The _sps_ Quizzle.

[swestrup]

The first few questions for a stephen quiz meme....
(1) What is the difference between a friend and a lover?
Technically, a lover is someone you make love to, but is not necessarily a friend. A friend is someone you like to spend time with, but not necessarily make love to. I don't think I'm capable of having a lover who isn't a friend, but I know others differ on that.

(2) Is the universe globally consistent? If so, how and why? If not, how and why?
It appears globally consistent, up to some 15 billion light years or so. After that, I dunno. This would seem to require either a common origin for all we perceive, or some sort of global consistency balancing mechanism.

(3) Who is, and who should be, more tightly bound by morals: you, your family, a person you never met?
Confession time: I've NEVER understood what you mean by morals, or how they contrast with ethics. I had to use a dictionary to look up morals, and it said it was a system of beliefs which one used to govern ones actions. Frankly, I don't think that anyone should be too tightly bound to their beliefs. If I thought there was a common moral system out there that gave decent default behaviours in the absense of careful thought, then I would say that the less influence I had a on a person, the more tightly bound by morals they should be (since most people I don't know don't think.) In the absense of such a moral system, I can only say, er, NO to the whole question.

(4) How can you know something?
You can't. The best you can achieve is a sort of fuzzy reliability based on the failure of an honest attempt to find counterexamples.

(5) There are, perhaps, distinctions to be drawn between perceptibility, observability, existence and being. Where do you draw the lines, and what are they?
I think perceptibility and observability are almost synonymous. In fact, I can't think of a distinguishing case, without positing alien intelligences with whom communication, even in principal, is impossible. I think existance is separate from what is currently perceivable. I am willing, in principal, to admit the existance of things which we know not of, can never know of, and which have no influence on us, as existing (I can accept such a definition of God), but mainly because its a useful limit case. As we expend greater energy/intelligence/technology, the range of what we can percieve increases. The limit of what can be percieved as that effort goes to infinity and perception becomes omniscient is what I like to think of as all of existance. Being is either a synonym for existance or its just the immediately percievable subset thereof.

(6) Are others the same kind of thing as you?
Same kind? Yes. Same? No.

(7) Do you feel the pain of others?
Less now that before. Always too much. Its why I don't watch horror movies, or dwell on war and/or politics. Its also what prevents me from doing much charity work excpet 2nd or 3rd hand. The pain is too great.

(8) Is it as good for you as it is for them?
A currently untestable hypothesis. Maybe one day I'll know.

(9) What is a thing?
A variably defined object of discourse.

(10) What is identity (i.e. the property of identicalness)? What makes something the same as itself? Is everything always, necessarily, the same as itself?
Oops. I distinguish identity and identicality and I don't know which you are talking about! Identity is the property that a consensually-derived set of measurements on two things are the same. Thus, there are multiple definitions of identity, for different purposes. Identicality is the property that all measurements on two things are the same, including position, composition, structure, etc.
I'm not sure identicality is possible in the physical universe, or anywhere outside of mathematics except in that a thing is identical to itself. From my definitions above, it would seem that whether something has the same identity as itself depends on the particular identity. Something would seem to always be identical to itself in a newtonian universe, but if one starts to consider quantum measurements, I am no longer sure.