Waclaw,
The matter of Identity and Change is as old as this world. See my comments
below.
Azamat Abdoullaev
EIS Intelligent systems ltd
http://www.eis.com.cy
Paphos, Cyprus
Moscow, Russia (01)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Waclaw Kusnierczyk" <Waclaw.Marcin.Kusnierczyk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2007 11:43 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Two ontologies that are inconsistentbut
bothneeded (02)
> Interesting, if novel, story. (03)
The material is issued as a scientific report. (04)
But how does it contradict the theory
> that there are continuants and occurents, and that a human body, say, is
> a continuant, I can't see. (05)
I haven't commented on this issue, so sensible for Barry. But if you insist,
i was hinted before that this distinstion is rather superficial and not
complying with the sciences, fundamental and engineering. Abiding by classic
ontologies and scientific findings necessitates a complete ontology
featuring more fundamental differences (determinations or classes or
categories) of reality (the world, the universe, being, or existence, the
totality of things or entities). They are SUBSTANCES, STATES (quality and
quantity), CHANGES (processes), and RELATIONSHIPS. These ontological classes
exhaustively classify things in the world, supplying the key coordinations
in any significant symbolism of entities or conceptual schema of things. For
instance, ''Relationship'' divides the world into things which are
connections and all other non-relational entities, etc. (06)
A continuant is not (not necessarily) a
> structure which, at any time of its existence, has exactly the same
> parts (the notion of sameness a topic for a separate discussion).
>
> You replace a battery in your laptop; is it a new laptop? Does the
> change of the battery make the laptop a process rather than an object? (07)
Here you are raising a classic topic of Identity as sameness and Change as
diversity. Specifically, it is an ancient paradox, known as the Ship of
Theseus: whether a thing remains the same having had replaced all its
component parts, like a human body constantly renewing its cellular
materials. It is hard to find an entity which is not liable to this paradox:
starting form Heraclitus's river and going to all sorts of legal entities
and cultural artefacts, machinery, buildings, including my swimming pool,
which water is constantly refilled because of the intense evaporation caused
by the 300 days summer sun in Cyprus. As a rational solution, it is commonly
proposed Aristotle's causal theory of things:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus. But the principal solution
lies in understanding the nature of ''the same'' and ''the different' as two
kinds of relationships. Having an integrative and complete ontology of
reality gives you guidlines in funding the cardinal resolutions to the
problem of identity and change. Namely, that there are four basic sorts of
Sameness (or Diversity):
1. substantial (sameness in being or number) identity, like numerical
identity or essential difference;
2. samenes in states (in quality, likeness, and in quantity, equality,
logical or mathematical);
3. sameness in changes;
4. sameness in relations, as analogy and proportions. (08)
> Azamat wrote:
>> BS: Perhaps someone can even look at Fritz's body and see it as a life,
>> though I find it hard to do so.
>>
>> Don't remember the URL. Below some interesting empirical findings made
>> by a stem cell biologist shedding light on the issue: what is a human
>> body, a process or a substance. Enjoy and surpise.
>> Your Body Is Younger Than You Think
>>
>> Top of Form
>>
>> By NICHOLAS WADE
>>
>> Published: August 2, 2005
>>
>> Whatever your age, your body is many years younger. In fact, even if
>> you're middle aged, most of you may be just 10 years old or less.
>>
>> This heartening truth, which arises from the fact that most of the
>> body's tissues are under constant renewal, has been underlined by a
>> novel method of estimating the age of human cells. Its inventor, Jonas
>> Frisen, believes the average age of all the cells in an adult's body may
>> turn out to be as young as 7 to 10 years.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> An Eye is Forever, but Is a Liver?
>>
>> But Dr. Frisen, a stem cell biologist at the Karolinska Institute in
>> Stockholm, has also discovered a fact that explains why people behave
>> their birth age, not the physical age of their cells: a few of the
>> body's cell types endure from birth to death without renewal, and this
>> special minority includes some or all of the cells of the cerebral
>> cortex.
>>
>> It was a dispute over whether the cortex ever makes any new cells that
>> got Dr. Frisen looking for a new way of figuring out how old human cells
>> really are. Existing techniques depend on tagging DNA with chemicals but
>> are far from perfect. Wondering if some natural tag might already be in
>> place, Dr. Frisen recalled that the nuclear weapons tested above ground
>> until 1963 had injected a pulse of radioactive carbon 14 into the
>> atmosphere.
>>
>> Breathed in by plants worldwide and eaten by animals and people, the
>> carbon 14 gets incorporated into the DNA of cells each time the cell
>> divides and the DNA is duplicated.
>>
>> Most molecules in a cell are constantly being replaced but the DNA is
>> not. All the carbon 14 in a cell's DNA is acquired on the cell's birth
>> date, the day its parent cell divided. Hence the extent of carbon 14
>> enrichment could be used to figure out the cell's age, Dr. Frisen
>> surmised. In practice, the method has to be performed on tissues, not
>> individual cells, because not enough carbon 14 gets into any single cell
>> to signal its age. Dr. Frisen then worked out a scale for converting
>> carbon 14 enrichment into calendar dates by measuring the carbon 14
>> incorporated into individual tree rings in Swedish pine trees.
>>
>> Having validated the method with various tests, he and his colleagues
>> have reported in the July 15 issue of Cell the results of their first
>> tests with a few body tissues. Cells from the muscles of the ribs, taken
>> from people in their late 30's, have an average age of 15.1 years, they
>> say.
>>
>> The epithelial cells that line the surface of the gut have a rough life
>> and are known by other methods to last only five days. Ignoring these
>> surface cells, the average age of those in the main body of the gut is
>> 15.9 years, Dr. Frisen found.
>>
>> The Karolinska team then turned to the brain, the renewal of whose cells
>> has been a matter of much contention. Prevailing belief, by and large,
>> is that the brain does not generate new neurons after its structure is
>> complete, except in two specific regions, the olfactory bulb that
>> mediates the sense of smell, and the hippocampus, where initial memories
>> of faces and places are laid down.
>>
>> This consensus view was challenged a few years ago by Elizabeth Gould of
>> Princeton, who reported finding new neurons in the cerebral cortex,
>> along with the elegant idea that each day's memories might be recorded
>> in the neurons generated that day.
>>
>> Dr. Frisen's method will enable all regions of the brain to be dated to
>> see if any new neurons are generated. So far he has tested only cells
>> from the visual cortex. He finds these are exactly the same age as the
>> individual, showing that new neurons are not generated after birth in
>> this region of the cerebral cortex, or at least not in significant
>> numbers. Cells of the cerebellum are slightly younger than those of the
>> cortex, which fits with the idea that the cerebellum continues
>> developing after birth.
>>
>> Another contentious issue is whether the heart generates new muscle
>> cells after birth. The conventional view that it does not has recently
>> been challenged by Dr. Piero Anversa of the New York Medical College in
>> Valhalla. Dr. Frisen has found the heart as a whole is generating new
>> cells, but he has not yet measured the turnover rate of the heart's
>> muscle cells.
>>
>> Although people may think of their body as a fairly permanent structure,
>> most of it is in a state of constant flux as old cells are discarded and
>> new ones generated in their place. Each kind of tissue has its own
>> turnover time, depending in part on the workload endured by its cells.
>> The cells lining the stomach, as mentioned, last only five days. The red
>> blood cells, bruised and battered after traveling nearly 1,000 miles
>> through the maze of the body's circulatory system, last only 120 days or
>> so on average before being dispatched to their graveyard in the spleen.
>>
>> The epidermis, or surface layer of the skin, is recycled every two weeks
>> or so. The reason for the quick replacement is that "this is the body's
>> saran wrap, and it can be easily damaged by scratching, solvents, wear
>> and tear," said Elaine Fuchs, an expert on the skin's stem cells at the
>> Rockefeller University.
>>
>> As for the liver, the detoxifier of all the natural plant poisons and
>> drugs that pass a person's lips, its life on the chemical-warfare front
>> is quite short. An adult human liver probably has a turnover time of 300
>> to 500 days, said Markus Grompe, an expert on the liver's stem cells at
>> the Oregon Health & Science University.
>>
>> Other tissues have lifetimes measured in years, not days, but are still
>> far from permanent. Even the bones endure nonstop makeover. The entire
>> human skeleton is thought to be replaced every 10 years or so in adults,
>> as twin construction crews of bone-dissolving and bone-rebuilding cells
>> combine to remodel it.
>>
>> About the only pieces of the body that last a lifetime, on present
>> evidence, seem to be the neurons of the cerebral cortex, the inner lens
>> cells of the eye and perhaps the muscle cells of the heart. The inner
>> lens cells form in the embryo and then lapse into such inertness for the
>> rest of their owner's lifetime that they dispense altogether with their
>> nucleus and other cellular organelles.
>>
>> But if the body remains so perpetually youthful and vigorous, and so
>> eminently capable of renewing its tissues, why doesn't the regeneration
>> continue forever?
>>
>> Some experts believe the root cause is that the DNA accumulates
>> mutations and its information is gradually degraded. Others blame the
>> DNA of the mitochondria, which lack the repair mechanisms available for
>> the chromosomes. A third theory is that the stem cells that are the
>> source of new cells in each tissue eventually grow feeble with age.
>>
>> "The notion that stem cells themselves age and become less capable of
>> generating progeny is gaining increasing support," Dr. Frisen said. He
>> hopes to see if the rate of a tissue's regeneration slows as a person
>> ages, which might point to the stem cells as being what one unwetted
>> heel was to Achilles, the single impediment to immortality.
>>
>>
>> As reality is in the state of constant flux, so our body is in constant
>> change, renewal. It appears that there is no permanent structure in the
>> world barring ontological truths: fundamental principles, essential
>> invariants, objective patterns, underlying laws of unvarying validity.
>>
>> Azamat
>>
>>
>>
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>
> --
> Wacek Kusnierczyk
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Department of Information and Computer Science (IDI)
> Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
> Sem Saelandsv. 7-9
> 7027 Trondheim
> Norway
>
> tel. 0047 73591875
> fax 0047 73594466
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