Stephen writes
> it seems that we have skipped
> past the question that I am trying to pose: Where does distinguishability
> and individuation follow from the mere existence of Platonic Forms, if
> "process" is merely a "relation" between Forms (as Bruno et al claim)?!
>
> In my previous post I tried to point out that *existence* is not a
> first-order (or n-th order) predicate and thus does nothing to distinguish
> one Form, Number, Algorithm, or what-have-you from another.
I don't know about that; I do know that 34 and 3 are not the
same thing, nor are they very similar. I wonder if you are
joining those who might say that I cannot speak of 34 or 3
without mentioning the process by which I know of them. (In
my opinion, that puts the cart before the horse. A lot more
people in history were more certain, and rightly so, that there
was a moon than that they had brains.)
> The property of
> individuation requires some manner of distinguishability of one "thing",
> "process", etc. from another. Mere existence is insufficient.
> We are tacitly assuming an observer or something that amounts to the
> same thing any time we assume some 3rd person PoView and such is required
> for any coherent notion of distinguishability to obtain and thus something
> "to whom" existence means/affects.
Well, I just disagree. Before there were people or even atoms, quarks
and leptons were not the same thing. They didn't have to be perceived
by anyone in order for that to be true. I know that you disagree with
this: they didn't even have to affect anything in order for that to
be true. If there had been just one quark and one electron in the whole
universe, and if they were separately by almost infinitely many light-
years, then there would still have been one quark and one electron.
Unfortunately, I probably can be of no more assistence to you on this
question.
Lee
> We can go on and on about relations between states, numbers, UDs, or
> whatever, but unless we have a consistent way to deal with the source of
> individuation and thus distinguishability, we are going nowhere...
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Received on Wed Jun 28 2006 - 00:57:26 PDT