pragmatist comments on [Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We? - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 26 September 2012 12:25PM

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Comment author: pragmatist 26 September 2012 08:08:30PM 1 point [-]

Could you elaborate, please?

Comment author: WrongBot 18 October 2012 06:53:08AM 0 points [-]

Sorry for the very belated reply, but I was struggling to find the words to describe exactly what I meant. Luckily, Eliezer has already done most of it for me in his latest post.

Thing A exists with respect to Thing B iff Thing A and Thing B are both part of the same causal network. So ArisKatsaris was half-right, but things outside our past and future light cones can be said to exist with respect to us if they have a causal relationship with anything that is inside our past and future light cones.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 27 September 2012 11:11:50AM *  -1 points [-]

Wrongbot's idea is probably that something "exists" only in relation to something else. So things beyond the Earth's past and future light-cones don't actually "exist" for us, though they exist for themselves, and similarly things in a mathematical model of a different universe exist in relation to each other, but not in relation to us...