Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist

https://nautil.us/confessions-of-a-theoretical-physicist-787199/

by signa11 • 2 years ago

185 207 2 years ago

nyc111• 2 years ago

“Yet these are concepts that reify a certain approximate sketch of the structure of the world. Physicists once thought that these categories were fundamental and real, but we now understand them as necessarily inexact because they ignore the finer details that our instruments have just not been able to measure.“

FeepingCreature2• 2 years ago

Sure, quarks and leptons are maybe a high-level concept that masks a more messy underlying reality, but surely quarks and leptons are less messy than dogs? There is an arrow of progress in the development of physical theories. I don't see a reason why a perfect description should not be possible.

infogulch• 2 years ago

Even wrong theories can be useful in some contexts, Newtonian gravity for example. Take it to an extreme: say quarks aren't useful at all for science, but are a useful conceptualization pedagogically, it can still be worth.

danbruc3• 2 years ago

Even wrong theories can be useful in some contexts, Newtonian gravity for example.

Newtonian gravity is not wrong, it is pretty good model of gravity in a certain region of the parameter space.

CoastalCoder• 2 years ago

but surely quarks and leptons are less messy than dogs?

I dunno, I'd rather clean up an accident from a dog than from a particle accelerator.

lokimedes4• 2 years ago

Physics is an empirical inquiry into the structure, composition and dynamics of the observable usensorium we inhabit. I find it just short of hybris to entertain any promise that the outcome can be more than a metaphor of the underlying reality. The whole quagmire of “the measurement problem” in quantum mechanics seems to largely come from misunderstanding Bohr’s philosophical objections on this difference between a theory of the measurable and the interpretation of the theory’s internal mechanics as evidence of the true reality it models.

Givens that twentieth century physics (apart from General Relativity) is based on Bohr’s foundation, no wonder people get confused.

The mathematization of physics hasn’t helped either. That Bell’s theorem “proves” something is language applicable to a mathematical structure, not to the physical world itself.

elashri• 2 years ago

Why can't you just shut up and calculate? /s

lokimedes4• 2 years ago

Exactly

DiscourseFan3• 2 years ago

formulas are meaningless without concepts

gpderetta• 2 years ago

c.f. "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" (https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf)

DiscourseFan3• 2 years ago

It is even possible that some of the laws of nature will be in conflict with each other in their implications, but each convincing enough in its own domain so that we may not be willing to abandon any of them. We may resign ourselves to such a state of affairs or our interest in clearing up the conflict between the various theories may fade out. We may lose interest in the "ultimate truth," that is, in a picture which is a consistent fusion into a single unit of the little pictures, formed on the various aspects of nature.

Mathematics alone cannot reflect on its conditions of possibility, and mathematical physics is as inept in that domain. The reason why the quantum physics vs. general relativity thing can't be resolved is not because we don't have the right math, its because to overcome it requires a paradigm shift away from the mathematization of physics, and to actually gain a familiarity with the conceptual apparatus that engendered these theories.

ko27• 2 years ago

It's funny that you mention hubris and yet you fall victim to it by dismissing the measurement problem and Bell's theorem. It's true that our theories are not a perfect description of "true reality", but they do tell you something about what "true reality" must be.

That Bell’s theorem “proves” something is language applicable to a mathematical structure, not to the physical world itself.

This is simply wrong, Bell's theorem definitely applies to the "physical world". A world that does not violate Bell's inequality would look vastly different to ours.

lokimedes4• 2 years ago

My point is that theorems are provable in a logical sense. How will you prove that the mathematical representation of an empirical measurement of nature is true in the same sense?

Arguably this is down to philosophy of science, and I admit to take to the ideas of Karl Popper on falsification as a criterion for sound physical theories.

simonh• 2 years ago

That Bell’s theorem “proves” something is language applicable to a mathematical structure, not to the physical world itself.

Do you not accept the validity of experimental verification?

lokimedes4• 2 years ago

Absolutely, but tentatively.

From the responses to my comment, it may seem pedantic, but it is the wording that strikes me. "Proof" belongs in a different category than experimental verification [1], as it imply logical consistency, or even an equivalence between the model and the object it attempts to model. So in mathematics, proofs make sense because it is dealing with relationships within a closed axiomatic structure. We haven't discovered the axioms of Nature, and therefore everything we propose, as a law, of nature rests on the relative foundation of our experiments.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you are a hardcore empiricist (like Bohr, in a sense, were) reasoning beyond the measurable is not physics. That is why the Copenhagen Interpretation doesen't deal with what the probability distribution of a wave-function actually is, simply that it is a useful construct to represent the possible outcomes of a measurement, until an expectation value is calculated. Perhaps that is also why Wheeler's many-world interpretation got off to a bad start, as it didn't provide any new measurable predictions.

[1] or rather lack of falsification, to adhere to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

sanxiyn• 2 years ago

I mean, leptons are definitely real, not just concepts. An electron is a lepton, and an electron surely exists? You can spray individual electrons. If an electron is just a concept, it is in a sense that a tiger is just a concept, and in a sense it is, but that is not very useful thing to say.

anatoly• 2 years ago

An electron is just an excitation of the electron field, a vast probabilistic something that's ever-present everywhere in the universe, with a different complex-number amplitude (not observable directly) at each and every point. Sometimes that vagaries of its ever-changing amplitudes cause it to locally coalesce into something that looks like an individual electron if you squint at it in the right manner, and that vision persists until a strong enough interaction with another vast and nebulous field shatters the illusion, at least in the tiny corner of the probabilistic multiverse your local version of your consciousness brazenly imagines to be the objective reality. What kind of existence is that?

(Well, the only kind on offer, really.)

goatlover5• 2 years ago

An existence that mistakenly took fundamental reality to consist of point particles instead of fields. But we still found out about fields and quantum mechanics.

digging2• 2 years ago

I mean, leptons are definitely real, not just concepts.

Have you informed Dr Balasubramanian?

BrandoElFollito3• 2 years ago

I am an ex-physist who stopped after his PhD in particle physics. I love physics but while money does not bring happiness, it is better to cry in a Mercedes than on a bike (this is not true, I just laughed when I first read it).

I went through the stages of OP (on a way smaller scale, I do not have his experience) and I think this is awesome. You continuously go from "oh yeah, now I get it" to "crap". This always have you on the bleeding edge between "this si physics, I know that" and "yes, but what if...". To me this is the essence of knowledge though curiosity.

I started my PhD on a specific topic and at some point I was a bit stuck (not panic mode stuck but pissed off stuck). I had dinner with a friend, we were discussing about my work (she is also a physicist) and she off-handly suggested something. And bam! my world changed. The direction of the thesis changed. I added an extra thesis director because what I was about to do was a world where the hands of men did not step on yet.

I thanked her profusely for her help in the thesis and suggested a joined publication (which she did not want to take because she was not interested and asked me to stop stalking her :))

And this is how science moves: because of eureka moments under the shower or at dinner or because someone thought "hmmm..." (looking at you Nikola Tesla).

So the fact that this guy doubts about what the world is, and that he is a theoretical physicist (so hopefully will not switch to some insanities) is awesome.

kaiwen1• 2 years ago

Off topic, but eureka moments are my favorite go-to evidence for the absence of free will. No one chooses to have a eureka moment. They just arrive. And not just those moments, but every thought in every moment. They all just arrive, none are choosen.

futuramaconarma• 2 years ago

That's not evidence But I agree there's no free will and anybody who believes it also believes in magic and god

mensetmanusman15• 2 years ago

Because instincts exist, there is no free will.

(Although free will is required to make any conclusion about the presence or absence of free will, so the point is moot).

InDubioProRubio• 2 years ago

Eureka moments, is the subconscious assembling conclusions and deductions and presenting them to you. That the subconscious is engaged and busy, is fed with information to build stuff from and rewarded for its actions - thus repeats it, is all conscious choices, thus subject to free will. The horse does pull of a record and the rider barely had to steer, is not a indicator of wild horses.

cameldrv• 2 years ago

I don’t think it rules out free will, but perhaps free will is more limited. There is a self reflective part of your mind, probably physically located in your frontal lobe, but there are also many other parts of your mind and brain that do important things, but aren’t self reflective. I’ve come to think of my brain as a committee. There are many things I can do, like walk or even do a mathematical proof, that I cannot really describe the process. We see in things like addiction that the self reflective mind also does not always (or maybe even often) have ultimate control over behavior. Kahenaman and Gallwey talk about this as System 1/2 and Self 1/2. Julian Jaynes even thinks that people used to have complete other simulated people inside of themselves that they called gods, and this still happens to people with Schizophrenia.

sgt1013• 2 years ago

I choose thoughts - I can conjour images, or scenes into my mind. I can choose not to think about things.

In fact, this is a proof of free will. If you were compelled to consider the consequences of your actions then evil would be impossible. The fact that we see evil means that people can choose not to think about what will happen when they do evil things.

ck2• 2 years ago

You can still have free will with "locked in" events.

Time is a fourth dimension but think of everything that has and everything that will happen as a three dimensional cube for a moment.

Now step outside the cube and observe everything that has and ever will happen.

Does that mean there was no free will because it's all observable and was "locked in" ?

No of course not. It's a unique box of time. If you look around there could be another unique box of time with different free will choices being made inside it.

(btw this is one way they attempt to theorize an excuse for quantum entanglement, it "knows" the outcome already by also existing outside the box)

api• 2 years ago

The choice is upstream. You choose what to focus on, which gives standing orders to your brain, which eventually leads to eureka moments.

If you choose to focus entirely on baking you'll have eureka moments about that.

dsizzle2• 2 years ago

Why would you assume it's all or nothing? Will (free or otherwise) implies something like effort and clearly we're not constantly applying effort. Believing in free will doesn't mean believing that everything results from it.

jll292• 2 years ago

This is a bit like saying program counters don't exist because a program's control flow can be changed by interrupts.

d0mine• 2 years ago

The presence of subconscious processes doesn't deny the existence of conscious ones.

Focus/diffuses modes are widely known/accepted.

You can direct the unconscious thoughts too. If I spend some time intensely trying to solve a problem on the conscious level, often I get new ideas on how to approach it in the morning or during a long run (without thinking about it on the conscious level).

---

Unrelated: the discussions about free will often miss that the existence of atoms doesn't imply that a wooden table doesn't exist: they are on different levels of abstraction--no point in comparing.

lukan• 2 years ago

One can want to have eureka moments.

And than one thinks hard.

And then one fine day "eureka!"

But they do not happen on their own. It takes effort to make them possible, even though there is no guaruantee that they will come (Dead ends exists).

exe34• 2 years ago

i don't believe in free will either, but this isn't very convincing evidence.

eureka moments don't hit like bird poo in the middle of the street. they hit people who have spent months-decades thinking about the problem.

a more convincing argument is that they didn't have a choice in choosing that ball of yarn to pick at - mostly it comes along as an irrepressible urge to figure it out.

k99x552• 2 years ago

it is better to cry in a Mercedes than on a bike

Do you perceive bicycle as a poor man's mode of transport?

Rich countries is where everyone can travel by public transport or bicycle (or car). Poor countries is where everyone HAS to travel by car (locked in car dependency)

I see what you are trying to say: its better to cry and have wealth than to cry and not have wealth. But bike=poor, car=rich is not a good analogy. It sends the message bikes/public transport are for loosers, when its not. Well it might be in car-centric societies, but not in more fair societies.

BrandoElFollito3• 2 years ago

Hoooooooo, it was a joke! (and I noted that). Honestly, this does not require a comment like that.

This is from someone who commutes to the office by bike daily (30 km) in a country where biking=good! :)

Actually the joke was Mercedes vs "trottinette" but I did not have a good translation of this French work handy (a kind of scooter you stand on and you traditionally move by pushing your foot on the ground - now they are electric). Which of course does not change anything because the scooter is good and comparing this in car-centric countries etc.

thewanderer1983• 2 years ago

It's refreshing to me to read articles like this. In the current climate of consensus science, and settled science. Here is someone well versed in Physics, and the Philosophy of it. Reminding people that we need to be humbled again.

openrisk• 2 years ago

Do we care about "real" reality if we can, more or less, make sense of some of its manifestations through our senses?

That there is something deeper and unknowable and "informationally huge" seems obvious. We didn't bring quarks or quasars into existence, we "discovered" them as and when we extended our senses far enough using technologies (which are themselves a result of us becoming comfortable enough with our immediate reality, as a sort of positive feedback loop).

There is every reason to suspect that this deeper reality does not stop where our technologically extended abilities peter out. Our imperfect and tentative understanding when reaching the extremes of scales (of time, space, complexity, etc) is perfectly understandable. Why should a finite carbon brain be able to map out a coherent and finite model of something much, much bigger than itself.

On the other hand over millennia of brainstorming (literally) we have collected some interesting datapoints about this deeper reality: it is not "malicious", and somehow it agrees to be mapped by us (mathematically), even if in disconnected parts.

In fact this benevolent aspect of deeper reality has made us unusually cocky. Imagine the existential angst if the universe changed its laws at whim. We'd be back to praying. E.g., that gravity remains stable for a while so that we don't drift into space. This premature self-assuredness explains repeated scientific episodes of proclaiming "we have explained everything". This also feeds the sterile chase of "a theory of everything".

In fact the limits of our understanding are in front of our eyes, everywhere. We haven't really explained a single phenomenon in the so called "complexity science" domain. Deeper reality is all around us and the most dramatic and impactful scientific revolutions are still ahead of us.

DiscourseFan3• 2 years ago

Deeper reality is all around us and the most dramatic and impactful scientific revolutions are still ahead of us.

Maybe

graycat• 2 years ago

Why should a finite carbon brain be able to map out a coherent and finite model of something much, much bigger than itself.

Have asked that and have a guess: Darwin-style selection rewarded getting some rational understanding of the most important parts of nature -- fire, rock tools, clean water, agriculture, staying warm in winter, basic geometry, bows and arrows, the Pythagorean theorem, levers, wheels, boats, etc. -- we encountered. Well, it so happens that in this universe such "rational understanding" is enough to understand basic math, physics, chemistry, biology, ... back to the Big Bang, the 3 K background radiation, cells, reproduction, nutrition, diseases and immunity, ....

I gave up on the US education physics community when my teachers couldn't give a valid proof of Stokes' theorem, explanation of Young's double slit, or the beginnings of quantum mechanics.

So, now I have several polished treatments of each of Stokes' theorem, Maxwell's equations, and special relativity. Got a good background in probability (Neveu, Poincaré recurrence, martingales, etc.), enough to get a good path through thermodynamics. From Rudin, etc., got enough solid Fourier theory to check carefully the uncertainty principle in physics (doubt that what physics does there is fully justified) -- also carefully treated in a great course in "Analysis and Probability". For differential geometry, an Andrew Gleason student gave me some lectures and explained that the keys are the inverse and implicit function theorems, proved in a book by W. Fleming and just exercises in a Rudin book -- local nonlinear versions of what is easy in linear algebra. So, now I attack physics as a curious amateur!

I do remember a remark from a good mathematician: "Physics abuses its students." Well, they can abuse me no longer, and I can still do high quality study of physics.

slkjdlskjdklsd6• 2 years ago

Do we care about "real" reality if we can, more or less, make sense of some of its manifestations through our senses?

we can - Who is the we?

our senses - Whose senses? What experience the sensory input?

catanama7• 2 years ago

What's your answer to that?

swayvil2• 2 years ago

A river of sensations. A play of attention. That's reality. The rest is fiction.

slkjdlskjdklsd6• 2 years ago

I don't think the ego accepts this easily.

catanama7• 2 years ago

We didn't bring quarks or quasars into existence, we "discovered" them as and when we extended our senses far enough using technologies

Did we? If we're in a simulation instead of base reality, it's possible that simulation have actually created them for us when we started looking, depending on the scope and paramaters of simulaiton scenario.

rralian• 2 years ago

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The idea that the act of observation impacts an experiment (or how particles behave) is one of the most counterintuitive and surprising “truths” I’ve ever heard. I would love to hear a logical explanation of why (not just a description of it).

alexpc2012• 2 years ago

It reminds me of the plot of the novel "The Three-Body Problem."

_hark• 2 years ago

I'm in the final year of my PhD, and I feel very lucky to be working on the question of what it means for an explanation to be "good". The closest thing to a satisfactory resolution of the question of "reality" in theories, to me, is Dennet's Real Patterns [1]

It may well be that multiple explanations are consistent with the most basic phenomena. The criterion for the reality of the theory is whether it does better than random (its predictive power, equivalently how well it can compress the observational data). We can try to find the simplest explanation, but we can never know if we have it [2]. We can stop thinking of theories as being real or not in a binary sense, and merely ask how well they compress the data. Of course, different theories can achieve the same compression by compressing different aspects of the data! Your pattern can look like my noise :-)

Luckily and interestingly, the physics of the macroscopic world is in many cases effectively independent of the underlying microscopic rules [3], with the details of the microscopic physics being screened off as complexity emerges.

Personally, I like to think of abstraction as a kind of hierarchy of hardware + software: at each level, some useful ontology is picked out for stable patterns to emerge (e.g. the software of "fluids" emerging from the hardware of quantum "particles"). Layers of software at one level become the hardware substrate for the next rung up the abstraction ladder.

Luckily, we get to choose the software that runs on us, so don't forget to vote this fall ;)

[1] https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/cla...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_field_theory

jll292• 2 years ago

what it means for an explanation to be "good"

Chomsky coined the technical term "explanatory adequacy" for that, which is used/recognized among linguists and psychologists.

mikepalmer3• 2 years ago

We can stop thinking of theories as being real or not in a binary sense, and merely ask how well they compress the data. Of course, different theories can achieve the same compression by compressing different aspects of the data! Your pattern can look like my noise :-)

Love this, thanks for these insights.

dakiol• 2 years ago

I didn’t know that Physics was about understanding reality (sure, from a romantic perspective yeah). I always thought it was about making our lives better (like any other branch of science).

I believe we will never find out what’s the real nature of reality. That doesn’t mean we should stop doing science, though: it makes human live better.

I believe that the “meaning of life” is not about the answer (science telling us what’s the actual meaning) but about the discovery process we embrace: knowing beforehand that we’ll never understand everything and nevertheless keep waking up every day to do the job.

jajko• 2 years ago

Understanding reality makes our lives significantly better. No room for primitive religions leading us to stagnation or even reversal, when we can understand very well what sun, moon and stars are, why they move as they do, or why lightning happens and why weather patterns are what they are.

Understanding of reality via physics gave us all electronics too, including one I use to write this and one you use to read it. That's a noble goal on its own, no need to meddle with that.

Pursuit of meaning of life is completely different topic, for different folks, no need to try to mix those two. Plus its very subjective - tons of folks already found it or simply don't care about it.

hnfong• 2 years ago

Understanding reality makes our lives significantly better.

Of course on the whole understanding makes our lives better, but if you're asserting this for everything, it's probably some kind of a survival bias. The understandings that aren't really useful are often forgotten, while the useful ones are passed down through generations.

It's actually very easy to get caught in understanding niche topics that genuinely find very little application.

mistermann2• 2 years ago

No room for primitive religions leading us to stagnation or even reversal, when we can understand very well what sun, moon and stars are, why they move as they do, or why lightning happens and why weather patterns are what they are.

Do you mean this literally, as in this is knowledge (JTB) that you possess?

Pursuit of meaning of life is completely different topic

Is this a part of reality, or of something else?

no need to try to mix those two

How does one go about accurately determining what is needed?

slkjdlskjdklsd6• 2 years ago

. I always thought it was about making our lives better

That's Engineering not Physics.

bjornsing2• 2 years ago

I could have been a theoretical physicist, but got out after my master’s. Subconsciously I think I had already come to this (the OP’s) conclusion then.

Since then I’ve worked a bit in statistics and machine learning. There’s a saying in this field that captures my subconscious conclusion well: “all models are wrong, but some models are useful”.

I’ve often said that I would have loved to do a PhD in physics in 1910, but less so in 2010. The models physicists found in the 20th century were extraordinarily useful. I have little hope that I will see anything comparable in my lifetime.

Don’t get me wrong: More models will undoubtedly be found, and there’s beauty and honor in that work. But they will most likely all be “wrong”, and far less useful than e.g. the models that let us harness nuclear reactions.

sigmoid102• 2 years ago

That depends a bit on the field. If you were doing particle physics (in particular using earth-borne accelerators), the second half of the 20th century would probably be best. But if you're into astroparticle or cosmology, the best time is literally right now. The 21st century has been one giant thing after another thanks to Sudbury, WMAP and Planck, the EHT, LIGO, the Pulsar Timing Array and tons of other experiments. When it comes to understanding the universe as a whole, there is no better time to work in physics than today. Similar goes for quantum and condensed matter, albeit with a focus on real world applications rather than understanding the universe.

bjornsing2• 2 years ago

I’m into usefulness. And I’m not convinced by your argument. I still doubt very much that I will see any new models as useful as those that transformed the world in the 20th century. I’d love to be wrong though.

momoschili• 2 years ago

This is bit of a commonly misheld perception in my opinion.

It took 30-50 years for anything in the 1910s to become particularly useful. Even the photoelectric effect itself took over 30 years before the first devices (photomultipliers) were even developed.

The much celebrated quantum mechanics likely wasn't so useful either until 30-40 years later with electronics such as transistors.

General relativity didn't really find a use until GPS and that was over 70 years later.

The only field that contributed 'relatively' quickly during that time period was nuclear physics, but that field saw an extreme concentration of effort due to the war.

Meanwhile theoretical condensed matter physics today is rife with things that are on the cusp of being useful with 2D materials, superconductors, quantum simulators, etc

swayvil2• 2 years ago

We do not craft models of reality because reality and models have any kind of intrinsic connection. We craft models of reality because we value models.

That is arguably very funny.

TheOtherHobbes• 2 years ago

So this is the new zeitgeist. Between AI, quantum fundamentals, disinformation, and a few other less obvious trends, "reality" is going to get less and less concrete and more and more contextual and non-binary.

jeroenvlek• 2 years ago

Ultimately, we're all just living in an episode on Rick & Morty's galactic cable TV

efitz• 2 years ago

Humans are not “generally intelligent”; our intelligence is extremely well adapted to being a hominid family animal in a tribe or clan in a savannah habitat with large predators and hostile members of our own species lurking about.

Our senses and brains are well suited to reasoning about and making decisions in environments at “human” scales. By that, I mean that humans don’t receive relativistic, atomic or quantum phenomena directly with our unaided senses, and therefore our brains never developed intuition for these phenomena.

So it’s no surprise at all that our intuition completely fails us at those scales.

Again, our intelligence is not “general”; it’s hominid.

snovv_crash3• 2 years ago

We also fail horrifically at recognising exponential growth, or understanding its implications.

mettamage3• 2 years ago

Exponential growth is pretty rare in nature, right?

Linear growth or fuzzy up and down growth/swings seems way more commonplace

LgWoodenBadger• 2 years ago

and yet plenty of us can expertly catch balls thrown in the air

robwwilliams• 2 years ago

I love this comment! Why have I never read this key insight in the form of an essay. Having recently watch Chimp Empire on Netflix I have a good feel for the “lower” foundational levels of our stack.

11101010001100• 2 years ago

We complement this weakness with tools. Now can we build tools that access all mass-energy scales is the question...(or do we need too :P)....

olooney• 2 years ago

And yet, counterintuitively, it's in precisely these areas (relativity, quantum physics) that our theories are best (most predictive with the strongest mathematical foundations) and the areas where our human intuition ought to supply the most assistance (psychology, sociology) where we seem to be lost at sea.

One explanation that I've come up with to explain this apparent paradox is that while humans may not have any special insight or intuition into microscopic or macroscopic phenomenon, at least we don't have any biases either. Thus, we are able to make progress in these areas by simply pouring in huge amounts of time and brainpower.

On the other hand, for subjects that are more "human," we come pre-equipped with a large number of instinctive insights; or to put it another way, we're burdened with a huge number of innate biases. These are mostly shortcut heuristics that only vaguely approximate the truth, and are deeply and unavoidable biased in ways that we ourselves are blind to. Thus, no matter how much time and brainpower we pour into these subjects, progress remains slow and theories remain poor.

It's a well-known theorem in machine learning that an ensemble of weak (only slightly better than random chance) but unbiased learners will eventually converge to a strong learner, but a collection of biased learners will never become unbiased unless their biases are all uncorrelated. In humans, of course, the biases are shared across all members of the species so do not cancel out in this way.

mensetmanusman15• 2 years ago

That’s mostly because complexity can’t be wrapped up in simple rules. Physics is easier because it is dealing with a handful of particles.

There isn’t enough energy in the universe to calculate the full Schrödinger equation of a human. That tells us something…

NemoNobody6• 2 years ago

The biases you have are different than mine or rather, I'm aware of most of my bias and can account for them - I have many, many predispositions, assumptions, inferences, unknown incorrect conclusions, etc.

I love your example bc it highlights the bias of science of for me. We know that quantum equations can't be looked at - I'd say that's near trivia level "known" at this point. What it actually means functionality is obviously more complicated but simply stated - reality is aware of our observation of it and reacts, at least at a quantum level.

Scientific bias is so great that they can literally work with a system that must account for that rather incredible fact, while ignoring it bc they can't explain it.

The placebo effect, NYT crossword experiments, the Stanford University 60some% threshold for an idea to be adopted/accepted by all of a society as a known/true belief - those 3 facts reshape our understanding of the world if they are actually facts. All three are undeniable facts that have simply never been acknowledged or examined further.

Further bias is displayed with the insistence that all things spontaneously came into existence from nothing, despite nothing coming from nothing for no reason - that's impossible, as no example within reality exists I can't just take that at face value, but it's the accepted "theory" - despite common sense stuff like, say a future corporation created this universe - or an inexplicable being even, BOTH trillions of times more likely to be the origin of the universe than nothing exploding for no reason.

I could write a book about the incredible biases that allow some of the smartest people to actually talk about the multiverse is a serious sense - the universe is not infinite, so a new universe can't come into existence for every possibility, that would be an incredibly stupid waste of resources - with any thought at all the commonly understood definition of the multiverse fall completely apart. It may be the dumbest thing we believe rn frfr

This is all without discussing the ACTUAL bias in science that comes from who funds stuff and etc...

So much bias in science

NemoNobody6• 2 years ago

I could write a book about your comment. I am incredibly impressed how well you articulated our "human subject biases" - that is an excellent starting point for understanding the human condition, the root of all of our bias.

It isn't only instinct tho. Heritage and culture. Societal beliefs. Personal experience. Expectations. What we recall and forget, how and when we recall - all automatic functions of memory. Your brain is biased and actively attempts to deliver a reality that adheres to that bias - it can do so. An example is that we don't choose what we look at or when we do - to maintain a smooth image, without choppiness, our eyes dart to the next object of our attention before our eyes begin to move.

Perception is reality. We see what we want to see... except that we rarely actively choose to look, see and observe - we outsource the whole thing. If buying a new car is in the back of your mind bc it's necessary, your subconscious will see your anxiety, and high light every car dealership to you in a hundred mile radius - that can also be a little stressful - it's trying to help.

You don't actually think about the words that come out of your mouth in conversation - nobody does that at speed of talk. We just have a mental idea prompt and we talk.

All that we don't decide outright is fundamentally biased - that's the root of it, what has been before, what we/the body liked and how to get more of that and nothing it doesn't want. The choice of tacos or burgers - the presentation of your "craving" as maybe one or the other is biased framing.

Most of what the endless stream of thoughts says - the words that flow into our conscious mind, often for reasons not clearly defined, all of that is bias.

The intellect and knowledge we accumulate is what we use with logic and reason to make sense of reality as we live it - knowledge once learned becomes a newspaper unless well tended - unchanging, unadaptable and less applicable over time.

An old dog can learn new tricks but it might have to let go of the tricks it thinks it knows now - so an old dog just doesn't do that. Old tricks still be old tho - want isn't part of the adapt or die equation.

All of this is bias, fundamental bias - as humans all experience aspects of these things but no two people have identical bias it cannot simply be ignored.

This is the base of the "right view" that Buddha talked so much about. We think we are something we are not, that we do things we do not and the stuff we do we don't know we do or why we do anything at all. Where we sit amidst all this automation and optimization is critical.

We are not what thinks. We are what is aware of the thoughts being thunk. The view from there is better, like 3rd person view vs 1st person in video games. Most of the body is like this, most of our habits and routines are just habit and routine, with nothing real behind them - more like randomness repeated into normalcy.

Like, one day you decide to read a mystery series and you enjoy them. You begin to read them when you wake up. Then you finish the series. Ten years later you still read every morning but it doesn't matter what.

The last movement that your body made... did you consciously decide to move? Did you decide to scratch your arm? Have you ever drank all the coffee without realizing it til the cup was at your lips? Ever drive for hours a very familiar route and realize you can't exactly remember doing most of it. Our brain fill in the corners of rooms for us - ceilings at familiar places can surprise us, bc we've never bothered to look up. When you walk, do you decide to take a step?

Everything you are, all that you have not actively decided to be, is essentially just bias. That is what most people are but that doesn't make it correct, there is a right view that reveals what is.

This is a rant. This is huge tho and deserving of one, especially on a dead comment thread.

Scientists be dealing with all this bias too, they are no different from you.

Workaccount22• 2 years ago

To be fair, humans, with all their ego, simply call hominid intelligence "general".

catanama7• 2 years ago

It's actually debatable given our capability for abstract thought and creating things like mathematics.

I think it's better to say that our minds have built in optimization for some patterns of behavior and thought but it doesn't mean we aren't "generally intelligent".

Just as if you have Turing complete language designed for accounting it doesn't mean you can actually write anything in it, even if that would be not optimal.

NemoNobody6• 2 years ago

I've always thought of mathematics as something that reveals itself - self evident for those who know to look for it.

Humans are absolutely "generally intelligent" - the languages we all come preloaded with provide a substantial base hominid intelligence.

Were one to compare all known species and their respective forms of intelligence, humans would be the standard for general intelligence and intelligence in general - this is only debatable if you entirely ignore the works of humanity, as it is only us that can see all known things as resources or potentially so.

Let a tree be known by it's fruits. Not to discredit the intelligence of dolphins, octupi/squids, chimps, ravens, certain dogs and cats but by no means are they, in any measurable way, comparable generally to a human or even specifically, save species specific intelligence, like how to operate a built in ink cloud organ.

If the point of evolution is to create endlessly more complex iterations of life forever, which it might as well be, we are the finest known example of evolutions success - we are the earth's magnum opus. Furthermore, were Earth alive and we its offspring, we are more than it - as a child is more than it's mother or father alone. We are the most important thing here rn.

At least so far. Definitely win overall.

Can another species do math, identify everything, name it all and turn a tree into a chair? That's base reqs to challenge for the smart crown.

tl;dr: I agree with the comment I'm replying to - I just like to write books

PmTKg5d3AoKVnj0• 2 years ago

I think that's pretty ignorant of historical materialism.

Humanity itself, insofar as its brain was made possible by new modes of nutrient-assimilation from the environment, is inherently technological. Nature is updated by work.

MiscCompFacts• 2 years ago

This got me thinking about the radio lab episode where they had to vote on which animals they thought were the smartest. The idea was to put yourself in the context and environment of these animals and see which one has developed the best intelligence given what senses and capabilities the animals had to work with. The first round is Crows vs Slime Molds. I never thought about it, slime molds decision making abilities to find food are actually really fascinating and given that it’s a unicellular organism it’s adapted suprisingly well for the limited resources it has. I never thought about intelligence relative to other organisms before.

Edit: here’s the link https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4YtbQkzLo1E

limit499karma• 2 years ago

According to a few (related) mystical schools of thought (that share a boundary with Jungian psychology) there is a distinction to be made between mind and intellect. The former, the mind, is held to be effectively a super-sense and its content and preoccupations naturally (as with the elemental senses) are bound firmly to the body. The intellect however is seen as the realm of knowledge whose domain extends to the transcendent.

While our intuition is indeed informed by experience it should be understood that speculative meditations (should one care not to believe in inspiration "from above") can enrich mental content and provide structural elements for conceptualization that transcends ordinary perception.

So the intellect is indeed superior to mentation. And for many of us this distinction is informative of our belief in the incompleteness of our self-perception.[..]

drdeca2• 2 years ago

I don’t think “general” means like, equally suited for all cases. Rather, being able to handle the things successfully at all, even after working past wrong intuitions, and taking much time, still counts.

flowingfocus• 2 years ago

Yes, our models are never complete. As someone here already wrote: "all models are wrong, some are useful".

What makes me optimistic here is that since the enlightenment we have a good track record with arriving at better and better models. In the language of David Deutsch: We are arriving at better and better explanations, where the quality of an explanation is determined by rigidity ("how hard it is to vary") and reach ("in how many situations does it apply"). His books "The Fabric of Reality" is a great book by the way, he describes how the theories of evolution, quantum physics, epistemology and the theory of computation are connected with each other. The bit about good explanations is from "The Beginning of Infinity", also a very good read.

sampo• 2 years ago

From 1954 to 1975, theoretical physics created the standard model of particle physics. Experimental verification of the theory continued through 1980s and 1990s, and finally the Higgs boson in 2011.

But if we follow the dictionary definition of scientific theory "A coherent statement or set of ideas that explains observed facts or phenomena and correctly predicts new facts or phenomena not previously observed" or "a hypothesis confirmed by observation, experiment etc.", then after the 1970s, theoretical physics about the fundamental building block of reality hasn't really been theoretical physics, but rather hypothetical physics. They have worked on lots of theories (or rather: hypotheses) that they have not been able to test and verify experimentally.

alexpc2012• 2 years ago

Most likely, the nature of consciousness and reality are rigged in such a way that we cannot use our consciousness to decipher them. Any progress in that direction is useless and, at this point, almost ridiculous.

librasteve• 2 years ago

Thanks to Vijay for a thought provoking post. I like the juxtaposition of quantum gravity and neuroscience.

I think that it carries two messages, one trivial and one deep.

The trivial one is that physics builds on the human nature to build concepts. Both a jaguar and a quark are ideas that we extract from our perceptions, that we share with others and that help us to model and predict the world - quarks just need a more expensive microscope like the LHC. Sure eagles and prawns may have slightly different versions of concepts since they have different colour perception, but only marginally so.

A practical fellow like a physicist will be clear that when the concepts can make measurable predictions they are worthwhile (we call this meta concept "real"). It is not possible to store the full state of or compute the evolution of anything macroscopic to full precision - such as the positions and momenta of all the particles in a table. So concepts are the only things we can know about reality.

They argue that we may never be able to attain the deep underlying reality - either because it is theoretically unattainable or that we will continue to be resource limited. I contend that this dichotomy is false. It just may never be possible to attain deep underlying reality. The best we can do until we get there is to find some probabilistic rules that work in a pragmatic sense and to refine these tools over time.

[That's pretty much a restatement of the Copenhagen interpretation of 1922].

The deep one is that we are probably looking down the wrong end of the telescope. As far as I can tell (from popular neuroscience) is that our ability to model the perceptual / conceptual processes and how they compose into intelligence remains in the dark ages.

But, given that we each have 70 billion neurones or so, there is a lot of classical physics going on in our heads to make these concepts and we have practically no hard, proven theories about how this works. We are doing layers of pattern recognition and extraction and feedback that allows us to avoid being eaten by Jaguars.

So let's get a proper theory of intelligence. One that let's us work out which aspects of quantum mechanics are philosophically necessary to sustain our subjective experience of space and time. With a substrate with branching / collapsing features. Where time has an arrow with memory in the past and uncertainty in the future. Where cause and effect are loosely coupled. Where there is a notion of free will.

Some endnotes: - The quantum measurement problem is perhaps a limit of this theory - Perhaps the notion of computational reducibility is a stab in this direction [Wolfram] - Probably all you need is emergence for this and not a quantum brain [Penrose]

Vecr7• 2 years ago

Where there is a notion of free will.
Perhaps the notion of computational reducibility is a stab in this direction [Wolfram] - Probably all you need is emergence for this and not a quantum brain [Penrose]

Well, yes, but I'm not sure you can have both of those at the same time without getting very clever. You'd need to make a version of compatibilism that's not just the next in a long line of increasingly convoluted magic shows.

throw7• 2 years ago

Science is an open system. Everything is open to being "wrong"/"updated". There is nothing that grounds the system. You must be always open that your prediction of unobserved things will be wrong. To actually believe that science will one day solve the great mystery of the universe is scientism.

jfactorial• 2 years ago

Is there any stronger tool for rational truth seeking than the scientific method?

Observe. Hypothesize with falsifiable statements. Form experiments that could disprove the falsifiable statements. Observe. Publicly make falsifiable statements to peers capable and incentivized to disprove them.

How can this fail to lead us to truth that is as close to objective as possible? What greater method exists?

bubblyworld• 2 years ago

This is a little bit out there from a rationalist point of view, but I think there are domains in which not all of the requisite concepts for the scientific method actually exist. An example that comes to mind is the nature of conscious experience - having spoken to a lot of meditators, for instance, I'm convinced that there really are commonalities to it that you can experience yourself by sitting down and paying attention. But I don't think there's anything to really falsify here, because there's nothing to measure!

You can't tell someone "here's this totally objective way you can pick apart your conscious experience into a bunch of statistics, and when you do change X I predict you'll see the statistics vary like Y". You can kinda just point their brain in a direction and hope that they experience it for themselves.

Another example, I think, is domains that are under optimisation pressure or control of some kind (like an ecosystem, or much more simply a thermometer). There was a post on HN a few days ago about causality, and how the standard statistical methodologies for determining causality kinda break down when you start measuring systems like this. Correlation is not causation, but in these systems causation no longer necessitates correlation either! Perhaps a different kind of epistemology would be useful here too.

Anyway, not sure this is making sense. Would be curious to hear your thoughts.

NemoNobody6• 2 years ago

Anyone that has actually utilized the scientific method truthfully to solve a problem or to verify truth ought to be able to identify several limitations or even identify it's more obvious flaws.

It is merely a formula - a method to determine, what is to be determined, why and to what end ALL is Science - the method alone is nothing, method cannot be without data and a hypothesis cannot be without someone to make it and the knowledge required to make a hypothesis. Without logic and reason the method, data, hypothesis and results would be nothing. Without society to allow for and direct progress there would be nothing to hypothesize.

Science is the sum of all of that. The method is a tool - not even the most effective necessarily. The method with make a light bulb - if allowed 200+ tries. Other tools allow for more direct results.

Tesla who transformed Edison's power delivery system into something infinitely more useable and that was only the beginning of his demonstrating mastery of a whole new thing - much of his inventions couldn't come of the scientific method. The method could be used to verify his brilliance but wasn't the source of it.

Tbh, it's literally just predefined, recorded, trial and error - that's it. Just guess, try and repeat - according to the rules so it can be replicated by anyone, super simple really.

It's like a brute force password hack - not the sharpest tool in the shed, but an effective one.

itishappy2• 2 years ago

Science is an open system.

To date, but I doubt this is a law of nature. What prevents the next big discovery from being the final piece that grounds the system making everything else fall into place?

digging2• 2 years ago

This is a semantic debate, but "science" is the process of finding those rules. If we find an "ultimate" rule, we're still using science. (Assuming science is capable of finding that ground truth rule.)

goatlover5• 2 years ago

Reality/nature/the world grounds science. Whether it can all be figured out depends on whether that information is contained within the universe. Are you prepared to say an advanced civilization millions of years old doesn't know the "great mystery" of the universe? It's a little premature.

__rito__• 2 years ago

The Indian Philosopher that is gravely missing from the article is Nagarjuna. The kinds of questions the author raises, the path he is treading on, will benefit from the study of Shunyata Philosophy of Madhyamika school, especially Nagarjuna.

I am not alone in thinking this. I was surprised to see Carlo Rovelli talking about it in multiple occasions.

Heres one [0].

Nyaya and Madhyamika Philosophies still have many lessons that are not yet discussed in the spotlight.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CgIfNuZs56w

ziofill4• 2 years ago

I am a theoretical physicist, and I am very much in tune with the author. Take quantum mechanics (my field), it is clear that even though we have a working model of it, it doesn't explain how nature instantiates it. Entanglement is a prime example of this: I know exactly how to describe it, but nobody has a clue of how it works. In other words, physics is a mostly coherent and certainly useful story about reality, but it isn't grounded on "bedrock" reality, rather on our perception of it.

BobaFloutist2• 2 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think of entanglement as less forming an actual binding relationship to two particles, and more as setting them up exactly the same way.

So it's not that you have two magnetic marbles and rotating one rotates the other, it's that you're rolling two dice with identical parameters and can expect that at any given slice of time they'll be doing the same thing.

Is that incorrect?

nathan_compton8• 2 years ago

Entanglement is neither a bond between two objects nor a setting up of two objects in the same way. Entanglement derives from the fact that quantum mechanical systems have properties which are non-local with respect to the "process" of measurement that do not depend on the physical size of the system in question. Its actually suspect to say that "particles" are entangled at all - the entanglement is a property of the wave function in which the particles identities are (with respect to the quantity that is entangled) indistinct.

ziofill4• 2 years ago

Yes you're on the right track: there isn't any 'action' between the two systems, it's a correlation. However, here's the thing that fries my brain: for classical systems correlation means the pre-existing value of some property is correlated (e.g. if I take a random glove out of a pair, the moment I look at the one I picked I know the handedness of the other). In the quantum case there isn't a pre-existing value for the property you're measuring (because you're free to pick the measurement basis), and you can't say one measurement outcome caused the other because you can set up the measurements to happen outside of each other's light cone (so you are free to pick which measurement happens first by changing reference frame).

So: how does particle A "know" how to produce the correct correlation if 1) the value is produced 'on the spot' and 2) there isn't a well-defined causal order between measurement of A and B?

ChrisClark• 2 years ago

Basically, could I say something like, QFT is about fields, but what are the fields, are they in something, are they self instantiated, what makes the fields?

We can describe the fields, but we can't get behind them, the how and why? At least we can't get behind them yet, but if we do, do we know the how of that or is it just another layer?

EvgeniyZh• 2 years ago

What do you mean by "how it works"? In my book, being able to predict the outcome of experiment is exactly understating how it works. Anything beyond this is the question of philosophy, not physics.

jebarker5• 2 years ago

I'm not a physicist. An idea from physics that I recently learned and found very unnerving was that the solid objects we see and feel in the world are actually mostly empty space. We just see them as solid because of the way light interacts with the particles. So in a sense our visual and tactile perception of the world is just one representation of the underlying reality and you can imagine there being infinitely many other possible representations.

I'm just crudely saying the same thing as the author I think, but I wanted to emphasize how uncomfortable this makes me. In some sense it feels like being a prisoner in a perceptual cell you can't escape from surrounded by a reality you'll never know.

Having philosophy as a counterpoint (in my case dabbling in Buddhism) has been essential to keep me calm and relaxed.

biggoodwolf• 2 years ago

You're a brain in a bucket. What is the nature of the bucket is up for debate

goatlover5• 2 years ago

Your brain is part of a nervous system that extends throughout the "bucket". Body and brain aren't really separate.

nathan_compton8• 2 years ago

This is more of an intellectual parlor trick than anything else. Like literally what else could "solid" mean besides "that which we call solid based on our perception." When you say that matter is "mostly empty space" you are really writing is a sentence which implicitly uses two definitions of solid in one place without distinguishing between them.

jebarker5• 2 years ago

But we have a common understanding of what "mostly empty space" looks like and what we perceive as solid objects don't look like it.

whatshisface• 2 years ago

Electrons meaningfully fill up the space in materials at low frequencies but not at high frequencies. So you can be... half calm?

nh23423fefe• 2 years ago

why is this unnerving? fog isnt transparent while air is and since these are gases they are "emptier" than solid things. the emptiness properties is disconnected from visual or tactile properties.

i cant understand what you mean by knowing reality. reality is sui generis and knowledge is a relational concept.

jebarker5• 2 years ago

Fog is a great analogy here and indeed much less unnerving. I think what I mean is that I'm unnerved by the fact that our perception only gives us a partial view on what really makes up the universe.

nonameiguess2• 2 years ago

"Solid" doesn't really have meaning at the sub-molecular level. All space has something in it, even if it's just vacuum energy. Virtual particle pairs come and go all the time. Some space has particles with electromagnetic charge. Each of these has some interaction radius. Technically, this is infinite. Electric field reaches everywhere, but thanks to inverse square law, only other particles within some much smaller radius than infinity will interact with enough force to change velocity noticeably. Gather together a large enough collection of these into chemically bonded distinct macroscopic objects, and there you go. The radius at which particles are repelled from each other is smaller than the distance between these bonds. That's all "solid" means.

Whether particles truly have any material extent at all, or are simply literal points representing the center of various interaction radii, is unknown and probably unknowable. It's not even clear what the difference would mean. Can a particle somehow "take up space" and prevent another particle from occupying that space if it interacted with no force at all? I'm not a physicist and kind of talking out of my ass here, but I think the Pauli exclusion principle implies maybe, but it doesn't apply to all particles.

Human perception relies entirely upon electromagnetism. Once you get down to distances less than the wavelength of the highest frequency photons and electrons, we can probe and describe the relationships mathematically, but I don't think it makes sense to try and conceive of what these things "are" in some greater ontological sense. We inherently analogize to what things look and feel like, but looking and feeling like anything is a higher-level emergent phenomenon of electromagnetic interactions.

wigster• 2 years ago

i can't read that due to the bobbing header. atrocious design.

michael9423• 2 years ago

How can he be sure he's a theoretical physicist if he doesn't know reality exists at all?

The truth is, instead of reality, he would be better off questioning theoretical physics, which indeed does not exist outside the heads of academia.

His "questioning of reality" only happens philosophically (in other words, it is an academic farce), once he gets up to do some grocery shopping he sure knows what to buy so he can eat in order to survive. There is your objective reality.

Humans understand reality if they do not bury their heads in the sand. But academia can get in the way.

analog31• 2 years ago

Disclosure: I'm not a theoretician, but just an old industrial physicist who helps design measurement equipment.

What I've noticed is that most physicists are aware of the great epistemological puzzles, and may even have briefly dabbled in them, but also tend to ignore them if there's work to be done. There's a lot of pleasure and utility to be gained from just finding a hard problem and working on it, maybe even solving it, or inventing something.

When people find out that I'm a physicist, and ask me about those puzzles, I usually plead ignorance. I'm not dismissive of them, or anti-intellectual, but I think you shouldn't let them be an obstacle to the enjoyment of physics, either as a spectator or practitioner.

aristofun• 2 years ago

There is little doubt left that materialistic reality (what people and even physicists usually mean when they say “reality”) is not the fundamental nature of reality.

This is the main philosophical, scientific and even cultural challenge today.

zdyn52• 2 years ago

Little doubt? By tautological reasoning sure…

zdyn52• 2 years ago

Sorry I had misread your line - somehow the “not” didn’t register. Can’t remove/edit my previous comment for some reason.

micheles• 2 years ago

I remember when I took my course of "Theoretical Physics" (so called, it was an Introduction to Quantum Field Theory in actuality) and I realized that particles do not exist. It was quite an enlightenment. Particles are a convenient description of Quantum Fields in the perturbative regime, but what Quantum Fields are is not known, not even at the mathematical level. When you live at frontier of knowledge, as a Theoretical Physicists, reality becomes fuzzy. But that's life.

mikepalmer3• 2 years ago

Near the end: "I believe that the quest to understand the reality of the universe must contend with the truncations imposed by the perceptual and cognitive limitations of the mind." Totally agree with him. Interestingly AGI will have different limitations. In fact different AGIs (transformers vs something not yet invented; or an AGI with an huge encyclopedic memory vs one without; or ones with different limitations of compute; etc. This touches on computability with limited or unlimited resources.) will have different limitations and be literally unable to understand each others' versions of reality.

curation• 2 years ago

The book Sublime Object of Ideology (Zizek) and a second volume due soon attempts an interdisciplinary reframing of the theory of everything - working with Quantum Physicists and Material Hegelian/Lacanian philosophy. I am a philosopher who works with theoretical physicists.

NemoNobody6• 2 years ago

Philosophy is the science of ideas. Ideas are the basis for all understanding - it is good that you are you there, this topic is inherently the realm of philosophy. Theoretical physicists must be very focused on theory to frame a "Theory of Everything" - what they kno will get in the way.

The Theory of Everything is just our modern way of saying "God" - they occupy the same position in our lives and society. We need to understand and it needs to make sense to us rn, in this time and space - like religion once did.

Even if incorrect, believing that we have a Theory of Everything is necessary. We have killed God and now find it necessary to create an idea that can encompass the void where God once was. Functionality is key.

I doubt the physicists ability to be objective. This is easily explained by adapting God into a Creator of a Game, us to fully uploaded VR Players, reality to the engine, mechanics and programming - all executed as science has already identified with the laws of the universe, etc.

A future version of Microsoft could easily hypothetically make this game. We already are testing reality to determine if it is a hologram.

I believe Stanford already declared it more likely we live in a simulation than it isn't - bc someday, if we can, we will totally make an exact copy of reality - maybe this it. Maybe we are dead and chose to upload ourselves here. Perhaps Musk is right and we are the NPCs of an alien game...

All of those things are far more likely than a spontaneous universe, coming into existence without cause, creating the universe for no reason and only time + chance allowing for what we call reality.

Far far more faith is needed to believe this not a created thing. I find it almost illogical that this being the simplest and most likely conclusion, that it is ignored. Where is the objectivity?

A working model is all we need to move forward - we can figure out later if it's right or not. I'll bet a seriously considered hypothetical" reality as a construct" would explain a lot of stuff.

You need include the placebo effect, how reality knows when I look at it and how only 60 some % of a society need believe something for all of them to declare it true - the collective unconscious, not as defined now - the NYT crossword experiment collective unconscious, the Theory of EVERYTHING must be all of that.

Purely philosophically I can account for much of reality - including ideas, what they are, how we have them, how they evolve and what they do. I'm not sure everything can actually be accounted for outside of a construct - I can't rn and I've tried.

I wish you all the best of luck.

ngcc_hk• 2 years ago

There is some discussion below about evil, part of my study.

There could evil as judgement, as nature, as action, as consequences or as being.

One starting point is somehow someone can judge a being, a thought, an action and a consequence as evil. Is killing … it depends upon context so much … or should we just back to I or God or whoever think it is evil itbis evil?

Action if assume above seems easy. I or some beings know it is evil or not and act on it. It is an evil act.

It is when consequence are considered it is really complicated. It can change over time as an evil act can have good consequence in certain place and time.

Nature as evil or not is part of one major Buddha sect - Tien Tai claim Buddha has evil in its nature forever just not do it (if … )

Evil as a being like God?

The problem of evil in the religion context has a much wider issue one has to consider.

Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist

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