On 4/22/2015 6:46 PM, LizR wrote:
On 23 April 2015 at 13:24, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[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).
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.
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