Lot's wife and the pillar of salt: a question of identity

Great Debates
1

This has always been one of the most intriguing philosophical questions to me: the question of identity and change, and the viability of the semantics used to descibe them.

The classic example comes from the Bible, but PLEASE do not take this thread, or any debate around it, to have any claim on or interest in, Biblical exegesis. The example is used here because it’s colorful, not because it’s attempting to say anything about the Bible, or even accurately reflect it. It’s a hypothetical meant to entice thought about fundamental questions of object identity.

The story is this: Lot’s wife is punished for looking back at the destruction of her hometown: she is (presumably by god, who warned them against looking back) turned “into” a pillar of salt.

But does it make sense to speak of turning a woman INTO a pillar of salt? At one moment, we have the woman, a being defined by certain characteristics. The next moment (or perhaps less quickly) we have a pillar or salt: a being with an entirely different set of characteristics (though perhaps “vaguely woman shaped” is one of them).

The problem is this: how can we meaningfully speak of one thing turning “into” another, when the each thing derives its paricular identity from its set of characteristics, and the objects on either side of the “into” have very different characteristics? If they have very different identities, then it is hard to concieve of it making sense to say that one thing “turns into” “transforms into” the other. WHAT is undergoing the “turning into” if that process involves changing the very characteristics that give her her identity in the first place? Can it intelligibly be said that “Lot’s wife” is undergoing the “turning into” event, or is it actually her components (perhaps her atoms) that are being re-arranged to compose something else? Can “Lot’s wife” be said to exist “as” a pillar salt? Perhaps this example is poor due to Lot’s wife being a person, with whom we have non-physical associations: if so then simply consider a fire hydrant “turning into” a pillar of salt. Does THAT make sense?

What seems at least concievable is that Lot’s wife could have been replaced, whether instantaneously or successively, with a pillar of salt. Is that all that “turning into” really implies (it certainly SEEMS to imply more than that, but what?)

Even if we go with the “components that previously made up Lot’s wife are re-arranged to compose something else” answer, is there any way to distinguish this from the “replacement” theory, especially if the transformation is instantaneous?

It makes my head spin…

2

This is an interesting topic, Apos! :slight_smile:

I think that one consideration must be temporality. Let A = “Lot’s wife is a pillar of salt”, and let B = “Lot’s wife is a woman”. Speaking from a temporal reference frame, A is false when B is true, and vice-versa.

But from an eternal reference frame, both A and B are both true and false. (Which makes sense, since eternity implies an absolute tautology — note that a tautology in temporal logic is a bit different from a tautology in first order logic.)

Deeper still is the question of her consciousness, and what happened to it during the event. As I see it, it is merely a kind of death, similar to a person who vaporizes in a nuclear blast. And because it is an event, it must be temporal. Thus, after the event occurs, B is true.

But deepest of all is the question of whether those atoms — when they formed the woman — comprised the woman. Was she nothing more than her brain, with the rest of her body being motorized appendages to it? If so, A ceased being true and B became true.

But if there is an eternity, then that eternity (because it is absolute) is the reality, and the temporal reference frame is already finished (from the eternal reference frame). And in the eternal reference frame, A is still true.

In other words, that’s an informal ontological proof that Lot’s wife is still a woman.

3

Libertarian, that is a fascinating perspective.

An identity thread I started: “Does consciousness/identity need to be continuous?”

The whole topic of identity boggles my mind. Lib, while I find your outline to be fascinating, it does raise some epistemological problems for me. not having access to this perspective, all claims of thisness seem dubious at best. I’m not sure I can agree to that.

Otherwise, I don’t think I have anything to add that isn’t nonsense, or long-winded and inconclusive.

4

I actually learned alot about this problem from the book Metaphysics of Star Trek, by a philosophy professor in Melbourne at the university there.

My personal opinion is that we have no essence, therefore no identity continuity at all over time. Each time-sice of “me” consists of a certain arrangement of neurons (mind, thought, consciousness, whatever), and that’s a subset of the overall arrangement of cells (body.) Over a period of time, our body gets entirely new cells, so no continuity there.

Moment-to-moment, the thing we really think of as ourselves, our conscious mind, takes on wholly new configurations. Those configurations of neurons, at any single time, define my attitudes, hopes, aspirations, abilities, etc., all it means to be me. So when those configurations change, the person I referred to as “me” just a moment ago now disappears and a new “me” is generated. In fact, the person who wrote “me” in those previous sentences, and conceptualized himself as that person with that identity, no longer exists by the time I write this sentence. He’s gone.

I have a huge complete theory about this, working in fun elements and examples from daytime television (if Stefano DiMera gave John Black Roman Brady’s memories, and a clone of his body, would he not then be Roman Brady? Would it matter if the original Roman Brady still lived as to determining who was who?) But I’ll leave that for another time. Suffice to say that I think we are all in a state of continuing identity death, at every moment of our lives. Absent some sort of essence to tie the mental states together, I think this conclusion is inevitable. Too bad those religious types are wrong about the soul, that would enable continuity over time if it existed. Well, you can wish in one hand and crap in the other…

5

Just because Lot made an insensitive comment at a co-worker’s 100th birthday party is no reason to turn his wife into salt. You people are taking this way too hard.

6

I’m sure sure I’d go that far in slicing up “me”, but I’ve long though that when one awakes from sleep that the “me” waking up is not the “me” that went to sleep. I imagine that one’s conscious mind does not hibernate; it’s erased like a program in your computer’s memory when there’s a power failure. And it get rebuilt perhaps like an a PC loading an OS from disk.

I generally don’t like computer/brain analogies, but maybe this one makes sense.

Imagine if this idea becomes universally accepted. Suicides will stop overnight; why kill yourself when you can just take a nap?

7

This one’s easy. All we have to do is figure out exactly what “consciousness” and “time” are, and we’ll have our answer.

That’s the glib response. I hope to think about this some more and return.

Oh, and I thought that was funny, Sampiro.

8

VarlosZ, I don’t think such definitions are really that necessary. We use them all the time: now, what do we mean by them in this use? An important way of looking at the problems that face us.

9

That is, we use those words all the time…

10

Let’s me be clear that by “indentity” I’m not talking about someone’s personality.
I’m talking about indentity in the sense that something is identified as an apple.

I also don’t really understand what you’re talking about Lib, and you’re going to have to sell me on the concept of an “eternal reference frame.”

There’s also what I consider to be the problem of the pillar of salt: what reason is there to call it “Lot’s wife” when it lacks everything that defines “Lot’s wife.” That is, A is NEVER true, not because of any particular time reference, but because Lot married a woman, not a pillar of salt.

—Too bad those religious types are wrong about the soul, that would enable continuity over time if it existed.—

Why too bad? If what you surmise is true (and I’ve certainly considered it as a very strong possibility) then it’s exactly the situation we are in right now… and it’s not so bad at all.

However, we do then get into what is simply a level of specificity problem. Sure, day to day, I am not EXACTLY the same set of constituent parts, and they are not arranged in EXACTLY the same way either. But we don’t ask such exactitude of almost any real world identity. Apples rot over time, their chemical composition changing. And they shed molecules that were once part of them into the open air. But they still remain apples for quite a long time, until they finally lose enough of their distinguishing characteristics. The real question there is: is there a moment when it’s both and apple and something else (rotting mush)? Two moments, one where it is an apple, and then another where it’s something else? Some other way of describing it?

11

Apos:

If that’s the kind of question you’re raising, then I think our answer is arbitrary. Or, more accurately, I think it depends on why we want to know. For some purposes, it will make sense to describe thing x as an apple, and for others it will make sense to descrbe it as mush. We can’t give a description of it that is necessary or “correct” except to point to it and say “there it is.”

I suppose the same thing holds for the case in the OP. Lot’s wife is. Anything beyond that is left to our discretion. “But,” you might say, “the question is whether we can call that thing [that pillar of salt] ‘Lot’s wife’ in the first place.” Well, “Lot’s wife” is just shorthand for “that thing.” That thing is different than it was when it was not composed primarily of salt, but, as has been pointed out, Lot’s wife at any given moment was different from Lot’s wife at any other given moment. This is true of every atom in the universe.

We can attach names to things and ascribe to them an identity which is semi-permanent, thereby “fixing” them and facilitating thought about them. Each of those things, however, is in a constant state of flux; the fixity is a (useful) construction of our minds. As such, it is up to us when a thing ceases to carry identity x and assumes identity y.
erislover:

I managed to say what I wanted without reference to either “consciousness” or “time.” Apparently, I agree with you.

12

The house where I grew up had a large and beautiful apple tree right outside. I don’t know the kind of apple tree it was; the apples were small, green, and rarely edible. During summers, it dropped approximately eighty billion of them on the ground each day. (I’m estimating.) A chore was to pick them up, and throw them into buckets, thenceforth to haul them off into the woods aways where the clouds of bugs they drew when they rotted wouldn’t be as much of a problem.

Being, er, me, I often procrastinated on this chore. There was definitely a point where apples on the ground achieved a state that was simultaneously “apple” and “rotting mush with random bugs inside it, of the exact consistency necessary to make an instinctive shudder go through a child when his fingers unexpectedly sink into it.” Another way to describe it would be “ack!”

I don’t really know that anything has an essential identity; I tend to accept the narrative that says everything is made out of the set of interdependent aggregates (including that pesky “I”). Labeling aggregate-sets that usually have high contrast between each other differently is usually convenient–a piece of narrative abstraction that it’d be hard to get through workaday life without.

13

Exactly.

14

Well, the apple question is a more simple example that might shed light on the Lot’s wife question. In the apple case we have components gradually moving around so that the whole gets less and less like an apple. With Lot’s wife’s case, though, we have instantaneous conversion. I think it bears some thinking as to whether the “instant” in some way negates the idea of “conversion.” If would be one thing if God instigated a chemical process by which all the atoms in Lot’s wife’s body transmuted into salt, and that process went too fast to observe. It’s quite another if whatever one form of matter instantly became another form, without progression or process. Because in what way, then, is even the identity of the matter preserved? That is, how can we, even in theory, distinguish the instant transformation of something into something else from the instant replacement of something with something else? What carries over if everything is different?

15

Well, if what I said before is true, then “identity” is up to us. We can choose to classify the thing as “Lot’s wife” or as “the pillar of salt that appeared in her place the instant Lot’s wife was taken by God.” If we were aware that God had simply removed “her” atoms and put salt in their place, then it might make sense to classify it as the latter.

Of course, I don’t know how much relevance the example can have. All bets are off, conceptually speaking, when a Judeo-Christian god gets involved.

Perhaps we can’t, but does it matter? When is anything ever “instantly replaced” in the real world?

16

But let’s think about that, Varlos, as you tend to describe a situation…

Imagine, my wife standing nesxt to me, then disappears. In 100 years, a salt pillar is in that place. Now imagine it in 99 years… 98 years… 97… at what point can we say she has “turned into” a pillar of salt?

17

So, Lot’s thought process probably went something like this:

Lot: “Where’d my wife go? She was right here. And where’d this wife-shaped pillar of salt come from? My God, my wife has been replaced by or transformed into a pillar of salt. But really, it doesn’t matter how it happened, the end result is that my wife no longer exists and in her place stands this giant salt lick!”

Logic often is cold comfort.

18

In terms of instants in Lot’s Alt Pillar Situations, I don’t think “replacement” and/or “transformation” are applicable terms. Sort of like “where” is a useful thing to know in terms of, say, the location of my keys in relationship to where I usually try to stow them, but bordering on meaningless in terms of the state of an electron in relationship to the nucleus it’s orbiting.

19

Again, I didn’t mean for the question to get hung up on the Biblical, or indeed even the personal (though the discussion can go anywhere it wants, of course). It’s a question of what sort of logic and language we can meaningfully use in a strange situation. Eris’ most recent question is more along the lines I was thinking.

20

eris:

At whichever point we want – that is, whenever and under whatever circumstances it is more useful for us to do so (not that usefulness is necessarily the proper criterion).

The question then becomes, “at what point should we say she has ‘turned into’ a pillar of salt.” This is a matter of opinion, however. I would prefer to say that, unless the atoms of Lot’s wife were somehow used to make the salt, she has been “replaced” and not “transformed.” This is just because “replaced” seems to me more indicative of that process than “transformed” (as I understand the words).

Apos:

Meaningfully?

Drastic:

Out of curiousity, what terms would you use?