RE: Being good without god
February 25, 2013 at 12:39 pm
(This post was last modified: February 25, 2013 at 12:50 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(February 25, 2013 at 11:56 am)ChadWooters Wrote: One can conceive of a universe in which one or all of the known physical constants have different values, however, you cannot conceive of a universe in which 1+1=3.
One cannot conceive of it because one has either intentionally or unintentionally not conceived of a universe that is actually "different" in a meaningful way from one's own.
If one were to invoke a meaningful difference along these lines then there's nothing stopping 1+1=3. Sure, that doesn't happen here, in our universe..but we're talking about a universe with different "rules" altogether, or no rules...as a possibility, aren't we? Perhaps if you were transported to such a place nothing would "make sense", you would be incapable of "properly" thinking about anything - but the inhabitants of said place would suffer from no such problem. While you could never understand how 1+1=3 - no matter how well it was explained to you by said inhabitants- in that universe, with it's alien rules, it could. It may not conform to our rules, but why do our rules apply in a universe so meaningfully different that our rules are not in operation?
In any case, whether or not Genk can conceive of that I don't know, but I can, obviously, and so can you - you're the one who invoked it. Both of us are probably at a loss as to explain how that could be, but that's to be expected, isn't it, coming from our universe with it's rules? Simply put, 1+1=2 is an observation of how our universe (or a universe with "rules" like our own) works - not some sort of indictment on -all- universes that might be dreamt up.
The statement is summarized as-
"Assume our rules apply - now conceive of a universe in which our rules don't apply."
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