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Guilty as charged. I guess I do not see the difference between convenient mathematical artifact and "real". But I am also a Greg Egan fan, so no surprise there.

Guilty as charged. I guess I do not see the difference between convenient mathematical artifact and "real". But I am also a Greg Egan fan, so no surprise there. Although people usually do not get hung up on the virtual particles. Rather people get annoyed when we say that the definition of a "particle" is "excitation of a quantum field".

colordrops 6y ago
It seems the implication is that there is a difference between abstractions and objective reality. But you are not in bad company. Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT, believes that the fundamental substrate is math, which is just another way of saying that reality is made of mind.
- simonh 6y ago
  I think that’s getting the cart and the horse back to front. If the fundamental substrate is math then to me that means reality is made of information. I believe mind is a particular form of process on information, but that doesn’t mean all processes on information are minds. This IMHO is the fundamental error at the heart of panpsychism.
danbmil99 6y ago
Upvoted for gratuitous Greg Egan name drop
xelxebar 6y ago
Equal doesn't mean idential. You have an apple in one hand. Since 1 = 1/2 + 1/4 + ... + 1/2^n + ... you therefore have an infinite collection of apple pieces in your hand? Whether that's a useful description, depends on context. Virtual particles are sort of like this decomposition. I think that a lot of confusion arises because of the innocuous seeming equal sign. Explicitly replace the equals by approprate (algebraic) maps, and at least for me, the relationship becomes a lot clearer. Maybe more familiar to HN, maybe it helps to do "typed" math? E.g. counting numbers have a different type than equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences. From a set theory perspective, it makes sense to ask the question whether the number 3 (as a set) equals the collection of triangles in R^3 (as a set). Of course, the two aren't equal, but it seems weird to even ask this question. Maybe it should be just as incongruous to say that some vacuum state equals it's decomposition into virtual particles. The two things are just differently-typed. You need some computation to convert between them.
- sunstone 6y ago
  Not to muddy the virtual waters here but are the "virtual ephemeral particles" of the vacuum qualitatively different from the "virtual particles" of "electrons and holes" of say semi-conductor physics which are more like mathematical, statistically aggregated entities? Or is the underlying math essentially the same?

colordrops 6y ago

It seems the implication is that there is a difference between abstractions and objective reality. But you are not in bad company. Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT, believes that the fundamental substrate is math, which is just another way of saying that reality is made of mind.

simonh 6y ago
I think that’s getting the cart and the horse back to front. If the fundamental substrate is math then to me that means reality is made of information. I believe mind is a particular form of process on information, but that doesn’t mean all processes on information are minds. This IMHO is the fundamental error at the heart of panpsychism.

danbmil99 6y ago

Upvoted for gratuitous Greg Egan name drop

xelxebar 6y ago

Equal doesn't mean idential. You have an apple in one hand. Since 1 = 1/2 + 1/4 + ... + 1/2^n + ... you therefore have an infinite collection of apple pieces in your hand? Whether that's a useful description, depends on context. Virtual particles are sort of like this decomposition. I think that a lot of confusion arises because of the innocuous seeming equal sign. Explicitly replace the equals by approprate (algebraic) maps, and at least for me, the relationship becomes a lot clearer. Maybe more familiar to HN, maybe it helps to do "typed" math? E.g. counting numbers have a different type than equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences. From a set theory perspective, it makes sense to ask the question whether the number 3 (as a set) equals the collection of triangles in R^3 (as a set). Of course, the two aren't equal, but it seems weird to even ask this question. Maybe it should be just as incongruous to say that some vacuum state equals it's decomposition into virtual particles. The two things are just differently-typed. You need some computation to convert between them.

sunstone 6y ago
Not to muddy the virtual waters here but are the "virtual ephemeral particles" of the vacuum qualitatively different from the "virtual particles" of "electrons and holes" of say semi-conductor physics which are more like mathematical, statistically aggregated entities? Or is the underlying math essentially the same?