Subject: More damn imaginary world stuff

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 13:08:21 EST

cowan:
<>     <Foreknowledge, even perfect foreknowledge, doesn't imply causation.> 
> True, but to the point, perfect foreknowledge does imply the lack of choice.

I meant to say "choice", not "causation".   The point of the envelope
example was to show that even though I foreknew that you would take
the $1 mil instead of drinking the battery acid, your choice was
perfectly unconstrained by me.>
No, you meant "causation" -- you don't constrain the choice (though you may 
have forced it a bit), but if you KNOW which choice he will make, then he 
does not have a choice. For, if he takes the other option, your prediction 
was wrong and you, consequently, did not know it at all. Just a logical 
point: a knows that p => p

xod:
<This is a completely meaningless sentence. C The
notion of "doing it over again" is meaningless. It does not correspond to
anything in reality.>
Well, that is a position, but not one that corresponds well with ordinary 
usage, of which logic tries to make as much sense as possible. The issue is 
not doing it over but doing instead. <You can only do one thing! > is a 
classic modal ambiguity and the sense in which it is obviously true does not 
cut offthe possibility that I could have done something else then.

<Moral strictures and legal punishments appear to have a negative
correlation against certain kinds of behaviors. That's all the
justification that is necessary,> 
["positive correlation"?]
In most societies, behavior is not enough, but a variety of circumstantial 
items enter in, at least one of which is a plausible case that someone could 
have done otherwise (often even in very remote senses -- look at the Leopold &
Loeb verdicts).

<The medieval conceptions of the Yahweh are the troublesome ones. All this
rot about all-knowing, all-powerful. If you postulate powerful, wise
beings, worthy of worship, you don't run into such problems, although you
may find it difficult to prove their existence.>
Not just Medieval (and not really Medieval either). I always start 
Philosophy of Religion by pointing out how little the God we are going to 
talk about has to do with the God that comes up on Sunday-Saturday-Friday.  
In spite of Neo-Platonism being a heresy in all Western Monotheisms, it 
pretty much won the game in theology and philosophy. Of course, you are left 
with the question of whether anything less than The One is really worthy of 
worship, since it might be a mere lickspittle in the hierarchy of gods.

<So I suppose you are asking whether there is a world in which
> every stement false IN THAT WORLD is true IN THAT SAME WORLD.

Not really. The idea was that there are two classes of facts, ones that
are true in this world but might be false in another (John's marriage),
and others that must be false everywhere (2 + 2 = 5). But since other
worlds do not exist, this isn't an issue.>
Well, the other "worlds" do help exlain what is peculiar about "2+2=5" 
compared to "I am the Pope," why one is easy to conceive and the other is at 
least a whole lot harder, if not impossible.

<It is entirely possible that ANY deviation from our known laws of physics
involves a logical contradiction.>
No. It may be that any deviation from the actual laws of physics (known and 
unknown) is physically impoossible -- that no world could actually exist in 
any other way -- but that is far from LOGICAL impossibility, that the laws 
imply, in themselves, a contradiction.

<I fail to see how speculation on the properties and differences between
worlds that DO NOT exist can help us understand anything in this one. They
do not, and in a real sense could not exist! If we want to tie our logic
to observed reality and derive useable results, we are obliged to ignore
such fiction.>
The point is that we do talk as though there were other ways that things 
might be and such talk seems often to make sense, even important sense. So, 
let's see what we can do to find out what kind of sense it makes and what are 
the conditions for its making that sense. Possible worlds are a nice fiction 
for doing this, since we can set them up and examine the effects of various 
restrictions on them on the truth conditions of what we say using them. We 
can then come back to wwhat ordinary peple say and poiint out what conditions 
make certain things true or even plausible and in this way get a better grasp 
on what a person is saying. Ideally, we also get people to be more careful 
about what they say. And maybe give up saying some things altogether -- or 
at least thinking that there is any useful content to it.

<If we cannot get clean predictions, how can we prove the future is
completely determined?.>
We can't but that doesn't mean that it isn't -- or that it is, of course.  
Knowing and proving and being are three very different things. The last 
guess I read was that the physical universe is deterministic but that 
complete predictions are inherently impossible because of indetectable 
parameters on initial conditions (Chinese butterflies).

Today balvi came up clear as a bell (well, not quite because of the purple on 
black, but something different from This Site Ain't Playin') Thanks.