marvelous wrote:
On Sat, 06 May 2006 00:11:58 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Chris Bacon wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Chris Bacon wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Chris Bacon wrote:
bigegg wrote:
What a strange thing for a "philosopher" to say - if you
put your cat in a sealed box, is it alive or dead?
That is a very simplistic question.
It's also a very simple one to answer., It isn't anything until you
make such a judgement call on the cat as to determnine, in human
terms, which of the sets of deadness and aliveness it falls into.
What I meant was that it is a very simplistic question compared
to the full version. The answer to the above is just that the
animal is in the same state as when you put it in.
Not necessarily, depending on how airtight it is and how long its been
in there.
The box was described as "sealed". When you put the cat in, it is in the
same state as it was when you put it in. Can I be plainer? HTH.
No, but you could not be wronger

You are assuming that the entity you refer to as 'cat' will only change
in response to external input and that that input will be totally
screened off by the 'sealed box'

Both are potentially erroneous, the first totally so

He's not philosophising, just being pedantic about the tense.
Then he should have said

"When you put the cat in,it WAS in the same state as when you put it in"

The use of "when", implies a past tense..the use of "Is" implies a
present tense.

I cannot be responsible for his inability to construct a grammatically
correct sentence, one has to do ones best with poor and sloppy
constructions, and assume that the split tenses imply two different times..