Jeff, Jon, Dan... For the past few months, I have been busy with some critical deadlines and activities that limited my participation in email discussions. But I'd like to comment on the many possible views of reality. Two points by Peirce: 1. Reality is independent of anything we may think about it. Although there are many different ways of thinking and talking about time, there is enough commonality among all those views to indicate that time is real in some sense. 2. There are three fundamental universes of discourse: possibilities, actualities, and necessities. Even if some view(s) might banish time from some way of talking about what actually exists at the current moment, it could still be real in thinking and talking about memories, plans, hopes, and fears. And for current discussions in science, I'd like to mention "model-dependent realism", as discussed by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their 2010 book, _The Grand Design_. They "argue that the quest to discover a final theory may in fact never lead to a unique set of equations. Every scientific theory, they write, comes with its own model of reality, and it may not make sense to talk of what reality actually is." That quotation come from a review in https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-elusive-thoery-of-everything/ . Many physicists have objected to that view because it would mean that further progress in physics is impossible. Others have argued that it might only be impossible with current technology, and new methods might be discovered at some time in the future -- perhaps even the far distant future. But the notion of model-dependent realism could also be extended to linguistics, phenomenology, and anthropology. Every language, culture, and individual has implicit models that determine the ways of interpreting experiences and talking about them. The experiences may be caused by something actual, but the connection to their language may be obscure . For a summary of some of the issues, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism John
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