Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

I blank out completely when you start talking about forms. I'm not able to interpret what you might mean by that. Form, pure forms, material forms. I don't know what any of it is supposed to mean. It seems like trying to fit understanding of the world into Platonic language which isn't suited to describing reality.

Form is being-something-in-particular, as opposed to (notionally) just having bare existence without actually being any particular thing. Electrons are electrons: they have a mass, a charge, a spin, and so on. Sodium atoms are sodium atoms, characterized by so many protons in the nucleus, by one of a few numbers of neutrons in the nucleus, and by having roughly enough electrons to balance the protons. And so on. What Aristotle calls "form" is what a thing is; what he calls "matter" is that it is. But as Rand puts it, everything is something; there is no matter without form and no form without matter.

So if you say that form is not real, I understand that to mean that you think electrons are real, but that their charge is not real, their mass is not real, their half-integral spin is not real, and so on.

Bill Stoddard

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Form is being-something-in-particular, as opposed to (notionally) just having bare existence without actually being any particular thing.

Yes, that wouldn't make any conceptual sense.

[Flyndaran]

Isn't a localized ultra hard vacuum technically existing without being any particular thing?
As far as modern physics can ascertain, that is.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

If law is never enforced, then it isn't law.

If you attempt to violate the laws of nature, you will fail. Is that not enforcement? If you violate mathematical laws, your results will be wrong. Are they not laws (perhaps not).

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by 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.

You can describe light itself, or you can describe my experience and perception of what I see, but there's no definition of 'color' that's going to include both, and if you pretend both of those things are the same, then you're employing equivocation.

And the same thing is going on with the identity of these computer emulations of people. Someone on the other end of a text chat with one of these emulations might experience the thing as being the dead person, but it's not actually the dead person, in the same way that my experience of yellow isn't a certain wavelength of light.



If light is a wavelength, then my monitor can't ever be accurately described as yellow, and if I say it is yellow, then I'm lying. I don't think that makes the least bit of sense.

What's going on there is that when I say, "My monitor is yellow," I'm saying something synonymous with, "When I look at my monitor, I perceive it as yellow."

Colors are either our perception or they're a certain wavelength of light. If you choose to go with the wavelength definition, then you're rejecting the normal use of the term and substituting it with your own.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

If you attempt to violate the laws of nature, you will fail. Is that not enforcement? If you violate mathematical laws, your results will be wrong. Are they not laws (perhaps not).

No, because enforcement is an action, and there is no entity or system to perform that action. Planets orbit the sun, not because there are angels compelling them to do so, or because God wills it, or because there is a cosmic consistency agency that makes them do what Mr. Newton or Mr. Einstein tells them, but because they have mass and the nature of mass is to accelerate in a gravitational field. The necessity is internal to them; it's in their being-what-they-are. It's not imposed externally.

I haven't objected to the phrase "law" for a conceptual structure within the human mind, which is what mathematical laws are. The natural sciences are a bunch of conceptual structures that (we hope) correspond to the actual natures of things, and thus describe their behavior. Natural laws form part of those conceptual structures, and describe how things behave. But they don't MAKE things behave as they do. There is no conceptual structure out there in physical reality—no natural lawgiver, no natural law enforcement, no natural legislator. There is just things-as-they-are.

The idea of natural law is a metaphor. I haven't objected to using it; I only object to taking it too literally.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Isn't a localized ultra hard vacuum technically existing without being any particular thing?
As far as modern physics can ascertain, that is.

I would not pretend to explain how contemporary physics regards vacuum. In terms of classical physics, a vacuum appears to be characterized by the absence of entities; but that absence is a feature of a region of space, and space exists as a relation between things. If there were no things anywhere, I don't think it would be meaningful to talk about the space between them, or to talk about its being "empty."

A vacuum is not an entity. That's the point of Aristotelian materialism: It says that all entities are physical, not that all existents are physical.

Bill Stoddard

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

No, because enforcement is an action, and there is no entity or system to perform that action.

I'm not sure why you're stuck on the problem of agency. Yes, there is no agent that is enforcing those laws, but the fact remains, if you try to break them, you will fail.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by Anthony

but the fact remains, if you try to break them, you will fail.

What does that even mean, to try to break them? To attempt to act against your nature? That doesn't make sense. That has to be a contradiction of some kind. To do something I can't, by definition, do.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

What does that even mean, to try to break them?

If I try to make an object behave in a manner other than the way physics says that object should behave, I will fail.