The Mongols conquered Russia, Poland, and much of Hungary by the 1240s. They were noted for their respect for indigenous religions -- many became Christians, Moslems and Buddhists — Ecurb

Kublai Khan's father had a hobby where every afternoon he would sit down with a Muslim, a Buddhist, and a Christian and listen to them argue. A Latin clergyman went out to visit him and asked at one point why he didn't become a Muslim. He reportedly said, "Just as the hand has many fingers, God gives us many paths."

These and other heresies were eventually quashed, sometimes violently, but perhaps the fact that Chrisianity was so malleable to suit tastes contributed
to its spread. — Ciceronianus

They never quashed the Nestorians in Central Asia, the Coptics in Egypt, the Byzantines in Constantinople or the Russian Orthodox Church. And I think you'll find that for the most part, when the Latin church used violence, the real reason was political.

I've read two histories of the era, one by an American historian and the other by a British historian who did research in Russia for two years.

I think I've been honest in describing what I think contributed to its success. I think there's significant evidence in support of my position. It's clear many found the new religion attractive, but I don't think that in itself accounts for its spread and dominion. — Ciceronianus

When Europeans started trading with China in the 16th Century, they were a little shocked to discover that Christianity was already there. It was the Nestorian form, and had travelled there through Central Asia. There are still churches out there that are fusions of Christianity and Buddhism. Two thousand years. All over the globe. It's not a simple story.

I'm not going back for Meta, who will double down and object to whatever is suggested. — Banno

Me neither. I'm just ignoring him at this point.

So I think we move on? — Banno

:up:

Your question wasn't in good faith to begin with, was it? You weren't asking what this religious framework has been providing such that it's been around for two millennia. You were just taking pot shots. That's what it looked like.

I asked my nurse practitioner a question and she typed it into an AI doctor. Wow.

This cannot be correct. If each possible world is separate from every other, in an absolute sense, then there would be no point to considering them, as they'd be completely irrelevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

So, it's kind of clear that you aren't reading along. Can you remedy that?

The era of the the European colonial wars was a different one from the Vietnam er — Tobias

That was a pivot point. The US originally became involved in Vietnam to help the French. French parties came to Washington between 1950 and 1954 asking for help to reassert their power over Vietnam. They emphasized that the world's rubber supply travelled through Vietnam, so if it became Communist, rubber might become expensive.

The US was planning to disarm after WW2, but Churchill came in 1952 to try to explain that the Russians were behaving threateningly and it wasn't clear what their plans were. The notion that the US ever felt threatened by an armed Europe is a little far-fetched. An armed Germany, well, yes.

do what to get my head around the section Irreducible Modality and Intensional Entities, and I don't think the material there especially deep. But finding the right words will take time. — Banno

Looks daunting. I'll see if I can get through it.

Maybe "number of posts" is indexical. — Banno

To tell you which w you're in? That's handy.

That's an interesting narrative. The American narrative is that after WW2, the US waited for the UK and France to get back on their feet and take over global governance again. They gave them money to help with that, but neither country seemed to care much about protecting the infrastructure of global trade, so the US decided to take over that role, partly inspired by Stalin's ongoing threats. Someone asked him how much more of Europe he was planning to take and he answered, "Not much."

I imagine neither of us is overly interested in the narrative of the other though.

Just a note, I've bowed out of the above discussion, but when Banno is ready to move on, I'm all in.

Exactly!

yep

It's abnormal to be normal — magritte

Normal is a bullseye no dart ever hits.

Sometimes trolls try really hard to get you to respond to them. Toxic stuff.

You are not a good faith interlocutor and I shall now avoid you. — AmadeusD

:up:

It's probably a collision of possible worlds.

I like that. That allows the logician to add on any ontology she likes, or just be anti-metaphysical.

Is there a problem with calling them possible worlds?

When I was in Catholic grade school, we'd be shown films displaying sinners writhing in flames. The Church has grown soft, it seems. — Ciceronianus

They were just trying to scare you.

Your claim that he'll is the absence of God is contrary to Scripture and tradition. — Ciceronianus

That's the Catholic view:

By definition, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), paragraph 1033, hell is “[the] state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” — here

There is no one Christian tradition. It's all over the place.

It's normal to be abnormal.

Therefore, what is needed is another way to understand modal logic without using modal logic. — RussellA

We all use modal logic pretty regularly. This was just an effort to understand modal expressions extensionally. It seems to work pretty well. Obviously this kind of philosophy isn't for everybody. :grin:

Yes that's exactly the problem. What we know as the independent, physical world, source of empirical observations, can no longer be accepted as such. It gets barred off as a sort of unreal illusion, and what we're left with is an extreme idealism where the ideas (possible worlds) are the reality. — Metaphysician Undercover

:grimace: I didn't see that coming!

It's very neat. But yes, quite mad. — Banno

:lol:

Others find it less convincing. — Banno

I'm not sure how popular Lewis' view is. It's kind of nutty.

All ancient civilizations exhibited religious tolerance (except the Jews). If you traveled to another region of the known world, your first task was to find the local temple and pay homage to their gods. The Romans were like everyone else in this.

Isaac Asimov said that the Jews invented religious intolerance and became the world's first victims of it in the 6th Century BCE when the Babylonians invaded and specifically attempted to destroy Judaism. Christianity inherited this preoccupation with truth. You're supposed to realize that the gods you've been worshiping aren't real. And Northern Europeans did realize that. The destruction of paganism didn't happen at the end of a Roman sword. The pagans destroyed their own culture(s). They burned it all.

Kripke (Naming and Necessity):
Proper names refer rigidly to the same individual across worlds.
Necessity is primitive and tied to rigid designation.
Modality is not reduced to something non-modal; it is taken as metaphysically basic.


Lewis (Modal Realism / counterpart theory):
Worlds are concrete; individuals do not literally exist in more than one world.
Identity across worlds is determined via counterpart relations.
Modality is reduced to quantification over concrete worlds.

Shared Logic / Semantics
Possible worlds semantics: Both use worlds as the basis for evaluating modal statements.
Quantified modal logic: Both accept first-order quantification over individuals.
Transworld reference: Both presuppose a way to interpret identity or counterparts across worlds.
Truth-at-a-world: Both define modal truth in terms of what holds at particular worlds.
Accessibility relations: Both can accommodate structured relations between worlds (for temporal or metaphysical distinctions).
Formal rigour: Both agree that modal claims can be modelled systematically, independent of metaphysical interpretation. — Banno

Which do you think is closer to approximating the way we really think about modality?

Could be. It was a regular practice in the monasteries founded by the descendants of those barbarian tribes. — Ciceronianus

Benedict was Italian. :cool:

I think it's because Rome was repeatedly sodomized by its enemies until it laid down and died.

True, although isn't there an extra conundrum with direct realism: that if it's true, then it must be false (by virtue of what we observe about how the senses work).

In the 9th Century, if you wanted to see a library, a school, some sort of hospital, you'd need to go to the local monastery. The monastery was built like a fortress in a world where buildings weren't built to last, and they didn't last due to the workings of the economy. Semi-nomadic warlords destroyed things for a living and paid their troops with the loot. It was the clergy who appealed to the warlords to give Europe a break and go wreak havoc in the holy land. And when these crusades resulted in a larger Greek presence in Europe, it was the clergy who welcomed their knowledge. Only the clergy could read and write.

Everything around you was built on their shoulders. I'm sure you have some snarky comment to make about that. I don't give a shit.

I'm skipping over some of the exploration of Lewis' theory to answer the obvious question: "Is Lewis serious?" The answer is: yes.

2.1.5 A Brief Assessment of Concretism
Lewis's theory is particularly commendable for its striking originality and ingenuity and for the simple and straightforward answers AW1 and AE1 that it provides to our two questions QW and QE above. Furthermore, because worlds are (plausibly) defined entirely in nonmodal terms, the truth conditions provided by Lewis's translation scheme themselves appear to be free of any implicit modality. Hence, unlike many other popular accounts of possible worlds (notably, the abstractionist accounts discussed in the following section), Lewis's promises to provide a genuine analysis of the modal operators.

Perhaps the biggest — if not the most philosophically sophisticated — challenge to Lewis's theory is “the incredulous stare”, i.e., less colorfully put, the fact that its ontology is wildly at variance with common sense. Lewis faces this objection head on: His theory of worlds, he acknowledges, “does disagree, to an extreme extent, with firm common sense opinion about what there is” (1986, 133). However, Lewis argues that no other theory explains so much so economically. With worlds in one's philosophical toolkit, one is able to provide elegant explanations of a wide variety of metaphysical, semantical, and intentional phenomena. As high as the intuitive cost is, Lewis (135) concludes, the existence of worlds “ought to be accepted as true. The theoretical benefits are worth it.”

Additional discussion of, and objections to, concretism can be found in the supplemental document — ibid

As a science fiction fan, the idea of modal realism doesn't seem all that strange. Protagonists are forever waking up in the wrong world, with much drama resulting. But on what basis do I accept the idea? According to Lewis, in spite of it's being ontological inflation, it's the simplest explanation for the way we think about modality. I think I agree with this.

Determinism seems to suggest that everything that happens, happens necessarily - implying there is no actual contingency in the world. This would mean there are no true possibilia.

Do you agree? — Relativist

Something like that. But we still think in terms of possibility.

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool determinist, by which I mean it's embedded in the way I see the world, morality, the way I assess my own past. Fate, basically. But that doesn't interfere with my understanding of modal logic.

It comes up in our recent discussion about disability. Some identify a disability as an essential feature of a person, and so to judge the lack of capability is to judge the person. The alternative is to think about disability as contingent. It's still the same person, with or without a particular set of challenges. So I think in terms of fate, but also distinguish between what's at the core of a person, the subject (so to speak), and the orbiting circumstances.

I'm aware that Heidegger would object to separating the two out in that way. After all, it's two sides of one coin. But Heidegger failed to see that we don't live our lives in that realm of unity. The intimate experience of life is infinite space in between.

So except for RussellA's last question here, we're ready to move on to section 2, right?

2. Three Philosophical Conceptions of Possible Worlds

So survival of the fittest?
— frank

Bit of a black-white fallacy I think. I'm pressing against survival of the least fit as a mode - not suggesting we do the Nazi thing. But I think it patently odd (and probably a bad thing, overall) that we train our best and brightest to put themselves in harm's way (well, 60 years ago this would hit a lot harder) and do our absolute best to pour resources into retaining the worst(you really need to read this word in context and not ascribe some mora position to me because of an emotional reaction here of us, in terms of species-level survival and progress. There is almost no way that doesn't leave a bad taste in mouths - but it seems obvious. — AmadeusD

So maybe you'd favor a plan that splits resources between improving access and doing medical research, recognizing that research is expensive up front, but keeps giving downstream.

Btw, there's a disable actress in the recent Wicked movies. She lost the ability to walk when she was 11 due to an automobile accident. So by research, we could also mean focusing on safety issues.