I can’t agree that it’s a good argument. Pratchett, through the character of Death, conflates the problem of constructing absolute standards with the ‘problem’ of finding material representations of complex concepts through isolating basic parts.
It’s the sort of alchemical thinking that should have been discarded with, well, alchemists. Of course you can’t grind down reality and find mercy. Can you smash a computer and find the essence of the computations it was carrying out? The very act of taking the computer apart and reducing it destroys the relationships it embodied.
Of course, you can find computation in atoms… just not the ones the computer was doing.
No, I don’t think that Death is conflating them at all. He is saying that Mercy, Justice and the like are human constructs and are not an inherent part of the universe. In this he is completely correct.
Where he goes wrong is in having only two categories “Truth” which seems to include only that which is inherent to the universe and “Lies” which he uses to hold everything else. There is no room in this philosophy for conjecture, goals, hopes, dreams, and the like.
Sadly, I have met folks who, while perhaps not as extreme in their classifications as this, nevertheless have no place in their personal philosophies for unproven conjectures, potentially true statements, partially supported beliefs, and the like. They are not comfortable with areas of gray between what they know is true and what they know is false.
I think the statements of Death are couched to appeal more to their philosophy than ours, but perhaps that is because Pratchett thinks such people more in need of the instruction.
I can’t agree that it’s a good argument. Pratchett, through the character of Death, conflates the problem of constructing absolute standards with the ‘problem’ of finding material representations of complex concepts through isolating basic parts.
It’s the sort of alchemical thinking that should have been discarded with, well, alchemists. Of course you can’t grind down reality and find mercy. Can you smash a computer and find the essence of the computations it was carrying out? The very act of taking the computer apart and reducing it destroys the relationships it embodied.
Of course, you can find computation in atoms… just not the ones the computer was doing.
No, I don’t think that Death is conflating them at all. He is saying that Mercy, Justice and the like are human constructs and are not an inherent part of the universe. In this he is completely correct.
Where he goes wrong is in having only two categories “Truth” which seems to include only that which is inherent to the universe and “Lies” which he uses to hold everything else. There is no room in this philosophy for conjecture, goals, hopes, dreams, and the like.
Sadly, I have met folks who, while perhaps not as extreme in their classifications as this, nevertheless have no place in their personal philosophies for unproven conjectures, potentially true statements, partially supported beliefs, and the like. They are not comfortable with areas of gray between what they know is true and what they know is false.
I think the statements of Death are couched to appeal more to their philosophy than ours, but perhaps that is because Pratchett thinks such people more in need of the instruction.