Wednesday, April 5, 2023

Naturalism and perdurance

According to one version of naturalism, the only objects that have causal influence are objects posited by a completed science.

According to perdurantism, changing persisting objects have temporal parts which have the changing properties more fundamentally.

The changing properties of objects are causally efficacious. Thus, if perdurantism is true, the temporal parts have causal influence.

But the temporal parts of changing persisting objects are not among the objects posited by our current science. For instance, our current physics holds electrons and quarks to be fundamental, i.e., not made up of other objects studied by physics. The temporal parts of electrons and quarks are thus not studied by physics. Yet they have causal influence. If the completed physics is relevantly similar to our current physics in this regard, it won’t include temporal parts, either. And hence perdurantism posits causally efficacious entities that are unlikely to be posited by a complete science.

Thus perdurantism does not appear to fit with naturalism understood as above.

16 comments:

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  10. Wow. So, if each piece of evidence is only 1/100 (perfectly "ordinary")....?

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  11. How about if we had 4 pieces of evidence that are only 1/30?

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  16. Please don't respond to banned commenters, even if it takes a while for the ban script to run.

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