Quote:
Originally posted by Colin
Punkworld,
I agree with what you're saying (this is our first time so mark down the date and time). I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a "real self" - whatever that means.
For example, the atoms that make up your body are constantly being exchanged for others. At some point, you have mostly different atoms than the ones you had earlier - however I still say "That is Punkworld. He's pugnacious" and everyone knows what and who I mean.
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It could be that the only real reason is an instrumentalist one - it makes life a whole lot easier to do this, in fact, language would become void if you couldn't refer to objects as being stable, regardless of whether they really are stable or not.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is in my opinion that they try to derive objective truth from language, while language is in fact merely a crude tool for describing the world.
An example: actions are referred to as either 'good' or 'bad', however, people have derived from this that there must be an objective 'good', that is independant of both humans and language. I think the reasoning behind that is flawed.