On Fri, July 22, 2011 10:40, Matthew West said: (01)
>> >> I do not... think that it is necessary to treat other worlds besides
>> >> this one as anything more than convenient fictions. The reason why we
>> >> need not take the worlds realistically is that they have no causal or
>> >> nomic links with the actual world. ... The actual world will be no
>> >> different whether they are there or are not. Why, then, give the
>> >> possible worlds ... any existence? Armstrong [211, p68]
>> >
>> > MW: Which I would refute by saying "Why commit to denying them
>> existence?"
>>
>> Perhaps only because of simplicity.
>
> MW: But the simplest thing is not to make a commitment at all. (02)
What makes it simplest to posit the possible existence of a higher
infinitude of non-detectable worlds? (03)
>> If one thinks of them as really existing,
>> then they are somewhat similar than the platonic heaven of all
>> mathematical entities. (04)
> MW: Not necessarily though. It is certainly not how I would think of them
> existing if they do. (05)
>> Platonic mathematicians think that all mathematical entities really
>> exist in the heaven, awaiting to be discovered. This is uneconomical
>> compared
>> to naturalism, as depicted in the attached image. The uneconomicality
>> derives
>> from the fact that the necessarily inaccessible worlds/heaven occupies a
>> space
>> in the limited mind of a transcendentalist/platonist, while they do not
>> occupy
>> the limited space of the mind of a naturalist. In the figure, the
>> examplatory
>> object is a circle. For a naturalist, the circle exist in the mind and
>> in the
>> concrete nature. For a transcendentalist, the circle exists in the mind,
>> in
>> the concrete nature, and in the heaven.
>> But when the transcendentalist scenario is put into a naturalist
>> mapping, it
>> is revealed that the heaven exists only in the mind of the
>> trascendentalist,
>> which is uneconomical compared to naturalism.
>>
>> >> As Jaegwon Kim has pointed out, an existence without causal powers is
>> >> an existence hardly worth having. Pylkkänen [112, p235]
>> >
>> > MW: I'm afraid that is irrelevant, and it is not clear that possible
>> > worlds do not have causal powers simply by our consideration of them.
>>
>> As Sowa said, if they are defined to be necessarily inaccessible, then
>> they
>> cannot affect this world; if they do affect this world, then they are
>> not
>> inaccessible, but parts of this world.
>
> MW: Those are not the only possibilities. They can have parts that are
> accessible in both worlds. For example, if you allow branching worlds,
> then two possible worlds can share a common history, but be distinct. (06)
In such cases the branched off worlds have no effect on ours; ours is
unaffected whether a googleplex other worlds have branched off since some
point in our common history or none. For that matter, if at every
decision point the world branches, nothing has any effect on anything in
our world or any other. At every decision point a world branches off with
each possible decision made; the choices made that resulted in our world
occurred solely by chance. (07)
>> >> But if the entities postulated lie beyond our world, and in addition
>> >> have no causal ... connection with it, then the postulation has no
>> >> explanatory value. Armstrong [151, p7-8]
>> >
>> > MW: Which is clearly untrue from the considerable utility that
>> > possible worlds have, so this is a spurious argument.
>>
>> Armstrong practices combinatorialist fictionalism, and in that domain
>> the
>> possible worlds are recombinations of the actual world. This can be
>> characterized as combinatiorialism that applies the term ``possible
>> worlds''.
>
> MW: That is just a different set of unnecessary commitments.
>
>> But in the above quote he just emphasizes that if something is
>> necessarily
>> inaccessible to us, then it cannot affect us in any way, not even in
>> principle.
>
> MW: But that is not a proof of non-existence (or existence). And I
> challenge that such things do not affect us, or else they would have no
> utility, and they clearly do have. (08)
Even though our considering non-existent worlds may have some utility,
that does not mean that the worlds affect us, merely our consideration of
them. (09)
-- doug f (010)
> Regards
>
> Matthew West
> Information Junction
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>
>>
>> -Avril
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
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doug foxvog doug@xxxxxxxxxx http://ProgressiveAustin.org (012)
"I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great
initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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