On Tuesday, July 13, 2021 at 4:39:25 PM UTC+2 Bruno Marchal wrote: > but I would say that self-reference in the sense of intrinsic identity of > an object explains qualitative properties of consciousness (qualia). > > > But what is a object? What is intrinsic identity? And why that would give > qualia? >
I think reality consists of two basic kinds of object: collections and properties. Collections are also known as combinations or sets. Properties are also known as universals or general/abstract objects. For example, a particular table is a collection, but table in general, or table-ness, is a property (that is possessed by particular tables). Collections have parts while properties have instances. Properties as real objects are controversial; many people think they are just words (yet these words apparently refer to something in reality). Collections as real objects are somewhat controversial too; people might hesitate to regard a collection of tables as a real object even though they don't mind regarding a single table as a real object despite it being a collection too (of atoms, for example). Collections are rigorously defined in various axiomatizations of set theory. All of these axiomatizations refer to real collections as long as they are consistent (which may be impossible to prove due to Godel's second incompleteness theorem). Pure collections are built up only from collections, with empty collections at the bottom (or maybe some collections have no bottom, as long as this is consistent). Properties can constitute collections too but these would not be pure collections since properties are not collections. More general properties have instances in less general properties (for example "color" has an instance in "green") and ultimately they have instances in collections (for example "green" has an instance in a particular green table); instantiation ends in collections (for example a particular table is not a property of anything and so it has no instances); this is the reason why set theory can represent all mathematical properties as collections. All properties are ultimately instantiated as collections. As for intrinsic identity, it is something that an object is in itself, as opposed to its relations to other objects. Without the intrinsic identity there would be nothing standing in relations, so there would be no relations either. Intrinsic identities and extrinsic identities (relations) are inseparable. Surely there are relations between relations but ultimately relations need to be grounded in intrinsic identities of objects. Since qualia are not relations or structures of relations but something monolithic, indivisible, unstructured, they might be the intrinsic identities. Note that intrinsic identities and relations are dependent on each other since they constitute two kinds of identity of the same object. That could explain why qualia like colors are mutually dependent on relations like wavelengths of photons or neural structures. I imagine that every object has two kinds of identity: intrinsic identity > (something that the object is in itself) > > > To be honest, I don’t understand. To be sure, I like mechanism because it > provide a clear explanation of where the physical appearance comes from, > without having us ti speculate on some “physical” object which would be > primary, as we have no evidence for this, and it makes the mind-body > problem unsolvable. > Numbers are relations. For example number 2 is a relation between 2 objects. If there were just relations and no intrinsic identities of objects then there would be relations between nothings. For example, there would be 2 nothings. Which seems absurd. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/d705028b-d8e1-47b3-be44-add6c3bfaf84n%40googlegroups.com.
