On Mon, 25 Aug 2008, Geoffrey Spear wrote: > 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.
Oh I see, you're accepting that CAN works to limit doing things through mechanism, but not SHALL. Sorry, I thought you were arguing in the "I'm privileged to do anything so I CAN do anything just by saying that I do it" camp. Ok, yeah, for SHALL, it just depends on whether you think "privilege" means "sure you've got the privilege to do X, but we've got the privilege to apply punishment Y to you if you do so." (in which case R101(i) doesn't do anything) or whether you think "privilege" means "you can't punish me at all if I do X" (in which case privilege means you can't be punished for anything at all). Either interpretation is broken I guess, in different directions. -Goethe
