One can imagine a fantasy world where the world-dominating liquid is different from water but a real liquid (so it doesn’t crumble as a molecyle (the would be a argument that star garbage output mechanics might need changing and could fail to make sense))
If we ever find a planet with life that lives for example in a nitrogen sea I would think that the term “aquatic” should apply to them and in the sense of “sea animal” those would be “fish”.
And yeah this comes from the dolphin discussion part of my brain.
I think the point is that we first point at a “splashy stuff” that turns out later to have details such as made out of hydrogen. “splashy stuff” is not conceptually connnected to hydrogen because if those details were found out to be different it would still be “that splashy stuff”
Water is pretty figured out, but for example dark matter could be a number of different things. If one thinks of neutronic dark matter or axionic dark matter they would be different aqnd not equivalent to each other but they still succeed to be dark matter. And this kidn of thing doesn’t go away even if the thing is known better.
It also strikes me that under current understanding having a planet made out of anti-matter would locally behave similarly even if water and anti-water are not interexhangeable. And the XYZ issue is that anti-water would be water in the “splashy stuff that makes oceanic worlds” sense. Or a radical rephrasing would be that if sitting on a chair in the real world is hard to distinguish from sitting on a chair in a simulation/matrix then “chairness” is not dependent on the metaphysics of the situation (so matrix-water woudl alos be water even if it made from bits instead of atoms).
One can imagine a fantasy world where the world-dominating liquid is different from water but a real liquid (so it doesn’t crumble as a molecyle (the would be a argument that star garbage output mechanics might need changing and could fail to make sense))
If we ever find a planet with life that lives for example in a nitrogen sea I would think that the term “aquatic” should apply to them and in the sense of “sea animal” those would be “fish”.
And yeah this comes from the dolphin discussion part of my brain.
Sure, but one would not posit that this world looks just like Earth.
I think the point is that we first point at a “splashy stuff” that turns out later to have details such as made out of hydrogen. “splashy stuff” is not conceptually connnected to hydrogen because if those details were found out to be different it would still be “that splashy stuff”
Water is pretty figured out, but for example dark matter could be a number of different things. If one thinks of neutronic dark matter or axionic dark matter they would be different aqnd not equivalent to each other but they still succeed to be dark matter. And this kidn of thing doesn’t go away even if the thing is known better.
It also strikes me that under current understanding having a planet made out of anti-matter would locally behave similarly even if water and anti-water are not interexhangeable. And the XYZ issue is that anti-water would be water in the “splashy stuff that makes oceanic worlds” sense. Or a radical rephrasing would be that if sitting on a chair in the real world is hard to distinguish from sitting on a chair in a simulation/matrix then “chairness” is not dependent on the metaphysics of the situation (so matrix-water woudl alos be water even if it made from bits instead of atoms).