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| A diagram of Jaegwon Kim's 1992 library walk problem; wherein the social first law of motion comes into play. [3] |
Scenario: “It occurs to you that you need to check a few references for an article you are writing, so you decide to walk over to the library after your office hours. Miracle of miracles! In half an hour, you find your body, all of it, at the front steps of the library, half a mile away. Think of all the molecules that make up your body: each of them has traversed the half-mile, zigzag path from your office to the library, and your whole body is now where it is.”The library walk problem was proposed in 1992 by Korean-born American physicalism philosopher Jaegwon Kim, concerning the "cause" of a man's walk to a library to get a reference; it is similar to Thomas Huxley's 1901 "zombie argument", found amid consciousness debates, discussed below.
Question: “What explains the spatial displacement of your body from the office to the library? What caused the motion of each and every molecule of your body over the half-mile path?”
Huxley | Zombies
“The argument which applies to brutes [zombies] holds equally good of men … It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, there is no proof that any state of consciousness is the cause of change in motion of the matter of the organism.”
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| A depiction of Mehdi Bazargan's 1980 explanation of the cause of movement, whether of a rock, plant, or human, as found on the back cover of Hmolpedia, Volume 6 (2016), the first seeming cogent answer to Jaegwon Kim's 1992 library walk problem. [4] |
“In general, an object in a given force field will, of necessity, behave in a calculable and predictable way. For any object, whether a stone, a plant, or a human society, force means movement.”— Mehdi Bazargan (1980), “The Cause of Movement” [4]
