The problem I have with this premise is that initial conditions can never be the same.
Why not?
So this in itself would prevent a duplicate world.
But we just created a world with all the same physical properties. What's preventing this from happening?
But given that this world somehow comes to be identical I would say it would be identical. Souls and emotions and everything else.
It is only physically identical, not 'spiritually' identical. Souls don't need to be replicated (and in fact explicitly aren't). Emotions are replicated in so far as their physical basis is replicated.
Would the iron molecules in a indviduals would be the same?
They would have all the same physical properties. But they wouldn't necessarily be the same molecules.
Would spontanenous mutations in genes be the same?
Yep - that's a physically based thing.
Would these two worlds evolve on every level of physics end up the same?
Yes.
I can not see how.
Not knowing how isn't material (heh). All that matters is that we consider such a universe.
Just one non functioning microtubual in a sperms flagellum would wipe out Hitlers whole family line.
But that would only happen if the physical properties of the universe are different, say the physicalists. And further - we could just create the new universe to be physically identical to the present one so we don't need to worry about history yet. Even if we stipulate that certain events will play out differently due to some inherent probabilistic effect which is not 'seeded' by the a physical property
* - the physicalist would argue that at the moment the two universes have identical physical properties - there are no differences between them.
I do not know what the soul is.
No, but the only necessary definition is that it is non-physical. It is a dualist's concept of a soul.
I still think the mind is non physical.
The mind may well be 'non physical' in one sense, but the physicalist argues that the mind is an emergent property of the brain (the mind is what the brain does). It 'non physical' in the same sense that running is non physical. You can't point to running, it doesn't exist as a noun. The mind, the the physicalist might say, is not a noun, but a verb.
However, you take away my legs (physical things) and I lose the ability to run (in the sense of a certain kind of leg based locomotion). Take away the brain, and I lose the ability to think.
Do you think we
should concentrate our research into consciousness surrounding the non-physical? Or have we not reached that point yet?
* Cavediver for example stresses that quantum physics is still deterministic - and it
could be that the identical physical universe would have every probabilistic outcome come out the same. The truth of this matter isn't actually important to the point though, and I raise it merely as a point of interest.
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.