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xod: > On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, And Rosta wrote: > > I don't want to stop you and others debating the philosophical > > point, but do you at least *understand* the metaphysical model > > I was describing? The important thing is that we should be > > able to express it in Lojban, like good whorfians, and you > > should understand it, but then, even as you declare it linguistically > > sound, you, with your philosophical hat on declare it philosophically > > bogus > > If I remember, it was about declaring certain events impossible (ones that > make for bad literature) and others possible (ones that make compelling > stories); as opposed to ones that are impossible (did not occur, or > cannot, inductively) from possible ones (selected events either unknown > and current, or in future) > > Overeager snippage, from the ancient habit of pandering to the now-empty > set of folks still stuck on the slower model modems, makes it difficult to > check myself and in another message: > On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, Jordan DeLong wrote: > How many propositions are we away from Irish Socrates or from President > McGovern? Your mission is to show that the former is "more propositions > different" than the latter pc in a message recently forwarded by Lojbab describes a model that I somewhat ill-informedly believe is also used in theoretical physics. This is that we can see potential worlds as like nodes in a tree. A world at a given instant in time branches into the infinitely many states it could develop into in the next instant of time. Ba'oi worlds are worlds that will all stem from our here and now. Mu'ei worlds are worlds such that it is to some contextually relevant degree easy to trace a path from our here and now to the mu'ei world. To get to McGovern as pres in 1972, you have to find the 1972 node ancestral to our here and now, and then work out as short as reasonably possible a path to McGovern being pres. You need to locate worlds that are cousins of our world such that they are like our world except that a few extra tens or hundreds of thousands of people voted for McGovern instead of Nixon. (Pardon my crap history if it is wrong. Remember I'm the person who thinks there are 51 states in the USA.) That's not too hard. Next, try to trace a path to a world where Mao Tse Tung running on the Republican ticket wins a second term as president of the USA in 1972. That's a much harder and more uncertain process: you can trace a path (e.g. his parents migrate to America and he is born there, etc.), but it's hard to know if it's as short as reasonably possible a path. Now try tracing a path to a world where Socrates is an Irish washerwoman. It's so difficult as to be virtually undoable (how would you recognize it if you came across it?), and arguably it is a world that cannot even exist (like a 2+2=5 world). Now try tracing a path to a world where Aragorn takes up his rightful place as king of Gondor -- you can't do it, because that world is not even in the same tree. Though, we can have "If Sherlock Holmes had existed" worlds, which suggests that we can either suppose that a fictional world is in the same tree as us, and then try to trace a path to it, or trace paths that jump from tree to tree as long as the nodes are similar enough. So we can leap from our world in 1890 to a node in another tree that is otherwise identical but for the existence of the Holmesian fictions. --And.