From: Robin Hanson (hanson@econ.berkeley.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 24 1998 - 14:37:03 MDT
Today the Fall Semester started here, and so the Philosophy
library finally opened, allowing me to read the Dieks vs. Leslie
exchange in the '92 Philosophical Quarterly. They discuss
the same issue Nick and I are discussing now: does it make sense
to think I could have been a rock?
Leslie writes: "First: Dieks would be very obviously wrong if he
had just said that more observers meant more opportunities of
being an observer rather than, say, being an unconscious collection
of atoms, ... things which do not actually observe anything and
which therefore must be left out of any calculations about what
observers could be expected to observe."
I think I fundamentally disagree with Leslie here. The universe
doesn't know whether we exist, and doesn't care. If we're going
to create a state space and prior describing possible universes,
we should do so in a way that is faithful to our best understanding
of the physics of universes, and neutral relative to whether some
set of atoms is organized so as to create an "observer."
We ordinarily want to talk about what would happen if I died or
if humans had never evolved. And it seems to me the
natural neutral physics-oriented way to do is to talk about
what would otherwise happen to the material that now makes me up.
It seems natural to me to talk about this as saying "I could have
been a rock," though Nick thinks this misuses the word "I". Maybe
so, but since the basic notion I'm trying to speak of makes sense,
there aught to be some similar words I could use to describe it.
Let my "I" stand for that.
Doomsday argument folks also seem to want talk about the possibility
that I might have been some other human at some other place in
space-time. This seems sorta metaphysical on first blush, but not
wanting to be a prude about such things, I've said O.K., I can do
this if I imagine that instead of being made of the material I am,
I could have been made of other material, perhaps arranged differently.
If I could have a rock, and if Nick could have been a rock, then it
seems we have to accept the possibility that we could have both been
rocks. If we now add in the possibility that I could have been Nick
and he me, it seems there are two ways we could be rocks. I could be my
rock and he could be his rock, or we could switch. Nick complains
this looks metaphysical, but it seems no more so to me that saying
I could have been Nick and he me.
Of course there are complexities related to the fact that the material
that makes up me changes with time, but I don't see these as essentially
changing the situation.
Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-8614
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