Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!husc6!rutgers!caip!clyde!cbatt!ihnp4!qantel!ptsfa!vixie!dwyer From: dwyer@vixie.UUCP (Bill Dwyer) Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc Subject: Dwyer's Response to Templeton on Objectivism (part 4 of 9) Message-ID: <152@vixie.UUCP> Date: Tue, 30-Sep-86 14:09:00 EDT Article-I.D.: vixie.152 Posted: Tue Sep 30 14:09:00 1986 Date-Received: Sat, 11-Oct-86 07:30:22 EDT Reply-To: dwyer@vixie.UUCP (Bill Dwyer) Distribution: world Organization: Vixie Enterprises, San Mateo, CA Lines: 110 A Response to Brad Templeton's Criticisms of Objectivism by William Dwyer (part 4 of 9) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article is a response to Brad Templeton's article 624@looking.UUCP, posted a few months ago. My response is very long, and so will be posted over a period of about a week. Copies of any portion of the response, or of the original article, are available upon request. Editorial assistance was provided by paul@vixie.UUCP (Paul A. Vixie) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- "PROBLEM 4: Is the law of identity being proved meaningless?" Templeton cites recent experiments that violate "Bell's famous inequality", a violation which allegedly implies one of the following possibilities: A) Faster than light communication. - Holy causality Batman! Without causality, Objectivism goes out with the bathwater. In order for faster than light communication to be possible, it must be con- sistent with the law of causality. Whether it is possible or not is, of course, a scientific question. And no valid scientific inferences are possible that repudiate the law of universal causation -- a principle on which all scientific induction depends. B) The Copenhagen Interpretation. - things DON'T have a specific nature. It is meaningless to propose that they do. "A is approximately A" - will this be the new slogan? How about, "A has a high probability of being A." If things don't have a specific nature, then it is not possible to draw any conclusions about them, including the conclusion that they don't have a specif- ic nature. To say that "A is approximately A" would be meaningless itself, if A were not A. For if A were not A, if it had no identity, how could one iden- tify it as being approximately anything? If a thing is not itself but only ap- proximately itself, then if it is "approximately A", does that mean then that it is approximately "approximately A"? And if so, does that in turn mean that it is approximately "approximately 'approximately A'"? Evidently. We are thus led to an infinite regress, in other words, to a contradiction. The statement "A has a high probability of being A" is no better. Is it TRUE that "A has a high probability of being A" or is it merely highly probable? And if it is merely highly probable, is that true, or merely highly probable? Etc. Furthermore, if A is not A, then how can one say that it -- A -- has a high probability of being A. Yes, A has a high probability of being A (accord- ing to this view). But A may not be A; it may only have a high probability of being A, in which case, one cannot say that IT has a high probability of being A; one can only say it if it is A, and according to this theory, it may not be A. C) The Many-Worlds Theory Things may have a specific nature, but the nature of Man is that it is is impossible for him to perceive the totality of it. I don't follow this. Of course, it is impossible for man to perceive the to- tality of existence. So what? Objectivists, in fact, stress this point as a justification for the importance of concept formation. With concepts, one can bring the not directly perceivable within man's grasp. For example, one can perceive five (|||||) but not five thousand. One grasps five thousand concep- tually. Thus, although one cannot grasp the totality of existence perceptual- ly, one can nevertheless grasp it conceptually. D) No local variables All particles that were ever related are forever related. By the Big Bang theory, that's the whole universe. No entity has an independent existence. A is A now only applies to the whole universe, and as such it's not very meaningful. "The universe is the universe." - That I'll agree with. I don't follow this either. To say that things are related is not to say that they do not have separate identities. A man may be related in some way to an asteroid, but that does not mean that a man is not a man, as distinct from an asteroid. Besides, if things do not have separate identities, how is it that we can say they are related? A relationship only applies between things that are in some sense separate and distinct. Otherwise, what is it that we have a relationship between? In order to have a relationship between A and B, A must be A, and B, B. A thing is "related to" something other than itself. It is only because different things have similarities that the concept of "relation- ship" is possible or meaningful. Templeton states: If this was all too much Physics for you, I advise you to read up soon. I find it hard to imagine you can talk about Metaphysics (the nature of reality) without some grounding in physics (the study of reality). But physics is not the study of reality (as such); it is the study of a partic- ular aspect of reality: the laws of matter and energy. In the sense of study- ing a particular aspect of reality, there are many subjects besides physics that "study reality". Medicine is the "study of reality". So is plumbing; so is automotive mechanics. It must be equally hard, then, for Templeton to ima- gine that one can talk about metaphysics (the nature of reality) without some grounding in medicine, plumbing and automotive mechanics, since these discip- lines also involve the study of reality. Furthermore, to say that physics is the study of reality (as such) is just to say that it is the study of the nature of reality. But as Templeton observes, it is metaphysics (not physics) that studies the nature of reality. In fact, without a proper metaphysics (without a correct understanding of the law of identity and its corollary, the law of causality), the conclusions of physics are themselves unreliable. It is metaphysics that is required for a proper in- terpretation of the evidence provided by the science of physics, not the other way around.