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From: jack@cs.glasgow.ac.UK (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Essense, determinism, and QM
Message-ID: <8707291432.AA20214@brahms.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Wed, 29-Jul-87 10:32:02 EDT
Article-I.D.: brahms.8707291432.AA20214
Posted: Wed Jul 29 10:32:02 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 31-Jul-87 04:19:41 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: jack%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: Computer Science Dept., University of Glasgow
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[This is posted from brahms, since Jack's machine can't post at the nonce.]

>From:  gould!proxftl!bill@seismo.CSS.GOV (T. William Wells)
>...  to say that the same thing acting on the same thing under the
>same conditions may yet produce a different effect, is to say that a
>thing need not be what it is...
>[This is from "An Introduction to Logic" by H.W.B. Joseph, as quoted
>in "Atheism: the Case Against God" by George H. Smith.

I can see no earthly reason to believe this. Maybe I could if I were Aristotle
and thought that *everything* an object does comes from some sort of essence,
though I suspect this is a bad parody even of Aristotle's views; at any rate
this is just a restatement of Laplacian determinism in essentialist language
and it is certainly NOT presupposed by quantum mechanics. Does Joseph's book
have an index entry for "petitio principii"?

- jack

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