[FRIAM] more modal realism

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Glen, 

 

Forgive me for larding but it is the best way for me when I have a yet a little to say back to somebody who has had a lot to say a lot. 

 

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2021 11:31 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] more modal realism

 

 

 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds

 

We see something like this in evolutionary justifications of various phenotypic traits, the most egregious being evolutionary psychology, but including Nick's hyena penis and the ontological status of epiphenomena. Yes, I'm posting this in part because of EricC's kindasorta Voltaire-ish response to what might seem like my Leibnizian defense of bureaucracy. But I'm also hoping y'all could help with the question I ask later.

 

Of course, I'm more on Spinoza's (or Lewis') side, here, something closer to a commitment to the existence of all possible worlds. I'm in a running argument at our pub salon about the metaphysical question "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" My personal answer to that question, unsatisfying to the philosopher who asked it, is that this is either a nonsense question *or* it relies fundamentally on the ambiguity in the concepts of "something" and "nothing". Every denial of the other proposed answers (mostly cosmological) involves moving the goal posts or invoking persnickety metaphysical assumptions that weren't laid out when the question was asked. ... it's just a lot of hemming and hawing by those who want to remain committed to their own romantic nonsense.

[NST===>Ok, I don’t know whether my nonsense is romantic, but here it is.  Experience is essentially random.  So, to answer the question, there is mostly nothing.  Indeed, experience seems often to repeat itself, but all random processes repeat themselves, and so are still nothing.  Every once in a while, however, such repetitions are so persistent as to beyond our capacity to shrug them off as random, and these experiences are somethings.  <===nst] 

 

But a better answer might be something like: Because the size of the set of possible worlds where there is something is *so much larger* than the size of the set of worlds where there is nothing. And one might even argue that all the possible worlds where there is nothing are degenerate, resulting in only 1 possible world with nothing. [⛧]

 

I don't think this is a probabilistic argument. But I'm too ignorant to be confident in that. Can any of you argue one way or the other? Is this argument from size swamping probabilistic, combinatorial? Or can I take a Lewisian stance and assert that all the possible worlds do, already, exist and this is just a numbers thing?

[NST===>OOOOOPS!  My always-slippery grasp on the word “possible” has failed.  What do we mean, in this context, by “possible”?<===nst] 

 

 

[⛧] This is not my own metaphysics, assuming that's stable, which is ... uh ... semi-monist (?) ... maybe pseudo-monist ... along the lines of an open-ended, increasing degrees of freedom universe ... whatever that might turn out to mean.

 

-- 

glen

Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.

 

 

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