From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org] Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2002 5:51 PM To: alt.atheism.moderated Subject: Re: Science & atheism are cultures. "Jesse Nowells" wrote: > > Please give a definition of 'actual' that applies to worlds > > and that makes this statement true. > > Actual means that something exists. Yes, and if you've been following any of the relevant threads here, you'll know that I've been challenging people to come up with a definition of 'exists' that applies to worlds and not just to the things in them. Here is my definition of 'exist': To exist is to have a causal relationship with the rest of the universe. The universe is the maximal set of circumstances that includes this statement and no subset of which is causally unrelated to the remainder. My definition of 'exist' doesn't encounter (the of course inevitable) circularity anywhere above my logical primitives (like 'term', 'property', 'relation') and epistemological primitives (like 'attribution'), all of which can probably be defined without any cycles that loop back to include 'existence'. By contrast, these dictionary definitions of 'exist' are toplevel synonym cycles: Merriam-Webster: exist -> real, be; be -> exist, real; real -> exist. philsophypages.com: existence -> reality, being; reality -> is. American Heritage: exist -> real, be; real -> actual -> exist; be -> actual, real. dictionary.com: exist -> be, real; be -> exist, real; real -> actual, verifiable existence; actual -> exist allwords.com: exist -> present in the real world or universe So again: please give a definition of 'actual' or 'existent' that isn't as blatantly circular as these dictionary definitions, and that doesn't require causal relations (as mine does) with other things (which worlds by definition cannot have). Good luck. :-) -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net