Subject: Re: [lojban] More damn imaginary world stuff

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 13:56:38 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 12 Feb 2001 [email-masked] wrote:

> 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.

"You could have done something else then" is a meaningless phrase. What
does it mean in reality? It means you might have done something other than
what you did. OK, but is that EVER observed in reality? Has there been
once instance, ever, of anybody not doing what they did? And if nobody
ever doesn't do what they did, or does something they didn't do,
then clearly what you are thinking of as an option is actually not an
option!

> <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).
>

Perhaps that individual couldn't do otherwise. But other people did do
otherwise when they found themselves in similar situations. The positive
correlation appears when you realize that punishment for behavior X tends
to reduce the amount of behavior X in that locale.

> <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.
>

Other worlds have nothing to do with it. We can imagine certain things,
and we can't imagine others. I can picture you being the Pope, no matter
how unlikely it is to occur. I don't even know what "2 + 2 = 5" MEANS, so
I can't imagine it.

> <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.
>

Are you saying that it is impossible that the laws of physics are arranged
such that any other arrangement requires a logical contradiction? Can you
show me an alternate arrangement that is logically consistent? Since we
don't have our complete picture yet, we are not yet sure if any other
alternate arrangements are logically possible.

> <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.

I haven't seen that to be the case here. Bytes were wasted considering the
ramifications of taking objects to alternate universes and pondering the
resulting effects in their name's meanings. Now I assert these other
universes cannot logically exist, so I can't see the utility of this line
of speculation anymore.

> <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).

Since we can never know (according to the Copenhagen interpretation) the
way a quantum state will really collapse, I don't see how the universe can
be considered deterministic.

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