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The worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws. It is contrasted by creationism, which posits non-differentiable phy

The worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws. It is contrasted by creationism, which posits non-differentiable physical behaviors. There’s a middle ground of accepting the possibility of differentiable but non-constant mechanisms that should technically be owned by the evolutionists, but this is a rarely embraced territory: you get neither the warm fuzzies of belief in a God who specially designed you, nor the cool satisfaction of a belief in making observations about the universe now and scaling/time-inverting them to speak confidently about the distant past and future.

gjm11 2y ago
People sometimes complain about "motte-and-bailey" rhetoric, where what you argue for explicitly is much more unassuming than what you really believe. I have rarely seen so spectacular an example. Motte: "there might be non-differentiable phenomena in physics". (Note that e.g. anyone who believes that "wavefunction collapse" in quantum physics is an actual real thing believes in non-differentiable phenomena; so does anyone who thinks that inside black holes there are actual singularities rather than merely places where general relativity breaks down and something more complicated happens; so does anyone who thinks that the smooth-looking stuff we seem to observe arises from some combinatorial underlying structure like a cellular automaton or some kind of constantly-evolving network of vertices and edges and whatnot.) Bailey: literal freakin' creationism. (Complete with "a God who specially designed you". Something in the world might not be differentiable, therefore there is a God who specially designed you. Gosh!) As I said elsewhere in this thread: evolutionism means belief in evolution, or belief that evolution happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. And creationism means belief in creation, or belief that creation happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. These are not, even slightly, the same thing as whether or not some functions describing the universe might be non-differentiable. Also, "non-differentiable" is not, even slightly, the same as "not time invariant". E.g., the function y = cos(exp(-x)) + exp(-x) cos(x^2) is not-time-invariant on both large and small scales, but it's differentiable, analytic even. And "x is a continuous function of t, and (dx/dt)^2 = 1 at all but a discrete set of points" is as time-invariant a law as you might care to mention, but almost all its solutions have places where they aren't differentiable."
- explaininjs 2y ago
  You clearly missed the paragraph where I very explicitly talked about the time variant differentiable middle ground? That’s surprising, it’s the majority of the content. Regardless, I’m not talking about functions describing the universal state, I’m talking one layer up from that, those that describe how that state changes, including any instantaneous events. Does the cat instantaneously die at any given second with the same probability, or does something intervene in the one second it does that did not exist in any of the others?
  - gjm11 2y ago
    I didn't miss the paragraph, but it seemed (and still seems) fundamentally confused to me. [EDITED to add:] I do agree that when I said "X and Y are clearly not the same thing" I should have added something along the lines of "I see that after treating them as the same thing you say that technically they're different but hardly anyone embraces just one of them, but I don't think the paragraph where you talk about that makes much sense". Sorry about that. In any case, it's rather a side issue; "nondifferentiable things obviously don't imply a god who specially designed you" was the more important point, and one your response doesn't address at all. Why would there be a "time variant differentiable middle ground" but not a "time invariant nondifferentiable middle ground"? Why would differentiability imply no God? (You think a god could intervene in the universe but not in a differentiable way??) For that matter, why would nondifferentiability imply a God? (Maybe nondifferentiable things happen that are just random noise.) Why would having "time-variant" phenomena stop you using science to extrapolate to the past or future? A time-varying law can be expressed as a time-invariant law about time-varying functions. So I suppose when you say "time-variant" you mean something like "varying with time in a way that cannot be described scientifically. But the real-work here is in the "cannot be described scientifically" bit, not the "varying with time" bit. If you had time-invariant behaviour that was beyond scientific description, that would block grandiose scientific ambitions too. I think that when you say "non-differentiability" you mean "divine intervention", and when you say "time-variant" you mean "fundamentally inaccessible to science", but you know that if you say what you actually mean then people will be all "science demonstrably works really well" and "claims of divine intervention keep not checking out when investigated carefully" and "evidence for gods is really weak" and so on, so you've picked these more modest-sounding mathematics-looking terms to use instead. Top tip: if you're going to do that, it gives the game away a bit if in the very next paragraph you start saying ridiculous things like "if you take things to be differentiable then you don't get the warm fuzzies of a God who specially designed you", and people will notice.
kergonath 2y ago
> The worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws. It is contrasted by creationism, which posits non-differentiable physical behaviors. LOL. You’re just cargo culting philosophy now, with a thin veneer of sciencey-sounding jargon. 1) An axiom is not an article of faith, it’s something on which we build a theory. Euclid’s axioms are invalid in quite a few situations and nobody loses any sleep about it. 2) The opposite of “the laws of physics never change” is “the laws of Physics can change”, not “god did it”. People would be very interested if you proved that Physics is not invariant with respect to time, because it would mean that energy is not conserved and it would open massive possibilities from a theoretical point of view. That would be much more impactful than most Nobel prizes in the last 60-odd years. 3) There is plenty of “non-differentiable physical behaviour” with invariant laws of Physics. No need for any creator. > There’s a middle ground of accepting the possibility of differentiable but non-constant mechanisms that should technically be owned by the evolutionists You fail to even allude to what this middle ground would be. Science itself would be fine with the time invariant being violated. A lot of laws we now know would be wrong, but science itself would not have any more problem than when we realised that the Galilean transformation of velocities was not actually true. Also, “differentiable but non-constant mechanisms” is just meaningless babble. > but this is a rarely embraced territory For a simple reason: it is a straw man and nobody actually believes what you are attacking (mostly because it is meaningless). > you get neither the warm fuzzies of belief in a God who specially designed you, nor the cool satisfaction of a belief in making observations about the universe now and scaling/time-inverting them to speak confidently about the distant past and future. You seem to be assuming that everyone shares your philosophical system, just swapping “science” for “god”. It is not the case. We do not need warm fuzzies or cool satisfaction. And we do not get any particular pleasure from the fact that any god that is not simply a hands-off creator is exceedingly implausible. You believe in whatever you tant to, and it’s fine. Do not assume that we are like you are.
- explaininjs 2y ago
  1. I mean axioms we take as fact when establishing a world view. 2. It can’t be proven that they are time invariant, that’s what you take on belief. 3. That’s not what I’m referring to. I’m referring to the laws themselves suddenly changing, not the state of a given particle suddenly changing. If you don’t understand point 3 there’s not much more to say. If you did you’d understand a lot of the other things you don’t at the moment, for instance what it might mean for a function to be differentiable but not constant. Contrast G changing over spacetime as can be described by a differentiable function vs a constant vs stepwise at the will of the creator.

gjm11 2y ago

People sometimes complain about "motte-and-bailey" rhetoric, where what you argue for explicitly is much more unassuming than what you really believe. I have rarely seen so spectacular an example. Motte: "there might be non-differentiable phenomena in physics". (Note that e.g. anyone who believes that "wavefunction collapse" in quantum physics is an actual real thing believes in non-differentiable phenomena; so does anyone who thinks that inside black holes there are actual singularities rather than merely places where general relativity breaks down and something more complicated happens; so does anyone who thinks that the smooth-looking stuff we seem to observe arises from some combinatorial underlying structure like a cellular automaton or some kind of constantly-evolving network of vertices and edges and whatnot.) Bailey: literal freakin' creationism. (Complete with "a God who specially designed you". Something in the world might not be differentiable, therefore there is a God who specially designed you. Gosh!) As I said elsewhere in this thread: evolutionism means belief in evolution, or belief that evolution happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. And creationism means belief in creation, or belief that creation happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. These are not, even slightly, the same thing as whether or not some functions describing the universe might be non-differentiable. Also, "non-differentiable" is not, even slightly, the same as "not time invariant". E.g., the function y = cos(exp(-x)) + exp(-x) cos(x^2) is not-time-invariant on both large and small scales, but it's differentiable, analytic even. And "x is a continuous function of t, and (dx/dt)^2 = 1 at all but a discrete set of points" is as time-invariant a law as you might care to mention, but almost all its solutions have places where they aren't differentiable."

explaininjs 2y ago
You clearly missed the paragraph where I very explicitly talked about the time variant differentiable middle ground? That’s surprising, it’s the majority of the content. Regardless, I’m not talking about functions describing the universal state, I’m talking one layer up from that, those that describe how that state changes, including any instantaneous events. Does the cat instantaneously die at any given second with the same probability, or does something intervene in the one second it does that did not exist in any of the others?
- gjm11 2y ago
  I didn't miss the paragraph, but it seemed (and still seems) fundamentally confused to me. [EDITED to add:] I do agree that when I said "X and Y are clearly not the same thing" I should have added something along the lines of "I see that after treating them as the same thing you say that technically they're different but hardly anyone embraces just one of them, but I don't think the paragraph where you talk about that makes much sense". Sorry about that. In any case, it's rather a side issue; "nondifferentiable things obviously don't imply a god who specially designed you" was the more important point, and one your response doesn't address at all. Why would there be a "time variant differentiable middle ground" but not a "time invariant nondifferentiable middle ground"? Why would differentiability imply no God? (You think a god could intervene in the universe but not in a differentiable way??) For that matter, why would nondifferentiability imply a God? (Maybe nondifferentiable things happen that are just random noise.) Why would having "time-variant" phenomena stop you using science to extrapolate to the past or future? A time-varying law can be expressed as a time-invariant law about time-varying functions. So I suppose when you say "time-variant" you mean something like "varying with time in a way that cannot be described scientifically. But the real-work here is in the "cannot be described scientifically" bit, not the "varying with time" bit. If you had time-invariant behaviour that was beyond scientific description, that would block grandiose scientific ambitions too. I think that when you say "non-differentiability" you mean "divine intervention", and when you say "time-variant" you mean "fundamentally inaccessible to science", but you know that if you say what you actually mean then people will be all "science demonstrably works really well" and "claims of divine intervention keep not checking out when investigated carefully" and "evidence for gods is really weak" and so on, so you've picked these more modest-sounding mathematics-looking terms to use instead. Top tip: if you're going to do that, it gives the game away a bit if in the very next paragraph you start saying ridiculous things like "if you take things to be differentiable then you don't get the warm fuzzies of a God who specially designed you", and people will notice.

kergonath 2y ago

> The worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws. It is contrasted by creationism, which posits non-differentiable physical behaviors. LOL. You’re just cargo culting philosophy now, with a thin veneer of sciencey-sounding jargon. 1) An axiom is not an article of faith, it’s something on which we build a theory. Euclid’s axioms are invalid in quite a few situations and nobody loses any sleep about it. 2) The opposite of “the laws of physics never change” is “the laws of Physics can change”, not “god did it”. People would be very interested if you proved that Physics is not invariant with respect to time, because it would mean that energy is not conserved and it would open massive possibilities from a theoretical point of view. That would be much more impactful than most Nobel prizes in the last 60-odd years. 3) There is plenty of “non-differentiable physical behaviour” with invariant laws of Physics. No need for any creator. > There’s a middle ground of accepting the possibility of differentiable but non-constant mechanisms that should technically be owned by the evolutionists You fail to even allude to what this middle ground would be. Science itself would be fine with the time invariant being violated. A lot of laws we now know would be wrong, but science itself would not have any more problem than when we realised that the Galilean transformation of velocities was not actually true. Also, “differentiable but non-constant mechanisms” is just meaningless babble. > but this is a rarely embraced territory For a simple reason: it is a straw man and nobody actually believes what you are attacking (mostly because it is meaningless). > you get neither the warm fuzzies of belief in a God who specially designed you, nor the cool satisfaction of a belief in making observations about the universe now and scaling/time-inverting them to speak confidently about the distant past and future. You seem to be assuming that everyone shares your philosophical system, just swapping “science” for “god”. It is not the case. We do not need warm fuzzies or cool satisfaction. And we do not get any particular pleasure from the fact that any god that is not simply a hands-off creator is exceedingly implausible. You believe in whatever you tant to, and it’s fine. Do not assume that we are like you are.

explaininjs 2y ago
1. I mean axioms we take as fact when establishing a world view. 2. It can’t be proven that they are time invariant, that’s what you take on belief. 3. That’s not what I’m referring to. I’m referring to the laws themselves suddenly changing, not the state of a given particle suddenly changing. If you don’t understand point 3 there’s not much more to say. If you did you’d understand a lot of the other things you don’t at the moment, for instance what it might mean for a function to be differentiable but not constant. Contrast G changing over spacetime as can be described by a differentiable function vs a constant vs stepwise at the will of the creator.