On 23 Apr 2015, at 03:46, LizR wrote:
On 23 April 2015 at 13:24, meekerdb <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.
Oooooh.... I agree with what you say above, but here you fell in a
trap here. Chess is a finite game, so it exists, at least in the
theory of the finite games, which is itself embedded in arithmetic.
not only chess exists like prime number, but it can be decomposed
cannonically into Nim-like simpler game, and they obeys laws which can
kick back, especially if you play with someone knowing those laws!
It didn't exist before people,
Well, it existed before, but it was not yet discovered by humans in
some history. In UD*, even the chess players exist "out of time".
They are, roughly speaking, the number i such that the phi_i plays
chess. That includes deep blues and Gasparov. Chess exists in
arithmetic, as long with the (roughly) 10^120 games of chess, and even
those non stopping (and thus recurring) where the local standard laws
of stopping the play does not apply.
They exist in abstract form, but also in relatively concrete form,
like "in" the i such that phi_i emulates the Milky-Way at a very low
subst. level. That emulation can go through the emulation of a chess
board de luxe, in a rare wood with a special perfume.
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).
Well, we can have a problem with the identity of chess, but that's the
same with humans, animals and plants, and that makes them not not
existing (in some modal sense) in arithmetic, once we assume
computationalism, of course.
Bruno
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