pragmatist comments on [Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (627)
The partial ordering actually encodes a surprising amount of information about space-time. Specifying the temporal ordering relationship between space-time points also fixes the topological structure of space-time, its differential structure, and the metric up to a conformal factor. It doesn't let you reconstruct the full metric, and maybe you think that certain metrical facts count as "temporal facts" (which seems right), in which case the definition of B-theory I gave above should be modified to include the claim that those metrical facts are provided as well. I don't want to make the definitions too technical though, and I think the current version gets the essential idea across, so I'm going to leave it as is.