Richard Brown and Pete Mandik have just posted the fourth installmen of their great new podcast, SpaceTimeMind. The new episode is entitled, "Death and Logic (with Eric Schwitzgebel)", and the capsule summary is as follows:
People say that two things in life are certain. The first is that no one gets out alive. The second is that if possibly necessarily P, then necessarily P. But, are death and logic really certainties? If, for example, there exists an infinite number of situations which each contain an individual who is intrinsically similar to you, aren't you effectively immortal? And is there a single best logic to use in assessing such possibilities? Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel joins Richard and Pete to tackle death and logic as well as topics concerning the reality of the past and the proper role of common sense in science and philosophy. This is the first part of our conversation with Eric. The second part will appear in a future episode.
As an aside, I've long liked the notion of immortality mentioned here (viz. if there are infinitely similar functional duplicates of you spread out across a vast multiverse of possibilities, there will always be a "continuer" of you. For every physical bodies of yours that dies, there will be some system -- perhaps trillions of years in the future -- that continues "your" cognition). I also think it is entailed by the new model of reality I defend in "A New Theory of Free Will" and elsewhere, but that it is neither here nor there. ;)
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