—Meaningfully?—
Yes: what terms actually make sense to use, and which don’t. More basically, what terms or ideas actually make sense, period? Are there situations where “turning into” makes sense to use? Which?
Whichever terms help us to understand and think about the situation more clearly. Or are you asking which terms would be correct to use? As I’ve explained, I don’t think any term could be correct. The words are conceptual stand-ins for the process, not the process itself.
I think so. I would say that a caterpillar “turns into” a butterfly. To me, it makes sense to distinguish between that kind of process and the kind of process whereby God removes one set of atoms and puts another set in their place. It also makes sense to me to use the terms “turns into” and “is replaced by” to signify this distinction.
Oh Varlos, I like that. That is indeed one use of the grammar of “turns into” that could help us here. But what about others? For example, a frog turning into a princess…
I guess it depends. This isn’t a necessary or complete description of what I have in mind, but I would tend to say that it makes more sense (for me) to use “turns into” if something significant carries over from the first stage of the process through the last.
If, to use your example, only the frog/princess’ consciousness carried over, is that “significant” enough to say that the frog was “transformed,” not “replaced”? I think so.
If the only thing that was carried over from Lot’s wife to the pillar of salt was their approximate location, is that “significant” enough? I think not.
Again, though, that’s just how I prefer to use the words.
In the Lot’s Wife case, I think “turned into” works well enough, given what little observable detail there presumably was. Six of one, half-dozen of the other though–I can’t disagree if someone wants to hold that she was replaced with the salt. (Old saw: is light a wave or a particle?) Transforming a body into salt just seems more miraculous to me than sleight-of-handing someone faster than the eye can track, so that fits that special case more strongly for me.
In general, I just don’t think it’s possible to speak more meaningfully about a process that hasn’t/cannot be observed. That whole blind-men-and-elephant deal, only without the benefit of groping the actual pachyderm.
Apos wrote:
Well, okay. Let’s just start with the temporal reference frame.
If you look at a snapshot of Lot’s wife just as they are coming out of the city, you will see a woman. That snapshot represents a moment in time. But if you look at a snapshot of her just after Lot turns around, you will see a pillar of salt. Another moment in time.
They are images of the same entity.
You’ve protested that Lot married a woman, and not a pillar of salt. But all you’ve done is identify Lot’s wife with the arbitrary term “woman”. You could as well have selected “Hebrew”. Or “nomad”. Or any number of other expressions, like “young hebrew woman dressed in a white robe”.
The thing is that the more specific you go, the less the amount of time that your identifier will apply. The more general you go, the greater the amount of time that your identifier will apply. Thus, you can simply declare that Lot married an electromagnetic field. Lot is an electromagnetic field, too — as is the earth, and the whole of the universe.
Let’s say you select to identify Lot’s wife in a temporal span from the time she marries until the time she dies, and call that “A”. A is true only while she is “A”. She is Not A when she is a baby. She is also Not A when she is a pillar of salt. “A” represents an identity with arbitrary scope, and if it exists within the scope, then it doesn’t exist outside the scope.
If you broaden your scope to identify her as representing “A” from the time she is born until the time she dies, it illustrates that the label and the identity are not the same. “Lot’s wife” is Not Lot’s wife when she is an infant, but she still is the entity identified as A. That’s analogous to the ordinary notion in formal logic that “A” is a statement, but A is a truth.
Your conundrum manifests when you conflate the statement with the truth, or the label with the identity.
If you insist upon identifying an entity temporally, then you must define an arbitrary scope, because in fact Lot’s wife is always changing. Neither her molecular compostion, nor the thoughts in her head, nor anything about her specifically is ever the same from one moment to the next.
If you examine one snapshot, you may identify her at a single moment. But that identity never existed before the snapshot and will never exist again. If you examine a series of snapshots, you must broaden your identity commensurately.
If you were capable, you could identify her from the time she emerges from the Big Bang until the time her particles come to rest (assuming one model of the universe). By that identity, she is always “A”, and A is always true. That is the broadest possible temporal reference frame and assumes that your sentience spans the whole of it.
To make that into an eternal reference frame, merely introduce the notion that you may view all of the snapshots in the broadest possible temporal reference frame at once — simultaneously. You may observe temporal states that do not yet exist, that are presently existing, and that have ceased to exist without regard to temporal bounds upon your observation.
It is analogous to the notion that you may make a two-dimensional reference frame into a three dimensional reference frame by introducing the notion that you can see both the inside and the outside of a circle at the same time. An entity in a two dimensional reference frame would see only the inside of the circle or the outside of it, depending upon its position with respect to the circle. But never both at the same time. It could never see “over” the circle’s wall (there is no “over”).
From the eternal reference frame, both A and Not A are true.
Yes your honor. As you can clearly see in those pictures of my wedding, I married a slim, beautiful, 25 year old woman with firm breasts and now, here, this fat 50 year old woman with sagging breasts claims she is my wife. I want my wife back!
Yep. I agree with Lib and Drastic (unless they disagree with me, I suppose).
But that’s the best part!
Oh, um…
here’s an interesting slant on the subject.
Lets try using a realistic situation, not hypothetical pillars of salt:
What happens to a person in a coma? or after a blow to the head causes amnesia? When she awakes, is she the same person she was a few days earlier? And how does she know? How do her loved ones know?
What about an old person with Alzheimers?After 80 years of being a specific person who everyone knows, he is not the same person. Or is he?
*Originally posted by chappachula *
I’ve had similar thoughts as well. At what point do we decide if someone is dead or alive? Is death a gradual process, or is it abrupt? I’m alive and conscious and the next instant I’m dead. The physical aspect of myself (my body) still exists from the one instant to the other, yet I no longer “exist”. What changed?
I don’t know if this will help, Apos, but might it be more useful if one were to base one’s ontology on process rather than substance? Or at the very least, give priority to process over substance in one’s ontology?
If viewed from an ontology of process, what has changed in the instant that Lot’s wife is transformed in to a pillar of salt is the aggregation of processes that formed/constituted the entitity known/referred to as “Lot’s wife” into the the aggregation of processes that form/constitute an entity known/referred to as a pillar of salt.
For those interested, here’s a link that might be of some help.
—They are images of the same entity.—
But we haven’t agreed that they are, since that’s the very question at hand: how can they be the same entity when they share none of the same characteristics? Identity need not be absolute down to te farthest specification, brooking no change in any atoms, but doesn’t “turning into” in this extreme way pretty much strain any sense of transitory identity for anything? Lot’s wife could have been turned into ANYTHING. If we come across any object, should we be able to suggest that it’s potentially Lot’s wife? Or potentially anything else?
I’m suggesting that Lot’s wife is never, at any point in time, a pillar of salt: Lot’s wife exists or she doesn’t, but she never exists “as” a pillar of salt, because pillars of salt are not what anyone means by “Lot’s wife.” An apple never exists as a skyscraper.
Was she “Lot’s wife” before she was Lot’s wife? (Before they married or committed?)
Suppose I see a chair in the corner of the room. As I get up to go touch it, it disappears. “Ah, it wasn’t really a chair at all, just a figment of my imagination.” But then a few moments later it is there again, and I can touch it. “Hmm,” I say, “it really was a chair, and it must have been my imagination that it disappeared.” And now I go to touch it, and it disappears again.
What do we say here? Was it ever a chair? If it kept behaving like that, would we still call it a chair? Offhand, one might say, we don’t have rules to govern this kind of use. It seems we could say a lot of things, and they’d all be equally correct (there’s no standard to judge here).
And this is what you’re asking, isn’t it? At it’s core, the question isn’t: “How could it be that…” but “What do we mean by…”? And if that is true, then the above story is my answer. We don’t have a rule to tell us what to do here, but a picture presents itself (you may think of this as a verbal description, a mental image, whatever suits you). And it presents itself quite naturally.
That chair is another example of an identifier with arbitrary temporal scope.
I recently reported an error on this website (which someone else corroborated). After two days, the error was corrected. When I noted the correction, someone responded that maybe the error had been a figment of my imagination.
A = “the error exists”. At that time, A was true. Now, A is false.
Well, that presumes there was, in fact, a chair. That is, by calling it a “chair” the designation was correct. But, given that behavior, we really can’t say whether it was correct or not.
The designation is neither correct nor incorrect; it is arbitrary. The label and the identity (or the statement and the truth) are not the same.
Oh, but that’s the problem I face here with you. Your conception of identity relies on a perspective I don’t have access to: an eternal and absolute frame.
Gah. Where did you get that from? I spent two hours composing a post that exposits identity in a temporal reference frame.
What this means to me is: Lot could turn to God and say, “What have you done to my wife!?” But we knew that.
I don’t think I agree that identity is a series of satisfied propositions, as you seem to be leading up to here:
She is still Lot’s wife; this is why the expression used was, “turned into a pillar of salt”, that is, the pillar of salt that is my wife. There is no union of qualities here between “pillar of salt” and “lot’s wife” that matches “this entity”.
It seems to me that in order to broaden the scope to keep the identity, we’d have to broaden it to the point of ridiculousness, unless we cease to look for a quality or set of qualities satisfied.
Well, those words have a meaning with a use quite outside the use we are concerned with here. I think it is important to keep those seperate. In some instances, “Lot’s wife” is exactly that (to a priest having just performed a wedding). In other instances it is incidental.
Then perhaps we should say: we cannot use these specifically as snapshots of identity at all.