Are you sure they are the same?

I met Beertino a couple of days back and we ended up talking about the philosophy essay that he's writing. The main focus of the essay is this theory: A and B can be called the same if they share the same properties. Beer was trying to show that it's not enough to show that two things only have to share the same properties to be the same. He wanted to reduce it to this one: A and B can be called the same if they share exactly the same characteristics. First of all, let me define some terms that we are using here. Property is define as something you use to describe something. It's not a really good definition, I know. Take it as this, if you see a red apple then you can say the redness is a property of that particular apple. Characteristic is a subset of property. It is the core property that we cannot do away with if we want to really describe something. Let us take the same red apple again. The colour red is a property but not a characteristic since there are plenty of green apples and they are still apples even though they are not red. Got it? Okay, let's plough on.

Let's take the original theory first. A and B can be called the same if they share the same properties. Straight away you know that there's something not right about this. So if the set of properties of two things intersect, they are the same? If the apple is red and my bicycle is red, are they the same? They share the same property, being red, don't they? Of course not, our common sense will straight away deny this.

So perhaps we can reduce it to having exactly the same properties. So if you list all the properties of two things and compare them to each other, only if all of them match then we can say that they are the same. You might be tempted to accept this as the correct theory. But the absoluteness of the statement is its own undoing. Let's go back to the apples again. One is red and one is green. They are both apples and yet they have differing properties. The colour. The smart lot of you will say, "They are two different things. One is green apple and one is red apple. They are not the same. And hence the theory is true." Tricky isn't it? Now imagine a machine that can replicate an object with exact preciseness. Put the red apple in and two red apples will come out. Two exact red apples side by side. Are they the same? So you list all of their properties and check them one by one. And let me just tell you that the answer is no. They are not the same. Why, you ask. Because one is on the left and one is on the right. Their spatial properties deny them of that sameness. So, is there any two things in this world that are the same? if you are a follower of this theory, the answer is no. At least, to my knowledge. So if you accept this theory, stop reading now because that's all you need to know.

However, if you find the above theory is too absolute, we can investigate further. It sounded too extreme to consider all the properties. So there must be a set of defining properties that we can use to judge whether two objects are the same. This defining properties is what we consider as characteristics. So let's say if we want to determine whether two objects (an apple and an orange) are the same, we choose one set of charateristics, let's say the apple's. Then we can compare whether the two objects are the same or not using that set. Of course we can take the orange set of characteristics and do the same thing. Thus, the theory becomes: A and B are the same if they have exactly the same characteristics.

The problem now is to determine which property of the object that we can take as the characteristic of the object and to what extent. Honestly, I don't know. My first guess was the chemical makeup of the object but I have doubts about it since obviously if we take green and red apple as the same, apples, their chemical makeups are different (I suppose the colour red and green are caused by different chemical compounds, but hey, maybe I'm wrong). Even if we don't take green and red apples as the same, I'm fairly certain that chemical compound is quite a shaky ground to base sameness on.

What I was saying above is the absolute take on sameness. This is assuming we have necessary knowledge regarding the objects involved. Instead of absolute view, we can also take the relative view. But this is mainly due to the limitation of our knowledge rather than the objects involved. To illustrate my point, let's say you show a child that has never seen an apple before and have no knowledge what is an apple, an apple and a peeled apple . If you ask the child whether the two objects are the same, he/she might answer that they are not. But this is because the child does not know what constitutes as an apple. His/her lack of knowledge impedes him/her from making a good judgement.

The extent of sameness is also somewhat relative. In the loose sense of the word and in the context of everyday life, we usually consider two fairly similar things as the same. And it's perfectly alright. That just means that the set of characteristics that is used in that context is fairly small.

Another side issue that relates to this is when does an object stop being that object? From the last theory, it's when any of the characteristics differ from the original characteristics of the objects. If we cut an apple into two, does it stop being an apple? Perhaps not. What if we cut it into many pieces? Or mash it? When does it stop being an apple? I'm tempted to relate it to the platonic concept of the world of ideas but I don't really believe in it. Descartes mentioned it with the wax analogy but he really didn't provide an answer to it, at least not in the part I read.

Interesting, isn't it?