FOM: RE: FOM Arbitrary Objects

charles silver silver_1 at mindspring.com
Sat Feb 2 08:03:21 EST 2002


>  > Mitchell Spector suggests that a "many-worlds interpretation"
>> would helpful, even though he tend[s] "to agree...'arbitrary'
>> isn't an adjective..."

>  > > A many-worlds approach would provide a way of formulating
>  > > arbitrary objects as virtual objects, or real objects in virtual
>  > > universes, depending how you think of it.
>  >
     Yes, I now see the point Harvey made about 'arbitrary' not being an
adjective.   This point is further clarified by Torkel Franzen's comment
about Homer Simpson asking what is any key.   However, your many-worlds
approach seems an interesting one.   The choice I would make is to have
arbitrary objects as something akin to your virtual objects in
a many-worlds approach, except that I'd go further
and call them pseudo-objects, or something of the sort.   But, when
making this decision, it seems that the extra worlds (models)
drop out of consideration entirely. The trick is to make reasonable
mathematical/logical sense of this notion using just
the resources of first-order logic.

Charlie









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