Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

I have written that the essence of a thing is constituted by its powers. Suppose that A subsists in itself, and B, in A. Then B is an accident of A. Thus, my skin has the power to appear white to observers. But this property, having white skin, is not essential to me. Does this contradict my claim that essences are sets of powers or causal dispositions? Not at all. The key here is “its own” powers. Appearing white in normal light is an essential property of whiteness. This disposition, therefore, makes up the essence of whiteness. I have whiteness accidentally, and whatever can be said of my own kind-nature (though not, of course, individual-nature) will exclude any reference to white skin.

1. A 3D enduring object is wholly present to us. But a 4D object which is extended also in the temporal dimension is not wholly present; only its time-slice right now is present to us. Its other temporal parts are nowhere to be seen. Hence it entails a controversial claim that presentism — the claim that only present objects exist — is false.

A related problem is a practical one. What can we do with a 4D thing? Its past is gone; its future is not yet, all we have is its present temporal slice. Of what use is postulating inaccessible to any human action parts? Few people think possible worlds to be more than conceptual devices, but four-dimensionists are hard-core realists about the past: they think it exists right now as a part of any 4D entity.

2. A 3D object can stay the same; it may be able to endure. But a 4D object does not actually perdure and stay the same; it grows with the passage of time. Friends of temporal parts say things like “a statue exists from 10:00 until 11:00″ (rather than at 10:00 and at 11:00). But a statue considered at 10:30 does not exist at 11:00. It keeps accumulating part after part every second. So, what causes this growth? How is ticking of a clock able to alter an innocent object so drastically?

In other words, a 4D object perdures only in its spatial aspect; as time goes on it changes. How counter-intuitive is that? A 3D theorist can, on the contrary, say, that the same object X has been persisting in being from 10 to 11 o’clock without having to make the strange claim that X has grown from an embryo into a fully actualized 4D worm just by sitting there and without consuming any food suitable for such creatures.

In order to argue that the universe participates in the divine nature we must distinguish between an actualization of a potentiality, moving- or acting-toward-rest, and an actualized potentiality or simply actuality or acting-while-at-rest. For not everything in nature can be acting-toward-rest. Indeed, any such thing is dependent upon the state of rest, the ultimate goal, the desideratum of its strivings. The state of rest and the acting-while-at-rest are prior to any movement toward that state. Acting-toward-rest is therefore not an ultimate given but exists for the sake of another. So, what we do is isolate the very essence of the state of rest and say that the essentially rested being, one which is independent of anything, is God. (We need not only the state of rest but a being in that state, because the state itself is an abstraction and not causally efficacious. But a rested being can potentially communicate its rest to others and draw them to itself.) That being must exist, because the chain of dependent beings cannot be infinite in length. The universe imitates God both when it is in actuality and when it is in potentiality, because even moving toward rest is good, insofar as it showcases the moving object’s love for the goal toward which it is moving, as well as its knowledge of how to attain the goal and the power to get there, though none of these three are as strong as when the goal is accomplished.

Thus, means are for the sake an end; variety, for the sake of unity.

It is a well-known psychological fact of utmost practical importance that (1) Artisans / Guardians and (2) Rationals / Idealists are natural complements in marriage. If you intend to marry, then you’ll be well-advised to find out your own temperament and limit your search to your precise match. I’m not kidding: if you value your happiness, it’s crucial to do this.

Now I have suggested that the four causes can be matched up with the four temperaments. If form and matter, connected to (1), are natural complements, signifying act and potency, present in all nature and purely in God and “prime matter,” then the efficient and final causes, connected to (2), must be complements, as well. The question is, what do they mean? The answer is: variety and unity; the technical details and the big picture, so to speak. These are just as metaphysically primal as act and potency. An illustration is the means vs. ends. The end might be one in three: metaphysical, moral, and physical perfection, and the latter in particular, called happiness. So, the end is one, but the means to it are incredibly varied. God is pure unity, being simple and one. Prime matter, abstractly, is pure variety, making up a bewildering array of elementary particles, forces, elements, molecules, etc.

Now God contains within Himself the variety, virtually. As I write here, “Aquinas believes that God, too, is a unity in variety. It’s just that he holds that God’s variety is such that He is infinite and incomprehensible by any finite creature; and that His unity is such that He is a simple being. God is thus the limit of both categories (unity and variety).” And that coheres well with the fact that God is the source of matter, despite being pure act. He knows all possibilities and potentialities.

I don’t bestow the title “work of art” lightly. But here are some of the titles which I found beautiful:

Computer Games:

Grim Fandango
Star Control II
Warcraft II

Fiction:

James Clavell’s Shogun
Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment
Edmond Hamilton’s Star Kings

TV:

The X-Files
Seinfeld
Aeon Flux
Avatar: The Last Airbender

Movies:

Casablanca
Notorious
The Rock
L.A. Confidential
The Matrix
Gladiator

What did I miss?

According to Time, “You have millions of Americans who are yearning to be more involved in the world and in their communities.” No, no, no. They must mean, “You have millions of Americans who are yearning to be forced to be more involved in the world and in their communities.” This could never get off the ground without so many people adopting fascism as their ideology. I don’t know what America is anymore.

HT: lrc.com blog.

A “material” conditional is so called, because it abstracts from the “form” of the propositions, that is, their meaning and reference and considers only their matter, that is, their truth values. Thus,

(1) “There are witches on Mars” ↔ “2 + 2 = 5″

is true, since False is equivalent to False. The two propositions share a common property, being false, and the logical operator emphasizes this.

But a conditional can easily have a “formal” part — it can convey information — which will put our implications above a mere logical game. For example,

(2) “The Morning Star” ↔ “The Evening Star”

, because both designate the planet Venus. Consider:

(3) “I am late for work.” → “The boss is going to yell at me.”
(4) “If I let go of the apple, it will fall on the floor.”
(5) “X is colored.” → “X is extended.”
(6) “X is a chair.” → “X can be comfortably sat in.”
(7) “A and B are identical.” ↔ “A and B are indiscernible.”

Here the parts of the conditionals are connected by more than (true, let us assume) mere material implications. In (3) the antecedent is interpreted as implying the consequent; the consequent is part of what the antecedent means. The reason for my being in trouble with the boss is that I am late for work. In (4) the effect — the apple’s falling — is contained in its cause; (5) presents us with a synthetic a priori connection; and in (6) the definition can replace in a sentence the term it defines. Unlike with (1), we can make statements such as “Being late for work is sufficient to get yelled at.” Or, “Being extended is necessary for being colored.” Or, “nothing that’s uncomfortable to sit in is a chair.” Or, finally, “Two things are numerically identical if and only if they are indiscernible.”

With respect to material objects, a thing remains the same if and only if its four causes remain the same. But given even the slightest change even in one of the causes, the old thing corrupts and a new thing is generated.

Thus, you can’t bathe in the same river twice, because, though the river’s form remain the same, its matter (water) changes; nor in the same water twice, because though the matter persists, the water’s form changes into a different river. But if we consider the form only, then you can bathe in the same river more than once; and if we consider matter only, then you can bathe in the same water more than once, if you run fast enough to where the old water has ended up.

The Theseus’s ship does not persist upon even a single new plank’s being installed. Matter must be numerically rather than merely qualitatively the same for identity to hold, so even if the new planks are made of the same kind of wood, there is no identity. (An argument can be made that two pieces of lumber qua matter are practically indiscernible. But they are not thereby made identical. So, it still matters whether the plank is old or new.) But if a new ship of the same form as the old one is made out of the old wooden planks (e.g., it follows the old ship and picks up the old planks which are thrown overboard), then given also the same efficient and final causes, that ship is identical to the old ship, while the renewed old ship is not.

With respect to human personal identity we must pay attention not only to the essence of a person, as defined by the four causes, but also to his self-knowledge and self-love. One’s personality cannot change very quickly, because any change must be “approved” (loved) and tracked and the resulting new person known. Update. In other words, even though in the strict sense I am not identical to the person “I” was yesterday, in a fast and loose sense I am (just as in such a sense a ship with just one plank replaced is identical to the old ship), but the identity is contingent on small changes accompanied by corresponding alterations in self-knowledge and self-love.

Update 2. There is a certain amount of permanence in a human being enshrined in the distinction between nature and nurture. Some qualities, such as one’s temperament, do not change, while others do. This further serves to perpetuate the illusion of a persisting identity through time.

All of the following is his email reply:

“My only comment on your new work is the same as my fundamental comment on all of your work: it is completely prejudicial in favor of the religion that you have decided in advance to defend. As a crucial example, your definition of religion, explicitly and intentionally, privileges your religion over other religions. But as an intelligent scholar, you know that that is unfair and invalid. While, to be sure, definitions are not objective things but man-made tools, some are better than others in being (1) inclusive and (2) productive. Your definition is higly exclusionary and totally unproductive. Here, and in all your other assertions, you are deeply immersed in the ‘language game’ of christianity. I am sure you are familiar with Wittgenstein and the concept of language game. The grammar of christianity allows and compels certain utterances, about ‘faith’ and ‘grace’ etc. It also forces Xians to say slanted things about concepts like relativism and agnosticism. However, outside that linguistic universe (which Xians usually think of as the ‘community of belief’) those terms, concepts, and utterances are not so much false as completley meaningless and inappropriate. Not all religions (your dismissive definition notwithstanding) have a concept of faith or grace or for that matter god or sin or prayer. But you must be able to see that you are trapped within your discursive world, not referring to or making any insights into the wider world outside your language game. And obviously, not only all other religions vary in their discursive realities, but all non-religions do too. For me, as a completely unreligious person, the Xian language game is as meaningless as the Hindu or Buddhist one. Your problem is that you–and your Xian interlocutors — are deep inside a box, and you do not even realize that you are in a box… or that a box exists.

“I say this to you as a concerned fellow scholar. One simply cannot make biased assertions in support of one’s own religion or language and expect those to stand as proof or argument for anything. Muslims advance their own ‘arguments,’ Hindus theirs, ad infinitum. They, and you, are stuck within a Kuhnian paradigm, and until they, and you, realize that they are purveyors and practitioners of paradigm and find a way to transcend their, and your, paradigm, then members of various religions cannot even talk to each other… and none of them can talk to me.

“I would like to ask you one question: can you name for me ONE element of the ‘method’ of metaphysics, and ONE discovery or fact that this ‘method’ has ever produced? Understand that the analysis of a concept like ’substance’ is not a discovery or fact; it is merely an elaboration on one lexical item in the language game of a particular discursive practice.”

1. Kenosis allows God to voluntarily lose some of His attributes, such as omniscience. But when that happens God no longer knows Himself! What He does not know He cannot love, so the Holy Spirit is hampered, too. In particular, kenosis may require that God does not realize that He is omnipotent. Far from being Godlike, He is then a fool, lacking the most basic knowledge of His own nature. That God could become such a fool seems like a major modal defect in Him, yet the Christian concept of God requires Him to be perfect in every way. Nor is God any longer pure act, because there is in Him a potentiality to forget.

2. If Jesus could not restore His omniscience at will, then this was a limitation on His power and therefore a grave imperfection. If He did, then the claim of limited knowledge is vapid: anything He needed to find out He could find out by allowing Himself to “remember” what He allegedly lost in the process of Incarnation and kenotic “emptying.”

3. How could God restore His essence once Jesus’s job was done? Lack of omniscience regarding God’s essence means that God’s generative or begetting power was after all defective, if there was a possibility for the Father’s image of Himself — the Son — to worsen in completeness of nature.

4. Kenosis tries to diminish God’s attributes. But Jesus had “low” attributes already from His human nature! Why alter the divine nature, as well? It is precisely the union of the metaphysically perfect and the metaphysically imperfect that must be explained. One can’t explain it by saying that the divine nature was after all just like human nature or that there was no assumption of the human nature at all: the divine nature somehow became the human nature. “It is not by virtue of what he gave up, but in virtue of what he took on, that he humbled himself,” writes Morris (The Logic of God Incarnate, 104). Exactly.

So of what use is the doctrine of kenosis?

Thomas Morris says He did. His main shtick consists in distinguishing between being fully X and being merely X; for example:

Consider a diamond. It has all the properties essential to being a physical object (mass, spatiotemporal location, etc.). So it is fully physical. Consider now an alligator. It has all the properties essential to being a physical object. It is fully physical. But, there is a sense in which we can say that it is not merely physical. It has properties of animation as well. It is an organic being. In contrast, the gem is merely physical as well as being fully physical. (The Logic of God Incarnate, 66)

You see the pattern; man is fully alive, like our alligator, but not merely alive; he is higher on the metaphysical hierarchy due to being rational, etc. “And… [Aristotle] compares the various souls to the species of figures, one of which contains another; as a pentagon contains and exceeds a tetragon. Thus the intellectual soul contains virtually whatever belongs to the sensitive soul of brute animals, and to the nutritive souls of plants.” (ST, I, 76, 3) Similarly, Jesus is fully human but, unlike you and me, not merely human; he is also divine — both fully and merely, of course, because there is nothing higher than God.

Many properties “may be essential to being merely human, but they can be held, in all epistemic and metaphysical propriety, not to be essential to being fully human, to exemplifying the kind-essence of humanity.” (67) One such property may be “being a child of human parents.” What Jesus assumed then is our humanity, namely, body and soul, the kind-essence, rational animality. The latter included the will and the intellect. But what He most certainly did not assume is human personality, that is, a spirit, the individual-essence. A related distinction Morris draws is between common or even universal properties of human beings and their essential properties. The difference is between ∀(x)(Fx), ∀(x which have ever existed and will ever exist)(Fx), and N(Fx). Just because a property is actually, in this world, common to all (mere) men does not make it necessary.

Now (1) if the human will and intellect did not result in a personality which in Jesus was the personality of God the Son, then what purpose did they serve? Jesus had “[c]ommand and sympathy, power and charm, authority and affection, cheerfulness and gravity”; unparalleled “strength, poise, and grace.” Were these from His divine nature or from His human nature? I think these traits were shared between Christ’s natures, but they originated in His divinity. (2) Who controlled the body of Jesus, the divine person or the human soul? The human soul acted but through the medium of and in obedience to the divine and godlike virtues which themselves were adornments of his divine personality and constituted his individual essence. Jesus’s powers of acting came from His human soul, but His habits were divine. Christ had the virtues “most perfectly beyond the common mode. In this sense Plotinus gave to a certain sublime degree of virtue the name of ‘virtue of the purified soul’.” (ST, III, 7, 2, ad 2) And (3) what was the relationship between the divine nature/person and the human mind in Jesus? The person of God the Son comprehended God, while His human intellect enjoyed the beatific vision but without comprehending God. I think that any question Jesus’s human mind wanted to ask of the inner life of God it could ask and receive an answer from His divine mind. On the other hand, Jesus’s divine mind was enriched by the “free” knowledge of the actual world Jesus was obtaining during His life with us.

On the Mises blog Nicholas Sorrells has written: “Evidently power is only to be feared if it comes from government (i.e. power accountable to the people), not if it comes from big business (completely unaccountable to the people).” This seems like a common misconception. Of course, business, whether big or small, is fully accountable to the people qua consumers. They also have contractual obligations to their business partners and employees.

Here is my understanding of it:

This is the one. Let’s sing something in celebration:

I promised her rings for her fingers,
Sparkling flowers for her flaxen hair;
I swore that I’d never set sail in foul weather,
But stay by her side at the shore.

Fare thee well, oh ye Barbary merchants,
Fare thee well to the Spanish blockade,
Fare thee well to the siege of Gibraltar,
And the treacherous seas of Cathay!

I gave her my word to be married,
And took her sweet vows in return;
I swore that I’d never set sail in foul weather,
But stay by her side at the shore.

Fare thee well, oh ye Barbary merchants,
Fare thee well to the Spanish blockade,
Fare thee well to the siege of Gibraltar,
And the treacherous seas of Cathay!

I built her a cottage in Chatham,
Gave her children to sit by the fire;
I swore that I’ll never set sail in foul weather,
But stay at her side at the shore.

Fare thee well, oh ye Barbary merchants,
Fare thee well to the Spanish blockade,
Fare thee well to the siege of Gibraltar,
And the treacherous seas of Cathay!

But our country’s too small for a sailor
Without the blue sea and the sky;
Though I swore that I’d never set sail in foul weather,
I left her behind at the shore.

Take me back, oh ye Barbary merchants,
Let me risk at the Spanish blockade,
Carry me to the siege of Gibraltar,
And the treacherous seas of Cathay!

May the Lord of blogs be with you always. (Reply: “And also with you”; that is, me.)

On a separate page.

That’s exactly what that blog is. It’s not scholarship, it’s not apologetics, it’s not even debate; it consists of outrageous rants, often in response to other rants no less outrageous.

Allan Gibbard claims that while same-world identity need not be relative to a sortal, trans-world identities do need to be like that, that is, two things in different worlds cannot be the same simply but only the same “F.” “We speak and think of ‘the same person’ but not of ‘the same entity’.” (Metaphysics: An Anthology, 106) Are these claims true? Suppose I tell you that Qwerty is identical to Poiuyt, though Qwerty is a Ruritarian term, and Poiuyt is a Waldavian term. You say: “Interesting, I’ll keep that in mind; but to what single entity do both Qwerty and Poiuyt refer?” And I reply, “A computer keyboard.” The talk of entities leaves us wanting more information, but it is hardly meaningless.

Now consider the following questions: Could Richard Nixon have been a different

(1) entity
(2) man
(3) president
(4) Nixon

than what he in fact was?

Answers:

(1) Since every property is accidental to Nixon qua entity, yes. There is no reason why he could not be, say, a bottle of wine.
(2) Yes, if, e.g., he had been, contrary to fact, defeated by Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election.
(3) Yes, if he had not been implicated in Watergate, or if he had disliked poker, etc.
(4) No, because every property of Nixon is now essential to him.

So, sortals do change the outcome in questions of trans-world identity.

Kripke surely said something important in arguing that we don’t “discover” possible worlds as if examining through a telescope various actors on a distant planet. (Metaphysics: An Anthology, 78) Instead, possible worlds are posited, stipulated, conceived, and ultimately created in one’s imagination. Our dealings with possible worlds are games. Consider reading fiction or playing a game like World of Warcraft. You say: I am playing the role of such and such class, e.g., a mage. If you get tired of playing a mage, you delete the character and create another, say, warrior, and say that in the Warcraft universe you are that. Nothing unites you and the character: the Warcraft world is about as far away from the real world as a world could possibly be.

On Kripke’s theory we could simply stipulate that in a possible world I am currently considering that fat male sailor is Cleopatra. The possible worlds are ours to play with. But, someone who worries about trans-world identity might object: really, what would that accomplish? We have to figure out when identity is preserved through change and when it is not. What we are dealing with, then, is a perturbation problem: How much can we muck around with Cleopatra’s character before it would no longer be reasonable to call her by her actual-world name?

The main question regarding trans-world identity is, Which of your properties are essential and which are accidental to you? If is clear that Cleopatra can’t be a musical performance, because it is her essence to be human. The name Cleopatra is a rigid designator vis-a-vis her humanity: it picks out a human being in all possible worlds in which Cleopatra exists. On the other hand, it is probably not her essence to be blond, though who knows: if she had not been blonde, Mark Anthony might not have taken a liking to her. But what of a property like being female? I think that between essential and accidental properties we must situate something called “proper accidents.” A proper accident is not officially part of the essence of a thing, but it follows from its essence, such that to remove it would change the thing into a monster. One standard example is the capacity of laughing: a human being is not defined by it, but a creature who is incapable of laughter would scarcely be human. Cleopatra’s being female would seem to be her proper accident; it is arguable that she would be unrecognizable if she were put into the body of a male.

Thus, as Robert M. Adams puts it, we must engage in both “conceptual legislation” and “metaphysical discovery.” (182)

And what a good libertarian ideology must prevent him from having: capitalist profits and socialized losses.

He writes:

Perhaps I can evoke the appropriate sense of bewilderment as follows. Mathematicians may conceivably be said to be necessarily rational and not necessarily two-legged; and cyclists necessarily two-legged and not necessarily rational. But what of an individual who counts amond his eccentricities both mathematics and cycling? Is this concrete individual necessarily rational and contingently two-legged or vice versa? (quoted in Metaphysics: An Anthology, 145)

This is a case of confusion of necessity of the consequent with necessity of the consequence. In order to conclude that

(30) Zwier is necessarily bipedal,

we need

(31) Cyclists are necessarily bipedal

and

(32) Zwier is a cyclist.

But (31) can be read as N(X is a cyclist → X is bipedal), in which case it’s true, yet (30) does not follow; or as (X is a cyclist → N(X is bipedal)), from which (30) would follow but which is unfortunately false.

In other words, we have the following 4 true statements:

(1) N(X is a mathematician → X is rational)
(2) ~N(X is a mathematician → X is bipedal)
(3) N(X is a cyclist → X is bipedal)
(4) ~N(X is a cyclist → X is rational).

Suppose in the actual world X is both a mathematician and a cyclist. Then he is both rational and bipedial. Suppose in some world W our X is a cyclist and is irrational. Then in that world he is not a mathematician. And so on. Whence the bewilderment?

The argument continues in Plantinga’s The Nature of Necessity, which I’ve yet to read.