Cyan, the ‘angels’ are a completely empty concept with no meaning and no implications. Saying that your model has Maxwell’s Laws plus angels is just a fancier way of saying it has Maxwell’s Laws—it’s like putting leading zeros on a number, or double negatives in sentences. It doesn’t change the value of anything, it’s just a somewhat silly elaboration. As ridiculous as such behaviors are, I don’t see any reason to prohibit them.
It’s when people insist that the dragon-without-actual-properties is somehow ‘metaphysically distinct’ from simply not having a dragon that they fall into error, as opposed to mere silliness.
People may use whichever ‘interpretation’ they prefer, because they’re all the same. It’s the people who insist that one of the interpretations is fundamentally better than the others, without producing new evidence that shows there is actually a difference, who are wrong.
Look at it this way: if I show you a given pattern in Conway’s Game of Life, and ask you what the grid looked like one step earlier, how would you respond? (To simplify the thought experiment, let’s restrict the size of the grid to something finite.)
Cyan, the ‘angels’ are a completely empty concept with no meaning and no implications. Saying that your model has Maxwell’s Laws plus angels is just a fancier way of saying it has Maxwell’s Laws—it’s like putting leading zeros on a number, or double negatives in sentences. It doesn’t change the value of anything, it’s just a somewhat silly elaboration. As ridiculous as such behaviors are, I don’t see any reason to prohibit them.
It’s when people insist that the dragon-without-actual-properties is somehow ‘metaphysically distinct’ from simply not having a dragon that they fall into error, as opposed to mere silliness.
People may use whichever ‘interpretation’ they prefer, because they’re all the same. It’s the people who insist that one of the interpretations is fundamentally better than the others, without producing new evidence that shows there is actually a difference, who are wrong.
Look at it this way: if I show you a given pattern in Conway’s Game of Life, and ask you what the grid looked like one step earlier, how would you respond? (To simplify the thought experiment, let’s restrict the size of the grid to something finite.)