(January 20, 2017 at 8:53 pm)Khemikal Wrote: OFC, since your claim regarding dragons is neither scientific nor evidentiary, but semantic. Nothing new or novel would necessarily make you change your assessment of that claims truth status if the mundane doesn't already. It's just bound up in how you word and such. It's an interesting thing, the way that the words we use can form/inform our thought and positions on a matter.You could argue that both the forms we perceive in "real" life and in a computer game hold more than semantic similarity: we know that they are representative, and that the things in question do not really exist as we represent them. It doesn't really matter if our representations come via computer bits or QM particles, because knowledge of either of those building blocks is separate from what we think we know about the things being presented. The only difference, really, is that one vehicle of presentation has a mechanism which is known and controlled by us (humans), and one seems to originate as a product of some other entity, quantity or framework.
The dragon exists-- as a collection of ideas encoded in the states of magnetic bits. "Mom" exists-- as a collection of ideas encoded in the states of quantum particles.
