Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

even if no-one observes it. Every something has an essence.

This of course still does not help physicists in their search for a substrate. But there is more to tell!

Let’s move on to ‘someones’. What is it about a creature that makes it a ‘someone’ rather than a ‘something’? In other words, what difference does consciousness make? Two things come to mind. Someones HAVE a body rather than just BEING a body. And someones have agency – or at least the illusion of agency. We can act on the world. So, for someones, two new types of relation are added – relations that mere somethings do not have. We OWN our bodies, whilst somethings just ARE bodies. We ACT ON the world, whilst somethings are just ACTED UPON. We could say that the definition of a something is: Body plus way of being in the word (relation). And the definition of a

someone is: My body, my agency plus my way of being in the world.

If we go right back to our initial deliberations about things and somethings – remember that the first attempt at finding a threshold between the thing and the something was to build up complexity until we achieved a uniqueness specific to a something. A similar argument is usually applied to the thresholds of life and consciousness. Make something complex

enough and it achieves these things by default. But, just as it was relationship that played the crucial role in distinguishing things and somethings, could we not also deploy relationship in distinguishing someones? The

relations involved for things are just a given – an immediately obvious fact about the way the world is. But could not the same thing be said

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