On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 09:41:28PM +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > You're a hard positivist. There's nothing really wrong with that: if > we had to choose between killing all the scientists and killing all > the metaphysicians, killing the metaphysicians would be the better
I'm quite relieved to be not the first in line to be put to the wall, come the revolution. > option. Nevertheless, I think it's interesting to speculate on such > unfalsifiable ideas as the interpretation of quantum mechanics and Certainly interesting, but not from a engineer's point of view. People are dying. Let's fix that first, and worry about the future later. Some speculations are however worse than merely sterile, they either make people complacent, or send them chasing up wrong alleys (Everett's daughter, ahem). You-might-be-immortal-already-without-having-to-lift-a-finger is perhaps quite a bit more benign than you-will-be-immortal-if-you-give-me-your-money-and-have-many-kids-and-spread-the-gospel but it's distinctly less constructive than let's-spend-money-on-research-about-personal-immortality-and-make-it-happen. Put bluntly, some theories are worse than others, as resource allocation algorithms. > multiverse theories, and such speculation may guide future scientific > work. After all, the verifiability/ falsifiability principle is > *itself* metaphysics by its own criterion. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=11983
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