Mereology question
How deep/close is the relationship between an object and its most fundamental building block?
Let's say X is an object and Y is its fundamental building block, where any part of X could be broken down entirely into Ys (but no further).
Does it make sense to say: "X is really just Y" ?
For example, say f'loom was found to be the fundamental building block of everything. Would it make sense to say:
A slice of apple pie is really just f'loom.
My body-mind is really just f'loom.
A Rembrandt painting is just f'loom.
Mother Teresa was just f'loom.
Hitler was just f'loom.
?
Let's say X is an object and Y is its fundamental building block, where any part of X could be broken down entirely into Ys (but no further).
Does it make sense to say: "X is really just Y" ?
For example, say f'loom was found to be the fundamental building block of everything. Would it make sense to say:
A slice of apple pie is really just f'loom.
My body-mind is really just f'loom.
A Rembrandt painting is just f'loom.
Mother Teresa was just f'loom.
Hitler was just f'loom.
?
Comments (72)
And if you disagree, well thats thought too.
I think?
Everything is basically made up of atoms and they are in turn made of smaller particles. It is just the arrangement of those particles that make them different.
I might be wrong, but I don't remember seeing anywhere that an electron in one element is any different from those in other elements.
I'd say that objects are identical to all the properties that comprise them. So the answer to your question is an identity relationship: X is Y. But bear in mind that all of the Ys are non-identical (i.e. nominalism), and the way they interact with each other makes X what it is.
A house is just a pile of bricks; why don't you live in a pile of bricks? I find that when the bricks are arranged just so, I can live in the space between. So a house is a pile of bricks - with lots of nothing between them. I don't care much about the bricks, it's the nothing that's important.
His predecessors, Democritus and Leucippus, were the originators of atomism, proper. But Lucretius' text is brilliant both as literature and as philosophy and enjoyed an enormous popular revival amongst the French philosoph of the Enlightenment; after all, it was one of them, Baron D'Holbach, who famously said 'I see nothing but bodies in motion'.
The problem which the ancient atomists tackled, was how The One could give rise to The Many. Recall this was the basic metaphysical conundrum posed by Parmenides - that nothing that truly is, could not be, and nothing that is not, could come to be. The atomists solution was to propose 'the atom' - meaning 'un-cuttable' or 'in-divisable' - as the form of the changeless in the middle of change. Now of course this is drastic simplification of a dialectical process that unfolded over centuries, but that is still an important part of the drift of it.
This is one of the main sources the idea that the universe can really be best understood in terms of ultimately-existing material point-particles or 'fundamental constituents'. There are other factors behind it as well but I think this is the most important one.
BUT, that said, it's worth a read of Werner Heisenberg's lecture, The Debate between Plato and Democritus. Heisenberg, as you're no doubt aware, was one of the founders of modern quantum mechanics (along with Neils Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, and several others). Later in life he wrote a book on Physics and Philosophy, of which this piece is representative. It's not that long, and well worth the time to read IMO.
Thought thinks?
And this is kind of what I'm trying to get at. If X consists solely of Y, does it make sense to say X *is* Y?
A diamond is carbon.
Michelangelo's David is marble.
A human being is quarks and leptons.
Let's say you've got two blocks of pure Carrara marble. One is carved into an exquisite sculpture by a master artist. The other is left untouched.
To what extent is it valid to say: They are simply different forms of marble.
I think it's true that they are two different forms or pieces of marble. All existents/objects are different from one another. With regards to resemblance, existents/objects are always on a degree/spectrum between similarity and difference and never identity.
The OP was not clear ... or at least my intent behind it. Lemme try again:
To what extent can one reduce the 'essence' of an object to that of its fundamental parts?
(To paraphrase a well-known metaphor:) Let's say you have three solid gold rings. One is an old family heirloom, handed down through five generations. One is a simple flat band sold by a jewelry chain store. One is a striking piece of wild ring art made by a local craftsman.
To what extent are these three rings all just (different shapes of) gold?
Quoting numberjohnny5
To what extent is it 'valid' to say: Their forms are different, but in essence they are both just marble.
It's true to say that since the two separate "forms" are made of the same "kind" of stuff.
Nope.
Your forum password consists of 1's and 0's, but your password is more than mere 1's and 0's: it's information contained in the arrangement of 1's and 0's that represents your password. If you change the specific arrangement of 1's and 0's then it's no longer your password. Extra information is contained in the arrangement, and cannot be found or inferred from the basic constituent alone. (you know that my password is 1's and 0's, but you don't actually know my password)
Quoting rachMiel
But if we're all really just the same, why do diamonds outlast apples?
Why doesn't Michael's David join the forum and start posting in this thread, and why am I not currently posing naked in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence?
It is not valid to say that, you could say however that they are marble in different forms.
You are saying that X consists solely of Y and X is Y are nontrivially different.
It's pretty clear what X consists of Y means.
So what does X is Y mean?
What you’re saying here amounts to something like the mixing of metaphors.
The idea of ‘essence’ is associated with Aristotle’s metaphysics. ‘Essence’ is derived from ‘esse’, so really amounts to declaring what a thing really is, or what it is about it that makes it what it is. So the hallmark of Aristotle’s approach is ‘essence, substance, and accidental qualities’. There are many discussions about substance and how it is related to the form and the act of manufacturing and so on.
But I don’t think that approach is reductionist. Reductionism, as it’s usually understood, is more associated with philosophical materialism as outlined in my earlier post. But it’s also often associated with science in the form of ‘scientific reductionism’ which is precisely ‘the idea of reducing complex interactions and entities to the sum of their constituent parts, in order to make them easier to study.’ But you don’t find much discussion of essence in scientific reductionism.
I know you were not intending to, but I want to interject and say that OCD can be a serious psychological disorder that significantly impacts the quality of a person's life. OCD is not just, or even, perfectionism, but unfortunately, this colloquial designation continues to be widespread. This makes it difficult for people with OCD, such as myself, to be taken seriously when they say they have OCD because it is assumed that we are simply perfectionists or even just joking around when in actuality it is something we struggle with every day. Just for future reference.
I'm saying that X consists of more than just Y, it consists of specific arrangements of Y. The arrangement itself is a part of what constitutes X.
Yes, mixing metaphors, that sounds right. But I'm not sure how else to get at what I'm trying to get at.
What is the essence of a marble statue?
1. Marble
2. Statue-ness
3. That which the statue depicts (bird in flight, mother and child, etc.)
To what extent is it valid to say, of *any* marble statue, that its essence is marble?
Likewise, to what extent is it valid to say of any human being that its essence is quarks and leptons? Or cells? Or energy? Or consciousness? (Or, if you're a Buddhist, anything at all?)
Yes, you're right, I'll be more careful.
I was diagnosed with OCD 20 years ago. So when I refer to "my OCD" I know of what I speak. I like to talk about OCD with humor, but I might be in the minority on that. So your point is a good one.
But every arrangement of Y consists solely of ... Y. No? (If an arrangement of Y is, in turn, a more deeply nested arrangement, this nested arrangement still consists solely of Y. And so on, all the way down.) Doesn't this propagate back all the way up so that it can be said that X consists solely of Y? And doesn't this equate to X is Y? Or X is in essence (ultimately) Y?
The question conceals an error. We do not know that there is any "fundamental building block(s)." The history of recent physics reveals that each object viewed as fundamental can give rise to new, previously unknown, objects.
This means that the building block paradigm, irrationally accepted from the Greek atomists, is fundamentally flawed. A better way of thinking about nature is to say that there are actual objects, out of which we can create finer objects and out of them finer objects still -- perhaps ad infinitum. Suppose you think string theory is viable. Then, what is to prevent strings from being modeled from, or actually decomposed into, components? And those components from being decomposed again?
None of the finer objects are discrete entities until we destroy the whole. in the original whole, they are potential, not actual individuals.
Further, we don't know that wholes contain no more information than obtainable from each component examined in isolation (if such an examination were even possible). In fact, we know the opposite. No examination of a proton in isolation would show that it will repel other protons at long range (via E-M interactions), bind to other nucleons at close range (via the strong interaction) or possibly transform into a neutron (via the weak interaction)?
So, clearly, behavior in holistic contexts is not reducible to behavior in isolation. Or, as Aristotle noted, the whole is not just the some of its parts.
Viewing objects as reducible to "atomic" building blocks is an example of Whiteheads fallacy of misplaced concreteness. When we're doing physics, we don't care if an electron is in an isolated hydrogen atom or in a human being. So, we abstract away (leave on the table) all of the data that distinguishes a human from a hydrogen atom. Once that data is gone (and it is gone from physics), it's not available to construct biology or describe a human. So, biology and human psychology can't possibly be reduced to physics -- there's no data in physics to do so.
Physics may leave open the possibility of bacteria, frogs and humans, but that is not information about actual bacteria, frogs and humans. As Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, pointed out, information is the reduction of possibility. Possibility is not information. Biology reduces some of the possibilities left open by physics to actuality. So, it is not reducible to physics. It has its own, independent methods and data.
Distinct things must consist of more than the same fundamental constituent in order to be distinct from one another. The different arrangements themselves play a role in what things consist of.
If you're asking about essence then really I think the answer is: read a bit more in Aristotle's metaphysics. I myself haven't read the original in the full or studied it formally, but even a synoptic account will convey the general idea.
But one point that I could make, is that the term that has been translated from Aristotle as 'substance' was originally 'ouisia', which is a form of the verb 'to be'. So it's a very different meaning to the word 'substance' conveyed by 'marble'. The meaning of substance in Aristotle is nearer 'the subject in which predicates inhere'. Nowadays we instinctively understand 'substance' in a more materialist manner.
Also I concur with DFpolis' response above. It's important to understand how modern culture has unconsciously assimilated materialist atomism into its thinking. The person-in-the-street will generally say that the Universe is 'made from atoms', and they are understood very broadly as the 'fundamental building blocks of nature'. But Aristotelean philosophy (which despite its differences is broadly Platonist) was never 'atomist' in its outlook to begin with. So again, thinking about ontology in terms of 'essence' is not what 'reductionism' usually means. In fact the beginning of modern philosophy proper generally shunned the Aristotelean first causes, essence and substance, which were associated with the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages.
(Buddhism has a different approach, but is also addressing a fundamentally different kind of question.)
Quoting Wayfarer
I feel like a guy who's walked into a room of sommeliers and asks: "Umm ... how do I get the cork out of this here bottle?" I apologize for not being more clear about what I'm trying to get at. (And I thought it was such a pellucid little question!) I'll try again. :-)
Some believe that everything is (made of) one and only one unchanging (non-)thing: consciousness. (This is the non-dual understanding of consciousness, not the conventional one.) When asked "If consciousness is all there is, why is there so much variety in the world?" these non-dualists will often say something like: "The apparent variety is merely different names and forms of consciousness."
This is what I'm trying to get at in this thread: Is it valid to say that an elephant and a rock and the feeling of looking at a sunset are all merely different names/forms of X (consciousness in this case)? Or do these things 'possess' some sort of essence/identity that make them ultimately unique, despite their all being sublated by consciousness?
I think that hit it. If you understand the above paragraph, you understand the reason I opened this thread. (Hopefully!)
Quoting Wayfarer
In non-dual circles it is often said that consciousness is the ultimate substrate, i.e. that everything is (made of) consciousness. When you ask a non-dualist "If everything is (made of) the same consciousness, why is there so much variety in the world?" the typical answer goes something like:
"The (apparent) variety is merely different names and forms of consciousness."
What I'm trying to get at in this thread is the viability of the above sentence. An elephant, a rock, and a memory of childhood ... can they all be reduced to being merely different names and forms of the same thing, consciousness? Or do objects possess an ultimate (essential) uniqueness that goes beyond this underlying sameness?
What's 'truer': X Y Z are the same, X Y Z are different ?
I don't like the historical notion of essence. I like talking in terms of existential dependency. One can reduce something(not necessarily an object) by virtue of looking at what all those somethings have in common with one another, as a means for gleaning knowledge about the things themselves that is not at all obvious otherwise...
One key...
The fundamental parts must exist in their entirety even when they are not in the combination of the thing being reduced.
So I would say that the sentence in question is meaningful (or viable if you want to put it like that) within the context within which it was situated. There, 'everything is Self' is a natural expression of the 'bliss of being' sat-chit-ananda. There are passages in the Upanisads about the Self in all beings, all being the same self.
But in the context of modern Western culture, the underlying worldview is very different, the 'one substance' being matter or at least something physical in nature. I suppose it is also a kind of monism, but it's a materialistic monism, where the 'one substance' is not 'cit' but dumb stuff. So materialism also believes that we're all 'made of the same stuff' but that 'stuff' is basically inert matter. So, I don't know if the kind of question you're asking is really something that modern philosophies bother much with; I think overall Sartre's 'existence before essence' holds sway (although the sense in which DNA amounts to essence might be an interesting one to consider).
Sorry about the circumlocution but I really think it is required by the kind of question you're asking. I think maybe it's a consequence of the way ideas from all kinds of traditions are mingling in today's culture.
A whole is not identical to any of its parts. A whole and its part are two different objects. A whole is a collection of its parts.
Quoting rachMiel
If by 'essence' you mean 'material', you can say fairly accurately that the 'essence' of the gold rings is the same as the 'essence' of the pieces of gold they consist of. Note however that gold is not a fundamental 'essence' because if you broke a gold atom into its constituent subatomic particles, these would not have the 'essence' of gold.
See the below
Quoting creativesoul
There’s an analogy in holograms - take a holographic image and divide it, and instead of two pieces with half the image in each, you end up with two smaller [and lower-res] pieces of the same image. Very important principle.
Essence is a form, not the matter. The form of a thing is "what" it is. When we come to know things we abstract their essence, and this is an instance of "what" they are, a form which exists in the mind. The matter stays in the thing and we never properly get to know it, we only know its forms. So it can never be valid to say that the essence of a thing is its matter.
Yes it’s an Advaita question. And yes, both the question and an appropriate answer to it are context-bound. And one more time yes, the disconnect in this thread between what I am trying to ask and what most people think I am asking is due in large part to all these different traditions, ideas, and worldviews having been thrown willy nilly into a big stone soup pot and swirled around.
I guess I’m trying to use western philosophical tools to investigate the nature of the eastern (particularly Vedic) concepts of paramartha or ultimate truth. But since I am so ignorant about western philosophical tools, my investigation keeps running around in circles!
One could argue that once the parts cease being the parts of a particular whole, they are no longer the same objects they used to be; they stopped existing when the whole they composed stopped existing. That's because their relations to other objects have changed, and when an object's relations change, its identity changes too. An object's identity is inseparable from how the object is different from other objects and these differences constitute the relations of the object to other objects.
But if the parts don't change "too much" after the dissolution of the whole they composed, they can be regarded, "for practical purposes", as the same objects they used to be.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, the pieces have a lower resolution than the original image so they are clearly not identical to the original image.
I was not addressing consciousness in my post, but the idea that the whole is convertible with tits parts.
As for consciousness, I see no reason to think that any material being we know has subjective awareness other than humans -- and certainly not rocks.
We have different ideas ("forms of consciousness") because objectively different kinds of things act on us in objectively different ways, and their action on our sensory system gives rise to our neural representations of them. We call our awareness of these representations "ideas."
Every two objects have some identical properties and some different properties; in this sense they are both same and different but never identical (meaning that they differ in at least one property, otherwise they would not be two objects but one).
If you are looking for the most general (universal) property, a property of every object, then we can call this property "objectness", "identity", "existence", or "logical consistency". Like any property, this property is a non-spatiotemporal, abstract, general object that is "instantiated" in other objects. These other objects can be properties (meaning that they themselves are instantiated in other objects) or concrete objects (meaning that they are not instantiated in other objects). The instantiation relation seems to be a primitive (unanalyzable) relation, like when a general triangle is instantiated in a particular triangle. It is also known as "exemplification"; it is a kind of manifestation or expression.
Or maybe you are not looking for the most general property but for the smallest objects that compose all other objects or for the biggest object that is composed of all other objects ("composition" is a different relation than "instantiation" but I think it is equally primitive). First, it is not clear whether there exists a smallest or biggest object, as composition might go on infinitely in both up and down directions, unless it would be logically inconsistent (which we may never know due to Godel's second incompleteness theorem, if I'm not mistaken). Second, in composition there seems to be a particular kind of similarity between a part and a whole, in that the identities (or "essences") of the parts are somehow subsumed into the identity of a single whole, or differentiated from the whole.
I think it makes sense, but I think this is the wrong question. I think the question should be "is it useful?", not "does it make sense to ask this?". If X is a galaxy cluster, and Y is "quark", does it help your understanding of astronomy to ask if "A galaxy cluster is really just quarks?" Equally, does your answer to that question help? I suggest it doesn't.
I finished a while ago Object-Oriented Ontology from Graham Harman, and you might want to check it out, as it deals a lot with this problem. There's also Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology, which might be of interest.
In mereological context, OOO will denounce both "x is really y" & "y is really x" as strategies to devaluate objects. You have mainly brought up the issue that "x is really y", which would constitute what OOO calls "undermining" : claiming that an object is a compound manifestation of other, smaller objects or forces, and that the phenomenal object we experience is somewhat not the real thing.
The problem you brought up is probably the most common example of undermining, a reduction through scientific or empirical means, but there are others ; when someone claims that "the world is mathematically structured" ; when they commit to either idealism or monism ; when they agree to panpsychism.
So, to answer your question, while the relation between subphenomenal components and phenomenal objects is close, it is not a reducible relation. "X is really just y" is an example of folk science, and can be useful as a linguistic form to share information about the object while specifying that the attributes we describe aren't phenomenally available. But anyone who wishes to produce a more sophisticated ontology will have to address both overmining and undermining.
That's just not true. Take an apple out of an apple pie:It's still an apple despite it's no longer being a part of an apple pie. The apple pie is still an apple pie as well.
No. Differences do not constitute relations. To quite the contrary, relations are existentially dependent upon different things.
I dont see why, a priori, identity couldnt be considered a relation. A is identical to A, thats the basis for the determination of all further relations, no?
The solution to the ontological question is simply to considerna object and its attributes and relations to be correlated, and not coconstitutives.
I'm not sure what the above has to do with what I claimed. I objected to saying that differences constitute relations.
What does the law of identity have to do with this? I see nothing and could effectively argue that point if you'd like.
The problem is that - all by itself - "A=A" is utterly meaningless at best and nonsensical at worst. Laws cannot be either. Thus, it behooves us all to acknowledge the brute fact that the law of identity is more than the mere expression "A=A".
The law of identity is a metacognitive tool that when used properly facilitates clear, meaningful, intelligible, and coherent language use. Metacognitive tools are existentially dependent upon language itself, for there can be no thinking about thought and belief if there is not already something to be isolated, named, and subsequently talked about. Thinking about thought and belief is an activity that is existentially dependent upon something to think about(pre-existing thought and belief).
Brute fact: The law of identity owes it's very existence to language.
p1.Whatever does not owe it's existence to language cannot... owe it's existence to language.
The law of identity does.
Not all relations do.
It only follows that not all relations are existentially dependent upon the law of identity. So, with that in mind I want to revisit the following claim...
Quoting Akanthinos
No.
One can attribute/recognize causality long before language acquisition. The fire example...
Sure, for all practical purposes it is still the same apple. But strictly speaking, by taking the apple out of the apple pie something has changed in the apple: its relations to other things have changed and so it is now different from other things in a different way than when it was in the apple pie. But as I said, this change is negligible for all practical purposes.
Quoting creativesoul
There would be no relations between things without things, but also there would be no things without relations between them. Things and relations depend on each other; you cannot have one without the other.
You can't derive differences (in thought or in the physical world) from identity. If you have differences, it is because there is some real difference giving rise to them. So, yes, it's rational to conclude that our experiences of elephants and rocks can be traced to irreducible differences in their origins.
It's irrational to think that the variety of our experiences is unreal. At the very least our experiences are part of reality.
You can. The moment of identity is also the moment of non-identity, so to speak.
I ask you to pick an object at random in the Great Bag of Things that is the world. You reach in and pick A. I ask you to do so once again, and lo and behold! you show A once more.
A is identical to A is identical to A is ... But each instances are different and identifiable. The phenomenal compound of "A on pick 1" and "A on pick 2" are different.
The law of Identity is not meaningless, its the basis for the possibility of meaning ever arising and being available. Without it you have no basis of ambiguity and equivocation, which aren't great in academic discourse, but absolutely required for natural languages.
Quoting creativesoul
If this was so, we would be having a purely epistemological debate, not an ontological one.
Quoting creativesoul
You are clearly equivocating. The law of identity doesn't owe its existence to language, language owe its existence to the law of identity. The object A in the phenomenal compound "A at t1" and A in the phenomenal compound "A at t2" are identical, regardless of the existence of a language that can designate them. That's why we are treating this as an ontological problem and not a philosophy of language one.
That's an example of fallacy by undermining. The A of "A at T1" and "A at T2" are identical because they are the same A, not because of any other attributes such as composition or spatial location.
Attributes and relations do not constitute objects, they reveal something about them.
Where there has never been language, there has never been the "law of identity"...
If you disagree... be my guest. I've nothing further. I've offered an argument. It hasn't been validly objected to. You've offered only gratuitous assertions.
That won't do with me.
You are unfortunately free to see gratuitous assertions wherever you want, but this sort of indignation really isn't appropriate to this conversation.
Quoting creativesoul
So logic didn't apply to dinosaurs? :chin:
Not interested. Valid objection against the argument I've presented or a valid argument for your position. Nothing else will suffice.
... :brow: ...
Since you are the one evaluating the validity of the objection, you can this way safeguard yourself against any form of criticism by simply ignoring anything that could be an objection. Which is what you are doing right now.
Agree. I think language relies on the ability of the rational mind to abstract and compare. When we say that A=A, by definition we're not talking about this particular A (unless we're comparing typefaces, or kinds of symbolic systems!) But usually what it means, is that 'A' denotes a particular value, so that is why if I have two apples, and two oranges, then I have the same quantity of completely different things.
- I think language relies on the ability of the rational mind to abstract and compare.
To be slightly pedant, language relies on so many things that its complete analysis probably evades us by simply requiring more time than our puny beings can afford to spend. But a priori, yes, abstraction and differentiation seems to be much lower-level than language. An animal can probably associate a smell to a memory by association, then abstract a larger category itself associated with the whole event. Without language, it would be fairly limited in what it could do with such an abstraction, but it would certainly not be a useless cognitive process.
- When we say that A=A, by definition we're not talking about this particular A (unless we're comparing typefaces, or kinds of symbolic systems!) But usually what it means, is that 'A' denotes a particular value, so that is why if I have two apples, and two oranges, then I have the same quantity of completely different things.
Exactly. In the ontological context of the OP, the purpose of bringing up identity was to object mainly to the idea that relations are between different things, but also to the ideas that object are their relations or attributes, or that objects and relations are ontically codependent. They arent, they are codetermined. So in this case me adhering to a preseance of the Law of Identity to language is not a form of idealism. Its simply the statement of a precondition to the specific process that allowed for intelligence to arise. A=A is, in the ontological context, the form of the relation that all (or at least, all available to us) things hold with themselves.
Other statements were made to the effect that you cant get from identity to difference, which is what brought me to use the A=A so as to denote particulars. Because the definition of identity and a layout of the properties necessary to demonstrate its counterfactual is very clearly all that you would need to show that you can get from identity to difference.
I don't think this can be right. A law is not a law unless formulated, and how could you formulate the law of identity absent language? I think the law of identity is a purely formal principle, which codifies the experience of reiterated or continuous cognition of an entity. Entities are understood as being themselves across disjoint multiple and/or continuous cognition of them, when the perceptual differences between each cognition or within continuous cognition are sufficiently minimal or the sameness is sufficiently great, which is the same. The law of identity is really based on the actuality of continuity. So, I could be fooled by a so-called identical twin, for example if there was discontinuity of cognition. The actuality of continuity is not dependent on language but it cannot become the law of identity without language.
Like I said, Im not taking a stance towar idealism here. The Law of Identity is not a force regulating the universe, nor is it a setting that could have been otherwise. That it seems to apply to everything normally available to us phenomenally is interesting, but not a solid foundation for ontology in my opinion.
However, even in a purely historical manner, A=A must have preceded language. As a requirement for functional informational systems, the simplest cell structure, even the cellular scaffolding itself would have had to, in some way, enact identity.
Put what you deem to be a valid objection or argument forth. We'll go over it. Let the chips fall where they may.
Just to be clear, by A and A' I meant two simultaneous instances of the same type, not one A at successive times. So, I'm not sure that we are considering the same example.
A at different times is numerically one because its successive states are linked by dynamic continuity, not because they are made of the same constituents. It is formally one to the extent that its successive states have the same intelligibility (can evoke the same concepts).
The question was "Can identity give rise to differences?" My claim was that it cannot. So, I pointed out the differences between two formally identical instance of the same type. Differences, being relational, cannot be found by examining one object in isolation. We need to consider their relations.
Quoting Akanthinos
I do not see how this rebuts my claim. Yes, A is numerically one, but your example is not pointing out a difference in A, but in the picking events. These events are different because they stand in objectively different temporal relations to each other.
Quoting Akanthinos
I never said they did. Still, they are our means of knowing objects.
I beg to differ : objects have intrinsic properties. Where p is an intrinsic property of object x: if p is not an intrinsic property of object y, then y is not x. i.e. p is a necessary property of x.
The converse is to assume particulars exist without properties. But if that's true, how do properties become associated with particulars?
You are correct in that constitution (or perhaps, composition would be a better term) is but another attribute which does not equate with the object's identity. And the example was somewhat misleading in that A=A, re particulars, does not really evoke what the law of Identity is supposed to express. Wayfarer pointed this out accurately,
Quoting Dfpolis
Differences are simply potentiality of values deviation between two observations. The determination of identity is the determination of a set of values. Even just non-{previous observation} is sufficient of set of value to reveals a difference.
Quoting Dfpolis
As any discussion regarding an object stands on the ground of the possibility of the observation of this object, so in the context of a phenomenal discourse, I think its warranted to always allow for the observer's conditions to come in play in the scenario. And the phenomenal description of any determination of identity is temporal.
In more than a way, ontology resist atomisation. Everything tend toward the amalgamation.
Every example of identity includes something to be thought of and something else to think about that. Identity without the process of identification is nonsense... literally sense-less.
What must already be the case, or what must be happening, or what must have already happened in order for some thing or other(we can always pick a candidate) to exist?
The answer to this is only discovered by knowing what makes our candidate what it is.
What makes an apple pie what it is? It's elemental constituents.
What must be the case in order for apple pies to emerge onto the world stage? More than that.
There's more to existential dependency than just basic elemental constituency.
Differences can be either actual or potential.
Quoting Akanthinos
Only if the identity in question is quantitative. Two numerically different protons can have identical masses and charges. We know they are numerically different because they stand in different relations to their environment -- including observers.