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lsparrish comments on Suspended Animation Inc. accused of incompetence - Less Wrong Discussion

38 Post author: CronoDAS 18 November 2010 12:20AM

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Comment author: lsparrish 05 December 2010 07:25:01PM *  1 point [-]

Besides, there's little hope of having a rational discussion with a boy who thinks a hydrogen atom, drawn on a piece of paper, is a real hydrogen atom. http://cryomedical.blogspot.com/2010/10/too-much-fantasy-not-enough-reality-in.html

(Edited in response to downvotes.)

Consider this. You are attacking me based on a misunderstanding of something I said on another forum, on an unrelated topic. I think this is questionable debate ethics at best.

In a nutshell, my position in the argument you reference is that a description is a real entity, and in Robert's hypothetical example he described something exactly equivalent to an atom at a moment in time. At the level of abstraction he was talking about, the atom was a real atom to the exact same degree and for the exact same reasons that a physical atom (in a given instant of time) is a real atom. Your comment about atoms exploding and undergoing fission because of the paper being torn makes no sense in the context of the argument I was making. The paper is not a part of the framework in which it makes sense to think of the atom existing, nor is the atom undergoing time in the same framework as the paper.