[FRIAM] This makes me think of this list...

[Nicholas Thompson]

I feel like, to you guys, my mind is like an old coil of sticky fly paper that has gotten dusted over. It has a bunch of dead flies stuck to it, and they are gray and dry, but it is incapable of capturing any  new flies. Anyway, I fear that that is the case.

So, in the spirit of scraping up one of my dead flies, I would like to point to something in Eric’s discussion of the difference between being a fluid and being a solid. To the extent that I can entertain essentialism, I would say that the essence of being a solid is not the molecular lattice, but how solids behave. That the behavior solidity is harder to define then the description of a molecular lattice, or whatever, doesn’t make it any less the essence of the concept of solid. Since I am not an essentialist, i can concede that the essence of solid can migrate through discourse and time from the behavior of solids to the lattice — the hankering beyond the facts can get displaced. The only thing I would hang onto with old flypaper stuckitude is that the lattice cannot be at one time and in one sentence what it is to be a solid and what explains solidity.  You can either have the satisfaction of defining solids by their latticity or explaining them because they are lattices, but you cannot have both. Everything else is negotiable.  Nick.
Sent from my Dumb Phone

On Aug 15, 2024, at 12:54 PM, Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:

cannot.

I spent a bit of time in my early twenties hitchhiking throughout North America, which often led to traveling between American festival culture loci. While I feel my orientation/attitude traveling was a bit misguided and overly ascetic, I witnessed enough to recognize how the awe-filled spiritual
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20240816/7ab97d32/attachment.html>