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| date | 2001-02-07:20:01 |
| Metaphysics |
I had a metaphysical thought today and this seems like the logical place to write it down. The concepts REAL and IMAGINARY are opposites. So are the concepts EXISTS and NONEXISTENT. But these are not the same concepts: REAL does not mean EXISTS and IMAGINARY does not mean NONEXISTENT, except informally, which is a polite way of saying incorrectly. REAL refers to things that exist independently of the mind. IMAGINARY refers to things that exist that depend on the mind in a particular way for their being--they exist because a mind created them, internally. Carolyn has argued that imaginary "things" are in fact actios of the mind, which I think is correct, although there is a furhter argument that it is legitimate to reify those actions based on their edges. The difficulty comes with the meaning of NONEXISTENT--to what in reality does NONEXISTENT refer? Nothing in reality, obviously! That's the point. Philosophers have worried for a long time about the nature of existence, but perhaps they should have been more worried about how we even got to have an idea of nonexistence. How we did is via the imagination. We can imagine things, and sometimes the things we imagine turn out to have mind-independent (in the sense of not requiring a mind to dream them up) existence. And sometimes they don't. This contrast, between imaginary things that turn out to be real and ones that don't, is what allows us to form the concept NONEXISTENCE. For instance, ten or fifteen years ago there was some evidence for a particle that decayed in to an electron-positron pair, that had a mass of a little less than twice the electron mass. There was a small industry within the physics community imagining what this particle might be like. The imaginings were quite mathematically rigorous. And not one of them described anything real--further experiments showed that the original evidence was spurious. So the concept "GSI PARTICLE", as it was sometimes known, refers to something that does not exist, insofar as we interpret it to mean "something in mind-independent reality that has these characteristics". Now, as a final caveate, everything we know is mind-dependent. But when I've been talking about mind-dependence in the above, I think I'm using a different sense of the term than the way we did in the edges paper. There are some fine distinctions here that still need to be clarified. |
| Software | Programming is about representation. This is a theme I'm going to take up at lenght eventually, but I'm noting it down to remind myself of it later. |
| Reading |
I'm taking it easy on myself after having made it through Tom Jones, and reading another of Bruce Alexander's Sir John Fielding books, Jack, Knave, Fool. Though set in the same time and about Henry Fielding's blind half-brother, it would be silly to compare them. Alexander is writing around the conventions of the modern mystery novel. I think he understates the misery of 18th century London by a wide margin, but his books do give some small flavor of how terrible that time must have been. A friend who has read more British history than I have once commented that if you could go back in time a few hundred years you'd probably be most struck by two things: how bad everyone and everything smelled, and how bad everyone's teeth were. I think this is accurate, and yet its hard to know how to project these things into an historical novel, for the people at the time would of course take them for granted. Turning the observation around, I dimly recall a story about a man from the 19th century who built a time machine and visited the mid-20th century, returned to his own time and found that no one believed the stories he told, not because they were full of machines that moved themselves or machines that flew or machines that let people talk over wires or record sounds or turn on lights at the flick of a switch. All of that, people felt, was plausible. What was unimaginable was the man's insistence that everyone took these things for granted. There is nothing so unusal, so wonderful, that it won't in the end come to be taken for granted by most people. Only people who really know what goes into making those things work will do otherwise. |