It has been a month and the transporter-accident illustration is still bothering me. In fact, this entire rave is going places that I had not anticipated. Let recap and vary the illustration a bit.
Lieutenant William Riker is beamed into places at once, thus having two identical individuals with identical histories. Following the Star Trek convention, let us name one Will and the other Tom. Unlike the Star Trek series, let us specify that they are both beamed into identical but separate environments. Don Turner and I set up this scenario years ago. However—contrary to Don—I am going to assume that Will and Tom lead identical (but separate) lives. Like the spheres we could say that Tom and Will share the same quiddity but different haecceities. Indeed, even if Tom and Will lead different lives, one could say either that they were either altering their quiddities simply realizing different aspects of the same quiddity. At any rate, at some point both Will and Tom share the same quiddity. A consequence of this is that haecceities cannot be represented in possible world semantics as a sort of life line or life web. For haecceities to make sense, they must be unique, single instances, to be found only once in any given possible world.
On the other hand, Will clearly is not Tom and yet they were both the same individual at some point in the past. Haecceities over time have identity transitively but not symmetrically. Will and Tom are both identical to their shared past self but the past self is not identical to either Will or Tom. This also applies to those of us who do not undergo transporter accidents. I am identical to the Jamesy Wetherbee of 35 years ago, but Jamesy is not identical to the Jimm Wetherbee of today.
The picture that now arises in terms of counterfactuals is to see quiddities as similar to branching tree structures I’ve outlined earlier and haecceities as points traveling along it. The problem with possible world talk is that we tend to see them as timeless but spatially extended (like a timeline) but the relationship between haecceities in past and future states of affairs makes this bias impossible. Perhaps haecceities are also substantial forms in intelligent beings.
For the time being, this rave is closed, but it opens a new one. When it comes to counterfactuals that can be actualized there seem to be two different options. One would be a Molinist view where a given haecceity determines which possible state of affairs (which branch) will be actualized and the other of Duns Scotus where God determines which state of affairs a haecceity realizes.
Comments (2)
Aside from the physicist in me screaming to be unchained and set right this matter-from-nothingness possibility that the teleporter incident has created - and let me assure you, such a monstrosity should never have been allowed, and where's that ethics committee when I need them? - I will have to write my own blog post and deal with this quandary myself.
Meanwhile, I hope you had a happy holiday. Things were quiet here at home, I managed to obtain a few choice books for Christmas (Matt Ridley! *cheers*) and have been engrossed since. Ciao --
Ghosty,
And many returns on the season just ending. Ah but a few short weeks before Lent.
Assume for a moment that one can pull such a quark/anitquark combination out of the false vacuum. There is no matter being created, just sucked out from somewhere else. Even if the scenario is physically impossible, there is nothing to bar its being logically or broadly logically possible. In that case the objection become a case of special pleading.
Beside, if you don't like that notion, there are theoretical physicists who in all seriousness propose that instead of probabilities existing in an indeterminate state until that state collapses that all possibilities are realized. Our histories do branch off into an an ever expanding number of universes. So again, we have haeccieties with identical quiddies that are not identical to each other but are each identical to some past instance of a haecciety.