Yes, I'll avoid that word for that purpose in future!
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Coming back to the main question, I'm not sure I see why God could not fully specify cottage cheese. It would seem that God's defining characteristic is being unlimited in precisely this way (omnipotence and omniscience means God has all of the data and infinite computing power).
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The notion of being able to see into the future, or precisely specify future events in human-meaningful terms, as God occasionally does, seems to require God to also be able to solve the cottage cheese problem.
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The issue is that there are marginal cases, in which there simply is no truth about whether or not something is cottage cheese. Presumably God would say "yeah, marginal case I guess, dude" then.
Relevant discussion:
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So even if God knew everything that every possible human knew and could know about cottage cheese, that knowledge cannot add up to a definition sufficient to eliminate all edge cases?
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Yes. As in the chapter cited, there is no particular minimal integer number of hairs you can have and still not be bald, which God could determine but we don’t (yet) know.
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So, even with perfect knowledge the best one can do is to say whether or not a given person is bald, but one can never give a complete account of how this was determined?
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Well, there are many people who you’d say “I guess he’s bald-*ish*” or “somewhat bald” or something. There’s a “gray area.”
This is not a matter of incomplete knowledge; you could inspect him as closely as you like and it wouldn’t make a difference. It’s in the world, not map.
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So the problem isn’t a lack of knowledge, or of perception, cognition, computation or reasoning. There just are people whose baldness is indeterminable. Even assuming a metaphysical being without human constraints doesn’t get around this problem.
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Yes, exactly. That’s what “nebulous” means. It’s “an ontological term, not an epistemological one.”
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Would you go the other extreme to Donald Hoffman’s position that ontology is entirely a matter of perceptual adaptive fit and that entities only exist in relation to fitness to survival purposes? Ie reality is one big nebulous blob that we carve up in ways that help us survive?
If there is a convergence between the two Davids' views here, I suspect it's to be found in Hoffman. Because Deutsch's core commitment is to a kind of evolutionary epistemology. But I haven't worked this out...
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I am very sympathetic to that position. Pinker has an even more solipsistic version, reducing ontology to evolved linguistic convention. What gives me pause is the existence of sharp-edged things like fundamental constants that don’t seem to be a matter of adaptive efficiency
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Think David C would say ontological nebulosity needn't be true of fundamental physics to be true of the eggplant-sized world. So not "mere" convention, but we get at these sharp ontologies through evolved faculties meant for eggplant-sized world.
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No… tbc, I am not doing philosophy and I’m not doing physics, so it’s not about those sorts of questions. But: culture is in some sense somewhat independent of biological evolution, and it’s much of what goes into ontology.
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In that case, since the boundaries among those 3 things are themselves nebulous, I think you need an argument as to why culture exists as an independent nebulous phenomenological domain at all, distinct from language-as-social-biological-instinct.
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