Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Matter obeys physical laws, yes?

Actually, no. Physical laws exist in the human mind. And unlike moral or social laws, which also exist in the human mind, but which can influence the conduct of human beings, or be enforced by human beings against human beings, physical laws do not influence the behavior of physical objects of systems and cannot be enforced against them. "Natural law" is a metaphor; there is not really a natural lawgiver.

Nietzsche somewhere says that physical reality is deterministic not because of natural law, but because of natural lawlessness: Every particle does what it has the power to do, without restraint by any sort of law, but only by the power of other particles. Though of course, he says, that too is a metaphor.

What I think is real is that physical things have natures. That is, each physical thing can be in various states, and in each state and under each set of environmental influences, it can assume a next state and a next relationship to its environment (which I imagine you will recognize from the theory of finite state automata). And of course those states and those relationships are not entities, and a nature is not an entity; states and natures are in entities, and relationships are between entities. Erhnam's terminology confuses "entity" with "existent."

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

I've been thinking about this. I think it has something to do with what you said in another thread about the notion that you can be aware of nonexistence being irrational. From the point of view of your self identity you don't experience nonexistence at any time, and especially not after death. The copy doesn't experience the original's nonexistence. How is that different from the Bill Stoddard that woke up this morning compared to the one that wen to sleep last night, except for the change in "hardware"?

I am not my experience. You keep appealing to states of consciousness as if they were primary. Consciousness is secondary; physical existence is primary.

Bill Stoddard

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Erhnam's terminology confuses "entity" with "existent."

I agree with the point you're making in your post, but I don't think I agree with this part. When I say that only physical material exists, I've chosen my words carefully to explain my metaphysics. I don't believe the properties of physical objects exist independently of the objects themselves, and I'm trying to make that as clear as possible. The properties aren't existent; they're an inherent part of the objects themselves. That we separate out the properties from the objects is a quirk of our understanding, rather than a description of the reality itself.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

I agree with the point you're making in your post, but I don't think I agree with this part. When I say that only physical material exists, I've chosen my words carefully to explain my metaphysics. I don't believe the properties of physical objects exist independently of the objects themselves, and I'm trying to make that as clear as possible. The properties aren't existent; they're an inherent part of the objects themselves. That we separate out the properties from the objects is a quirk of our understanding, rather than a description of the reality itself.

Your phrasing seems to convey, not "don't exist independent of," but "don't exist [at all]."

This is why Aristotle's categories are so useful. In his terms, we can say that substances (which exist primarily) are physical things, and that other things such as essences exist in substances. So Aristotle would have said that rationality and animality exist in human beings, but you won't find rationality wandering about by itself.

Bill Stoddard

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Your phrasing seems to convey, not "don't exist independent of," but "don't exist [at all]."

This is an intractable problem, where different people are using the same word to mean different things. I don't know how to convince a Platonist or a spiritualist or whatever to change their language, since their beliefs are so different from my own, and everyone wants the language high ground.

I'm not going to cede the word 'exists' to people who want to apply it to properties of objects rather than the objects themselves. Size doesn't exist. It doesn't make sense to say that something's size exists. The thing itself exists and 'size' is how we describe that thing. Our method of describing a thing isn't part of the thing.

[Flyndaran]

But red does exist as a wavelength of light regardless of whether we consciously recognize an object's reflected light as red or not.
A blue car is still blue even in dim light when it looks black to me.
Pretty blue is a subjective term that does not exist outside of personal aesthetics though.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

This is an intractable problem, where different people are using the same word to mean different things. I don't know how to convince a Platonist or a spiritualist or whatever to change their language, since their beliefs are so different from my own, and everyone wants the language high ground.

I'm not going to cede the word 'exists' to people who want to apply it to properties of objects rather than the objects themselves. Size doesn't exist. It doesn't make sense to say that something's size exists. The thing itself exists and 'size' is how we describe that thing. Our method of describing a thing isn't part of the thing.

That seems to say that if we did not exist, or if we did not describe things, or if there are things we have not yet discovered, that those things have no properties. So, for example, there are planets in other solar systems, but until we started discovering them, none of those planets had a mass or an orbital period or a mean temperature or anything like that; there are microorganisms, but until Leeuwenhoek looked through his microscope, they had no size or shape or structure. That just sounds weird.

Here is what Aristotle says:

A substance—that which is called a substance most strictly, primarily, and most of all—is that which is neither said of a subject nor in a subject, e.g. the individual man or the individual horse. The species in which the things primarily called substances are, are called secondary substances, as also are the genera of these species. For example, the individual man belongs in a species, man, and animal is a genus of the species; so these—both man and animal—are called secondary substances.

That is, individual human beings exist primarily; but attributes such as humanity or animality exist secondarily, in human beings, and not on their own.

I think that Aristotelian materialism avoids the problems of other sorts of materialism, in that it lets us say that there are no pure forms; every form is the form of some material entity—and conversely, there is no matter without form. But the form is real.

Bill Stoddard

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Actually, no. Physical laws exist in the human mind. And unlike moral or social laws, which also exist in the human mind, but which can influence the conduct of human beings, or be enforced by human beings against human beings, physical laws do not influence the behavior of physical objects of systems and cannot be enforced against them. "Natural law" is a metaphor; there is not really a natural lawgiver.

This is something of a semantic dispute, I think. Natural laws are fundamentally descriptive rather than prescriptive, but what they're describing not only influences the behavior of natural objects, but in fact cannot be violated (and thus enforcement has no meaning, as enforcement is a means of preventing or punishing lawbreaking that would otherwise be possible). Now, "natural law" as used by some political philosophers is in fact a metaphor.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

This is something of a semantic dispute, I think. Natural laws are fundamentally descriptive rather than prescriptive, but what they're describing not only influences the behavior of natural objects, but in fact cannot be violated (and thus enforcement has no meaning, as enforcement is a means of preventing or punishing lawbreaking that would otherwise be possible). Now, "natural law" as used by some political philosophers is in fact a metaphor.

I think it's meaningless to say that natural law influences the behavior of objects. There is no thing, or force, or power of "natural law" existing outside the objects, and making them behave in a specific way in which they would not otherwise behave. Objects do what they do because they are what they are; it's their own natures, their own identities, that determine how they behave in a given situation. (For example, it's the charge on an electron that makes it accelerate in parallel to an electric field, or perpendicular to a magnetic field.) They aren't compelled by an external force—but "law" implies such a force.

What if there were such a force? Could we cancel it, or shut it down? If we did, would that mean there would be no limit on the behavior of objects? Would every object become omnipotent, that is, become God? Are we to envision objects as inherently having unlimited freedom of action that is taken away from them by the agency of natural law?

Epistemologically, that's kind of weird. It seems to imply that we know both how objects behave in the real world, and how they would behave in some counterfactual world where their behavior had no limits; and since in the latter case we would presumably observe total chaos, which we do not observe, we infer that there is some force that is preventing the existence of that counterfactual world. But, in fact, we never observe objects acting in that way, and have no basis for imagining their doing so; we only observe their acting as they do in the real world. Everything we know about their natures comes from that observation.

Bill Stoddard

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I think it's meaningless to say that natural law influences the behavior of objects. There is no thing, or force, or power of "natural law" existing outside the objects, and making them behave in a specific way in which they would not otherwise behave.

Enforcement mechanisms are not a requirement of law -- law is fundamentally about classification, not enforcement.