Physical idealism

[bennyboy]

Forgive me if I am missing the point but do you mean that, in other words, the "idea" or "formal principle" of limbness precedes the arrangement of genetic materials by which actual limbs are produced?

"Limbness" is a composite idea, and I wouldn't say that it is likely to be floating in the ether. That being said, there was never a time when any composite idea wasn't a derivation of a more primitive idea, extending way back to before even abiogenesis.

I''d say the difference is in "chunking," where a composite idea takes on meaning as an individual unit. So in the OP, I don't think it's just that some disorder cause the happenstance growing of extra fingers. I think that the "finger" idea was applied a different number of times than it is in most people.

Is it besides the point whether or not the success of certain genetic arrangements slowly refined such "ideas" as that of limbs until these came to be encoded as the distinct "ideas" of which they now appear?

One of my ideas in this thread is that an idea, while requiring a medium, is independent of its mechanism. So an .mp3 song is still one whether it's recorded in RAM, or on a CD, or in an arrangement of colored shells on a beach on a distant planet. I'm pretty sure that if you ran an evolution simulator with Earthlike parameters, you'd still end up with limbed organisms, despite the lack of DNA.