formerly...
a response to someone who didn't seem to understand BestOfAllPossibleWorlds, with a specific example or 2...
Is there any way to retrieve a reply that seems to have been lost in cyberspace? I just wrote a long piece in response and hit submit and it disappeared??? No, Carl. It's gone. This is just another reminder that ours is not the best world possible...Oh, wait, after a little reflection I realized I couldn’t really say that. “The best possible” simply means there can’t be any better one in existence. Thus no matter how crappy this world actually is, there is a chance it is the best possible world. If that’s the case, all other possible worlds are simply even crappier than this one. In all the rest of them not only would Meetup.com have gobbled up your text, no, it would also have sent you a nasty-gram and a bill!!!
I'm not sure if you were just being snarky, but I think you may have missed the point of my essay entirely. Your use of the word "crappy" to describe the world indicates you're evaluating it against what you imagine would be a better world rather than accepting the world as it is. In other words, your evaluation of the world is purely imaginary and chosen to put the world in a negative light. Why would someone choose to paint the world in a negative light?
Please don't think I'm picking on you personally, but I want to use this complaint as a strawman to demonstrate an example of the point of the essay. You say this could not the best world possible because meetup's forum engine is not very robust. But what basis could you be using to evaluate it in such a negative way? Would a better world be one without meetup? A world without the problem did exist 10 yrs ago, in the world with no online forums at all. So was that world better because it lacked this problem?
See, there's something evil already afoot in the evaluative and interpretive faculty which labels the world through its gaps as wrong or evil or bad or negative in any way at all. This particular complaint is a great example of a gap whose whole derivation and existence stems from the creation of an entirely new and highly valued mode of communication which has never been seen in the history of the universe before: the internet forum. How can one judge the world as subpar because of this? Meetup in its current imperfect state is in fact proof that the world in which it was derived is bursting with new solutions and new opportunities. Behold the internet forum has come into existence, and YOU value it so much that you use it on a regular basis. Yet ironically you value it so much that you criticize its lack of some features and then proceed to judge the world as bad because it is not perfect? Isn't that a type of insanity?
Perhaps you (the strawman example) just believe that every solution that ever comes into existence should be expected to spring forth whole and perfect in its first incarnation? But there is absolutely NOTHING in all of reality that suggests such an expectation has any merit or real basis. Nothing in nature comes about that way. There's no perfect internet forum. There's no perfect car. There's no perfect city, flower, human, or swiss watch*. There's no perfect ANYTHING! There never has been and never will be. Not even mathematical theories are perfect, and those exist in as abstract a domain as we are aware of. The Platonist ideal, which underpins the idea of perfection embodied and is pursued as if achievable in the way humans approach design, is ontologically radically different from the way the natural world does its creation, through emergence and evolution.
One of the many aspects of the movie Frozen which makes me such a fan is the character Olaf. Olaf longs for summer, his heaven; a place or state which would also mean his death, for his nature as a snowman is incompatible with the heaven for which he pines. Consider that in the context of this paragraph, and check out my commentary about the movie for more on the topic.
It would be interesting to explore whether a Perfect World would be the best kind.
Raise your hand if you want to live in heaven.
In a perfect world there would be nothing to live for, and no life at all. Complete efficiency, complete perfection, and complete understanding, these are all phrases which are synonyms with DEATH or nonexistence. Is life good? Life is a struggle. Is struggle good? What about suffering?
Perfection, a concept so deeply embedded in the western worldview, encoded in theology, promulgated by Plato, and at the heart of absolute truth, is very deeply imaginary, ie. so imaginary that it cannot be conceivably tied to any reality we can imagine. (That's some sort of logic loop, which perhaps just belies the depth of absurdity we're getting at here.)
- Footnotes
I first seriously explored the "designed watch distinction" as part of BeginningOfInfinityComments, which includes the most complete, though still very unassembled, exploration of the crucially distinct creation modes I have come to label design and derivation.
- The swiss watch could be seen as perfect under certain conditions. For example, if a specific instance of a swiss watch were assembled entirely of parts which met all specifications, and the assembly process was done within specs, then one might say that that instance is perfect. But this class of criteria only applies to objects which were designed, and only to the extent that they were designed. Design is ontologically different from the way all other things come to be. In design, the essence or form of the object is conceived first, and then a co-designed process in the real world implements the design. But design is a finite thing; by this I mean its scope is limited, ie. the design has a functional goal and that goal necessarily falls short even of the essence of the purpose of the object. In the case of a swiss watch, we might note that its purpose is to serve as a timepiece. But the design will begin with a compromise about how long the object will function in that capacity, for example. Either it will wind down, or it will depend on external sources like windings or batteries which lie outside the scope of the object's design. In other words, while one might be able to implement a design to a measured degree of perfection, no design can itself be perfect in solving any problem. To become a design, it must necessarily embody compromises between the essence of the intended purpose and the reality in which it must be brought to bear. So a swiss watch may perfectly embody its design, but its design cannot perfectly solve the problem of being a timepiece. This is just the way the world is, and it's not at all bad. In fact, a world without this "problem" would be a perfect world, and in a perfect world, nothing would have any meaning, purpose, or perhaps even existence.