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?
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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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If fundamental physics isn't nebulous, what stops us from grounding everything in fundamental physics?
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Also: reframe what we mean by "fundamental physics isn't nebulous" to "we are able to take up fully context-and-purpose-independent patterns of interaction with it, at some resolutions."
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