no it’s concrete. everything that is in it is causally related to everything else that is in it. just not to anything in any other world.
Is there this idea that the imaginative realm is more real (necessary) than the (contingent) spatiotemporal. realm?
i think in the most rudimentary form, an ontology is a categorization of everything that there is. sometimes that’s within a context and therefore limited. like a scientific ontology wouldn’t include magic spells. so its limited.
but if you’re doing philosophy and you want to make an ontology, there has to be a place for everything. the impossible stuff, the merely possible stuff, the actual stuff, etc. everything. what is actual can move back and fourth based on what you learn about the world that you are in.
i think it has to do with the idea that possible worlds are causally isolated and if they were imagined then something in the actual one could make us imagine them differently and therefore they’d then be affected by that. i know that sounds circular, but all logic is, at it’s bottom, circular.
So stuff that is necessary exists in every possible world. So it has to exist, because one of those possible worlds is the actual world.
have you ever read a book by thomas kuhn called the structure of scientific revolutions? i think it counts as one of those “great books”
bingo. except i wouldn’t say “necessarily exists” id say “is necessary” because everything exists…even the things that aren’t in any possible world. they may exist only in an impossible world where everything is disjointed and does not conform to the basics like identity theory, or reductive and functional descriptions.
some people would argue that logic, reasoning, our ability to analyze and interpret the world around us is bound by the structure of our perception. so it could be that some things exist that do not conform to that. we can’t rule it out. so we have to put that shit somewhere and it can’t be here.
Dr. Carter suggested it … and I think I had a little bit of exposure to it previously, but not much… I don’t think I ever read it. I had some exposure to it when I was studying epistemology book by Christopher Norris (was not ready!). I think that’s the one that talks about paradigm shifts, which I use incorrectly to go quickly (like tectonic earthquake or shift of polarity) rather than slowly. I prefer my use.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say impossible worlds don’t belong in anyone’s ontology.
it is fantastic and worth the time. it wont tell you anything that you dont already know, but it will tell you what you already know in the clearest and most precise terms. if you adopt the idea that the aim should be to gather and categorize information, through your senses, in order to form the best understanding of the world, and then go after modal logic through the language or lewis’ possible worlds and through the lens that you’re in the actual world and want to understand it better, it all falls right into place. lewis just gives you the perfect set of linguistic boxes to organize all the messy stuff in the closet. when you go to sort it all out and clean it up, everything makes sense.
youre not wrong. lewis dismisses that shit right off the bat.
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Impossible? Impassable may be that limit, variable it is, almost infinitely, which the act of revising methodology squares off with it’s apparent counterpart - the near absolution of space/time, multi universes are like stars that no longer exist but still twinkle, , proof that even near any event horizon, the minutest gradient can sustain the whole structural colossus.
when i say impossible i mean something like a “symbol that refers to a referent that it does not refer to”.
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this part of the second sentence above should say this instead.
"if something is possible, then its necessarily obtains in some possible world. "
edited the post above this because i didnt include the word “not”
i feel like if faust were here, he’d tell us that we were just parsing language and that none of this mattered but then i would tell him that what i think im doing is that i am trying to explain how i think an epistemology machine works
You don’t understand modal logic at its base.
It means that we can’t have an idea unless it actually exists. Because that would mean something comes from nothing. To refute it …
There is a plane of imagination where things don’t substantiate.
I have the power to simulate entire cosmoses simultaneously to seek the best outcome… they never came to be just because I can simulate them.
Imagine if you didn’t need to do trial and error because you imagined things right/beautiful/necessary (& thus possible) the first/meta time?
Anywhayz.
I just had a glorious chat with Bing Copilot about Kant’s ought implies can (the crux of graded absolutism) and Hare’s ought implies imperative (the crux of Kierkegaard’s Subjectivity is Truth)…
Some scribblies:
