On 23 April 2015 at 13:24, meekerdb <[email protected]> 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). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
