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Ars - your seem to have a problem, that you use language wrong. your improper use of language causes you to be overly dogmatic in your thinking. 'The world i

by LPTS 18y ago

Ars - your seem to have a problem, that you use language wrong. your improper use of language causes you to be overly dogmatic in your thinking. 'The world is a simulation' 'spacetime is a matrix of pixels', what does that mean? All sentences of the form 'A is B' should be re-written 'A seems B to frame X' (or observer x). loop quantum gravity does not say spacetime is pixels. it does say that spacetime might better be approximated as discrete at very small scales, and that such approximations might be useful tools for making progress. Recent experiments show that the idea that space is continuous at small scales is (make that, 'seems') an approximation. No one doing serious work on quantum anything thinks anything in the form X is Y. That worldview has been dead for 100 years. You can't play the speculate about quantum stuff game until you have changed your language to remove outmoded century old logical flaws you aren't aware of, which are built into the rules of a grammar you aren't conscious of, which governs the language you think in and predisposes you to make huge errors (like thinking there are cases where 'A is B'). You seem to think reality is actually one way, and our goal is to understand how reality is. That hasn't been the game for almost a hundred years. We now know that all models of reality, from physics to Aunt Edna's dogmatic catholicism, are tools that do not conform to reality. The idea is to refine our tools so they are more useful, not to figure out how reality is. You need to drop some acid and read 'quantum psychology,' stat! The map is not the territory! The hand pointing at the moon is not the moon. The language that describes the map is not the territory it's even further from the territory. There is no meaning in life, because life is what meaning refers to. Looking for meaning in life is like looking for trees on a map. Looking for what reality is in quantum loop gravity is like looking for trees on a map.

ars 18y ago
What you are saying is that loop quantum gravity does not say "the world is discrete", but rather "a way to calculate stuff is to assume that it's discrete"? To me that sounds like saying protons don't exist, it's just we can explain all sort of stuff by assuming they do. If that really is the thinking in quantum physics it would explain a lot, but I think it's simply a cop-out because our intuitive sense does not work with the rules of quantum physics. Thanks for posting this, it helps me put some strange papers on quantum physics in their proper perspective - they are not "this is what the world is", but rather "we found some cool math". I guess that's what happens when you can't do experiments but can only make models and theories.
- LPTS 18y ago
  If you stop using 'is' and all forms of the verb 'to be', our intuitive sense changes. If you never heard of the verb 'to be' or any of it's forms, and never thought in those terms, quantum physics would not contradict our intuitions. Easterners raised on the I-Ching and Chinese language do not find quantum physics as counterintuitive as we do. When viewing western portraits in art, Chinese pay more attention than westerners to the background and less to the object. Never mind our intuitive sense, this 'cop-out' is what we keep seeing time and time again. Our intuitive sense arises from the way the unconscious rules in our grammar shape our thinking. It's not that our intuitive sense clashes with quantum physics, but the much weirder situation that any single sense we could possibly have about it does not conform to the experiential reality. Far from being a cop-out, it's the bravest intellectual view you can take, and your only hope if you aren't down with the mathematics used in quantum physics. I wouldn't take it quite as far as reading the papers as only 'we found cool math'. Instead try 'we found experimental results such that no one set of mathematical models can (possibly!?) account for our experimental results."
  - astine 18y ago
    So the expression of identity is source of all confusion in communication? I would have attributed it to sloppy thinking and and imprecise grammar but oh I guess I'm wrong.
    - LPTS 18y ago
      using 'is' or 'to be' causes sloppy thinking. The main confusion here arises from using the is of identity on reality. Reality is as described by this math. That's a case of confusing a reference and the thing refered to. That's calling a hand pointing at the moon the moon. Mathematics points to the structure of reality, but mathematics is not reality. Pointing to a theory understood in terms of language about mathematics about reality, and then saying "reality is that theory" is like pointing to a hand pointing to a hand pointing at the moon and saying "that hand is the moon." You can't really get started correctly not understanding quantum physics until you get real clear on those differences. You can't get real clear on those differences while using the is of identity. so it's not the source of all confusion in communication (I find poor communication is the fault of the person listening to me), but it is the source of the intuitions that make quantum physics seem counterintuitive, weird and mysterious.
yters 18y ago
That way of thinking isn't new. It's how people like Heraclitus and Protagoras thought about reality. Everything new is actually pretty old. One of Protagoras' sayings is "man is the measure of all things."
- LPTS 18y ago
  In one of the vids I linked to, he says: "that's called naive realism, reality is how I perceive it. Philosophers have refuted naive realism every generation going back thousands of years, and still people act on the basis of naive realism."
  - yters 18y ago
    What's the difference between naive realism and this? "All sentences of the form 'A is B' should be re-written 'A seems B to frame X' (or observer x)."

by LPTS 18y ago

ars 18y ago

What you are saying is that loop quantum gravity does not say "the world is discrete", but rather "a way to calculate stuff is to assume that it's discrete"? To me that sounds like saying protons don't exist, it's just we can explain all sort of stuff by assuming they do. If that really is the thinking in quantum physics it would explain a lot, but I think it's simply a cop-out because our intuitive sense does not work with the rules of quantum physics. Thanks for posting this, it helps me put some strange papers on quantum physics in their proper perspective - they are not "this is what the world is", but rather "we found some cool math". I guess that's what happens when you can't do experiments but can only make models and theories.

LPTS 18y ago
If you stop using 'is' and all forms of the verb 'to be', our intuitive sense changes. If you never heard of the verb 'to be' or any of it's forms, and never thought in those terms, quantum physics would not contradict our intuitions. Easterners raised on the I-Ching and Chinese language do not find quantum physics as counterintuitive as we do. When viewing western portraits in art, Chinese pay more attention than westerners to the background and less to the object. Never mind our intuitive sense, this 'cop-out' is what we keep seeing time and time again. Our intuitive sense arises from the way the unconscious rules in our grammar shape our thinking. It's not that our intuitive sense clashes with quantum physics, but the much weirder situation that any single sense we could possibly have about it does not conform to the experiential reality. Far from being a cop-out, it's the bravest intellectual view you can take, and your only hope if you aren't down with the mathematics used in quantum physics. I wouldn't take it quite as far as reading the papers as only 'we found cool math'. Instead try 'we found experimental results such that no one set of mathematical models can (possibly!?) account for our experimental results."
- astine 18y ago
  So the expression of identity is source of all confusion in communication? I would have attributed it to sloppy thinking and and imprecise grammar but oh I guess I'm wrong.
  - LPTS 18y ago
    using 'is' or 'to be' causes sloppy thinking. The main confusion here arises from using the is of identity on reality. Reality is as described by this math. That's a case of confusing a reference and the thing refered to. That's calling a hand pointing at the moon the moon. Mathematics points to the structure of reality, but mathematics is not reality. Pointing to a theory understood in terms of language about mathematics about reality, and then saying "reality is that theory" is like pointing to a hand pointing to a hand pointing at the moon and saying "that hand is the moon." You can't really get started correctly not understanding quantum physics until you get real clear on those differences. You can't get real clear on those differences while using the is of identity. so it's not the source of all confusion in communication (I find poor communication is the fault of the person listening to me), but it is the source of the intuitions that make quantum physics seem counterintuitive, weird and mysterious.

yters 18y ago

That way of thinking isn't new. It's how people like Heraclitus and Protagoras thought about reality. Everything new is actually pretty old. One of Protagoras' sayings is "man is the measure of all things."

LPTS 18y ago
In one of the vids I linked to, he says: "that's called naive realism, reality is how I perceive it. Philosophers have refuted naive realism every generation going back thousands of years, and still people act on the basis of naive realism."
- yters 18y ago
  What's the difference between naive realism and this? "All sentences of the form 'A is B' should be re-written 'A seems B to frame X' (or observer x)."