I largely agree with Cyan, but with a little more empathy for your mom’s viewpoint. For example, you write:
There is something. All that there is, we generally call “reality”. Note that by this definition, reality is unique.
So you throw out a description and a quantifier, and slap a label on the result. Doesn’t that sound a little similar to naive set theory? Maybe it’s not as straightforward as it looks.
I’m not actually resistant to defining “reality” your way; I think it’s not actually a step toward sets that don’t contain themselves. But it takes some sophistication to see that, and your mom might lack the formal skills to discriminate innocent-looking “logic” that leads to paradox from innocent-looking logic that doesn’t. Note that she needn’t have studied set theory to have run into similar exercises in labeling and deductive argument that subtly lead to insane results.
I largely agree with Cyan, but with a little more empathy for your mom’s viewpoint. For example, you write:
So you throw out a description and a quantifier, and slap a label on the result. Doesn’t that sound a little similar to naive set theory? Maybe it’s not as straightforward as it looks.
I’m not actually resistant to defining “reality” your way; I think it’s not actually a step toward sets that don’t contain themselves. But it takes some sophistication to see that, and your mom might lack the formal skills to discriminate innocent-looking “logic” that leads to paradox from innocent-looking logic that doesn’t. Note that she needn’t have studied set theory to have run into similar exercises in labeling and deductive argument that subtly lead to insane results.