Quote:
Originally Posted by Molokh
I don't know. I'm not a philosophy expert. What does that word mean in the current context?
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Classical philosophy distinguishes between universals and particulars. The universal is the category to which we assign an existent; the particular is the specific existent we perceive or otherwise detect at a particular time in a particular place. For example, the two cats in my home are particular cats (in fact, they're
extremely particular!), and so are the various cats that other people reading this comment may own, and the cats that I may meet or see on an evening walk, and so on . . . but "cat," the universal, is the category that includes all those cats and only those cats.
Aristotle said that an individual cat is an entity: a concrete entity perceivable by the senses. (In his time, known concrete entities were nearly all perceivable by the senses; in our time, the category has to also include concrete entities detectable through scientific instrumentation, such as distant planets, protein molecules, or subatomic particles.) He did not consider the abstraction "cat" to be an entity. Rather, "cat" was the form of the concrete entities that are cats. In Aristotle's view, only concretes exist in their own right; forms or abstractions exist only as attributes or aspects of concretes.
Plato disagreed with this; he regarded forms or abstractions as entities in their own right. He thought that the human mind had a higher intellectual intuition that could access the realm of forms, and could compare the particular moving, breathing, vocalizing entity in front of a person with that form and say, for example, "Oh, that's a cat; it matches the form of Cat." In fact, Plato thought that abstractions had a truer reality than concretes; the concrete could come to be or cease to be, it could fall short of perfectly embodying the abstraction, it could be flawed or mutilated, whereas the abstraction was eternal, unchanging, and flawless. And thus he thought that there was an eternal Form of Man that could not perish, and that the more fully we embodied the Form of Man, the more we perfected ourselves, the more we participated in that eternity.
Now, in the terms we've been using here, qualitative identity is basically a relation between a concrete entity and the abstraction that identifies it; two cats both have the qualitative identity of cat. So two different concrete entities can have the same abstract qualitative identity. But numerical identity is not a relation at all. An entity has numerical identity only with and as itself. If we extend matters over time, a cat now is numerically identical with that same cat tomorrow or last week; numerical identity is the property of being capable of being tracked through time.
It makes it easier to track two entities through time in a distinguishable way if they have some distinctive qualities that are not included in the qualitative identity they share. For example, I can tell my two cats apart because one is black with a little white on the belly, and one is gray and cream tortoiseshell; because one's fur is fine and the other's is coarser; because one speaks in a variety of soft chirps and the other in a couple of loud cries. If they were identical twins, telling them apart would be much harder. But they would not be numerically identical; if I watched closely all the time, I could track each cat along its separate timelike line through the space of my apartment.
I suggest that you're a Platonist because you seem to define yourself as an abstract pattern that could have different concrete embodiments; you think that you could be transferred from an organic body to a digital simulation, or that as a digital simulation you could be xoxed repeated, and all of those would be equally "you." Conversely, I define myself as a concrete individual; that is, I'm an Aristotelian. I care about my numerical identity, and not just about my qualitative identity.
Bill Stoddard