Rob Speer on 14 Feb 2002 00:44:40 -0000


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spoon-business: A future proposal


I submit the following proposal 6 days from now:

__Someday We'll All Look Back On This and Laugh Nervously__
{{
Create revisable object 129/3, which is identical to 129/1.
[[ This undoes uin's proposal, and puts back what Wonko's intended to do
to 129. ]]
}}

[[
I must make another reference to Godel, Escher, Bach. Uncle P, if you're
dying to know why your proposal will never work, the chapter
"Contrafactus" sums it up (it involves Tortoise and Achilles watching
their Subjunc-TV, which shows exactly what would have happened at
various stages in a football game if certain contrary-to-fact events had
occurred.)

Since we have no Subjunc-TV, we have no way of looking at the
counterfactual version of the Nomic, where (for example) the proposals
were numbered differently. Is it a version of the game where one of the
proposals with conflicting numbers didn't exist? Or a version where
those two proposals had each other's numbers? Or where all the numbers
were different? Or a version of the game where a highly efficient but
silly bunch of players encodes everything about each object in a
three-digit number, which could be the same as another object's
three-digit number, and these numbers are then uniquely identified by
multiple paragraphs of text?

The rule gives no way to determine this; it only says "what they now
would be had the statement been true at the time it was made", as if
there is any deterministic way to tell that.

If we do not undo this proposal, the game WILL die.
]]

-- 
Rob Speer