"Live players" vs. "Dead players" (THREAD)
Since reading this distinction two weeks ago, I've thought about it more or less every day. It's a simple distinction, but it explains so much.
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Interesting. I came up with an isomorphic concept for my next book. Here’s my email note to myself on that:
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I’m gonna need that unpacked a little (or a lot)... but I imagine that’s what the book is for?
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tldr: logical positivism is just wrong. Falsificationism is not even wrong, but gestures at an adjacent sound epistemolgy: a truth is like a log of experimental tinkering with an idea. There’s no such thing as “falsifiable in principle”. You’re either tweaking it or it’s dead.
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Embodied truths like an engineered artifact or a publishing medium can’t be true or false like propositions but they can be alive or dead, which is almost the same thing. You’re either tinkering with it, or it’s dead/untrue.
In Pratchett’s Raising Steam, the character Dick Simnel, who invents the steam locomotive (fictionalized George Stephenson), keeps tinkering with an improving his first prototype even as newer/bigger production models help build out the industrial revolution on Discworld.
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Since it’s a magical world, this makes that first engine, Iron Girder, magically alive. She kills people who try to sabotage her for example, and pulls off physically impossible feats via being animistically alive from Simnel’s relentless tinkering. wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Iron
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I treat "true" as "aligned with reality", like a trued-up board in carpentry. All artifacts have a "truth" of 1, just like past events have a "probability" of 1.
Alive vs dead seems about whether future truths align with the artifact's reality? Important stat for me, if so.
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The past only has a notional unfalsifiable probability of 1. In practice, all histories are contingent on future revisionist data about the past.
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