Re: More on identifiers

On Jun 8, 7:25 am, Bernard Peek <b..._at_shrdlu.com> wrote:
> In message <Oo6Wl.770$u86..._at_nwrddc01.gnilink.net>, Walter Mitty
> <wami..._at_verizon.net> writes
>
> >Consider two electrons.  They both have the same mass, and they have the
> >same charge.  They might have opposite spins.  But the minute we add a third
> >electron, the spin of two of them is going to be identical.  It seems that,
> >on the surface at least, electrons do not have enough properties to carry
> >identity.  As you descend into lower level particles like quarks, things get
> >even more this way.  Particles seem more and more interchangeable.
> >Subatomic particles might not have much to do with your objects in a box,
> >but it seems to me that any theory of reality and identity that falls apart
> >at the subatomic level should at least take that into account.
>
> I don't think the analogy to electrons is particularly useful here. It's
> not clear that electrons have an attribute called Identity.  Electrons
> in different locations can change places with each other (insofar as the
> concept of place has meaning here.) It's provably impossible to measure
> all of the properties of an electron even if we only consider it as a
> particle. When we add wavelike properties it only gets worse.

This is actually an interesting question worth researching. RL is a nondistributive lattice and lack of distributivity is analogous to that of Von Neumann's quantum logic. However orthomodular (and even more generally orthocomplemented) lattices are incompatible with RL. Adding complement law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Complemented_lattice) to RL collapses it to boolean algebra. Therefore, no, microworld doesn't fit into relational model. Received on Mon Jun 08 2009 - 18:00:57 CEST