It's obviously meant to be metaphorical for life. Meaning you can't love the same girl twice, because it somehow it won't be the same, the sane experience. Or you can never come home, because somehow it won't be the same as you remembered it, even though it is still the same. But it's not. For a river that doesn't really apply. Because the river itself will largely be unchanged in one's lifetime, and you really can step into the same river twice, even though of course the water molecules are not the same. Which is stupid. If anything something like a river will remain seemingly timeless, so you can come back twenty years and it will feel identical. So it's metaphorical. Or even beyond that, like a buddhist koan or something. Just something to get your mind thinking....
It's just the basic problem of identity, whether for rivers, tables, ships, or persons. Efforts to find identity criteria in physical terms generally end without success, which perhaps ought to move us in the direction of concluding that we don't actually think the identity of a table has to do with a set of molecules or smaller particles and that the assumption that an identity relation between A and B must be stated in physical terms is not supported. For legal purposes physical-term criteria may be considered necessary, but that doesn't mean we cannot think of objects - even tables, rivers, etc. - as being actually abstract things.
In terms of practicality, we should probably still label the same river as being the same river because it would honestly just get frustrating over time saying that 'I was at Lake X yesterday', and someone then saying 'but you weren't though, it was a different lake'. Although, one could object to the paradox by saying that, aslong as there is water in that certain place, we can call it the same river. Still a very interesting paradox though.
No, if the definition of "river" is the water in the river. But I argue that a better definition of a river is continual flow of water through a course. The course changes a little over time, but as long as it is not dried up or earthquake-flung miles to the side, it is the same river. 5:00 OMG! Temporal Change is a very interesting concept! Just as a river is made up of different parts of water in different places (some deep, some shallow, some clean, some dirty) it is also made up of different parts of water in different times! In the spring it was rushing, now it is but a trickle, but it is the same river! (I am not a Temporalist yet, but it sounds clever.) 6:00 Hey, this explanation is cool too! "A river is not exactly this water, a river is any water there, so as long as you step into any water there, you step into the same river." Oh wait, but then if the river got polluted it would no longer necessarily be water in it. Or if sea currents pushed saltwater up it.
Everything is in flux. Even the dog in the counter argument is not the same dog when seen again. Things become unrecognisable at different rates. Labels are just a tool to ease our navigation of the world. And often speaks more on our interaction and experience of different objects rather than the objective reality. A label does what a compression algorithm does for computer files, saves information space. If you can reduce a river down to a Name you are saving gigantic cognitive space while loosing most of the information.
As a Californian I DO think of rivers as being made of dirt, and sometimes containing varying quantities of water. The river is the geographical feature that tends to have water flowing through it on at least some occasions; it is not the water itself.
Granted that this basically reduces the river paradox to the problem of holes, but I prefer to think of the problem of holes as a matter of topological features more generally anyway. A river is a groove in the terrain, which might exist merely because there are two parallel ridges in the terrain; but a ridge could likewise exist merely in virtue of there being two rivers running parallel to each other, such that if you added material to fill in the rivers you would somehow end up destroying the ridge even though all the ridge material is still there arranged as it always was. This is because rivers and ridges and holes and bumps are not made of the substance they are composed of (a lack of), but rather by their form or structure. And when you really get down to the bottom of things, that form or structure is all there is to anything, with different substances merely being different microstructures.
While Heraclitus contends that the same man cannot step into the same river twice, one might playfully argue that while the same man cannot step into the same river twice, nothing stops him from stepping into two different rivers at two different times. For every river, like every moment, is distinct and flows on just the same.
You can read one book, then read the exact same book one year later, and it will seem different, because you are different. Heraclitus wasn't really talking about water. I think the point he was trying to make, is nothing ever stays the same; everything is constantly changing
My position is that a river is not identified by the water at all, but by the river bed. I once drove over the Rio Grande, which was bone dry at the time, and it was still the Rio Grande on the map.
The misunderstanding that causes the paradox is due to a reification error. The river is not water. The river is a geographical area where water flows. Think of a river where water only flows for part of the year. It is the same river next year as this year. In fact, the river is in the same geographical area even during the period when no water flows. When a river floods, we do not say that now the whole area is the river. We still think of it as the river being over there...while the water that is here is due to the flood...the river has overflowed its banks. All known classical paradoxes are due to not distinguishing between the model of reality and reality.
In a materialist world view I see no way around mereological nihilism, which establishes the idea, that composite objects don't exist, only fundamental building blocks like elementary particles/force fields, which are referred to as simples. Collections and composites are useful categories in language and thought, that's why we use them, but there is no firm metaphysical ground to define a table, dog or river without running heads on into ambiguity and fuzziness.
Being and time, the time being making the river different, the river was not at one time and it will not be at another time, the time between not being making the river be, how narrowly you define the instance of the river being is as small as an instance according to hereclitus, the river being from its first instance to its last would be wittgensteins definition maybe, wittgenstein saying that the man who said this was wrong but failed to specify at which instance was the man wrong
Yes, because the river isn't the water. And also like how if we took all the water out of Lake Huron and moved it to some other area, it would not be Lake Huron.
IMO a river is what we commonly call a flowing liquid (or any substance capable of acting in the aggregate as a liquid). Those are the essential elements. What liquid, what its viscosity or composition is to me irrelevant. As long as it is flowing it’s properly a river. If you want to get granular you can stop at whatever level you pick from molecular down to quantum. There isn’t an atom in you that you were born with if you’re over ten. So, as Horton might say, WHO are YOU? 😉
You are also not the same person when you step into the river again, even infinitesimally you have changed so you are a different or more accurately a changed person stepping into a changed/different river.
I'd challenge premise 2 on the basis that there's no way you could know for certain that you were stepping into different water. Y'all ain't out here labeling and tracking specific molecules.
This is only a paradox because of the imprecise nature of human language. The concept of a river lacks a precise enough definition to say whether it is the same river, so there is no objective answer to the question. Were you to define "river" sufficiently, you could always say whether or not it was the same. It's like asking if a boat is the "same boat" if you rebuild all of its parts. It's easy to resolve through clarification and frankly not particularly interesting. I'm amazed that you were able to cycle through so many obtuse philosophical distinctions without getting to that ultimate issue.
The deeper problem is not "if we offered a sufficient definition it would solve it" but rather "there is no sufficient definition of river." The problem here is not that our term is non-specific, but rather that there is no way of specifying the term. Feel free to offer what you think fit the necessary and sufficient conditions for something being the same river over time. The reason that these problems of identity are real issues is when it comes down to something more ethically relevant, like personal identity. What makes a person the same person over time? Should someone with complete amnesia be prosecuted for crimes they can't remember? Should someone with 5 organs from a serial killer be prosecuted for those crimes?
@@CarneadesOfCyrene I don't agree with this. If I defined a river as "A fixed geographic location with established parameters containing a specific collection of water" Then you could assuredly never step into the same river twice unless all of the variables were replicated exactly. If I instead defined it as "An area with unfixed parameters that has water flowing through it" then you can step into the same river fifty times a day. Or I could come up with any number of alternative definitions that describe the phenomenon that is occurring. Or, I could just come up with a more precise definition for the word "same" which seems to be the crux of the paradox itself. It's all semantics.
@@Stonefallow I can still disagree with your definition as it's still too vague, for example by your definition a canal is also a river yet they aren't the same thing, can't you also just call it a bigger stream of water?
@@hydrofn5120 The definition might be incomplete but that doesn't mean you couldn't expand on it with qualifiers. Just define the maximum and minimum size parameters, and if any other ambiguities arise you can specify those as well.
@@hydrofn5120 Only claim a rivier is a surface geomorphological region which was structured by non-artificial phenomena in which some water and minerals flow. Contradiction solved, Heraclite can go back to his grave with his trivialities.
It's ancient! How many times throughout history have people asked this same question? The Buddha talked about this, buddy. Modern logicians have solved it. It's like solving Fermat's last theorem. You know about that, right? Maybe it's too deep
Not only has the water in the river changed between two points of time, also "I" have changed. Thus, I doubly cannot step twice into the same river.
It's obviously meant to be metaphorical for life. Meaning you can't love the same girl twice, because it somehow it won't be the same, the sane experience. Or you can never come home, because somehow it won't be the same as you remembered it, even though it is still the same. But it's not. For a river that doesn't really apply. Because the river itself will largely be unchanged in one's lifetime, and you really can step into the same river twice, even though of course the water molecules are not the same. Which is stupid. If anything something like a river will remain seemingly timeless, so you can come back twenty years and it will feel identical. So it's metaphorical. Or even beyond that, like a buddhist koan or something. Just something to get your mind thinking....
It's just the basic problem of identity, whether for rivers, tables, ships, or persons. Efforts to find identity criteria in physical terms generally end without success, which perhaps ought to move us in the direction of concluding that we don't actually think the identity of a table has to do with a set of molecules or smaller particles and that the assumption that an identity relation between A and B must be stated in physical terms is not supported. For legal purposes physical-term criteria may be considered necessary, but that doesn't mean we cannot think of objects - even tables, rivers, etc. - as being actually abstract things.
In terms of practicality, we should probably still label the same river as being the same river because it would honestly just get frustrating over time saying that 'I was at Lake X yesterday', and someone then saying 'but you weren't though, it was a different lake'. Although, one could object to the paradox by saying that, aslong as there is water in that certain place, we can call it the same river. Still a very interesting paradox though.
No, if the definition of "river" is the water in the river.
But I argue that a better definition of a river is continual flow of water through a course. The course changes a little over time, but as long as it is not dried up or earthquake-flung miles to the side, it is the same river.
5:00 OMG! Temporal Change is a very interesting concept! Just as a river is made up of different parts of water in different places (some deep, some shallow, some clean, some dirty) it is also made up of different parts of water in different times! In the spring it was rushing, now it is but a trickle, but it is the same river!
(I am not a Temporalist yet, but it sounds clever.)
6:00 Hey, this explanation is cool too! "A river is not exactly this water, a river is any water there, so as long as you step into any water there, you step into the same river."
Oh wait, but then if the river got polluted it would no longer necessarily be water in it. Or if sea currents pushed saltwater up it.
Everything is in flux. Even the dog in the counter argument is not the same dog when seen again. Things become unrecognisable at different rates. Labels are just a tool to ease our navigation of the world. And often speaks more on our interaction and experience of different objects rather than the objective reality. A label does what a compression algorithm does for computer files, saves information space. If you can reduce a river down to a Name you are saving gigantic cognitive space while loosing most of the information.
As a Californian I DO think of rivers as being made of dirt, and sometimes containing varying quantities of water. The river is the geographical feature that tends to have water flowing through it on at least some occasions; it is not the water itself.
Granted that this basically reduces the river paradox to the problem of holes, but I prefer to think of the problem of holes as a matter of topological features more generally anyway. A river is a groove in the terrain, which might exist merely because there are two parallel ridges in the terrain; but a ridge could likewise exist merely in virtue of there being two rivers running parallel to each other, such that if you added material to fill in the rivers you would somehow end up destroying the ridge even though all the ridge material is still there arranged as it always was. This is because rivers and ridges and holes and bumps are not made of the substance they are composed of (a lack of), but rather by their form or structure.
And when you really get down to the bottom of things, that form or structure is all there is to anything, with different substances merely being different microstructures.
While Heraclitus contends that the same man cannot step into the same river twice, one might playfully argue that while the same man cannot step into the same river twice, nothing stops him from stepping into two different rivers at two different times. For every river, like every moment, is distinct and flows on just the same.
You can read one book, then read the exact same book one year later, and it will seem different, because you are different. Heraclitus wasn't really talking about water. I think the point he was trying to make, is nothing ever stays the same; everything is constantly changing
If people only ever thing of a river as being water that flows, from point A to point B, then how would that be different from a waterfall?
My position is that a river is not identified by the water at all, but by the river bed. I once drove over the Rio Grande, which was bone dry at the time, and it was still the Rio Grande on the map.
2:40 is that what Agrippa means when saying things appear changed by how observers relate to them?
Is there not an eternal return? I once again meet this spider, this moonlight....
The misunderstanding that causes the paradox is due to a reification error. The river is not water. The river is a geographical area where water flows. Think of a river where water only flows for part of the year. It is the same river next year as this year. In fact, the river is in the same geographical area even during the period when no water flows. When a river floods, we do not say that now the whole area is the river. We still think of it as the river being over there...while the water that is here is due to the flood...the river has overflowed its banks.
All known classical paradoxes are due to not distinguishing between the model of reality and reality.
In a materialist world view I see no way around mereological nihilism, which establishes the idea, that composite objects don't exist, only fundamental building blocks like elementary particles/force fields, which are referred to as simples.
Collections and composites are useful categories in language and thought, that's why we use them, but there is no firm metaphysical ground to define a table, dog or river without running heads on into ambiguity and fuzziness.
I am waiting your happy Halloween
This paradox laid upon linguistic confusion
Being and time, the time being making the river different, the river was not at one time and it will not be at another time, the time between not being making the river be, how narrowly you define the instance of the river being is as small as an instance according to hereclitus, the river being from its first instance to its last would be wittgensteins definition maybe, wittgenstein saying that the man who said this was wrong but failed to specify at which instance was the man wrong
Woo hoo!!
The unity of opposites is an adjunction, which creates a monad. Simple. Or a monad that creates an adjunction. Clearly.
There are individual rivers that I have jumped in too many times. I called the river by the same name. I have been in one River many times
water is water
Acharya Prashant 😊
Yes, because the river isn't the water. And also like how if we took all the water out of Lake Huron and moved it to some other area, it would not be Lake Huron.
It's kind of like a donut hole, isn't it? It's the space through which the water flows?
But what is a hole? ruclips.net/video/5B9224txYNg/видео.html
IMO a river is what we commonly call a flowing liquid (or any substance capable of acting in the aggregate as a liquid). Those are the essential elements. What liquid, what its viscosity or composition is to me irrelevant. As long as it is flowing it’s properly a river.
If you want to get granular you can stop at whatever level you pick from molecular down to quantum.
There isn’t an atom in you that you were born with if you’re over ten.
So, as Horton might say, WHO are YOU? 😉
You are also not the same person when you step into the river again, even infinitesimally you have changed so you are a different or more accurately a changed person stepping into a changed/different river.
Yes because otherwise it wouldn't be the same river
I'd challenge premise 2 on the basis that there's no way you could know for certain that you were stepping into different water. Y'all ain't out here labeling and tracking specific molecules.
I guess I'd appeal to a relativized identity and say it's the same river, but not the same water.
This is only a paradox because of the imprecise nature of human language. The concept of a river lacks a precise enough definition to say whether it is the same river, so there is no objective answer to the question. Were you to define "river" sufficiently, you could always say whether or not it was the same. It's like asking if a boat is the "same boat" if you rebuild all of its parts. It's easy to resolve through clarification and frankly not particularly interesting.
I'm amazed that you were able to cycle through so many obtuse philosophical distinctions without getting to that ultimate issue.
The deeper problem is not "if we offered a sufficient definition it would solve it" but rather "there is no sufficient definition of river." The problem here is not that our term is non-specific, but rather that there is no way of specifying the term. Feel free to offer what you think fit the necessary and sufficient conditions for something being the same river over time.
The reason that these problems of identity are real issues is when it comes down to something more ethically relevant, like personal identity. What makes a person the same person over time? Should someone with complete amnesia be prosecuted for crimes they can't remember? Should someone with 5 organs from a serial killer be prosecuted for those crimes?
@@CarneadesOfCyrene I don't agree with this. If I defined a river as "A fixed geographic location with established parameters containing a specific collection of water" Then you could assuredly never step into the same river twice unless all of the variables were replicated exactly. If I instead defined it as "An area with unfixed parameters that has water flowing through it" then you can step into the same river fifty times a day. Or I could come up with any number of alternative definitions that describe the phenomenon that is occurring. Or, I could just come up with a more precise definition for the word "same" which seems to be the crux of the paradox itself. It's all semantics.
@@Stonefallow I can still disagree with your definition as it's still too vague, for example by your definition a canal is also a river yet they aren't the same thing, can't you also just call it a bigger stream of water?
@@hydrofn5120 The definition might be incomplete but that doesn't mean you couldn't expand on it with qualifiers. Just define the maximum and minimum size parameters, and if any other ambiguities arise you can specify those as well.
@@hydrofn5120 Only claim a rivier is a surface geomorphological region which was structured by non-artificial phenomena in which some water and minerals flow. Contradiction solved, Heraclite can go back to his grave with his trivialities.
Philosophy people think this is deep.
It's ancient! How many times throughout history have people asked this same question? The Buddha talked about this, buddy.
Modern logicians have solved it. It's like solving Fermat's last theorem. You know about that, right? Maybe it's too deep
@@tomholroyd7519 three year olds solved it when they figured out what a river is.