I'm only doing this in order to procrastinate. — Banno

What we do not have to do is to work out if the person eating the eggs in that possible world is the same as the person eating cornflakes in the actual world. That they are the same is set in the specification: "What if I had eggs instead of cornflakes..."

And that's where those who think there is a problem of transworld identity (@frank ?) get it wrong, setting the cart before the horse. — Banno

Is it a fact that someone else might have been president 37? — Banno

Any disagreement? — Banno

Neither Nixon nor the 37th president are necessarily existent - neither must exist in every possible world. — Banno

So you are saying something like, since Nixon actually was president 37, no one else could actually have been president 37.

But it remains that someone other then Nixon might have been president 37. — Banno

So you are setting up "essence" to mean the collection of definite descriptions that are true of an individual in the actual world. — Banno

A property had by only that individual - that is, the property picked out by a definite description. — Banno

Don't copy-and-paste at me. Paraphrase or quote the bit you think I should be looking at. — Banno

Peter Geach has advocated (in Mental Acts, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1957, Section 16, and elsewhere) a notion of 'nominal essence' different from the type of essential property considered here. According to Geach, since any act of pointing is ambiguous, someone who baptizes an object by pointing to it must apply a sortal property to disambiguate his reference and to ensure correct criteria of identity over time-for example, someone who assigns a reference to 'Nixon' by pointing to him must say, 'I use "Nixon" as a name of that man', thus removing his hearer's temptations to take him to be pointing to a nose or a time-slice. The sortal is then in some sense part of the meaning of the name; names do have a (partial) sense after all, though their senses may not be complete enough to determine their references, as they are in description and cluster-of-descriptions theories. If I understand Geach correctly, his nominal essence should be understood in terms of a prioricity, not necessity, and thus is quite different from the kind of essence advocated here (perhaps this is part of what he means when he says he is dealing with 'nominal', not 'real', essences). So 'Nixon is a man', 'Dobbin is a horse', and the like would be a priori truths — Kripke, pg. 114, footnote 58

In addition to the principle that the original of an object is essential to it, another principle suggested is that the substance of which it is made is essential. Several complications exist here. First, one should not confuse the type of essence involved in the question 'What properties must an object retain if it is not to cease to exist, and what properties of the object can change while the object endures?', which is a temporal question, with the question 'What (timeless) properties could the object not have failed to have, and what properties could it have lacked while still (timelessly) existing?', which concerns necessity and not time and which is our topic here. Thus the question of whether the table could have changed into ice is irrelevant here. The question whether the table could originally have been made of anything other than wood is relevant. Obviously this question is related to the necessity of the origin of the table from a given block of wood and whether that block, too, is essentially wood (even wood of a particular kind). Thus it is ordinarily impossible to imagine the table made from any substance other than the one of which it is actually made without going back through the entire history of the universe, a mind-boggling feat. (Other possibilities of the table not having been wooden originally have been suggested to me, including an ingenious suggestion of Slote's, but I find none of them really convincing. I cannot discuss them here.) A full discussion of the problems of essential properties of particulars is impossible here, but I will mention a few other points: (I) Ordinarily when we ask intuitively whether something might have happened to a given object, we ask whether the universe could have gone on as it actually did up to a certain time, but diverge in its history from that point forward so that the vicissitudes of that object would have been different from that time forth. Perhaps this feature should be erected into a general principle about essence. Note that the time in which the divergence from actual history occurs may be sometime before the object itself is actually created. For example, I might have been deformed if the fertilized egg from which I originated had been damaged in certain ways, even though I presumably did not yet exist at that time. (2) I am not suggesting that only origin and substantial makeup are essential. For example, if the very block of wood from which the table was made had instead been made into a vase, the table never would have existed. So (roughly) being a table seems to be an essential property of the table. (3) Just as the question whether an object actually has a certain property (e.g. baldness) can be vague, so the question whether the object essentially has a certain property can be vague, even when the question whether it actually has the property is decided. (4) Certain counterexamples to the origin principle appear to exist in ordinary parlance. I am convinced that they are not genuine counterexamples, but their exact analysis is difficult. I cannot discuss this here. — Kripke, pg. 113, footnote 57

In what way? I can tell someone - a child, perhaps - and isn't that sharing? Don't we share this understanding? — Banno

Then in what way would it be a description? — Banno

Perhaps there is not really such a thing as an essence. Or perhaps the notion has no use. — Banno

So that's not what an essence is. — Banno

What is an essence? — Banno

And it would make no sense to suppose that Big Chief Cover-Up was not a big chief and didn't get involved in a cover-up, because his name identifies this as his essence. This is not to say that they or we believe in formal immutable essences, because after some momentous event, one changes one's name - before the election, he would have been called 'Dances with Words', or something. — unenlightened

Is Frank addressing the same thing? — Banno

So : the question of transworld identification makes some sense, in terms of asking about the identity of an object via questions about its component parts. But these parts are not qualities, and it is not an object resembling the given one which is in question. Theorists have often said that we identify objects across possible worlds as objects resembling the given one in the most important respects. On the contrary, Nixon, had he decided to act otherwise, might have avoided politics like the plague, though privately harboring radical opinions. Most important, even when we can replace questions about an object by questions about its parts, we need not do so. We can refer to the object and ask what might have happened to it. So, we do not begin with worlds (which are supposed somehow to be real, and whose qualities, but not whose objects, are perceptible to us), and then ask about criteria of transworld identification; on the contrary, we begin with the objects, which we have, and can identify, in the actual world. We can then ask whether certain things might have been true of the objects. — Kripke pg. 53

But all you do is push stuff off the table. If you will not engage, I can't see how this will be any fun. — Banno

You say you haven't understood the notion of identity criterion, on the rejection of which the remainder of the book is based, and although I found it interesting to revisit, I have several other books I ought be reading. — Banno

Perhaps it is not emotional reasoning, in some cases, people struggle with those thoughts regardless of the emotional state. Happiness is an emotion, hence the reason to NOT die would be a result of emotional reasoning. — Waya