On 4/22/2015 6:46 PM, LizR wrote:
On 23 April 2015 at 13:24, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>>
wrote:
On 4/22/2015 6:06 PM, LizR wrote:
I can't see how his categorisation works. Existence is generally
considered to be
a property of "kicking back" - of something existing independently of us,
and not
conforming to whatever we'd like it to be. For example. a planet is
generally
considered to exist - we can observer it (or land things on it) and discover
unexpected results - Mars is /not/ covered in H.G.Wells' Martian
civilisation or
Ray Bradbury's crystal cities, no matter how much we might want it to be.
God (in
the conventional sense of supreme being who created the universe) is
sometimes
considered not to exist because it's a concept that gets modified to
account for
new scientific discoveries - few Christians nowadays consider that God
created the
Earth 6000 years ago, or directly caused it to be entirely flooded, for
example.
Roberto Unger and Lee Smolin are trying to claim that something can exist
(kick
back - or as they put it, have rigid properties) yet not have existed prior
to
being thought of by human minds. It seems hard to reconcile these
properties.
Something thought up that describes something that exists could reasonably
be
called an accurate scientific theory; something thought up that describes
something
that doesn't exist could reasonably be called fictional (or a failed
scientific
theory). I can see no reason why a fiction should have rigid properties.
Conversely, if the subject of some theory kicks back, it's reasonable to
consider
it a (possibly) accurate theory describing something that should be
considered (at
least provisionally) real.
So is chess real?
No, chess is an agreed-upon set of conventions invented by the human mind. It didn't
exist before people, and it has rules which can be changed without it kicking back
(Castling, the pawn's two-square starting move - and hence en passant - were introduced
to speed up the game).
But isn't the fact that we call it chess with a change also a convention. If we'd called
the game with castling etc, "Chass" then chass would be a new rigid invention...like
arithmetic. I can imagine some Homo Neanderthalis saying,"Look over there. There's Thog,
Glug, and Drod." His companion says,"That's sorta the same as me, you, and Crak. Let's
call it 'three'." And so they invented arithmetic. Arithmetic depends on seeing
similarities to group individuals and abstract away all the count.
Brent
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