A counterfactual is something that is discussed as if it exists but does not. I can talk about the bald king of france and people will follow my flight of fancy knowing there is no such person. In one sentence i have conjured up a world different from our own. Many talk about the multiple world hypothesis and attribute this some more tangible meaning than i think it is due. Just because we can discuss an alternative reality does not mean that one can, or should, exist "out there." These counterfacturals hinge on a capacity of human minds to imagine that which is not.
If Speech Act Theory does one thing well, it explains how the very real abstract objects of social life are created. Property, money, and justice all depend upon these human created objects which would have no existence in our universe without people. These are human constructs but real and important to us even without any corporeal presence.
Programs too conjure things into existence. The objects instantiated by a program are mere potential or real energy captured as information on some substrate. Through multiple layers of representation we come to attribute meaning or social reality to these strings of bits. Is it accurate to look at these ontologically? to suggest that we are recognizing a new metaphysics? I am beginning to believe we should.
The human mind continually engages in imaging alternatives to the world we perceive. We can see improvements in our mind's eye. We wreck havoc on our enemies to satisfy an urge we must not act on. And we spin tales, fiction that generates many billions of dollars of US revenue by making more real something that is not.
When writers invite us into a fictional universe, they do so with conventions. A book is understood to be fictional before the first page is read. A movie, already something understood to be at minimum a dramatic retelling of some historical truth, may tip into magical realism with sone scene that defies the rules of physics. We willingly enter into the consensual hallucination of the story and are entertained by it. But when Searle talks about fiction and its speech acts, it all becomes hopelessly muddled. It seems that recognizing this alternative reality more directly makes the whole enterprise much easier as a theory.
While the multiverse may be entertained by some as a form of cosmology, it is undeniable that we can imagine a multi-verse whether or not one exists. Why not allow this human capacity to exist in multiple realities into the theory of language? By casting myself as an author and speaking as the author of this reality, I am relieved of the usual burden of truth. I am free to populated by universe with whatever rules and objects I like. I take on God-like powers there and can create heroes and demons at will. And these objects become real in the minds of the readers, the audience at a play or movie and in the players of games. The consumer of these products willingly pushes the one reality we cannot deny into the background enough to allow this alternative reality to consume their attention.
In this way creating computer systems is very much like taking some small bit of physical space and spinning an alternative universe for some purpose. Prosaically we build formal models of the social realities we want. We create accounting systems to reflect the economic systems we have, land registries, policy and procedure manuals and they record the various roles individuals play in the myriad organizations we create. These systems do more than make tangible the concepts we have. In important ways they become that reality. If the bank shows a balance, that is my money and there is no point in arguing one way or the other at that point of time. There have been many interesting cases of bank errors that enriched an individual and sometimes the money cannot be clawed back by the bank due to some accounting error on their part. Their accounting error created a reality and it is only in the most obvious cases where that windfall is understood to be theft when acted upon.
As our world become more determined by these cybernetic realities, it is important to heighten our philosophical notions to match this encroaching reality where cyber objects become as real, or even more real, than the older forms of social reality that preceded them. I suppose one hopes that it is still only human speech acts that create the cyber reality that transcends the older one. But like the Buttle/Tuttle mixup of the movie Brazil, that veil is thin. I want to dwell on this metaphysic for a time and come to my own understanding of the relationship between human language and the socio technical systems we create.
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