critical minds want to know the answer to this question

  • polonius-rex@kbin.run
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    3 months ago

    but you could birth a new person who didn’t fit that finite number

    there will always be a hypothetical new person who could exist

    • Match!!@pawb.social
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      3 months ago

      me, pedantically giving birth to a new child in order to prove the n+1 case

      • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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        3 months ago

        Countries have been trying gamification and incentivization to increase birth rates, when they should have been appealing to our pedantic impulses all along.

    • J Lou@mastodon.social
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      3 months ago

      There are finite number of possible humans due to there being a finite number of states a brain can be in.

      There is an argument for moral realism that takes advantage of finiteness and computability of mental processes to show that there could be an objective morality

      @askbeehaw

      • polonius-rex@kbin.run
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        3 months ago

        a finite number of states a brain can be in

        there are infinite ways to arrange and configure finite neurons

        computability of mental processes

        are mental processes entirely computable though? you kind of run into a halting-problem-style issue because if you can compute your response to anything that should imply that you can never make a decision that surprises the computation. but if you feed knowledge of the computation’s result into your decision making process you can just pick the opposite

        • Zadig@beehaw.org
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          3 months ago

          there are infinite ways to arrange and configure finite neurons

          hm? i don’t see how this is true at all. a finite of anything in a finite space can only have finite configurations.

        • J Lou@mastodon.social
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          3 months ago

          The universe might be discrete.

          If mental states are finite, then the space of all possible human minds is finite and includes the one that believes they have knowledge of the computation’s result. It is possible for mental states of 2 minds to be different but extensionally behave like the same person. We would exclude human minds whose models don’t map well onto the physics of our universe though. You might not be willing to pick the opposite if we are talking about morality also @askbeehaw

          • Match!!@pawb.social
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            3 months ago

            It’s possible that brains act stochastically such that two discrete identical brains produce a range of outputs under identical conditions. In that case, mental states would be confined by the space of outputs of minds, and if that’s the real numbers then it would be uncountably many.