[ExI] The rock "was The Reality of Categories"

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 22/07/07, Anna Taylor <femmechakra at yahoo.ca> wrote:

> On 7/16/07, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
> >Well, no, because rocks always *do* change, even
> >though it's not easy to observe it.
>
> Rocks can't change themself.  They can't do anything.
> What happens to rocks depend on the contacts the rocks
> makes.

Even a rock in the vacuum of interstellar space changes, since the
atoms in it have thermal motion (it can't be at absolute zero) and
some of them undergo radioactive decay. Moreover, the rock will be
moving relative to other bodies, and motion is a gross form of change,
even if the atoms in the rock maintained their position relative to
each other. An alien might claim that it is ridiculous to say it is
the same rock, but a metre to the left, since the rock would in that
case have obviously changed relative to the observer. Lee was arguing
that such a pedantic alien would likely not have evolved naturally and
maybe this is so, but it doesn't change the fact that when we say "the
same" we are referring some gradation of sameness rather than absolute
and context-free sameness.



-- 
Stathis Papaioannou