Couldn’t we just say that the pillar used to be Lot’s wife?
Lot’s pointing would just be a way of indicating to his guest what happened to her (she turned into the statue).
The pillar of salt we call “Lot’s Wife” used to be a woman. She used to eat bread. She used to have sex. The pillar of salt is still identified as “Lot’s Wife”.
Not anymore it isn’t. It’s identified as “the pillar of salt formerly known as ‘Lot’s wife’”.
If she had merely died and become a corpse, that corpse wouldn’t be Lot’s wife, it would be her mortal remains (formerly her body).
“Where is your wife?” ; “She is dead. Her corpse is there.”
“Where is your wife?” ; “She has been turned into a pillar of salt. She is there.”
Sure it is. How else can one answer the question, “What happened to your wife?” How can one answer? How does one answer? Now, how does one answer if the pillar of salt is not ‘Lot’s Wife’?
Why wouldn’t the corpse be ‘Lot’s Wife’? Because aspects of her description have changed? But this happens all the time! People’s hair grows and is cut, it changes color with exposure to the sun or with age, tragic accidents can cause the loss of a limb or cognitive abilities, disease can kill. None of this removes ‘Lot’s Wife’ from the language-game, from conversations. It merely brings it up in perhaps different contexts, or more to the point, it causes different descriptions to be made.
Lot doesn’t ask god, “Why is this pillar of salt here and my wife gone?” Why is that? We don’t say, “Whatever my grandfather was, there lies the body he once inhabited” (say, at a funeral); no, we say, “My grandfather is dead.” Surely ‘My grandfather’ as a symbol in language is still meaningful after he has died (or even decomposed!). Similarly, if you ask me for my hammer, but that hammer broke two days ago, I do not respond, “I don’t know what you’re talking about—I have no hammer.” Perhaps I would show you the pieces of my hammer, perhaps I would inform you, “I’m sorry, it broke the other day” [note: what broke? If ‘my hammer’ no longer indicates something this sentence is nonsense!] or something similar, and you would understand. This can only be possible if the symbol ‘my hammer’ still had meaning. What it means is showed by how the symbol is used. Various transitional descriptions can be inferred or given straight off by considering how the symbol was used previously, and how it is used now (turned into, was damaged, melted, etc).
It is not important whether there is a pillar of salt there or not; in fact she could have simply vanished. ‘Lot’s Wife’ still identifies—not “identifies something”, it merely identifies—and this symbol plays that part. Due to events the part it plays may shift. The events feed the interpretation of identity, they cause various descriptions to become more appropriate and others less (or not appropriate at all).
Do you suppose there is some objective checklist we may assign to ‘Lot’s Wife’ that is no longer met when she turned into a pillar of salt? Can you list some of those criteria? If not, what are you supposing? Why can’t we identify the pillar of salt as ‘Lot’s Wife’?
That is, really, why can’t we say Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt?
I’m sorry: are you actually asking for an explanation of the concept of death?
No. Is your answer to my question, “We can’t call Lot’s Wife ‘Lot’s Wife’ because she’s dead?” 
(Note: This post was written at various times over the past week or so as I bounced in and out of this thread trying to get a handle on it. So please excuse points already addressed in some form by erislover, astorian and epolo. Also, remember that I’m in way over my head here.)
This is fascinating. And, for me, has immense implications. The question of identity is, I suspect, fundamental to our every voluntary action. (And/or perhaps to our involuntary actions.)
Let me try to put this into a kind of perspective for myself:
Lot’s wife = caterpillar = unknown hominid.
Pillar of salt = butterfly = homo sapiens.
God = genetic coding = development of speech.
Turned Into = ? I don’t know what the hell this equals, damnit. Except itself, which is no answer at all. Is it? This is where I fall down. And I’m not sure that replacing “turned into” with “is replaced by” helps. A quick read up on process philosphy doesn’t help me much yet either. I’ve been thinking about this all week.
The best I can do with “turned into” is that it is an imperceptible moment of transition (a word which implies continuity – doesn’t it?). Imperceptible because our perceptions are locked into the temporal. And, as Lib said, “Continuity is born of temporality.” Or does “turned into” have no bearing on the matter because we are locked into temporality?
If I give up on continuity, then I can say that “Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt; she is still Lot’s wife, but she is also a pillar of salt.” Or, “A caterpillar turned into a butterfly; it is still a caterpillar, but it is also a butterfly.” Or, “An unknown hominid turned into homo sapiens; it is still a hominid, but it is also homo sapiens.” Or would I be not giving up on continuity to say those things?
And does this leave me [list=1]
[li]realizing that what I am is subject to change at any moment without any perceivable cause? That what I am is not defined by what I was, but is, instead, arbitrary?[/li][li]or with the knowledge that there is a frame of reference of which my existence is an immutable part?[/li][/list=1]
Or do they come to the same thing? Personally I prefer the first; the second frightens me more.
Of course I also prefer to think of Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt as a metaphor. That she became full of bitterness at the destruction of everything she had known. And that her bitterness consumed her.
But whether she became a literal or metaphorical pillar of salt does not lessen the question of identity. In either case, she was changed from what she was before.
And this is the crux of the matter. How does she change while her label doesn’t? The only answer I can see is that she and her label are not equivalent to each other. But this begs the question of identity. Doesn’t it? Or does it posit that identity exists separately from label? So that even if we did not have the label “Lot’s Wife” for Lot’s Wife, the identity which we label as “Lot’s Wife” would still exist. Or have I simply stumbled into some clumsy, half-assed variant of a refutation of solipsism? Help.
We categorize things based on our perceptions of them, but the categories have no real, objective meaning.
Consider: Lot remarries. After a period of time, Lot’s wife-II dies. We say that “she is now a corpse”. This corpse disintegrates, becoming bacteria and soil nutrients. We say that “she is now the bacteria and soil nutrients”. Plants grow in the soil made fertile by the aforementioned nutrients and bacteria. We say that “she is now the plants”. Lot eats the plants. We say that “Lot is now his wife”.
Do you see the problem with this reasoning?
The categories have no real, objective meaning (other than to allow us to function). But the things (including consciousness and/or self) themselves do exist. And their existence/identity is not contingent upon our observation.
Identity is integral to existence. Or is it vice versa? Anyway, whether the way we perceive a thing is arbitrary or not, the fact that we can perceive it indicates that it exists.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that identity rests in the thing itself, not in our perception of the thing.
And since our perception is limited to the temporal, we can’t know whether a change in the way we perceive a thing describes a change in the thing, or in the way we see it. So, the best way to deal with that is to assume that our perspective changes as we cling to time’s speeding arrow, and the identity of the thing remains unchanged. So Lot’s Wife remains Lot’s Wife.
And from Lot’s point of view she is quite useful a source of flavour enhancer for vegetables that grew where he buried his second wife who remains (whether or not her remains have disintegrated from Lot’s perspective) Lot’s Second Wife.
If we truly accept that, then everything is only the first thing.
You’re right on with the first one, but losing it on the second. We must note that a symbol in a language can sometimes have two roles (or more, or less, but we only need concern ourselves with two here). One role is as a pointer; it is a free variable, a name. Lot’s Wife can play this part (this is what we call her). “Caterpillar”, however, does not play this part normally; of course, we can name this caterpillar “Caterpillar”, but that seems like an unnecessarily complicated hypothetical. So in this case, “caterpillar” doesn’t name anything, it serves only as a description. Of course, “Lot’s Wife” also may serve as a description. This is one possible case of confusion here.
When we consider the name—the placeholder—“Lot’s Wife”, we find that it can stand for many things in various circumstances. In humorous ones, perhaps the toilet or a bottle of liquor. In serious ones, a woman. In times of God playing around with this moral coil, a pillar of salt.
You are defined by whatever is necessary to make the definition—if you are defined at all. What do I recognize when I recognize you? —say, when I see you in person, and we have been friends for years? And why would it matter if I used arbitrary conventions to accomplish this or not, or indeed how would you know if I did or not, if in almost all cases I recognize you?
Why immutable? If there was one thing you would consider immutable about you, what would it be? If this question cannot be answered, should you abandon immutability as a criterion of “something we use to ascribe identity”?
The same way Oreos can be emptied from a tin and replaced with 10-32 hex nuts. It is true that label didn’t change, but in some cases the use of the label has: a consequence of what is being identified as what.
The pillar of salt is no longer Lot’s wife. It may be what remains of her, but it isn’t her.
If you claim that it is Lot’s wife because it was once Lot’s wife, then you can claim that anything is what it used to be. Lot is really several dozen goats and thousands of grain seeds, ground into paste and cooked.
Oh, I don’t know about that. Suppose we are looking at the infamous figure where on one hand you see an old woman, and on the other a young one. We would all report that, in fact, nothing in the drawing has changed. But how do we describe the drawing? If a person only saw the old woman, how would they describe it? And from these descriptions and our own perception, why do we say it is all really the same thing? Because of the circumstances surrounding our perception? I think this is a very real possibility. A person only hearing about some drawing on the phone from two people might not realize that the drawing of the old woman and the drawing of the young woman are actually the same drawing. But once this has been surmised, are we forced to say that the descriptions of the drawing must be “somehow” equivalent since they, in fact, refer to the same drawing? Surely not.
And this is how I’m looking at the question before us. Lot’s Wife is Lot’s Wife, be she a young lady, an old crone, a corpse, or a pillar of salt. What is important is the (non-static!) role the symbol ‘Lot’s Wife’ plays in the acts of communication. The question, “How did Lot’s Wife turn into a pillar of salt?” is a scientific one. But the significant report is that of Lot: his wife one minute, a pillar of salt the next.
Of course, ‘Lot’s Wife’ needn’t refer to a something to have a role. As considered earlier, her corpse will eventually rot away, and it seems quite strained (to me) to put forth that the symbol somehow refers to her various decomposed bits, perhaps now scattered by animals and rain, among other natural events. It needn’t refer to anything in particular, it only needs a role to play. In our case, it does happen to refer to something still: a pillar of salt. But even this needn’t be the case absolutely. “What color hair did your wife have?” is perfectly understandable, and quickly answered, without appealing to a pillar of salt at all.
It is Lot’s Wife because that’s what we call it. It has surplanted previous use of the self-same symbol with a new one.
Would it help you to understand my post if you approached it realizing I am not discussing metaphysics?
Vorlon, pretend you are Lot. I ask you, “Where is your wife?” Given that your report of events to other parties, and how you recall it yourself, is that she turned into a pillar of salt (this is the case we are dealing with), how do you answer? Suppose the salt is right next to you, even.
“She’s dead. She turned into this pillar of salt.”
I’m not married to the pillar. The pillar shares no properties with my (former) wife (except trivially, like being made out of mass-energy).
The pillar is not my wife, the pillar was once my wife before she was transformed.
Well, we’ll have to disagree here. I do not look at identity as “a series of properties something has” as all properties may conceivably shift without loss of identity. Indeed, given science as we know it today, your entire body has replaced itself. Given normal interaction with people, I will hazard a guess that all the physical characteristics of you have changed over time.
Somehow your mother playing the part of your mother hasn’t the same issue you do playing the part of Lot. Why the discrepency?
Exactly. My body isn’t any particular bits of matter: every molecule in my body has (probably) been replaced by now. It’s the relationship between the bits of matter, the higher-order properties, that are “me”.
Well, hey, who can argue with this? But we can ask: what properties?
“What happened to your wife?” ; “She is a pillar of salt.” I do not see why this ‘is’ is not the ‘is’ of identity here. We are, after all, identifying it in such a manner. No one expects you to cook dinner for a pillar of salt, whether it used to be someone you cooked dinner for or not.
To me, this means, roughly, “I no longer engage in marital activities with my wife as she is a pillar of salt.” But I never said one should, that would be quite a silly argument (not that I don’t put those forward now and then… and then again). I did note that the descriptions of ‘Lot’s Wife’ would necessarily change since she has changed. She is a pillar of salt. That is how we identify this pillar of salt: it is Lot’s wife.