Well quantifying your beliefs is pretty important if you want an accurate map of the territory.
If someone said to you that the counterargument that you can’t quantify an immortal soul isn’t a problem for the believe in an immortal soul but only for a hypothetical belief called “having a quantifiable immortal soul”, you’d rightly be pretty upset.
I don’t think I would ever ask someone to quantify an immortal soul, that would be a bizarre and uncharitable thing to do—there are plenty of things that are useful categories that dont break down into real numbers.
Quantified theories are preferable to non-quantified theories because you can test and thus falsify them. I highly recommend Fake Beliefs if you want to see what I’m getting at.
The whole point of this post was that you can’t objectively quantify similarity between patterns, that doing that is inherently a subjective judgement call.
I was already talking about objectively in my post:
I fear that there is no real way to do this objectively [...]
It would be preferable to measure objectively, because, for one, different cultures and people can converge on the same ideas thus promoting accurate cooperation.
I agree that it would be useful to have an objective measure of identity, as it would be useful to have an objective measure of morality… But alas I fear both of those fall prey to the is-ought dilemma
Why is it a problem with patternism that you can’t quantify the difference?
I can definitely see it being a problem for some hypothetical belief called “quantifiable patternism.”
Well quantifying your beliefs is pretty important if you want an accurate map of the territory.
If someone said to you that the counterargument that you can’t quantify an immortal soul isn’t a problem for the believe in an immortal soul but only for a hypothetical belief called “having a quantifiable immortal soul”, you’d rightly be pretty upset.
No I wouldn’t?
I don’t think I would ever ask someone to quantify an immortal soul, that would be a bizarre and uncharitable thing to do—there are plenty of things that are useful categories that dont break down into real numbers.
Quantified theories are preferable to non-quantified theories because you can test and thus falsify them. I highly recommend Fake Beliefs if you want to see what I’m getting at.
Let’s say I had a method for quantifying similarity in patterns between identity… What’s the test I then perform to validate that method?
The whole point of this post was that you can’t objectively quantify similarity between patterns, that doing that is inherently a subjective judgement call.
Subjective is distinct from un-quantifiable. There are plenty of quantifiable, subjective things (say, value of an object to a potential buyer).
I agree completely (but patternism doesn’t do that either)
Ohhh, so now you’re talking about OBJECTIVELY quantifying patterns. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Is there a reason that you think ways of measuring identity should be objective?
I was already talking about objectively in my post:
It would be preferable to measure objectively, because, for one, different cultures and people can converge on the same ideas thus promoting accurate cooperation.
I agree that it would be useful to have an objective measure of identity, as it would be useful to have an objective measure of morality… But alas I fear both of those fall prey to the is-ought dilemma