Suppose one has a bridge made of wood. One day, the bridge is made unnecessary and instead of letting it rot, one decides to disassemble it and make from its pieces - and no others - a wooden house.

Would the two objects - bridge and house - be the same? Or different?

What if one disassembled the house and remade the bridge exactly?

Suppose one has a bridge made of wood. One day, the bridge is made unnecessary and instead of letting it rot, one decides to disassemble it and make from its pieces - and no others - a wooden house.

Would the two objects - bridge and house - be the same? Or different?

What if one disassembled the house and remade the bridge exactly?

We are all children of this universe, yet we are different. So we are, so will be the house...

The bridge and the house do not exist. What exists is the wood and the nails. But not even that. The wood and nails are made of fibers and minerals. And the concepts that tie them together in our minds.

Suppose one has a bridge made of wood. One day, the bridge is made unnecessary and instead of letting it rot, one decides to disassemble it and make from its pieces - and no others - a wooden house.

Would the two objects - bridge and house - be the same? Or different?

What if one disassembled the house and remade the bridge exactly?

They would be different. One would have a shape which is distinguishable from the other. Their uses would allow you to tell them apart. And if you can tell two things apart, then they are distinguishable from each other, never to be confused for each other, and therefore not the same thing.

A more interesting question would be this:

A man builds a house right between two cliffs. The edge of the roof to the West perfectly touches one cliff. The edge of the roof to the East perfectly touches the other cliff. Beyond one cliff lies a small village. Beyond the other one is a freshwater stream. The walk from the village to the stream is one mile down a path which descends one cliff, and then scales the other. The trip takes 1 hour.

Some villagers soon discover that they can walk right across the man's roof, and turn the trip into a nice, level stroll of 1/4 mile that only takes 15 minutes. However, the man is very nasty, puts up signs which read "This is NOT a bridge", and never allows a single villager to pass.

Years later, the man passes away and has no relatives nearby. The house remains vacant for 20 years, and during that time no person ever resides in it. Also, during that time, the villagers tread across the roof every day without ever going into the valley. The young ones never even see that there is a house there, they just see a nice, level, wooden surface to walk on. The elders soon forget about the house as well. People start to refer to the roof as a "bridge". "THE bridge", even. Now... are they walking across a roof, or a bridge? Is it a house, or a bridge?

A few generations go by like this when a young man falls off the bridge/roof and lo and behold he discovers that the thing has walls, a door, windows, and even rotted furnishings. Lacking a home of his own, he immediately realizes the potential of this place, and the chance to get out of his parents' house. So he fixes the place up and moves in. He even delights in the sound of his villager-friends walking across his roof to get water. What is this structure now?

Before long, he passes away and his demented son falls into ownership of the house. He is lazy and greedy and wants some easy money. He understands what a great benefit the passage facilitated by his house is to the villagers, so he decided to charge a toll for passage. The villagers, however, can not afford his rate, so they rediscover the ancient passage through the valley, and use the longer route for free. Nobody ever walks across the roof for water ever again, even though they are free to for a nominal charge. Since it is not being used as a bridge, but has the latent potential, and someone is living in it, what is this structure now?

Draqon:

Stop, Guru boy.

RoyLennigan:

Certainly, the overall structure the wood and nails are positioned in implies that the bridge and house are real things, just as much as their constituent parts, yes?

Swivel:

They would be different. One would have a shape which is distinguishable from the other. Their uses would allow you to tell them apart. And if you can tell two things apart, then they are distinguishable from each other, never to be confused for each other, and therefore not the same thing.

What of the reconstructed bridge? Bridge II would be indistinguishable from Bridge I.

Suppose one has a bridge made of wood. One day, the bridge is made unnecessary and instead of letting it rot, one decides to disassemble it and make from its pieces - and no others - a wooden house.

Would the two objects - bridge and house - be the same? Or different?

What if one disassembled the house and remade the bridge exactly?

My cells just called to tell me this is happening inside me all the time. That god, matter is an idea derived from experience, a convenient way of talking about things, but not real.

Grantywanty:

How do you figure?

Swivel:



What of the reconstructed bridge? Bridge II would be indistinguishable from Bridge I.

Not entirely. If I were to witness the entire affair, I could talk about Bridge I, and the fact that it was never a house. While I could talk about Bridge II, and remember that it used to be a house.

Another way to look at it:

You have two identical bridges. The same in every respect. Bridge I is left alone, while Bridge II is transformed into a house. Now, Bridge II is turned back into the same bridge as before, identical to the first. As long as you can keep track of which bridge is which, they are distinguishable. One is the one that has always been a bridge, the other is the one that used to be a house.

And this does not require memory, or any differences between the bridges. Everyone aware of this difference could die away, making the two bridges indistinguishable from each other. Years later, some bridge archaeologists stumble across the two bridges, which are completely identical. But they find footsteps preserved in clay, and the signs of an old foundation. The see where the bridge material was dragged from some other location, and use quantum computers to reconstruct the possible house designs from the material. They are able to deduce that one of these bridges was once transformed into a house, and back again. And they can do this deducing using clues that are external from the two bridges.

What of the reconstructed bridge? Bridge II would be indistinguishable from Bridge I.
If you look in enough detail, you'll find that Bridge I is distinguishable from itself a second earlier. Atoms and molecules vibrate, molecules at the surface of the bridge may get knocked into the atmosphere, air molecules may dissolve into the wood, and the wood itself could decay.

The pattern is as important as the constituents.

E.g: all microcircuits can be constructed from NAND gates :D

But in fact, physics seems to show that if you go down far enough, there are no constituents, only patterns.

Does this mean that anything can be transformed into anything? Well, not by us, not yet anyway. Here you run into constraints of quantum uncertainty, incomputability, and entropy.

RoyLennigan:

Certainly, the overall structure the wood and nails are positioned in implies that the bridge and house are real things, just as much as their constituent parts, yes?

First off, I would like to say that I am speaking from a human perspective. This does not take into consideration the implication that anything exists outside the human mind. Because that is all we can observe, that is all we can take for granted. You may call it semantics, but it stems from our ultimate awareness, so it is more important than you may think.

We could call the house and/or the bridge a function of the pieces. But this function, like all functions, requires certain input in order to work. The input is the entity or force that assembled it. Like an abstract idea, the house is not a real thing existing materially. Even though it seems material, 'house' does not exist, it is simply the wood and nails in the form of the function 'house'. It is an abstract function, because when I think of 'house', it is different than when you think of 'house'.

And even after that, the nails and wood are also abstract functions. They are functions of minerals or dead tissue. And those are functions of molecules, which are functions of atoms and so on until you reach pure energy, which is what everything is really made of.

So pretty much all we see it merely functions, or interactions, between energy. These interactions happen naturally due to the constants (which might not be so constant after all).

Grantywanty:

How do you figure?

It should have read 'Thank God.....'

I think most rationalists see and think about the world as Newtonians, even if they have followed more recent discoveries and theories in physics.

In QM matter is not Newtonian. It's not solid. In fact it is whirling in and out of potential and actuality, the future and the past, here and there.

side greetz: Prince James what you sayin bro? What you been up to these days? I been finding you're acting a little distant these days. Almost alienated. So I just thought I'd drop a holla.
Peace.

Suppose one has a bridge made of wood. One day, the bridge is made unnecessary and instead of letting it rot, one decides to disassemble it and make from its pieces - and no others - a wooden house.

Would the two objects - bridge and house - be the same? Or different?

This is an easy answer. No they would not be absolutely the same or "absolutely equal" (a term I borrowed from satyr who used it in the "female minds" thread to whitewolf regarding the similarities between men and women). They would both be located in a separate spacetime inertial frame, and thus would not be congruent in both geometric structure and dimension. Not to mention the difference in chemical composition and decay between both timeframes.

Now suppose we were to place the components in a vacuum which will allow the wood not to age naturally. In fact, it will be something comparable to a cryogenic state which freezes the chemical and biological aging of living things (which is a quality which the wood can in some sense be said to possess), then we would have knocked off one referrential frame of comparison from our list of differentiable frames. And so on, and so forth.

What if one disassembled the house and remade the bridge exactly?

Again, the geometric structural components and shape of the bridge will be equivalent, but the chemical make-up would have decayed and the biological qualities of the wood may have changed unless placed in the aforementioned vacuum.

Suppose one has a bridge made of wood. One day, the bridge is made unnecessary and instead of letting it rot, one decides to disassemble it and make from its pieces - and no others - a wooden house.

Would the two objects - bridge and house - be the same? Or different?

What if one disassembled the house and remade the bridge exactly?

It seems obvious that the bridge and the house are different entities. They have the same components, but different form and function.

If the bridge was reassembled, the question is trickier. I'd lean toward calling them the same entity... but perhaps it depends. Perhaps "same" has more than one meaning.

Does "sameness" depend on physical continuity? If a leg falls off a chair and is reattached (say it's made using unglued pegs, and is reattached using the original peg), is it the same chair? Or is it now a "mended chair", different to the original chair? Both interpretations seem to be meaningful.

Perhaps "the same" is an ambiguous term, and needs to be be made more explicit for the purpose of a specific philosophical question.

side greetz: Prince James what you sayin bro? What you been up to these days? I been finding you're acting a little distant these days. Almost alienated. So I just thought I'd drop a holla.
Peace.

He hasn't been the same since I took his queen on an exposed check sacrifice. Very sad.