Avoiding Reductio Ad Absurdum

In philosophy of mind.

Suppose someone claimed to have a microscopically exact replica (in marble, even) of Michelangelo's David in his home. When you go to see this marvel, you find a twenty-foot-tall roughly rectilinear hunk of pure white marble standing in his living room. "I haven't gotten to unpacking it yet," he says, "but I know it's in there."

Need we not simply print the whole alphabet just once and be done with all of book publishing? Who says we should print the whole alphabet? Will not just one letter, or one stroke do? One dot?

The physicist John Archibald Wheeler once speculate that perhaps the reason all electrons are alike is that there is really only one electron, careening back and forth from the ends of time, weaving the fabric of the physical universe by crossing its own path innumerable times. Perhaps Parmenides was right: there is only one thing!

Hee. Philosophy jokes. They crack me up.