Hi all
After reading, and being engaged in, a couple of head-on discussions here, I'm
beginning to wonder if we have any common ground to stand on. One such common
ground should be (IMO) the notion of what a metaphysics is. If we don't share
that, we will end up like the people with no sense of direction running 100
yards on Monty Python's silly Olympics. Everyone will end up at their own 100
yard line and yell "I won!".
I have a certain feeling we will get at least 2 different goals to aim for.
We've had discussions about this before but I can't find them right now.
I can start:
To me, metaphysics has the same relationship to physics as metadata has to data
in a database. For example, if you have an address book, the metadata is name,
address, phone and email. Using that metadata, you can describe all your
friends.
A metaphysics should do the same with the reality/physics we want to describe
with it. Your metadata describes your friends, and your metaphysics describes
the reality.
However, IMO there's one crucial difference between the two:
If one of your friends gets one of those nifty things called mobile phone, your
metadata is insufficient to describe this friend. You have to add a "Mobile
phone" to your metadata. This is ok for metadata.
But, IMO, it's *not* ok to do that for a metaphysics. Of course we can do that
with our understanding/model of the metaphysics, but not to the metaphysics
itself. The metaphysics has been working for ~15 billion years according to
current research, and since time is a physical concept, the metaphysics has
been
ruling time as well, perhaps even initiating it from a timeless soup some
"time"
before the big bang.
So, to me, a metaphysics is really outside our reality. We can't see it, we
can't change it, we can only see it working in our reality. The only thing we
can do is to describe it as good as we can and in doing so, understand the
reality better.
Anyone else?
P.S. Let's try to keep this as civil as possible, please. The "This Event"
thread starring SA and Ron is a great example. It would, for example, be
prudent
to lay out your own view of what a metaphysics is before criticizing anyone
else's.
Magnus
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