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Originally Posted by Angakuk
Quote:
Originally Posted by wstewart
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Originally Posted by davidm
In any event, we can posit another, more extreme scenario. Suppose evil doctors kidnap old Paul and, armed with advance technology, yank the brain out of his head and totally destroy it. Then they rebuild the brain...
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Your sci-fi is non-functional, hence magical, hence superfluous. |
davidm's evil doctor, your Old Paul/New Paul and your Nikos/Thanos scenarios are all hypotheticals. Why are you allowed your hypotheticals and davidm is not allowed his? After all, these are all thought experiments, are they not? |
The more complete the descriptions in thought experiment, the more likely the derived inferences are to be correct. A magical element cannot be described because there's no true function to describe, and this spoils the thought experiment. Hence the need for natural scenarios, wherein every element of the scenario can be described with true function, as needed.