On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 3:58 PM, Kerim Aydin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well we've never really settled that "Rules are an agreement issue" but > I have a meta-argument for choosing it... if we accept your argument, > it's not possible to play Agora, so we might as well choose the > interpretation that lets us play Agora. Yes, this is a "life exists > in a universe with these physical constants because these physical > constants are the ones that let us ask if life exists" kind of argument.
I'm not sure I accept that it's not possible to play if CAN implies MAY. Of course, it makes a lot of the stuff that's intentionally "CAN but SHALL NOT" for pragmatic purposes break, but it's still possible to play. B Nomic for a long time effectively had rules that made it impossible to break the rules since you could only change the platonic gamestate in ways that you were explicitly allowed to. Sure, it's a bit ugly to need to recalculate gamestate when someone thought they could do something ages ago that they really couldn't, but that's nothing that can't be smoothed over with ratification.
