I see these themes as central to the tradition, and I welcome others to bring in the famous thinkers on this issue. But I want to get things started in a simpler language.
How does a thing change ? It must be the same thing differently than it was before. This suggests that identity — the somehow remaining the same of the nevertheless changing object — is required to make sense of change.
But such change just as obviously depends on difference. It is only the difference between the two “states” of a thing that give us a single thing that has changed.
Some thinkers have tried to make identity prior to difference or the reverse, but I tend to see these concepts are interdependent. What do you think ?
I bring up ideality because I currently think that identity is “ideal” in a sense that is prior to the mental and the physical. For instance, Saussure’s sound-image is “ideal” in the sense that it is itself not a sound and yet not obviously other than the sounds it “characterizes.”
Two vocalizations of the same word are analogous, in my view, to the two differing states of a changing object. In both cases, the “unity” of these differences is “ideal.” This is how I would make sense of Heraclitus here.
The sun is new each day.
The (ideal) enduring sun is “new” each day, is differently the same each day. If identity is “ideal,” what is difference ?
I’m thinking of “Wittgenstein’s thread” (PI 67). In order for difference to be discernible there must be something that remains the same in order for the comparison to be made. But “remains the same” need only mean that it changes much more slowly than the qualities that are of interest to us. And there may be a multiplicity of such slowly changing qualities, with one taking over from another as the standard by which we make the comparison.
So we don’t need to postulate the existence of some kind of underlying substance. All that is required is that we infer some kind of cohesion and that we overlook such changes in standard. The Ship of Theseus comes to mind. What we call identity is just a slow rate of change relative to an observer’s interest, and the anchor for comparison can shift over time — so no substance is needed, only conventional cohesion.
The human propensity for naming clearly offers a mechanism that would reinforce the (erroneous) impression of substance. In this view things have only a conventional existence, and no inherent existence, just as is suggest by your allusion to dependent origination.
… And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: “There is something common to all these constructions — namely the disjunction of all their common properties” — I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: “Something runs through the whole thread — namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres”.
We might understand the number three as a game we play with numerals. I’d want to generalize numerals to include 3 pebbles in someone’s open hand. Limited to text here, I have to use the textual numeral “3” which is already an idealization. How many ways are there to write this “same” numeral with a pencil ? What do they have in common ? The way we treat them, what we do with them.
Yet I live at the “same address” for years at a time. I pre-theoretically experience the world as including changing objects. I am the “same” me as my face ages in the mirror over the years. How can I age if multiple “states” are not somehow at least “virtually” or “ideally” joined ?
I agree at least that a slow rate of change would explain, in many cases, what gets “grasped” as a unity. I suppose I am also looking to get a grip on the “sense” of this cohesion. To even discuss observers, which should be discussed, we have to project their “enduring unity through change.”
I’m 100% with you on a suspicion of substance talk. My objection to mathematical platonism is a loss of this elusive ideality through a making of it substantial. I take Plato’s famously difficult Parmenides to about this issue. What the real Plato actually meant is interesting but secondary to what we should believe now. But I speculate anyway that maybe he was discussing this “formal” or “ideal” articulation of experience, and that he had to reach for metaphors that tempted people to think in terms of substances.
You mention “conventional cohesion,” so I think of Saussure’s sound-image as whatever glues together the vocalizations of what are therefore of the word “form,” for instance. To hear a sound as the sounding of a word. Weirdly the “word itself” is there “as” one of many vocalizations that would also serve. Is the articulation as pure sound a “representative” ? That almost puts too much difference between the sound-image and the sound. It’s more like each vocalization is a “face” of a sound-image that has no official or final face.
The ship of Theseus is a great example, along with Neurath’s raft.
I think we are on the same page. I would just say that the “formal component” of reality is “there” but only in an “ideal” or elusive sense. This “ideality” seems to give enduring objects their “virtual being,” which would all of their “speakable” being. But the other to this ideality is just as insubstantial. It is ineffable “quality” (sensation, affect, etc.) that only becomes “speakable” through the ideal/conventional imposition of “form” on it. I would include the self or ego as one more “virtual” or “ideal” pattern in the “qualitative continuum,” something like the booming buzzing confusion mentioned by James. Which we don’t experience but can try to summon theoretically as the world with its ideal articulation removed.
As you’re already aware, I’m attracted to the view of “consciousness as presence,” and I can’t help but see the next level here – that there’s a new ‘thread’ weaved by this multiplicity of perspectives. And again at this level, we don’t have to postulate an enduring substance – i.e. metaphysical realism becomes a redundant postulate.
And in anticipation of the criticism that this view reduces everything to difference, I would respond that this view makes identity perspective-relative – i.e. the same continuum can be seen as stable or changing depending on what you compare it to. Thus identity and difference can be regarded as being co-constituted by the choice of comparison class. I think this idea could be extended to reveal some interesting consequences, but I’m not there yet.
I say “There is a chair”. What if I go up to it, meaning to fetch it, and it suddenly disappears from sight?——“So it wasn’t a chair, but some kind of illusion”.——But in a few moments we see it again and are able to touch it and so on.——“So the chair was there after all and its disappearance was some kind of illusion”.——But suppose that after a time it disappears again—or seems to disappear. What are wei to say now? Have you rules ready for such cases—rules saying whether one may use the word “chair” to include this kind of thing? But do we miss them when we use the word “chair”; and are we to say that we do not really attach any meaning to this word, because we are not equipped with rules for every possible application of it?
This shows us the remaining indeterminateness of the “meaning” of the word chair. The sign is “passed around in the world” and gets the job done for “average situations.” Some philosophers would like this repeatable sound to already “mean” something definite for untried situations.
And the talk of the meaning of the word “chair” is already a massive idealization, for I am affected by this sound at a particular place and time in unpredictable ways. I hear this spoken word and it has a very “local” significance.
Yet what Wittgenstein might have discussed was the sound-image, for this is weirdly pretty stable. We don’t usually bicker about which word was pronounced, but only what it “meant.” The “ideality” of “meaning” has tended to obsess philosophers, because this “meaning” is what “truth” is made of. But the ideality of the “body” of the sign (for me the sign is just the signifier or body, without some “extra” something ) is more fascinating. For without this the issue of the “meaning” of a word could never come up.
We are at one on this. One problem with metaphysical realism is that it has only these elusive ideal identities to project. It wants to say “thing outside of meaning and consciousness.” But the thing, as such, is ideal — and of course I don’t mean “mental.” The category of the “mental” is one more elusive “unity” of what it “includes.”
Right. I’m with you on that. This gets a bit wild because it applies to our discourse now. It’s like our discussion about reducing “microcosms” to flashes of objects. It’s plausible, but one has to “make a coherent case for it” by being a relatively unified stream/microcosm, a relatively unified member of the forum sharing a vision of the world. I’m personally happy with explorations that push to the limit of sense, so I’m “confessing” that it’s weird out here.
Basically I like moves toward an ocean of difference. As we discussed before, language can be made minimally positive toward a pure structure of differences without positive elements. And we can even “see” that the signs we use to represent it are not important or replaceable, so “in the limit” it is a substance-less structure of difference.
I see a thing such as a Rook, which is also an object. “Thing” is a synonym for “object”.
The identity of an object derives from its name. Naming an object gives that object its identity. A name is a set of intensional and necessary properties, such that the Rook can only move in straight lines.
As Saussure argued, a word gets its meaning from its opposite, such that for “hot” to have meaning then there must be “cold”. Similarly, for “a necessary property” to have meaning there must be “a contingent property”.
Therefore, for the Rook to have the necessary property of having to move in a straight line to have meaning the Rook must also have a contingent property, such as being made of plastic.
So yes, that the Rook has the same identity through time, ie, having the necessary property of having to move in a straight line, can only makes sense if there can be a change in its contingent properties, ie, being made of plastic or onyx.
Agreed. We are sort of asking what is a thing such that it can change ?
Names are important, I see that. But we can rename objects.
Opposites make sense in the simplified case.
The second point seems separate but still relevant.
I like your example. It shows the change that we allow in a rook that doesn’t cancel its identity. The same chess game can continue on many different boards and with many sets of pieces.
This “sameness” is elusive. We can say that it is “performed” and “conventional.” That looks like a solid claim. There’s also the way that game as a unity is “experienced.” The game as a whole has “no substance.”
Yes. Why so afraid of the n-word? Call every vocalisation a “token” (or mark) of the would-be “type” (or form or idea or phonetic word) and leave a note promising to explain the type as no more than its token instances or ‘faces’? None of them the official or final one? (But some of them perhaps being especially ‘representative’ of the type by ‘exemplifying’ it. That is, by referring back to the word-name… or token instances thereof.)
Interesting point. In what sense identity is “ideal” and is prior to the mental and physical?
Because looking back at Saussure’s sound-image, when I am hearing a sound of songs I know by imagining it without the song being played, it is neither sound nor image. Because sound we normally hear is definitely physical in a sense that it hits our ears via the vibrating air which the sound causes.
But it is not image either, because I don’t need any image when hearing the imagined sound of the a song or voice of someone I know, or even the sound of the rain. Hence it sounds to me the imagined sound I hear is some sort of idea.
In that regard, could it be named as sound-idea, instead of sound-image? Would it be the same things I am talking about? Or totally different idea I am guessing here?
But still I am not sure how identity could be prior to the mental or physical.
But Rook you are referring to seems to be totally different object to Rook I am thinking about. To me, Rook is a dog owned by one of my relatives. He doesn’t move straight only.
He runs in all directions and jumps and barks as well. And he is not definitely made of plastic or onyx. He is made of flesh and fur coat.
But being the same thing is purely a mental designation. There’s nothing beyond that, nothing physical. I did an entire topic on this. The only examples I could come up with were from fiction because it can’t work in reality.
So with the chair, stripped of mental baggage, there is (in a naive sense) a sort of state of things in a certain volume at time X which an animal might consider to contain object ‘stick’, and then state of that ‘same volume’ (in quotes because it too is only a mental designation) does nor does not contain stick. If it does, it is up to that which makes the designation to treat it as the same stick or not.
I didn’t use the ‘chair’ example since it’s too meaningful to humans vs something else like a bird looking for nest building material. It’s not about humans.
What would be the problem with reducing everything to difference? After all, similarity is a species of difference, and it can be argued that identity is a species of similarity. This is how Husserl described the constituting of ‘real’ spatial objects. To see anything as repeating itself identically is to not notice the subtle changes in oneself which accompany the ongoing experiencing of identity.
Deleuze goes even further than Husserl. Drawing from Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, he asserts that identity is real but it is derived; difference is primary. Identity is an effect or product of difference. Repetition does not presuppose an identical thing that returns. What returns is the power of differing itself.
“When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity).
The eternal return is itself the Identical, the similar and the equal, but it presupposes nothing of itself in that of which it is said. It is said of that which has no identity, no resemblance and no equality. It is the identical which is said of the different, the resemblance which is said of the pure disparate, the equal which is said only of the unequal and the proximity which is said of all distances.
Things must be dispersed within
difference, and their identity must be dissolved before they become subject to eternal return and to identity in the eternal return.”(Difference and Repetition)
I think Heidegger would be sympathetic to Deleuze here:
“The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical…The same…is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say “the same” if we think difference.”
Deleuze certainly thinks Heidegger is close to his own thinking on difference when he writes:
Consider the two propositions: only that which is alike differs; and only differences are alike. The first formula posits resemblance as the condition of difference. It therefore undoubtedly demands the possibility of an identical concept for the two things which differ on condition that they are alike; and implies an analogy in the relation each thing has to this concept; and finally leads to the reduction of the difference between them to an opposition determined by these three moments. According to the other formula, by contrast, resemblance, identity, analogy and opposition can no longer be considered anything but effects, the products of a primary difference or a primary system of differences. According to this other formula, difference must immediately relate the differing terms to one another.
In accordance with Heidegger’s ontological intuition, difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator, a Sich-unterscheidende, by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition. As for these latter instances, since they cease to be conditions, they become no more than effects of the primary difference and its differenciation, overall or surface effects which characterise the distorted world of representation, and express the manner in which the in-itself of difference hides itself by giving rise to that which covers it.
Derrida showed the influence of Heidegger when he proclaims the derivative origin of presence:
"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference.
It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual “element” as well as between “elements”, because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence.
Yes, we could rename a rook, for example, a castle or un roque.
Thinking about Tarski’s T-schema “snow is white” is true iff snow is white, in the object language, the object could be named rook, castle or roque, but in the metalanguage, rook means castle and roque.
Perhaps re-wording: “the identity of an object derives from its metalanguage name rather than its object language name”
How are we to treat the nature of our understanding of ‘the’ form, name, idea, type, word? Don’t we have to ask what these notions are doing every time we use them?
That came up in my topic. The only examples that arguably have persistent physical identity seem to require abandoning the classical realm and reaching for the quantum realm. Sure, an electron is always the same type of thing, but the question is if it’s the same thing. So two electrons come in from east/west, interact, and depart N/S. Can we in any way say which is the same electron as what was the westbound one? At best this seems interpretation dependent.
Not sure how symmetries come into play. Norther’s theorem seems to just say that an electron can’t just vanish. It can annihilate with a positron, but that doesn’t destroy energy or momentum.
Edit: My prior post completely contradicts the assertion by @Mok just below
Anything has a set of properties, some of which are unchanging, so they define the identity, and others are subject to change, which explain the difference.
Not sure I understand the question, but… sure, we are free, at least, to ask and speculate about what any received notion is doing any and every time we use it in ordinary discourse? Perhaps there’s a positive obligation in specifically philosophical discourse?
Anyway, my favourite kind of analysis of this particular notion sees reference by a word type as reducing to the aggregate of all the instances of reference by the separate word tokens in use (some people might call that bottom-up influence or emergence), and each token instance as determined by both context and the aggregate of past and projected future token reference (top-down influence).
Emmy Noether’s first theorem (informally expressed):
If a system has a continuous symmetry property, then there are corresponding quantities whose values are conserved in time.
For example, you can move a free particle in empty space any distance and in any direction, and the equations for motion and the physical outcomes remain the same. This continuous symmetry leads to the conservation of momentum.
Some physical things, structures, or constellations seem fairly invariant.
Cute. But metaphysical realism is just the assumption that something exists independent of us, no? Such as physically recalcitrant structures, constellations, or forms.
What also exists, but depends on us, is our ability to identify and recognize forms.
When two forms appear identical I can still distinguish them by their use in different contexts or symbol systems. Identities that can’t be settled by the form can be settled by use and various practical requirements.
Signs in notational and formal symbol systems have stronger requirements on semantic disjointness and unambiguousness than signs in natural languages.