Yes. As practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
Yes. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing.
"They're not the same at all!"
You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy.
Susan and Death, in Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
So far we've talked about two kinds of meaningfulness and two ways that sentences can refer; a way of comparing to physical things found by following pinned-down causal links, and logical reference by comparison to models pinned-down by axioms. Is there anything else that can be meaningfully talked about? Where would you find justice, or mercy?
Comment author:TauCeti
02 November 2012 01:35:23AM
6 points
[-]
(Note: this is my first post. I may be wrong, and if so am curious as to how. Anyway, I figure it's high time that my beliefs stick their neck out. I expect this will hurt, and apologize now should I later respond poorly.)
This may be the answer to a different question, but...
I play lots of role-playing games. Role-playing games are like make-believe; events in them exist in a shared counter-factual space (in the players' imagination). Make-believe has a problem: if two people imagine different things, who is right? (This tends to end with a bunch of kids arguing about whether the fictional T-Rex is alive or dead).
Role-playing games solve this problem by handing authority over various facets of the game to different things. The protagonists are controlled by their respective players, the results of choices by dice and rules, and most of the fictional world by the Game Master.*
So, in a role-playing game, when you ask what is true[RPG], you should direct that question to the appropriate authority. Basically, truth[RPG] is actually canon (in the fandom sense; TV Trope's page is good, but comes with the usual where-did-my-evening-go caveats).
Similarly, if we ask "where did Luke Skywalker go to preschool?", we're asking a question about canon.
That said, even canon needs to be internally consistent. If someone with authority were to claim that Tatooine has no preschools, then we can conclude that Luke Skywalker didn't go to preschool. If an authority claims two inconsistent things, we can conclude that the authority is wrong (namely, in the mathematical sense the canon wouldn't match any possible model).
I've long felt that ideas like morality and liberty are a variety of canon.
Specifically, you can have authorities (a religion or philosopher telling you stuff), and those authorities can be provably wrong (because they said something inconsistent), but these ideas exists in a kind of shared imaginary space. Also, people can disagree with the canon and make up their own ideas.
Now, that space is still informed by reality. Even in fiction, we expect gravity to drop off as the square of distance, and we expect solid objects to be unable to pass through each other.** With ideas, we can state that they are nonsensical (or, at minimum, not useful) if they refers to real things which don't exist. A map of morality is a map of a non-real thing, but morality must interface with reality to be useful, so anywhere the interface doesn't line up with reality, morality (or its map) is wrong.
*This is one possible breakdown. There are many others.
**In most games/stories, anyway. At first glance I'd expect morality to be better bound to reality, but I suppose there's been plenty of people who's moral system boiled down to "don't do anything Ma'at would disapprove of", backed up with concepts like the literal weight of sin (vs. the weight of a feather).
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Meditation:
So far we've talked about two kinds of meaningfulness and two ways that sentences can refer; a way of comparing to physical things found by following pinned-down causal links, and logical reference by comparison to models pinned-down by axioms. Is there anything else that can be meaningfully talked about? Where would you find justice, or mercy?
(Note: this is my first post. I may be wrong, and if so am curious as to how. Anyway, I figure it's high time that my beliefs stick their neck out. I expect this will hurt, and apologize now should I later respond poorly.)
This may be the answer to a different question, but...
I play lots of role-playing games. Role-playing games are like make-believe; events in them exist in a shared counter-factual space (in the players' imagination). Make-believe has a problem: if two people imagine different things, who is right? (This tends to end with a bunch of kids arguing about whether the fictional T-Rex is alive or dead).
Role-playing games solve this problem by handing authority over various facets of the game to different things. The protagonists are controlled by their respective players, the results of choices by dice and rules, and most of the fictional world by the Game Master.*
So, in a role-playing game, when you ask what is true[RPG], you should direct that question to the appropriate authority. Basically, truth[RPG] is actually canon (in the fandom sense; TV Trope's page is good, but comes with the usual where-did-my-evening-go caveats).
Similarly, if we ask "where did Luke Skywalker go to preschool?", we're asking a question about canon.
That said, even canon needs to be internally consistent. If someone with authority were to claim that Tatooine has no preschools, then we can conclude that Luke Skywalker didn't go to preschool. If an authority claims two inconsistent things, we can conclude that the authority is wrong (namely, in the mathematical sense the canon wouldn't match any possible model).
I've long felt that ideas like morality and liberty are a variety of canon.
Specifically, you can have authorities (a religion or philosopher telling you stuff), and those authorities can be provably wrong (because they said something inconsistent), but these ideas exists in a kind of shared imaginary space. Also, people can disagree with the canon and make up their own ideas.
Now, that space is still informed by reality. Even in fiction, we expect gravity to drop off as the square of distance, and we expect solid objects to be unable to pass through each other.** With ideas, we can state that they are nonsensical (or, at minimum, not useful) if they refers to real things which don't exist. A map of morality is a map of a non-real thing, but morality must interface with reality to be useful, so anywhere the interface doesn't line up with reality, morality (or its map) is wrong.
*This is one possible breakdown. There are many others.
**In most games/stories, anyway. At first glance I'd expect morality to be better bound to reality, but I suppose there's been plenty of people who's moral system boiled down to "don't do anything Ma'at would disapprove of", backed up with concepts like the literal weight of sin (vs. the weight of a feather).