Subject: Re: [lojban] RE: imaginary worlds etc.

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 15:17:35 +0000

Jorge:
#One way out of this is to see what happens in the imaginary 
#worlds where you do come five minutes earlier. In those 
#worlds, you meet her but pigs don't fly. That's the easy part. 
#The difficult part is how to select those worlds, because it 
#is not that difficult to imagine worlds where you do come 
#earlier but you still don't meet her, somehow you have to 
#restrict the possible variation of the imaginary worlds from 
#the real world, which to me seems to mean that all we
#did is kick the problem a little further. 

This is true, but once we've got to the easy part we can
linguistically model human reasoning, and until we get there 
we can't. Thereafter the problem shifts from a linguistic
problem to a purely philosophical one. So long as Lojban
can quantify over *'relevant'* possible worlds, then the
problem for Lojban is solved, and the issue of what
defines 'relevant' can be handed over to the philosophers
or the psychologists.

--And.