The Christian Vanguard

We often talk about possibilities or the way the world would have been. For example, I could be home sleeping in right now, or I could be a sailor in Hawaii. There are endless ways to talk about the way the world could have been, and these worlds actually exist. Under modal realism, any way the world could have been actually is. There are countless other worlds that are temporally-spatio isolated from us and from each other. They don’t overlap. They have no parts in common (except, maybe, universals). There is no causal connection. They exist truly and literally just as you are real and existing. There is no difference in the way they exist. They aren’t just real in our imagination, like in some abstract platonic heaven, but real and concrete. They exist simpliciter, or without qualification. Modal realism is serviceable in that we can quantify modal claims. So if I were to claim, “It is possible that I was President of the United States” we would ask how we make sense of that c...

Smart thinks that talk of “past”, “present”, and “future” can replaced by some reference to a subjects utterance. So “past” will be replaced with, “X is earlier than this utterance”, “present is replaced with, “X is simultaneous to this utterance” and “future” will be replaced with, “X is later than this utterance.” The same can be done for any sentence with a tense in it. When one utters “X is earlier than this utterance”, it could be objected that the word “is” in the sentence is tensed, and so even with the effort to phrase everything in a tenseless way, it is still necessary to smuggle in tensed language. Smart says we can amend the predicate to say, “X is earlier at this utterance” and referring to an utterance in this way makes no use of a tensed “is”. So for example, a tribe that had three sorts of numbers, that of being earlier than, equal to, or greater than the kings age, denoted by alpha, beta and gamma, but no tense is employed there either. 

In the A series of time, events have the position of past, present, and future. These positions are not permanent. Under the B series of time, events have the position of earlier or later than some position. These positions are permanent. A series can change positions because an event which is now future will eventually be past, but in the B series, if some event X is before some event Y, it will always be so. 

The problem of temporary intrinsics is that for persisting things, they change their intrinsic properties, such as shape. When I sit, I have a bent shape and when I stand I have changed my shape to a straight shape. This is distinguished from it's relations such as weight and height. For example, being the heaviest person in the room (weight) is not an intrinsic property because a heavier man may enter the room and I am no longer the heaviest man, even though nothing intrinsic about me has changed. So the problem is to explain how this change in intrinsics is possible. Lewis’ solution to this problem is to say that things perdure , not endure. Under perdurance, I have temporal parts, and intrinsics would be properties of that particular temporal part, and obviously these parts differ from one another, so it is no mystery how a thing could change its intrinsics properties. So for example, a road perdures, that is, it has different parts at different times, but doesn’t endure i...

Something persists iff it exists at various times. There are two ways something can persist: by enduring or perduring. Something endures iff it persists by being wholly present at more than one time. Something perdures iff it persists by having different temporal parts or stages at different times, though no one part of it is wholly present at more than one time, also known as 4 Dimensionalism.

The problem given in the question “Can you bathe in the same river twice?” is that since the substance of the river is constantly renewed, it would seem that it is not the same river, and so our words, that is the names we give the things we are trying to describe, are too vague to denote that this is a river. The same is true of similar examples, such as the ship of Theseus.  Quine’s answer to the problem is to say that these questions don’t really concern the nature of identity, but rather, they concern what we choose to count as a river, a boat, or a person. What makes gives something the nature of identity is not that they have the same river stage or same river substance, but that it is a process of continually replacing the substance or stages of time. So we may be tempted to point at the Ganges River at two different times and say that because of the constant change of substance they are not both the Ganges River, but all that would be true here is that you are pointin...

Lewis and Nemirow say that Mary does not learn anything upon her release because there are different senses of knowledge at play. What she does gain is a certain representational or imaginative ability, or a knowledge of how rather than a knowledge that, which can be granted without having to deny that her earlier factual knowledge was incomplete. She may not be able to remember what it red is like, but that is an ability not a fact. Jackson responds by supposing that Mary had a lecture on skepticism, and that upon her release in which she can now take in color, she worries if her experience of the colors is the same kind that others have had. This worry is not about her abilities but whether her knowledge of others was truly complete. So the sense of knowledge, which shows to be problematic, stays the same and relevant.

Chalmers suggestion for addressing the hard problem is to posit that consciousness is a fundamental feature or law such as space, time, mass, and change in that it is not reducible or explained in terms of more basic entities. So it will have its own rules and regulations, like the other basic or fundamental features of our world do. He wants to call them psychophysical laws. This wouldn’t be without precedent for Chalmers as he notes that electromagnetic phenomena couldn’t be explained by previously known physical features and laws, and so they had to posit electromagnetic charge as a new basic feature of the world since nothing in the physical world could explain it. Likewise with consciousness, since there seems to be no already existing theories which encompasses it, then something new is required.

The easy problem of consciousness is figuring out how we receive information and how we respond. Some questions that fall under the easy problem are “How does the brain integrate information?” and “How is it that subjects can verbalize their internal state?” This is not to say that figuring out the answers to these questions are easy to do or are trivial, but that they are easy compared to the hard problem. And the hard problem asks how do physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience, or consciousness, at all? How experience works is the easy problem and why we have experience at all is the hard problem. One needs to figure out how to cover that explanatory gap.

The problem, according to Richard Swinburne, with the body theory is that one part of the body, the brain, seems to be of crucial importance for determining the characteristic behavior of the rest, which isn’t true of other body parts. You could have a heart or liver transplant and be the same person, but the same cannot be said of the brain. So the brain would have to be “the core” of the body and not the body simpliciter. This makes it susceptible to duplication problems. If you were to split the brain of some Person P1 into its two hemispheres and put each hemisphere into an empty skull, both hemispheres would seem to have a claim of being P1. So if the brain is the core of the person, and the brain can be split into two, then it seems you can have two of the same persons, which would fail the criterion of identity. The problem with memory theory is that it also has duplication problems. Suppose someone claiming to be Guy Fawkes claims to have done all the things Fawkes has done a...

Qualitative identity and numerical identity are different in that you can have multiple instances of a thing qualitatively but you cannot have multiple instances of the same numerical thing. Shoemaker uses a suitcase as an example. You can have multiple suitcases that have the same qualities, that it is a certain color, a certain shape, made of a certain material, or even have the same model number. Two people can buy the same suitcase in this sense. But numerical identity is a stronger claim in that it is really unique in what it points out. This numerical identity has an indiscernibility. So for example, if I have a Pen A, and I want to know that it is identical to Pen B, there should be no property that A has that B doesn’t have. So even if I have the same model number of pen, that Pen A is in my left hand while Pen B is in my right shows that there is something Pen A had that Pen B doesn’t, which is a particular location, and would thus be qualitative identity. There would be no s...

I've noticed in some of the forums I frequent, one of the recurring issues between Catholics and Orthodox is whether it is legitimate to take only the bread/body of Christ and not the cup/blood. Catholics, though we do both during our liturgy, don't always do so. Orthodoxy, from what I understand, do both through intinction. I had a protestant friend come to Mass once and concluded that we were more liberal on the issue. No such thing is true.  There are plenty of places in scripture that discuss only the body in reference to the Eucharist, such as John 6:31-35, 48-51, 57-58, Acts 2:42, and others. The reason is that since you take his body or blood, you receive the fullness of His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. This is brought out in more explicit terms in 1 Corinthians 11:27 " Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. " Paul makes two uses of logical opera...