John E. Clifford scripsit:
> While there may or may not be one and only one John Clifford, there
> clearly is not only one cat.
Well, that depends on the specifics of your ontology. The ancient
Egyptians, who were by no means primitives, apparently really did think
that a new sun was born every morning in the eastern desert, crossed
the sky, and died in the western desert (wherefore the latter was the
land of the dead for them). If you had told them there was only one
Sun, they would have thought that was ludicrous: obviously each sun is
ontologically distinct!
There is a group of 47,000 quaking aspens in the Wasatch Mountains of
Utah that have been shown to be a single organism: the root systems are
interconnected and the trees are genetically identical. From the mass
point of view, Pando (< Latin _pando_ 'I spread') is at least 80,000
years old and perhaps a million; it weighs about 6000 metric tons.
Myopically singularized, it's just one tree of perfectly ordinary size
and lifespan.
--
What has four pairs of pants, lives John Cowan
in Philadelphia, and it never rains http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
but it pours? cowan@hidden.email
--Rufus T. Firefly