HistoricalGoof said:*What if all that was original Torker was the wheel, rim, and frame?
Could we still call that a Torker? Seems so to me.
I don't agree with this. I don't think time should matter, because
how could you ever determine the certain amount of time that divides
when it becomes something new and when it remains the same? What if
you replace the frame, wait a week then replace the wheel? Same uni?
What if you replace the frame, have a sandwich and then replace the
wheel? Different uni now? Does it depend on someone else seeing it
between each stage?
I like the idea that it's the memories we attach to it that gives it
its "-ness". Although every philosopher has his mad scientist example
that does crazy things like replace one memory at a time with someone
else's, creating that same grey area that comes up in the time problem
and is meant to be demonstrated by the Ship of Theseus.
.....I like uni's and philosophy, especially mixed. *
"[Fuller] grasps and tenses an invisible rope, on which we are to
understand a common overhand knot, two 360° rotations in intersecting
planes, each passed through the other:
"Pull, and whatever your effort each lobe of the knot makes it
impossible that the other shall disappear. It is a self-interfering
pattern. Slacken, and its structure hangs open for anlysis, but suffers
no topological impairment. Slide the knot along the rope: you are
sliding the rope through the knot. Slide through it, if you have them
spliced in sequence, hemp rope, cotton rope, nylon rope. The knot is
indifferent to these transactions. the knot is neither hemp nor cotton
nor nylon: is not the rope. The knot is a patterned integrity. The rope
renders it visible. No member of Fuller's audience has ever objected (he
remarks) that throughout this exposition he has been holding no rope at
all, so accessible to the mind is a patterned integrity, visible or no,
once the senses have taught us the contours.
"Imagine, next, the metabolic flow that passes through a man and is not
the man: some hundreds of tons of solids, liquids and gasses serving to
render a single man corporeal during the seventy years he persists, a
patterned integrity, a knot through which pass the swift strands of
simultaneous ecological cycles, recycling transformations of solar
energy. At any given moment the knotted materials weigh perhaps 160
pounds."
(Buckminster Fuller, 1967)
--
tholub - Kinetic Sculptor
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