[MD] Uncertainty

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Platt]
I take it then that your believe existence depends on human perception.

[Arlo]
What we perceive to be "existence" depends on our "perception".

[Platt]
I live in a reality where if Penn State player breaks a leg in a football game,
it's reality, not an analogy. 

[Arlo]
Never go to the theatre, Platt... and never wish an actor/actress to do well...
In any case, like any symbolic system, "break a leg" is an analogy for the
"experience", albeit in in this case not a very profound one. 

[Platt]
My reality is also one where death is permanent and real.

[Arlo]
"Death" is an absence, it is the "absence of a thing". This is why saying
"death is permanent" is akin to a mathematical description of randomness.
Anyway, I live in a world where (as profoundly described by Pirsig) "Chris got
his ticket after all"... 

[Platt]
Your answer then is a permanent, "No."

[Arlo]
A stable "no". But, again, "conceptualization" is, by definition, the encoding
of "experience" into "symbols" (be the sounds, shapes, words, colors,
movements, etc.) This is, again, you playing silly linguistic games. Like
saying, "is red a color? yes? so red is permanently a color." it is so long as
its defined as such....

Again, any statement anyone can make can be looped onto itself. Like Godel
showed us, the more complex and descriptive the statement, the greater the
paradox from the resulting recursion. You can go with statement with very
little explanatory power, that won't give you much recursion, or you can accept
statements of great explanatory power and laugh at the inevitable recursive
paradoxes (and drink tea with the Zen Masters and postmodern thinkers, such as
Pirsig).

[Platt]
So I take it you think time began with the first human and will end with the
last? Is that your position?  

[Arlo]
Just like the "law of gravity", probably. "... the separation between past,
present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one." (Einstein)

By the way, I wouldn't say "time began with the first human", I'd say "the
concept of "time" drawn from human perception began when such a perception
among humans attained value."