spoon-discuss: RE: spoon-business: A future proposal

["Gavin Doig" <gmd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> [[
> 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.
>
I'm not so sure that's true. We *do* have a way of looking at the counterfactual nomic - exactly the same way we have of looking at the factual nomic. It's just like if there were a thread split, where one thread is counterfactual. The only way we have of ever knowing what the state of the nomic is is if we work it out; all we need to do is work it out starting from when the previously counterfactual statement was true.

And anyway, even if there is a huge problem, all we need is for the admin to say that the gamestate is what it should have been, and it'll all go away.

uin.
-- 

_______________________________________________
Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com
http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup

Win a ski trip!
http://www.nowcode.com/register.asp?affiliate=1net2phone3a