Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:cart before the horse? (Score 2) 242

One might even say (as Max Tegmark more or less does) that concrete existence, the kind of existence that applies to rocks and trees and such, is just a special case of abstract existence, the kind that applies to mathematical structures like numbers and triangles. All mathematical structures "exist" in that abstract sense, and the things that "exist" in a more concrete sense are just the things that are part of the same mathematical structure of which we are a part, i.e. of our physical reality.

Or, as Aristotle says, the substance of a thing like a rock or a tree has a prior existence to the concrete instances of it: "The essence, i.e. the substantial reality, no one has expressed distinctly. It is hinted at chiefly by those who believe in the Forms; (...) they furnish the Forms as the essence of every other thing, and the One as the essence of the Forms." (Metaphysics, Book I, part 7)

Similar to how, as David Lewis puts it, "'actual' is indexical", i.e. in a multiverse of possible worlds (which, NB, would all be part of the concrete world we're talking about above), the "actual world" is just the one that we happen to be part of, and not ontologically different from any of the other possible worlds. We might likewise say that "'concrete' is indexical"; concrete reality is just the abstract structure of which we are a part, and not ontologically different from any other abstract structures.

Aristotle again? "Actuality, then, is the existence of a thing not in the way which we express by 'potentially'; we say that potentially, for instance, a statue of Hermes is in the block of wood and the half-line is in the whole, because it might be separated out, and we call even the man who is not studying a man of science, if he is capable of studying; the thing that stands in contrast to each of these exists actually."

Comment Re: Time to out the assholes on 4chan (Score 1) 577

You'd be surprised: your employer typically can fire you for any reason or for no reason at all, so long as they pay you severance and follow all the procedures. Remember, the First Amendment guarantees that "Congress shall make no law (...) abridging the freedom of speech..." Brendan Eich was sacked from Mozilla for donating $1,000.00 for Proposition 8 in California, and the same media circus over Jessica Price happened over him. Were they wrong in firing him?

Comment Re:any excuse will do (Score 1) 98

Okami is advertisement for Amaterasu, who is a dirty Pagan demoness, so obviously the Wahhabists are going to look at it as a step worse than Saints' Row or GTA, which merely glorify sociopathy and violence. At least the latter two games allow the clerics to point their fingers at the "decadence" of the infidel Westerners (while carefully pretending not to see the staunch alliance of their king with them).

Comment WW, eh? (Score 1) 131

I'm not really an EVE Online player, so maybe the point is moot, but I did play the WW series back when I was younger. Technically, I still play Vampire: The Masquerade, although we haven't had a session in something like three years. I am concerned that the Vampire franchise specially was originally somewhat cool (even if the complex mechanics somewhat clobbered that idea), but after the sourcebooks and expansions of the Second Edition, I was thoroughly disgusted with them (I still remember playing "The Chaos Factor" adventure, and it was a nadir in all my years of roleplaying; I can't believe they published that). I'm hoping they will have learned this time around, but I doubt it.

Slashdot Top Deals

Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man -- who has no gills. -- Ambrose Bierce

Working...