Marcus, et al. I do hope to some extent that the others agree with you about what is *the point*. Though I am not sure with what certainty or authority one can make such a claim. The concept of *meaning* arises from ontological commitments. When the legal system includes notions like intent and punishment, they are *exactly* making the ontological commitment to *free will*. It is within this scope that any meaning for intent and punishment is accessible. You speak of *believers* as if they *must* be troubled by inconsistency. I suspect, like applied mathematicians, they need not be. Further, those *believers* may not require an *all-knowing* condition to conflict with choice, you would have to know what commitments they have already made. The immediate commitments I may import when a *believer* describes choice under an omniscient god, result in god predetermining sinners going to hell. The *believer*, however, may make other commitments that escape this predetermining.
Making judicious choices of ontological commitment happen everywhere in the sciences. If someone decides that they are going to make a commitment to the aether, I think it is polite to see what model they make and what they wish to describe before jumping on them about Michelson-Morley. Showing that an ontological commitment is not unique or necessary in some absolute sense need not invalidate a theory. SteveG and Nick go back and forth about this with respect to evolutionary theory. Nick points out how making a commitment to *selection* produces fruit. SteveG argues that evolution is all *Lagrangians*. Whichever commitment is made, I beg we use it to identify further entailments. If we attempt to invalidate another's entailment by switching the ontological grounds by which they were made, we act in bad faith. -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
