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/lit/ - Literature

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4585388 No.4585388[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

So philosophy question /lit/:

Say we are in the distant future, and we have that matter creator/holo deck scenario that Star Trek has. You think of something, and it appears in physical form. Not in description or "computer summon me an orange", but if you think of the sweetest orange you ever had, that same "sweetest orange" of your memory will appear in front of you.

Say this "orange making" happens for decades, or centuries. People know what an orange is, but they've never had a homegrown orange. Never seen a real orange or orange tree in their life. Merely one reproduced by human memory through this machine. At what point do you have to stop calling it an orange? Is it always an orange, and is that version of the orange the definitive version rather than some garbage from a tree? I figure at some point there would be a "telephone" scenario if the only model available is memory.

I suppose this goes in line with the Bladerunner thing with the artificial animals and such, but I would like to know what makes something what it is. Is it the memory of things before it? Is it the origin or composition? Why would the holo deck orange still be an orange.

>> No.4585394

>>4585388

Im pretty sure it keeps being an orange.

>> No.4585396

Considering memories are flawed and deceiving, you'd probably remember the orange to be sweeter than it ever actually was and the original orange wasn't really an orange to begin with.

>> No.4585398

Pretty sure it's still an orange as well, after all it has all the properties of an orange. A better question regarding the identity of things is the Ship of Theseus question.

>> No.4585411

I had a class on philosophy a long time ago.
And this teacher was talking about some pre-socratic philospher (unfortuatly don't remember wich one).
The point is, that this philosopher brought up the following situation:
> A man fishes a salmon
> this man and this salmon are different beings
> the man roasts the salmon and eats it
> the salmon's bits get inside the man's mouth, down his gastric duct, is digested and turns to excrement.

At what moment does the salmon stop being a salmon and merges into the being of the man?

I think that your question is pretty similar.

>> No.4585418

>>4585411

>At what moment does the salmon stop being a salmon and merges into the being of the man?

When its digested.

>> No.4585420

Why wouldn't it still be an orange?

>> No.4585425

>>4585418
But wouldn't the being of the salmon merge with the being of the man who ate it?

>> No.4585427

>>4585418
Why would it stop being a fish and start to be considered as a man?

>> No.4585430

>>4585425
No.

>> No.4585454

>>4585427

It becomes calories and fats that are then added to the man's mass.

>> No.4585465

>>4585411
Thinking of it as a salmon is just a linguistic fallacy. It's a collection of things we happen to call a salmon when they are arranged in that specific order and structure.

>> No.4585469

You don't need that scenario to pose that question.

You're working on the limit in which something can still be called that something. But the lesson to be learned is not to what extent does the referent matches the definition, but the other way around.

An orange is always a different orange, from memory or from life, but you have ideas that you associate with the word "orange" that grants you the power to call it orange. If, say, you were to imagine a complete deviation from the premise, in which oranges are now "mistaken" for a blue fruit in the shape of a pineapple, it would still be called an orange, because you see, along with the transformation of this object, the definition of the word is also transformed. One could picture that if the person in this context were to see an orange as we know it now, that person would simply not call it an orange, for now one has a different definition for it, a different referent.

We can't built an orange from memory like in the strange device you mentioned, but you see, we already build a defition for orange from memory.

To me, oranges comes from trees. If they do not, I shall not call it orange. But if the reality presented to me that this thing which does not come from a tree is called orange, then I shall call that orange and never associate it with the three

The language

>> No.4585476

>>4585469 here
Sorry, I'm slightly drunk.

>> No.4585480

>>4585465
Do you mean a salmon isn't conscious?

>> No.4585493

>>4585411
"Jesus said, "Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human." "

>> No.4585496

>>4585480
No, I mean a salmon is only a salmon in that we call it a salmon, we see it and identify it as salmon, and we have only recently come to understand that what our ancestors called salmon is, at it's base structure, just a bunch of stuff. Thinking of a fish as a fish and not as a biological/physical conglomeration of baser elements is fine, but it's just language. When you ask when salmon stops being salmon you're just confusing linguistic habits and logic with physical reality.

>> No.4585541

>>4585496
And this goes with all animals, also humans, according to you?

>> No.4585555
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4585555

>>4585496

>> No.4585570

>>4585541
Dude, he is saying nothing much. It's not about animals, people or things, but about how we name them.

>> No.4585574

>>4585570
I know but I don't agree

>> No.4585591

>>4585574
How? The question "when does salmon stop being salmon" is as nonsensical as asking when King David climbed the Eiffel Tower. It's linguistically valid, but not logically. A salmon is just part of a heuristic we've created. As much as we might like to think our language is a consistent basis for logic, it's only a group of words that approximate reality. The salmon was never really a salmon just as a man is never really a man. We are cells and neurons and equations all simplified into a single word which is a poor but useful replacement.

>> No.4585618
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4585618

>>4585591
>>4585574

If you get up to it, and define which individual atoms constitutes the set that we define as a salmon and do the same to the fisherman, you will notice that the salmon's atoms never disappear, they are still there, alas, mixed with the atoms that constitute the man.

>Pic related

>> No.4585634

>>4585618
They are not the salmon's atoms, though. The salmon belongs more to the atoms than the other way around. Same with stardust and men.

>> No.4585654

>>4585634
>If you get up to it, and define which individual atoms constitutes the set that we define as a salmon
>and define
>the set that we define as a salmon

>> No.4585665

>>4585388
Like a sci-fi version of the telephone game?

>> No.4585752

>>4585591
>the salmon was never really a salmon
And that was his point retard. Lrn2language

>> No.4585757

>>4585454
>It becomes
No it doesn't

>> No.4585786

>>4585618
We don't define things through atoms, idiot.

>> No.4585853

>>4585786
but we can, though.

in this >>4585618 I was talking hypothetically

>> No.4585877

>>4585786
You are retarded, go back to /b/

>> No.4585931

>>4585853
People do not confuse a swimming salmon for a salmon that went through the mixer, even though you may confuse a salmon with a fake but realistic looking plastic salmon. That's the point. Words derive from our relation with those objects, with our perception, memory and their associations.

>> No.4585959

Orange is a word. Is the menu, not the meal. Each orange is different than each other one. Making the same noise to refer to a similarly structured thing does not make them the same thing.

>> No.4586860
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4586860

>>4585388

The question for the essence of things has been recurrent over the ages Op. Being essence, very poorly described, that series of atributes, that make a thing be what the thing is, independently from the symbolic elements we use to refer to it.

Having this in mind, the word you use to refer to a thing, is a variable, as proven by the different versions of the term orange in the crucible of languages that exist, and existed.

But you also introduced mutability of the refered attributes, by stating the orange wasn't generated from planting a seed, and waiting for a tree to grow, and getting the fruit, but by re-composing the orange, with the collective memories of something that existed long ago.

Since there is no other reference to "orange" but what people believe it to be, you could end up calling orange to an apple, or a pear.

Now, let's think we got the DNA of several kinds of oranges, and that we are in position to introduce mutations in them, aside from the random ways of nature... In which point an orange stops being an orange, and looses it's "orangeity"? Which one of the new strains are oranges, and which ones are another thing? Are any of them an orange?

I'll give you a clue: go give an old person, one of the lab mutated stuff we pass as fruit nowadays, and ask them if it tastes like the one of their memories...

Not pretending to make you guys bend to what I said, I'm just exposing a point of view. Nevar forget that. ;)