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Metaphysical Puzzles and Paradoxes
What are we to say about a field of human inquiry whose problems have hardly changed over two millennia?
The
Metaphysicist provides pages on the background history of some classic puzzles or paradoxes that have been used for millennia to wrestle with metaphysical problems. The debates between
metaphysicians have changed relatively little in recent centuries despite great advances in human knowledge.
Many of these puzzles are the result of assuming that the contents of the universe are pure material and all
change is material change. They depend on the mistaken idea that
material alone constitutes complete
knowledge - the
identity - of any physical thing.
Mereological nihilists, like the early
Peter Geach and
Peter van Inwagen have a simple solution to many of these puzzles.
Composite objects, they say, do not exist. They are simples (atoms, perhaps) "arranged object-wise." Now an "arrangement" is organization of the matter and pure information. Aristotle called arrangement τὸ σχῆμα τῆς ἰδέας.
Matter without form is shapeless, inchoate. Form without matter is empty, but not without meaning. Because it is what we think we see - form informs us.
Philosophers have become materialist, even
eliminative materialists, denying the existence of
mind, for example. They are also mostly
determinist, denying the existence of
alternative possibilities in our actual universe, while investing a great deal of their energy in the study of inaccessible possible worlds (in each of which there are also
no possibilities, only actuality).
The new light thrown by
information philosophy on many metaphysical problems, puzzles, and paradoxes comes from re-establishing an
immaterial, yet physical, realm of ideas alongside the material realm. No physical object is completely known without understanding its form in terms of
quantifiable information.
The Debtor's Paradox
Dion and Theon, a/k/a Tibbles, the Cat
The Growing Argument
The Infinite Regress
The Problem of the Many
The Ship of Theseus
The Statue and Lump of Clay
The Sorites Puzzle
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