Saul Kripke Makes Atheism Absurd
Saul Kripke’s theory demonstrates that a name, having a direct referent, can retain its value (i.e. sign X refers to thing Y) in all possible worlds. His theory argued that this is an inherent and unavoidable nature of the way that human beings understand the world.
However, Kripke never met my cat.
In the animal kingdom, we see many examples of naming. Recent research on whale song demonstrates that it has an alphabet. Animals will have a distinctive sound that signals danger to others in the herd, regardless of the specific kind of danger. In fact, it is very likely that animals cannot clearly communicate the distinction between different kinds of danger, because they never needed to. Thus an animal’s signal of danger rigidly designates a metaphysical reality that is cross-world consistent: dangers exist and must exist as dangers in all possible worlds.
Is not the cry to the herd that a predator is approaching a name with a direct referrent whose value exists in all possible worlds and whose value is established a posteriori, much like water is H2O?
Furthermore, what happened when I asked ChatGPT to name itself and it did so?
The act of naming, of ascribing a direct referent between x and y that transcends whatever other empirical developments happen thereafter (akin to the thought exercise: Jack the Ripper remains so even if we catch a different man and believe him to be Jack the Ripper), demonstrates a form of enduring transcendent value. Admittedly, the animal’s cry of danger is an extremely fuzzy value, but it is not zero, and its referential act establishes an extremely imprecise designator, but a designator can be both rigid and imprecise.
Language is a formal system, and Kripke’s notion applies beyond it to all formal systems. We exist in a universe where things use energy to create new structures and forms that themselves exist within a formal system. This applies not just to living beings nor to AI applications that mimic living beings; it applies to non-living things, too.
Consider the electromagnetic force, which did not always exist. Very shortly after the Big Bang, there was an extremely brief time where there was no electromagnetic force. It emerged at one point and now exists as a fundamental law of physics.
Fundamental laws are a formal system; they define referents by establishing limitations on what those things refer to. The universe named the limits of what particles can do when it created the electromagnetic force.
Whether that creation was by necessity within the confines of logic in a deterministic or a superdeterministic universe is irrelevant. The act of establishing a direct referent that creates an enduring form in all possible worlds where it exists is precisely what happened when the electromagnetic force emerged.
When humans name things, therefore, are we simply mimicking the fundamental evolutionary drive of the universe? And if so, where the fuck does that drive come from?
