From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org] Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2002 8:53 AM To: Alt.Atheism.Moderated Subject: Re: Science & atheism are cultures. From: "Jesse Nowells" wrote: > Then why are you trying to claim that there is an equivalance between > other worlds' possibility & their actuality, if you're not trying to give > these worlds "some sense of 'reality'?! Because, as I've told you repeatedly, 'reality' cannot mean for other worlds the same thing that you think it means in this world. > Actuality has a distinct meaning > regardless if you *presume* it has no application to "other worlds". If a term "has no application" in a given domain, then it obviously false to say it "has a distinct meaning" in that domain. > > you should be able to state such a definition. You have > > repeatedly shown that you are incapable of doing so. > > You mean you have repeatedly ignored any definition available No, I have repeatedly demonstrated that your attempted definitions are merely either proposals of synonymy, or incomplete lists of excluder predicates that do not exclude all merely-possible worlds. > If it is the case that exist is not > applicable to other worlds, so is possibility Possibility is quite well-defined for other worlds, namely: having a world-model that contains no contradictions. > why are you attempting to claim anything about the properties of > other universes if you can't even discern them or have any adequate words > to describe them with? I never said I can't describe, or discern anything about, other possible worlds. Indeed, I've explicitly said that other worlds are *defined* by listing propositions about them! > So "we" don't have any criteria to judge other worlds by because they may > operate by other criteria than the world we live in. No -- we don't have any criteria (separate from mere possibility) to judge the existence of other worlds because WE HAVE NOT IDENTIFIED ANY SUCH CRITERIA. How can you repeatedly fail to understand this simple claim? > How can you then say > anything about these worlds if they are "unknowable" or "unknown" I've never said they are "unknowable" or "unknown", and your use of quotation marks to imply that I ever have is blatantly deceptive. > Suggesting that other world's possibility is equivalent to their actuality > is begging the question of such world's existence, however way you define > it. That would be true if the "way you define" existence were something that can be distinguished from mere possibility. But it isn't. -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net