WHAT IS A PHYSICAL OBJECT? This isn't a straightforward issue. I came upon it reading through a few archives from LDS-PHIL that I'd downloaded. Back about ten years ago when I was young and naïve, Dennis Potter had brought up the issue of God’s body and some of the things entailed by God’s being embodied. The paper he brought up to discuss the issue was Richard Cartwright’s paper Scattered Objects. Basically the issue is whether God’s body can be in more than one place at the same time. I’ll not rehash that argument. But there is an interesting issue in all this. What are the boundaries of an object? Put in simple terms, if God is essentially embodied, can we speak about “where” he is? Going further, doesn’t our notion of embodiment imply that God is a physical object? (Which is not to say he is just a physical object – but then neither are we)
This isn't a straightforward issue. I came upon it reading through a few archives from LDS-PHIL that I'd downloaded. Back about ten years ago when I was young and naïve, Dennis Potter had brought up the issue of God’s body and some of the things entailed by God’s being embodied. The paper he brought up to discuss the issue was Richard Cartwright’s Scattered Objects. Basically the issue is whether God’s body can be in more than one place at the same time. I’ll not rehash that argument. But there is an interesting issue in all this. What are the boundaries of an object? Put in simple terms, if God is essentially embodied, can we speak about “where” he is? Going further, doesn’t our notion of embodiment imply that God is a physical object? (Which is not to say he is just a physical object – but then neither are we)
I wasn't able to find the Cartwright paper on the web. Basically he just talks about considering the smallest container that can contain all the elements that constitute a body. The problem with this, in my mind, is that it assumes a certain degree of determinism regarding the boundaries of those elements that constitute the body. Given many interpretations of quantum mechanics, I’m not sure that is a valid assumption. Further many philosophies, such as perhaps Peirce’s, would say that indeterminism of various sorts are part of reality itself. The assumption that reality is not fully determinate certainly isn’t that uncommon. We can see in Heidegger the idea that the west’s assumption about reality being determinate that leads to the errors of metaphysical thinking. Heidegger speaks of this in terms of death. A meditation of being oriented towards death or closure is what enables metaphysics and thinking of things as “things.” Yet if God is immortal and thus unclosed, he is always open towards the future and thereby indeterminate in a very real sense. In LDS theology this is called eternal progression. I suppose in more postmodern language we might term this his transcendence.
The question is, of course, whether you accept this notion of indeterminacy for real physical objects. There was one paper I found on the web that discussed, in passing Cartwright’s paper. I’m including a link to “What are Physical Objects” because I think it presents the “standard” interpretation that I reject. I bring this up because I think the standard view is what some suppose Mormon materialism must entail. Yet hopefully I’ve sketched out, however briefly, why this view rests on an assumption of indeterminism that may not hold. The standard view allows indeterminacy, but an indeterminacy of description and not of reference or reality. For a different approach, consider the following essay on anti- realism about objects. I don't necessarily agree with that paper, but it might clarify issues for some. I'm an anti-realist with respect to the essential extension of objects. I suppose that puts me out of the Cartesian traditional at a minimum.
I think that this is a significant issue relative to Mormon theology and one that has not really been well thought though. Our desire to think that materialism entails a kind of Newtonian materialism is a grave weakness in our thinking. It was this approach to the issues of theology that led Orson Pratt to make the choices he did theologically. I believe he ran into problems because his ontology of materialism entailed determinism.
PHYSICS IS FUN. OK, perhaps not for everyone. However I will readily admit that I came into philosophy from physics and had, for a long time, a heavy distrust of philosophy and especially metaphysics. In those days I was a thorough going pragmatist who didn't yet see an essential conflict between my basic scientific realism and instrumentalism. My hero was Richard Feynman whose own views on philosophy are notorious. One of his famous sayings about Quantum Mechanics ought still be kept in mind by all delving into philosophy:
Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, `But how can it be like that?', because you will get `down the drain' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.
Perhaps Feynman's distrust of philosophy was a little overstated. And of course philosophy had its revenge when his own son became a philosopher. Still that basic distrust of ones own knowledge is a basic stance of physicists. It is something I always try to keep in mind when trying to understand. However the other thing physics brought me was an unquenchable desire to know and understand.
Still, I do think there is a danger in philosophy of going "down the drain" into a blind alley. The fact is that when investigating what is beyond or behind our common day experience that we get lost among the possibilities. In philosophy there are no answers, merely possibilities. Just because you can ground an idea one way is no indication that you can't ground it an other way. What ultimately counts isn't metaphysics, but phenomena. And it is that phenomena that we must encounter and expand.
Just something to keep in mind when we head down the paths. As Nietzsche said, `gaze long into the abyss, and the abyss gazes into you.'
and Theology
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