He has no magical soul so it is of no importance. The Swampman's brain and body are identical to davidson's so to anyone but davidson it would appear to be him. Yet Davidson's consciousness would have stopped. He's dead. And a new him has been created.
I agree with part one. Its the dead/new bit I find difficult to swallow. This how I saw it....
"it can't recognize anything, since it never cognized anything in the first place". This the Zombie argument in a new guise. I'm not sure what he is trying to imply, but although it seems to be a Locke-an consciousness=identity I think it is more. I think it is trying to suggest that there is something more than physical things involved in consciousness. It is this D-factor that actually 'does' the learning/cognising/etc and is the non-physical seat of it all. Even though the phyical aspects of the mind - the neural structures, synapse activation, etc at the precise moment of Davidson-1's disintegration are precisely replicated, the D-factor isn't. Davidsons intuition is that something is missing and Swampamn isn't him.
From my intuitions, Swampman is Davidson - he DOES have Davidson's consciousness. He has all his memories, he has the
effects of learning that Davidson denies. Consciousness is a property of the brain. Reproduce the brain molecule for molecule and you will have consciousness. And identity.
"to anyone but Davidson it would appear to be him" But who is Davidson is at the heart of the quandary....
Try the other thought experiment: are you happier with the Star Trek transporter? But if you are, shouldn't Kirk, Spock etc all be just replicas. Don't they too lose thier identities when they are beamed around? Does that account for the zombie acting, perhaps?
I think it might be helpful to talk about metal cubes for a moment (we take away the complications that using a human involves).
Two identical metal cubes (A and B) are sitting on a table. I create a tiny black hole and A disappears. The one sitting on the table is B agreed?
Now imagine A is sitting on the table. I destroy A. One second later I create B (somehow) from thin air. A is gone now and B is the one on the table.
Now imagine I decrease the time between destroying A and creating B gradually to 0 so that the two events happen at the same instant. When there was a 1 Planck time interval we had B sitting on the table and A disappearing so why should it be any different now the interval is 0? A is destroyed and an identical B is created - yet they are different individual spheres.
The same must be true for Davidson and the Swampman - mustn't it? And with the transporter.
I'm happy that the aspect of the scenarios that you find most interesting is the one of identity. But your example starts awry with a different use of 'identical'. If we both have Testarossas, I could say that your car is identical to mine. But that doesn't mean they share an identity. They are not the same car, they are the same type of car.
Or you could say that they are different instances of the same car. Anyway, I used the term identical to mean that they were the same in every way not that they shared an identity. And the Microsoft Word thesaurus hasn't come up with a better one.
The main aim of the argument, however, by me at least, is to consider the elements of mentality. I am trying to show that Davidsons mind (and Spock and Kirk's) 'moves' into Swampman.
But why would it?
First of all do you mean the mind as something separate from the brain that can somehow fly between bodies? Or is it part of the brain?
If the former then how is that different from the 'soul' which we both dismissed earlier?
If Davidson and Swampman both exist simultaneously do they share the same mind? If you create Swampman and then 1 second later destroy Davidson do they then share the same mind? Then take that 1 sec as 0 instead, is there a difference now?
Now, if you want to take Locke's view of personal identity (over time), then you can deny or argue for them being the same person - at this point I find it a side-issue (! Later I may well come back to it!). But it is interesting that philosofear sees the issue as a means of denying physicalism. Of course it isn't a reductio ad absurdum unless you do see things in Locke's way - but this too is arguable. He was right in pointing out that the two ideas are contradictary - that is all one can say, without further argument.
You'll have to excuse me for not knowing who Locke is or what he said. If it's important to this I'll look it up.
BTW Davidsons thought experiment was intended to support an externalist view of language - there is something outside our minds that makes language (specifically names) meaningful. "It can't mean what I do by the word 'house', for example, since the sound 'house' it makes was not learned in a context that would give it the right meaning -or any meaning at all. Indeed, I don't see how my replica can be said to mean
anything by the sounds it makes, nor to have any thoughts". Since Swampy doesn't have a direct causal connection with the naming of 'house' he cannot mean etc.
Nonsense. The context in which Davidson learned the word 'house' is contained within his brain/mind (I see the two as synonymous) and since Swampman has an exact copy of Davidson's brain it is in his mind/brain too. So Swampman can obviously mean the same as Davidson when he says 'house' - unless I'm missing something.
Your example seems to support this - taking a Kripkean view of naming as conferring an 'essentiality' on the named (cube A is named differently from cube B, so they are diffrent). I'm not sure that this is right, but it follows from (or rather is necessary for) K's possible-worlds interpretation of modal logics. Maybe thats a problem with that interpretation (a great pity if it is, since p-ws are a beautifully intuitive approach).
Yes, I did do that didn't I? Perhaps if I had said: Two cubes on the table; if I destroy one of them is the cube I destroy still sitting on the table afterwards?
