"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.
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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.
All histories are false, but some are useful.
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