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> We are made out of functions Not really true, our minds create approximate models of reality and in doing so divides the world into discrete objects that we

> We are made out of functions Not really true, our minds create approximate models of reality and in doing so divides the world into discrete objects that we can play with, but there's no reason to believe those discrete objects actually exist "out there" independent of our senses. In this regard, even something as seemingly fundamental as arithmetic is just language. There's not really "two" "oranges". I can write a function that explains what happens when a ball bounces off concrete, but nothing about that function is the ball bouncing off the concrete - the bouncing ball is not made of the function, nor is the function even a part of it. It's a totally outside replica that isn't even fully 1:1. Any attempt to completely model the ball or the concrete or the bouncing will fall short - they'll always be reductions. So we're not made of functions. We don't know what we are. We use functions to model what's happening, but they're approximations or reductions of what it really is.

hateful 2y ago
I don't think the author was referring to thinking or consciousness itself, but things like the processes within cells and the replication of DNA.
kaashif 2y ago
> Any attempt to completely model the ball or the concrete or the bouncing will fall short - they'll always be reductions. I don't like it when people assume perfect descriptions of reality are possible, but I also don't like it when people baselessly assume they're impossible. Maybe one day we'll have a theory of everything and a solar system sized computer capable of perfectly simulating a bouncing ball at all levels, with no reduction. Or maybe it's impossible. We just don't know, and I don't know if it's possible to know you have the full picture.
- bschmidt1 2y ago
  There are things that are simultaneously true/false depending on how you look at it - and looking at something 1 way makes the other incompatible. Thought experiment: I live on a planet near Star A and you live 6 trillion miles away on a planet near Star B. Each of us can see each other's host star as a bright star in our respective skies. Suddenly, both of our host stars supernova and burn out at the exact same time. However, survivors on my planet observe that Star A supernova'd, and then about 1 year later Star B supernova'd (due to how long the light takes to reach Star A from Star B). And survivors on your planet observe the opposite: That Star B blew up first, and 1 year later Star A followed. Only an observer precisely equidistant from both stars would have observed the stars burn out simultaneously. But there's nothing special about this vantage point - this vantage point isn't "the truth" either. This means that a concept like the order of events is not an absolute measurement. To come up with a new function that explains what "really happened" here, accounting for relativity and lightspeed, would be to leave out at least that detail. Each additional function that answers new mysteries abstracts further and leaves out other details by necessity. I think of it like fine-tuning a model to increase accuracy, it necessarily de-tunes it in other ways. > simulating a bouncing ball at all levels, with no reduction It wouldn't fully be the same thing (although could be a very good approximation).
  - voxl 2y ago
    1. Truth itself is an invention of the human mind to try and sort physical observations / claims about the external world into two neat buckets. 2. Time as a linear description is the same, a way of sorting the physical world into a series of events. Both have generalizations. Topos Theory generalizes Set Theory with different notions of what is "true." There are several variations on temporal logic with Linear Temporal Logic being only one such idea. With all that in mind, your thought experiment does not cause any issues because you can say that the framework for reasoning about the example is _itself_ the problem. Hence, it fails as a counterexample for our inability to potentially understand reality without flaw.
    - bschmidt1 2y ago
      > It fails as a counterexample for our inability to potentially understand reality without flaw In both comments I assert that phenomena cannot be wholly modeled (or replicated). The gist is that descriptions and replicas are always lossy to some extent. The second comment just expands on why, relating it ultimately to physical limitations (features) of physical reality. You can get uncannily precise and predictive with some knowledge - engineering, manufacturing, math - that any lossiness is truly negligible. Especially the smaller the scope and more "medium sized" the object or idea in question. But compounded, and at extreme scales, the incompleteness of our understanding of reality shows. I agree with your 1 & 2.
  - kaashif 2y ago
    It's not that we're "leaving out a detail" or "abstracting" it's that there genuinely isn't a global reference frame and the events genuinely cannot be globally ordered. You have it backwards. Events not having a globally consistent order is reality. Events seeming like they do is your intuition and leaves out details.
    - bschmidt1 2y ago
      All these are true: - A happened before B - B happened before A - A & B happened at the exact same time - Neither / there is no "before"/"after" Considering this is the case with anything measured, what explanatory "truth" would be left when you consider a perfect description of reality? One that accounts for the global reference frames of every possible metric (not just order of events)? There's no absolute "truth" to any of the mainstays: Where things are When they happened In what order they happened Even whether or not they happened (there is a perspective where all the values of a measured thing can be zero - like mirroring the velocity of a speeding object to reduce its speed to zero, or rotating a plane to make its height zero - and the different physical implications therein). We correlate observed "locations in space" and the "passage of time" to heuristical approximations that work (as scientific theories) for our intents and purposes on a hyper local level (a tiny fraction of just our galaxy), but they break down on macro levels because they aren't really accurate descriptions of reality. Our physics doesn't work at scale - not smaller than atoms, nor larger than ~solar systems, without theories falling apart. Space The XYZ coordinate system we understand as "3D space" works great for locating and measuring the size of objects locally, we could perfectly track a tiny marble bouncing down a huge mountain with a granular enough XYZ coordinate system and telemetry. But that wouldn't work on larger scales like comparing the movement of subatomic particles with the movement of stars in the same graph. The graph couldn't accurately chart that without normalizing data or adjusting the reference frame toward one bias or the other (see scale invariance, vacuum catastrophe). We can only neatly slap a fixed reference frame over a scoped area, invent units and call it a "field", if we expect any predictive utility. Time There's not really an absolute "arrow of time" with a past and future, where A happened, then B happened, etc. in an absolute sense. As shown in the star example, it completely depends on the orientation and velocity of the observer, and other factors. No one perspective is more true than the other. We all happen to hang out in the same frames, so it seems like some of these are rigid laws - they effectively are, for us - but they aren't really, ultimately. When you eliminate the heuristics that give value to science there's nothing left - which as mentioned above is a possible and potential state.
- swayvil 2y ago
  It's like building a working human heart out of emojis. I don't care how crafty you are, it ain't gonna work.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
"our minds create approximate models of reality and in doing so divides the world into discrete objects" Perhaps in our neural net, we are also approximating functions that deal the approximated objects. I think we know the brain doesn't just call an api. But it is doing some 'function' like things.

hateful 2y ago

I don't think the author was referring to thinking or consciousness itself, but things like the processes within cells and the replication of DNA.

kaashif 2y ago

> Any attempt to completely model the ball or the concrete or the bouncing will fall short - they'll always be reductions. I don't like it when people assume perfect descriptions of reality are possible, but I also don't like it when people baselessly assume they're impossible. Maybe one day we'll have a theory of everything and a solar system sized computer capable of perfectly simulating a bouncing ball at all levels, with no reduction. Or maybe it's impossible. We just don't know, and I don't know if it's possible to know you have the full picture.

bschmidt1 2y ago
There are things that are simultaneously true/false depending on how you look at it - and looking at something 1 way makes the other incompatible. Thought experiment: I live on a planet near Star A and you live 6 trillion miles away on a planet near Star B. Each of us can see each other's host star as a bright star in our respective skies. Suddenly, both of our host stars supernova and burn out at the exact same time. However, survivors on my planet observe that Star A supernova'd, and then about 1 year later Star B supernova'd (due to how long the light takes to reach Star A from Star B). And survivors on your planet observe the opposite: That Star B blew up first, and 1 year later Star A followed. Only an observer precisely equidistant from both stars would have observed the stars burn out simultaneously. But there's nothing special about this vantage point - this vantage point isn't "the truth" either. This means that a concept like the order of events is not an absolute measurement. To come up with a new function that explains what "really happened" here, accounting for relativity and lightspeed, would be to leave out at least that detail. Each additional function that answers new mysteries abstracts further and leaves out other details by necessity. I think of it like fine-tuning a model to increase accuracy, it necessarily de-tunes it in other ways. > simulating a bouncing ball at all levels, with no reduction It wouldn't fully be the same thing (although could be a very good approximation).
- voxl 2y ago
  1. Truth itself is an invention of the human mind to try and sort physical observations / claims about the external world into two neat buckets. 2. Time as a linear description is the same, a way of sorting the physical world into a series of events. Both have generalizations. Topos Theory generalizes Set Theory with different notions of what is "true." There are several variations on temporal logic with Linear Temporal Logic being only one such idea. With all that in mind, your thought experiment does not cause any issues because you can say that the framework for reasoning about the example is _itself_ the problem. Hence, it fails as a counterexample for our inability to potentially understand reality without flaw.
  - bschmidt1 2y ago
    > It fails as a counterexample for our inability to potentially understand reality without flaw In both comments I assert that phenomena cannot be wholly modeled (or replicated). The gist is that descriptions and replicas are always lossy to some extent. The second comment just expands on why, relating it ultimately to physical limitations (features) of physical reality. You can get uncannily precise and predictive with some knowledge - engineering, manufacturing, math - that any lossiness is truly negligible. Especially the smaller the scope and more "medium sized" the object or idea in question. But compounded, and at extreme scales, the incompleteness of our understanding of reality shows. I agree with your 1 & 2.
- kaashif 2y ago
  It's not that we're "leaving out a detail" or "abstracting" it's that there genuinely isn't a global reference frame and the events genuinely cannot be globally ordered. You have it backwards. Events not having a globally consistent order is reality. Events seeming like they do is your intuition and leaves out details.
  - bschmidt1 2y ago
    All these are true: - A happened before B - B happened before A - A & B happened at the exact same time - Neither / there is no "before"/"after" Considering this is the case with anything measured, what explanatory "truth" would be left when you consider a perfect description of reality? One that accounts for the global reference frames of every possible metric (not just order of events)? There's no absolute "truth" to any of the mainstays: Where things are When they happened In what order they happened Even whether or not they happened (there is a perspective where all the values of a measured thing can be zero - like mirroring the velocity of a speeding object to reduce its speed to zero, or rotating a plane to make its height zero - and the different physical implications therein). We correlate observed "locations in space" and the "passage of time" to heuristical approximations that work (as scientific theories) for our intents and purposes on a hyper local level (a tiny fraction of just our galaxy), but they break down on macro levels because they aren't really accurate descriptions of reality. Our physics doesn't work at scale - not smaller than atoms, nor larger than ~solar systems, without theories falling apart. Space The XYZ coordinate system we understand as "3D space" works great for locating and measuring the size of objects locally, we could perfectly track a tiny marble bouncing down a huge mountain with a granular enough XYZ coordinate system and telemetry. But that wouldn't work on larger scales like comparing the movement of subatomic particles with the movement of stars in the same graph. The graph couldn't accurately chart that without normalizing data or adjusting the reference frame toward one bias or the other (see scale invariance, vacuum catastrophe). We can only neatly slap a fixed reference frame over a scoped area, invent units and call it a "field", if we expect any predictive utility. Time There's not really an absolute "arrow of time" with a past and future, where A happened, then B happened, etc. in an absolute sense. As shown in the star example, it completely depends on the orientation and velocity of the observer, and other factors. No one perspective is more true than the other. We all happen to hang out in the same frames, so it seems like some of these are rigid laws - they effectively are, for us - but they aren't really, ultimately. When you eliminate the heuristics that give value to science there's nothing left - which as mentioned above is a possible and potential state.
swayvil 2y ago
It's like building a working human heart out of emojis. I don't care how crafty you are, it ain't gonna work.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

"our minds create approximate models of reality and in doing so divides the world into discrete objects" Perhaps in our neural net, we are also approximating functions that deal the approximated objects. I think we know the brain doesn't just call an api. But it is doing some 'function' like things.