On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 2:09 PM, ihope <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If you want to, say "I can do anything by announcement; this sentence > takes precedence over the laws of physics." and see what happens.
Hmm. When we agree to the rules of a nomic, what are we really agreeing to-- what thing defines the game being played? We have a set of things called Rules, but they could be renamed to Regulations without ceasing to be in effect; yet if I make a set of things known to Agora as Regulations, through a contract, they cannot govern the gamestate. So clearly the gamestate is defined in relation to a class of entities, those entities being the Rules; they can define new entities to be Rules, or existing Rules to no longer be Rules. But there is a boundary between Rules and not-Rules; and we are agreeing to the Rules as a whole. In Nomic Wars, the Rules are Sections; and certainly the existing Sections allowed me to create a new Section. The Rules of nomics purport to define their own interpretation-- how is that possible? I could make up a language, interpreted in which the Rules say that they are, in fact, written in that language; but again, that would not be Agora. There are at least two options. One is an infinite "interpretation loop", where we constantly interpret the Rules based on how the Rules an instant ago said that we should interpret them, and at the beginning of the game everyone agreed on how the initial Rules should be interpreted. But another is that we allow the Rules to be governed by a higher authority with respect to interpretation, like any other game. Only what the Rules right now say should be taken into account; this leads to multiple self-consistent interpretations: the interpretation in English, the interpretation in made-up-language-in-which-the-rules-say-comex-wins-the-game. We pick the most reasonable: what defines reasonableness? The higher and external authority of game custom. If we use the former "meta-interpretation", then there is no paradox. When my Section was enacted, the Sections collectively said that higher-Rating takes precedence over higher-Rating, so for an instant, the old definition remains and the Section is void. But then, that instant, because the Section is void, it cannot override the normal precedence Sections; so they take effect for interpretation of the contract at the *next* instant. etc... But in the latter, there is: game custom does not go so far as to dictate a method of determining precedence among Agoran Rules or Nomic Wars Sections, so there are two self-consistent interpretations among which we have no way of selecting.
