wex@ittvax.UUCP (Alan Wexelblat) (09/01/83)
Larry tells me that the room I'm looking at is not really made up of objects. It's made up of objects, and collections of objects. Pardon me for being *really* dense, but how does this change the force of my argument (that "reality" is created by our perceptions)? --Alan Wexelblat (until 9/2:decxvax!ittvax!wex) (after 9/12:ucbvax!wex.UPenn@UDel-Relay)
larry@grkermit.UUCP (Larry Kolodney) (09/01/83)
Larry tells me that the room I'm looking at is not really made up of
objects. It's made up of objects, and collections of objects. Pardon
me for being *really* dense, but how does this change the force of my
argument (that "reality" is created by our perceptions)?
--Alan Wexelblat
What I said (or meant to say) was that what you call an object is
arbitrary. Normally we don't think of say, the collection of people
who's last names are wexelblat or kolodney as an object, yet you cannot
objectively (no pun intended) say why that is any less an object than
the collection of atoms that make up a toaster.
Again, there is no physical reality to the notion of object. Objects
are just collections of matter that we associate because all the matter
in the object has some shared property.
Each of the atoms in my chair is doing its own thing, oblivious to the
notion that it is part of a chair. All it knows about is the few atoms
near it. Then, take the example of the atom on the surface of the
chair. All it know about are the atoms near it, but some of those
atoms are 'air' atoms, not chair atoms. So as far as that atom is
concerned, it is part of an object made up of 'air' atoms and 'chair'
atoms. Of course that applies to the subatomic particles within it too, ad
infinitum.
--
Larry Kolodney (The Devil's Advocate)
{linus decvax}!genrad!grkermit!larry (until Sept. 8)
(ARPA) lkk@mit-ml (after sept. 1)laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (09/03/83)
wait a second here with what those 'air molecules' and 'chair molecules' and what they 'know'. They do not KNOW anything, do they? they do not really have some sort of 'soul' which records their 'chairness', do they? a carbon atom couldnt really care if it is part of the C02 in the air, or in the wood that made up the tree that made up the chair, could it? So somebody had to come around and classify things into objects, right? And that makes reality a matter of perceptions, right? And you have just lost your argument (or I didn't understand it), right? laura creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura