Richard Hudson wrote:
>
> Thanks for this interesting exchange. My view of Dick is that there is
> something permanent running through my various appearances on the world
> stage (though I have no idea how to push this idea back to me when I was
> much younger).
What is permanent is your identity. Identity is not something that inheres
in any complex event, it's something that is created by the mind when the
event is reified as an object. So to the extent that you're modelling a
perspective (your father's, for instance) that has lent identity to Dick
from before birth until now, I don't see a problem in principle with
reconciling the ground with the figure -- even though even the ground may
change (evolve) completely over time.
Does "life on Earth" have a referent?
> On the other hand, as Mark says, my properties vary from time to time,
> and the only way to reconcile these time-bound properties with this
> permanence is to distinguish tokens of Dick from the type Dick.
Why?
There's no reason to model a different Dick-token isa Dick-type for every
event if you model the events themselves, is there? Surely, when we know
the details of an event, we know who the participants were. Why would the
Dick node about which we know he dropped his copy of Wheelock at the age
of 12 need to be a different node than the Dick node about which we know
he wrote _Word Grammar_?
-- Mark
Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX
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