six of spades are both spades. There is no material difference in "spadedness" between them. Filling out a straight flush in poker means you need to pay attention to both properties, but that's only because we arbitrarily drew the rules up that way, not because this arises out of the nature of those properties. A three of hearts is different than the three of spades for that purpose, but not because of anything having to do with the card's rank.
The takeaway from this example is that spadedness and threeness are, as properties, non-discrete and non-apportioned in practice. They don't change or become materially different except as we extrinsically dictate, and that they have a hierarchy of specificity. The analogous takeaway from the car example is that "going 60 mph" is non-discrete and non-apportioned and also belies a specificity. We can say "going 60 mph" just as we can say "is moving under its own power," and just as we can say both "has a suit" and "is a spade" for cards. These are all just properties.
When godless dave says
I take that to mean they are self-aware in the same sense in which a moving car has a velocity and a playing card has a rank and a suit. We don't care at this level exactly what non-stationary velocity the car has, or what rank and suit some particular card is. The goal is to explain what it means to be a property, something Jabba simply doesn't get.
But Jabba wants E to be more specific than that. He wants E to be that he exists and has his particular identity -- the sum of his experiences, knowledge, and prior cognition. And that's where the though experiment comes in handy. Jabba wants the soul to be the seat of identity on both sides of the argument. Which is to say, he wants to gather together all the traits that form an identity and think about them collectively. In his theory they would all be functions of a soul. So that's how he thinks collectively about them in all contexts. Consciously or otherwise, he lets that thinking leak over and pretend that its part of the observation that has to be explained by another theory. Because he can't separate the notion of soul from the observation of identity, he thinks we are obliged to keep them together too.
The thought experiment asks what would happen if the organism Jabba were perfectly cloned. We can even borrow some Heisenberg compensators from Capt. Picard and say that the organism is duplicated right down to the quantum level. So no possibility of differences arising from differences between the matter, at the instant of duplication. What would happen to Jabba's identity?
The way Jabba formulates identity presents a problem. His encapsulation of the traits of identity is, for all intents and purposes, an entity. Entities have limitations that don't apply to properties. The operative one here is number. I can have two outwardly identical Volkswagens. But in Jabba's formulation I can't have two of the same Volkswagen because which one would the identity-traits attach to? There would have to be, in his formulation, a completely different -- a second -- entity that encapsulates those traits. And even if there were no discernible difference between them, the fact that there's two means a new identity has been created just by virtual of its cardinality. (Or, as he commonly says also, the identity would have to be shared between the Volkswagens in a way that would be, in his mind, metaphysically problematic. The identity would be looking out through two sets of headlights.)
Obviously this is dualism. And just as obviously, he's trying to insist that the data, E, is inherently and irrecoverably dualistic.
Elon Musk, Nikolaus Otto, and Rudolph Diesel all have different theories for how some car can propel itself to 60 mph -- or to any other reasonable speed. Otto and Diesel may not be very far apart, but Otto might say to Diesel, "Mein Herr, the data we're trying to explain is the observation of a car going 60 mph by means of a four-stroke thermodynamic combustion cycle ignited by an electric spark. Your car has no spark plug, and therefore it has a very low probability of being the correct explanation for your car going 60 mph." And both may turn to Musk and say, "Sir, an inevitable product of a car going 60 mph (or any other speed) is an exhaust compounded from carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Your car makes no such exhaust, therefore your theory of how it is working has a very low probability of being correct. It doesn't explain what we 'see' in the data." You can see the effects of tainting the observation with speculations or theories about how it came about. This is what Jabba does.
Materialism has no problem with the cloning problem because properties are not limited in number. Properties aren't even discrete, or even discretizable. They're ideas, concepts. They're indivisible, non-apportionable. The proposition that a property exists in quantity or number just doesn't make sense. Objects that exhibit the property may be enumerated or quantized, but that's not the same thing. No matter how many card decks we print, we'll never run out of "three" or "spades." As many cards as we need can be printed without depleting some supposed store of "potential spades." And while my freeways may be clogged, that's not an argument for trying to quantify self-propulsion as an abstract idea. Similarly in materialism we won't run out of identity. It's not a thing that can be quantized, so considering it relative to some "potential" amount of it is nonsensical.
Even though I'm fond of arguing that self-awareness is not individualized, I'm not stuck if we shift the discussion to a question of dissimilar identity. If we pare away Jabba's inappropriate constraints and say that E = Jabba exists and has a certain unique personality, we would evaluate P(E|H) according to the mechanism in H by which such things as E are said to arise. In materialism all those things that compose the identity are properties of the brain. If you duplicate the brain with sufficient fidelity, you have in the copy everything that forms identity -- memory, knowledge, proclivities, cognition, etc. The reason I'm fond of arguing for non-individualized self-awareness is that it isolates this particular error in Jabba's reasoning from another he's making: the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. He observing that he himself has a particular identity is a separate error. The error we identify in the "car going 60 mph" example is his attempt to foist dualism where it cannot go. He's proposing a property-entity dualism that simply cannot fly under the ordinary definitions of those words.
I apologize for rambling. I've said a lot, and yet left a lot unsaid.
