[ExI] Free will was: Everett worlds

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 9:28 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Nobody said that the examples were perfect. In fact, I think that a good definition-by-example would involve many examples of the concept in question (watch a dog show), and furthermore, show differences that might not be apparent on a few looks -  or even a lot of looks, such as the difference between a dog and a similar looking wolf..    Democracy = the U. S. is just ludicrous.
> bill w

I wasn't arguing for perfection, but with my examples it should be
obvious why there might be problems thought would be easier to resolve
by a standard definition: one doesn't have to list out myriad examples
and hope the other person gets it and isn't confused by something
else. With the dog example -- true, people rarely define dog in real
life and they're so common for most people (as opposed to wolves and
coyotes, which look very close to them) that there seems little need
for definition.

But my point was that definition in the standard way is so much more
efficient than examples that this is why people use definitions at all
and why dictionaries in general aren't merely lists of examples
covered by the words. For instance, for dog, see:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dog

and for democracy, see:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy

In either case, why didn't the dictionary list examples and that would
be that? Well, for the reasons I stated: this would lead to confusion
because the reader might not know what's being included or excluded.
Might a reasonable reader who sees, say, my neighbor's dog listed as
an example think the term means a mammal or maybe a pet or maybe a
furry object or a brown one? How would we settle this? Well we could
pile ever more examples and give examples of non-dogs too, but that
would be cumbersome.

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/