poke comments on Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical? - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 April 2008 07:06AM

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Comment author: poke 14 April 2008 06:26:32PM 3 points [-]

Eliezer, I think you'd enjoy Tim Maudlin's The Metaphysics Within Physics where he uses gauge theory to argue against the classical metaphysics of particulars, properties, universals, etc. IIRC, he claims there's no straightforward identity relationship between, say, individual electrons or the properties of electrons in particle physics (i.e., individual electrons don't belong to a type, trope or set). The book is a great opportunity to see a (rare) physics-savvy philosopher beat up on other philosophers.

Comment author: false_vacuum 18 February 2011 01:45:17PM 0 points [-]

Tim Maudlin's The Metaphysics Within Physics

Thank you for this. I had completely missed it somehow. It will be interesting to see how much of my own work-in-progress is redundant with Maudlin's.

a (rare) physics-savvy philosopher

Well, of course there are quite a few of them (us?), although they have a low frequency in the population.