Why can't real-ness just be functionality? People often resist this concept, but it seems sensible to me.
Exploring the function of things, in fact, how we know about the universe - when we talk about what something is, we'll really talking about an aggregate of functions that it has (e.g. we know that if we do something to a part of the universe, something will happen - since the result varies by the part of the universe we're looking at and the conditions under which we perturb it, we can divide the universe into "things.") We can say that ato... (read more)
Why can't real-ness just be functionality? People often resist this concept, but it seems sensible to me.
Exploring the function of things, in fact, how we know about the universe - when we talk about what something is, we'll really talking about an aggregate of functions that it has (e.g. we know that if we do something to a part of the universe, something will happen - since the result varies by the part of the universe we're looking at and the conditions under which we perturb it, we can divide the universe into "things.") We can say that ato... (read more)