thanks for your comment. i appreciate it.

Yeah, i know that the current physical worldview is not actually exactly correct. It’s an approximation that is somewhat close to what we can practically observe today, namely close enough that no practical deviation has been found for all experiments performed. That does not mean that it actually describes the world correctly.

I believe that every physical model is wrong, in the sense that it deviates from how-the-world-actually-behaves by some non-zero amount. Yet that amount is small enough to be declared “insignificant” by world-leading scientists. And i’m too tired to argue about that.

Anyways, another interesting concept of physics that i believe is wrong is the commonly-held assumption that energy is always conserved. In fact, some 20th-century authors have already written about the fact that this is not the case in cosmological contexts, for example this paper (full text available as PDF for free download). I recommend checking it out, it’s rather short (4 pages) and well-written.

Yet we have that model in our world that “energy is conserved”, that’s what’s being taught at every engineering school, because for every practical context (i.e. everything outside of cosmological timescales which involve billions of years), conservation of energy is a good enough approximation that does not show any differences to what can be measured in human-made experiments.

So, every physical model is an approximation, even the very central ones, such as the conservation of energy.

As Bohm argued, autonomous objects are human inventions.

Yeah but they are not just arbitrary inventions. They are necessary inventions which every type of animal or intelligent being would necessarily make, and that puts them on a higher ontological level.

This is where your Plato point breaks down. You replace the ill-defined river with another definition including an ill-defined “shape of the landscape,” which is also changing all the time just as much as the river does, with no singular and consistent “shape of the landscape,” and its very precise shape is impossible to rigorously define even at a single time instant.

Well, i get your point, but what plato does is actually to go further and not just replace the water with some curve in space, but he goes on to say that precisely because the shape is infinitely complex (and we can therefore not comprehend it anyways), we have to replace it with something simpler in our mind. something like doing the following:

replace the fuzzy nature of reality with something simpler, which then (by agreeing upon it), becomes what we call real.

funnily enough, that’s exactly the argument that you seem to be making. “reality” is perceived by us precisely because it is a social construct that is useful to us, and therefore it has to be simple.

For example, Benoist would say that, if you are talking about a river in the abstract, it does not refer to anything real. But the word “river” serves as a socially constructed norm that can be used to judge reality to be something, and thus can be employed in a social setting. If I see a river and point to it, and say, “look at that river over there,” the river is now not just an abstract symbol, but it is a symbol pointing to something in a real world context, where people can really observe its glistening surface, dip their toes in it and feel its cold water, etc.

Yes, precisely, that is why we think abstract thoughts. Because they convey information more meaningfully than the thing with you call reality. Check out how pictograms are used by IKEA furniture, chemical lab danger warnings, anime etc to convey information, because that is actually clearer / more fun / easier to digest than to use real-world depictions. Thus, by social contract, these abstractions become our reality, just like the smartphone has replaced actual inter-human contact.

After reading all your comments, i want to comment something myself:

Reality, as i see it, comes from the latin word “res”, often literally translated as thing. However, i want to propose a slightly related, but different origin of the word. It does indeed come from latin “res”, which again comes from latin “rex”, which means king. Let me explain:

I’m not so sure about roman law specifically, but under medieval law, property could in theory be owned by anyone, but in practice, specific types of property (namely land property especially, and often mines (and minerals) and later in early modern age right to exert military actions) were mostly only owned by feudal lords (which represent the ruler, replacing the king). Thus “reality” are the things that belong to the kings and feudal lords. There’s also a similar word that discusses this more explicitly: “regalities” (kingly rights).

Therefore land geometry (how big a grain field is), minerals (and metals derived thereof) and for some reason, the military, are real, while things like typical “personal” property (related: personal property article) like clothing, food products (especially vegetable harvests, which were not taxed by the king) and various movable utensils are not real, because they could be owned by anyone and were not considered “typical ruler’s things”.

i think this is just a metaphorical picture for depression

Gravity applies no matter how far away you are.

ISS begs to differ

deep original profound thoughts that stand for all time after masturbating

they stand for all time because this pattern keeps repeating over and over again

i think that falls under the “I don’t know” and “be not afraid lol” categories :P

The book was motivated precisely by the question I raised in my previous comment: does the common man’s position really have to be abandoned?

no, i don’t think that the “common man’s position has to be abandoned”. In fact, i think that people should be allowed to believe that the earth is flat. For 99% of people, that is what they can observe in their daily lives, and it’s the simplest model that “gets the job done” (i.e. navigates the person through their daily lifes). You only need to know that the earth is a globe if you’re doing international trade, geopolitics, or spaceflight. For every other application, it does not matter.

If physicists object that such an absolute rest frame could never be experimentally identified, that does not prove it does not exist. It means only that its existence is empirically undetermined.

You are right here.

At that point, the usual response is Occam’s razor: if we cannot directly detect such a frame, we should eliminate it from our ontology. … My point is not that this is wrong. It may be a perfectly reasonable philosophical choice. My point is that Occam’s razor is a philosophical argument.

The thing is that Occam’s razor is not just a philosophical argument. It comes from practical thinking.

The thing is, our brains are a computer too. So they need software, programming. Now, if you want to write software, you have to keep to some meaningful physical constraints, such as: Be simple, don’t waste computing resources, be energy-efficient, make the code run fast. These circumstances urge you to use the simplest possible model (of how the physical world works) that works for your practical applications.

So, occam’s razor really comes from the urge to optimize the software that runs in our brains for simplicity and speed. It does not come for no reason. And that is why indeed, yes, occam’s razor follows from being pragmatic.

yeah i get what you mean. a whole lot of academic writing is unnecessarily complex, which hurts clarity (and often obfuscates poor reasoning). (there’s a meme about this, i saw it a while ago, where somebody wrote a long paragraph full of complicated words, which could have been said with a very simple four-word sentence. i’ve been looking for that meme ever since, in case somebody happens to have saved it.)

anyways, i get what you mean. it’s so obvious to say that “reality exists” and that the objects around us “obviously are real”. but: there’s very good argument to the counter.

plato, for example, starts (iirc) by proposing the analogy of the river. imagine a river in front of your house. it carries water every day, but the water is fresh new water each day. it’s never the same water twice. but you would intuitively still recognize the river as the same river the next day, and the day after that. how come? if it is not made from the same material, it is not the same object, and should therefore not be the same?

plato resolves this by saying that the identity of the river (i.e. that what makes the river the river) is the shape of the landscape, not so much the physical water running in it. so, even if you have new water, it’s still the same river because it occupies the same location on the landscape, features the same bends and currents, etc.

now, what is real? is it the water, which is new each day, so you can never actually grasp it, because it changes while you are watching it; or is it the shape of the river, that which stays the same each day, that which provides a fixed notion for your mind that you can rely on? plato argues it’s the second one.

if two objects behave the same in every way (such as the water on the first day, and the water on the second day), then is it not the same object? so the single drop of water in the river does not even exist, because instead, the fact that there is water in the river is what you can actually say for sure, while you could in fact not distinguish one drop from another. but if you cannot distinguish one drop from another, does the individual drop even exist? or is it maybe just a fraction of a much larger mass of water that exists instead?

lol i thought so too at first. it’s clear there’s bell curves … the author says that higher IQ value leads to “reality is subjective and all is mental” worldview.

but then i thought, wait a moment, maybe the author is wise enough to recognize that higher IQ value is not always a good thing? maybe they actually don’t identify as being super-IQ? maybe they just want to live a chill live, and identify themselves somewhere in the middle of the curve? that would mean that the author does not actually think that all reality is just a thought construct …

fandom is a classic example of a company shamelessly profiting off user’s contributions

they only get page views at all because of stuff that people wrote.

no lol, the issue is the ad covering half the available screen size :P

archive of memes on my disk

is there a written version of it? i really don’t like getting news/explanations of things through videos

yeah ok but i don’t have a github account (fck microsoft)

then how do you find new stuff?

you can also just add comments i guess. but yeah, both would work fine.

more like “wildly infuriating”

thanks, multi-communities seems like a nice feature!