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Physics is map making, but from that your claims - subjective nature of reality, no objective structure - do not follow, at best you could claim that physics ha

Physics is map making, but from that your claims - subjective nature of reality, no objective structure - do not follow, at best you could claim that physics has nothing to say about the nature of reality. And I have doubts about that, at least to some extend. What kind of answer would you expect for a question like what is the true nature of an electron? You can describe the properties of an electron, what more do you want? What is a thing above and beyond the sum of its properties?

BlueTemplar 4y ago
The tricky issue here is that "the electron" itself is a specific model that only makes sense under some paradigms... There's also a point in how one paradigm might be ontologically radically different compared to the previous one... but what science cares about more is the new paradigm being a "tighter fit" between its new models and the results of the new experiments. Also, beyound a single "thing", it's when we start considering collections of things that the situation can get very tricky very fast, like chaotic behavior from something as simple as 3 masses under the Newtonian paradigm ! (See also : "emergence") Or the concept of temperature : it doesn't go "down" to the "true nature of reality", but is a statistical one that is not even always defined, yet is still quite useful. But yet again I would like to emphasize how in several subfields of physics we now are in a situation where we had to give up an objective viewpoint of the situation for a subjective one, and where the information itself that we have about a system (aka negative entropy) is another variable in a super system that includes us (and our instruments) and the system being studied, and we are forced to consider that supersystem instead, or at least also, in order to go "deeper". (It's also impressive how in some cases we now study "turtles all the way down" situations, with models having an infinite number of correction steps that we can cheat around thanks to the use of advanced mathematics. But maybe in the future these will be seen as trivial as we see the Zeno paradox today ?)

BlueTemplar 4y ago

The tricky issue here is that "the electron" itself is a specific model that only makes sense under some paradigms... There's also a point in how one paradigm might be ontologically radically different compared to the previous one... but what science cares about more is the new paradigm being a "tighter fit" between its new models and the results of the new experiments. Also, beyound a single "thing", it's when we start considering collections of things that the situation can get very tricky very fast, like chaotic behavior from something as simple as 3 masses under the Newtonian paradigm ! (See also : "emergence") Or the concept of temperature : it doesn't go "down" to the "true nature of reality", but is a statistical one that is not even always defined, yet is still quite useful. But yet again I would like to emphasize how in several subfields of physics we now are in a situation where we had to give up an objective viewpoint of the situation for a subjective one, and where the information itself that we have about a system (aka negative entropy) is another variable in a super system that includes us (and our instruments) and the system being studied, and we are forced to consider that supersystem instead, or at least also, in order to go "deeper". (It's also impressive how in some cases we now study "turtles all the way down" situations, with models having an infinite number of correction steps that we can cheat around thanks to the use of advanced mathematics. But maybe in the future these will be seen as trivial as we see the Zeno paradox today ?)