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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 ra

by 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.
  - explaininjs 2y ago
    > people will notice What does this mean? People who don’t know what they’re talking about will get their feathers all ruffled and start rambling about missing the case of nondifferentiable constants? I guess I should have expected as much. But that is, indeed, my point: evolutionists get stuck against the wall just the same as the rest of the religions the GP mentioned.

by gjm11 2y ago

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.
- explaininjs 2y ago
  > people will notice What does this mean? People who don’t know what they’re talking about will get their feathers all ruffled and start rambling about missing the case of nondifferentiable constants? I guess I should have expected as much. But that is, indeed, my point: evolutionists get stuck against the wall just the same as the rest of the religions the GP mentioned.