humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Mar 26, 1:17 pm, Mark N wrote:

> Does a consciousness turn collections into units, or does it *consider*
> them as units? The former makes it sound as if the consciousness is
> changing the nature of the things that it is thinking about.

It considers them as units. I don't know that it makes sense to argue
that the Sun "is really" a unit. Perhaps someone can some up with
something for that to mean, but it's not immediately obvious to me
what that would mean.

> But if the indivisibility was a property of the model only, then I don't
> see how it makes any sense to say that the atoms themselves are not
> indivisible "anymore." They never were indivisible!

They never were, period. There simply never were indivisible atoms.
The original meaning of the term "atom" was indivisible. That we now
call something divisible an "atom" is simply an odd quirk of language.
What we really learned is that what we previously called atoms are
simply not atoms.

The whole point of the model is that part of what it meant to be an
atom is to be indivisible. So you have to argue that there are still
indivisible atoms or the model never referred to anything. Both of
those positions are absurd.

The "indivisibility" of the things the word "atom" referred to was a
property of the model, not of the things themselves.

DS