Excellent post, however,
“But people often don’t realize that their argument about where to draw a definitional boundary, is really a dispute over whether to infer a characteristic shared by most things inside an empirical cluster...”
Indeed so, but there are other aspects. Humans also have obsessions with
(a) how far your cluster is from mine (kinship or the lack of it)
(b) given one empirical cluster, how can I pick a characteristic, however minor, which will allow me to split it into ‘us vs them’ (Robber’s Cave).
So when you get to discussing whether an uploaded human brain is part of the cluster ‘human’, those are the considerations which will be foremost.
Excellent post, however, “But people often don’t realize that their argument about where to draw a definitional boundary, is really a dispute over whether to infer a characteristic shared by most things inside an empirical cluster...” Indeed so, but there are other aspects. Humans also have obsessions with (a) how far your cluster is from mine (kinship or the lack of it) (b) given one empirical cluster, how can I pick a characteristic, however minor, which will allow me to split it into ‘us vs them’ (Robber’s Cave). So when you get to discussing whether an uploaded human brain is part of the cluster ‘human’, those are the considerations which will be foremost.