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Article 7557 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (lincoln carr)
Subject: Re: Simulated Brain
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Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 06:49:14 GMT
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In article <burt.721365558@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca> burt@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca (Burt Voorhees) writes:
>>In article <BxBBnw.CEK@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (l
>incoln carr) writes:

>>>I would argue that you don't know that as surely as you think you do.
>>>Certainty is a very nebulous thing.  You perceive the phenomena, not
>>>noumena, that you associate with the word "cat" and, because of
>>>certain a priori assumptions that human beings make, you assume that
>>>it must have existed prior to your perception of it and your
>>>assignment of the word "cat" to it.
>
>If I can trust my memories, I knew that cats existed long before I knew
>words for them, or for that matter, long before I knew many words at all.
>But this diverges from the point I was trying to make which is that 
>metaphysics and identity are prior to logic.  Logic is a tool for cutting
>the world up into catagories.  We then assign these catagories names and
>hope that they match up with some accuracy to the actual world.  But
>things have an identity before we have done any logical classification
>or analysis.  To see that logic does not give immediate access to identity
>we only need to consider that it is static.  The law of contradiction
>says that A is not B, so in particular, A cannot change into B because
>that would violate contradiction.  But in the world A's do change into
>B's all the time.  Some adolescents become adult, seeds grow, and so on.
>
>The question of metaphysics is: what _is_ identity, and how can we think
>about it?  But the menu is not the meal, it only indicates what the meal
>might be.
>bv

After reading this statement, I don't think that we really disagree at
all.  The whole point that I was trying to make about the cat is that
the set of phenomena that we perceive to be a cat may or may not
correspond to a single noumenon, what I think your calling an
"identity."  There is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence
between the items on the menu and the items of food, to use your
metaphor.  In fact, we don't have any way of finding out a whole hell
of a lot about the food and we're better off talking about the menu.



-- 
Lincoln R. Carr, Computer Scientist-Philosopher    lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu
"Treat all rational autonomous moral agents, whether in the form of yourself
or another, never as means solely, but always as ends in themselves."
                  Immanuel Kant, from "Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals"


