On Mon, 26 Feb 2018, Kerim Aydin wrote:
> > I also massively disagree with CFJ 3580, for the " Agora exists
> > platonically, and so can exist without the rest of reality" thing, for the
> > same reasons that CFJ 3622 gave that judgement.
Hi CuddleBeam,
I wanted to come back to this a little and explain why it's really a kind
of "pragmatic" ruling.
First the basis. Let's say you're playing a game of cards. You don't have
the Ace of Spades. You say loudly "I play the Ace of Spades" and put down
the two of clubs (face-up, I don't mean as a bluff). In this case, there's
an immediate physical reality that everyone can look and say "hey, that's
not the ace!"
Our reflection of that is Reports (you compare your attempted play to the
report) but we recognize that reports have mistakes where the physical
reality doesn't. And (over time and experience) we've found it's better
to not treat the report as the ultimate arbitrator of reality, because
there's plenty of report mistakes made too. So we come up with "there's
an underlying 'physical' reality called the platonic state, that reports
only measure". It's just a practical way of describing how we recover from
mistakes.
So that judgement just takes this baseline assumption and extrapolates it.
However it serves a very important purpose, too! Let's say everyone
deregisters. If then someone registers, we want to ask: "is this a brand
new game of Agora, since all the players quit the last game, or is it
the same game?" In other board games, everyone would just say "it's a
new game". But having been going continuously for nearly 25 years, we
really DON'T want to do that. So we say "even if we're all gone, there's
a continuity out there that someone can come back to". This is *really*
important because it's not too hard to imagine rules bugs that might
accidentally deregister everyone - better to be assured that we can all
"re-join" rather than saying "ok now we have to start a new game."
This is all semantics and legal fictions. But rather than argue about it
in a crisis, it's good to know the continuity is there given that we
really *really* don't want the game to "end". Maybe someday the collective
players will prefer to end and re-start, and at that time it's perfectly
ok to re-think this assumption. But in the meantime, this just puts down
(ahead of a crisis) a predisposition for that background continuity, so it's
there when and if we need it.
-G.
