Conversation

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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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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I think I'm stuck on understanding the impossibility of framing things in the absence of physical constraints on our ability to do so. I believe in the physical constraints and I'm having a hard time seeing where the non-physical ones come from.
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