OT: but Mr. Architect, why can't you make a perfect world?

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by thejeff

This discussion started with the assumption of infinitely quickly growing grass. I assumed from that the laws of physics were up for grabs.

If you're saying that you can't have perfection under our existing physical laws, then sure, I agree. And if you want humans in it, then it certainly won't be perfect.

But much of the discussion has been over whether such a perfect world is even conceptually possible. Whether the concept has meaning. That discussion doesn't need to be constrained by physical realities.

You're on a dangerous slippery slope. What do you keep as essential and what is ok to eject? I mean, thermodynamics is a pretty fundamental aspect of physics to just decide it shouldn't apply, effecting things like chemical reactions and therefore digestion, cell division, neuron signalling, etc...

But even if we assume we can eject thermodynamics (...), do we have to keep E+M? Strong and weak nuclear forces? What's essential to even having a cogent discussion? I'd argue ditching Thermodynamics is well past the point beyond which discussion ceases to make any sense.

And we can't just ignore physical realities. Proving its physically impossible for a perfect world to exist makes the concept meaningless, and actually inconceivable.

It would strike me that you'd just allow people to make arbitrary claims without any consequences, which leads to the worst sorts of discussions because nothing can be concluded. "Oh no, i didn't mean it like that, its a special type of Foo that doesn't have all the problems normally associated with Foo." "And how does one get specialFoo? What are the consequences of specialFoo instead of normal Foo?" "We don't have to worry about that, i just declare it to be so."

I'd argue that anything which disregards fundamental laws of nature is going to be unable to truly be conceived, because whatever 'laws' it obeys will have unforeseen corellaries that won't be able to be enumerated, and will be so alien from our experience as to be meaningless. Just because you can put a word to it doesn't mean you can actually imagine it. Heck, physics taught me i can put words to lots of things I can't actually envision, and those are *real*. (Curse you tensors!)