Hacker News Reader

What does "baked into reality" mean? We can never know more about reality than what we observe, and furthermore conservation laws are axiomatic -- conservation simply means that we are able to account for (almost) everything we observe, in a consistent way. When conservation is broken, we name a new form of energy, and (so far), we find that it can by accounted in a consistent, predictable way. (Dark matter is an unsolved problem. Knowledge is incomplete. That doesn't mean conservation is false.)

When it comes to fundamental science, a consistent map is the territory. "Map is not the territory" applies to simplifications that omit detail.

I don't see people trying to be "clever".

> When it comes to fundamental science, a consistent map is the territory. "Map is not the territory" applies to simplifications that omit detail.

But physics does leave out detail. It's an abstraction over many particular instances. Nature isn't a physics equation. An equation doesn't generate a field of force, nor does it have any causal powers.

> We can never know more about reality than what we observe

If that were true, then theoretical physics wouldn't exist. Much of scientific theory involves unobservables, or processes way too long for us to observe. Most of evolutionary history is unobservable. We have to fill in the gaps with a theory explaining the fossil record, genetics, and the organisms around us.

We don't have time machines, nor billion year old cameras.

What does "baked into reality" mean? We can never know more about reality than what we observe, and furthermore conservation laws are axiomatic -- conservation simply means that we are able to account for (almost) everything we observe, in a consistent way.

You said it right there. "Almost." We keep on prying and doing experiments, and we can't find any exception. If we've tried hard enough for long enough, we can start to conclude that we're probably getting close to reality. If we pry and we find it's "almost" then we know it's not baked into reality.

When conservation is broken, we name a new form of energy, and (so far), we find that it can by accounted in a consistent, predictable way. (Dark matter is an unsolved problem.

[Citation Needed] Yes, we still don't know what Dark Matter is, but do you understand that dark energy is not dark matter, and the current model for dark energy involves space expanding and more dark energy appearing due to the space expanding? Citing dark energy is tantamount to admitting that conservation of energy isn't universal.

When it comes to fundamental science, a consistent map is the territory.

Arrgh. You're getting your pointers mixed up here. A context where science is the territory would be the study of Science, as in the philosophy of science. When it comes to fundamental reality, Science is the map and fundamental reality is the territory.

Sorry, I should have said we don't understand dark energy yet.

In what sense does "fundamental reality" exist?

kudos to stcredzero for a humorous and tactful exit... I'll be the killjoy and explain his joke, which I think was a last-ditch attempt illustrate the point he's been trying (and failing) to get across all thread, which is that

> When it comes to fundamental science, a consistent map is the territory

isn't the case.

Science/empiricism merely produce predictive models; over the last few hundred years, these models have improved dramatically, but they are nonetheless only maps of a territory ("reality"), and it's still fundamentally uncertain that the underlying assumptions (that laws of nature exist/that reality is mappable) are reliable.

> "Map is not the territory" applies to simplifications that omit detail.

Even if we had a perfect model, which we don't (and it's not clear that such a model is obtainable) that could predict everything, it would still be separate from the territory. You might think this is a pedantic distinction, and in your ideal world where we have a unified field theory, it certainly would be, but like I said above, it's not clear that such a thing is obtainable, so it's important to hold onto the distinction lest we forget the fact that we're still sitting on an incredibly young and uncertain foundation.

That which gives rise to experimental results and perception. If you don't think there's a real world responsible for those, then how do you explain what we sense and the results from experiments? What makes the technology work? God?

I surely don't know. That's metaphysics, not science.

I surely don't know. That's metaphysics, not science.

But you can clearly do science on the technology. People do this with high degrees of success, developing theoretical models with high predictive ability. It's called "reverse engineering." If you're going to retreat into metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, that's up to you. The doing and the results will speak for themselves, and no one will pay attention to the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo obscurantists.

> God?

What do you mean by this?

I mean that if reality (nature, the world) isn't responsible for our experiences of a world, including scientific experiments, then what is? Does the empirical just a appear for no reason with nothing behind it?

We're working on it. We'll get back to you on that. (Maybe we need a bigger particle accelerator?)

Sean Carroll has an interesting article on this: "Energy Is Not Conserved": http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-i...

I went to exactly the same post on Carroll's blog in response to the parent comment as well! Quite relevant I thought, given the comments about conservation laws and the especially the mention of dark energy that followed. -I elected not to post up there as I am studying GR - and not so confident with it! Thanks for dropping it in.

Completely unrelated to the original article which is just more multiverse bullocks of the stringy landscape variety. These scientists will die off and with it these articles.

The map is the territory for belief about belief though, sometimes, if people choose to agree.

You can believe things about how people think and this can affect how people think. Sometimes precisely, such as in the case of a mental illness diagnosis a person may have been indoctrinated into believing is their identity, sometimes generally, chaotically, without direct transmission perfectly.

I'd compare Machiavellian motivations here, belief about belief with the intent to control comes from the desire to control and rule through thinking, but the domination of thought/behavior of individuals through one's thoughts alone... people eventually become aware of intents, if there's always that imbalance. The problem often stems from assuming one has earned the right to dominate and another must do X,Y,Z to earn respect. Quite frankly, humans from birth to death and every point in between are equivalently autonomous and worthy of being able to think the way they want to, without having to do anything to have earned such a right. Thinking otherwise is a good example of being wrong and clever in a way that can be quite haunting.

I think these kinds of validations get conflated with hard data. Often, it is a lot easier to just listen to people and let them believe what they want to. Gotta trust people to come to their own conclusions independently.

In the age of machine learning, behavior shaping, I think a lot of this is quite topical.

The map is the territory for belief about belief though, sometimes, if people choose to agree.

Let's say I build a theme park in the form of a giant map of the world. I could then print a map to my theme park.

Quite frankly, humans from birth to death and every point in between are equivalently autonomous and worthy of being able to think the way they want to, without having to do anything to have earned such a right.

You can think any way you want to, and I will respect your right to think that way. I can respect that you think, but that doesn't mean I have to respect what you think.

> You can think any way you want to, and I will respect your right to think that way. I can respect that you think, but that doesn't mean I have to respect what you think.

That's totally fine, just in my personal experience, stuff like that has a funny way of coming back in thought.

I find that no matter what words come out in reality, transmission through language, it never really tells you very much about how a person actually thinks. Kind of hard to know how another person thinks, because, that kind of seems like believing in telepathy.

Let's say that the mere act of me saying what I 'think' causes my thinking to change, instantly, perfectly flipping to a perfectly opposite perspective. What's there to respect at that point?

What's there to respect at that point?

You were thinking. I respect that. Hell, if you were sincerely trying to think, then had a total brain-fart, I'd still respect the attempt.

I suppose at this point I would ask the question, what does it mean to think? What is 'thinking'? What's the goal?

I tell you what, you think about that and get back to me about it.

I've thought about it a lot. It just seems to loop, to find a way that allows me to believe I have done enough work such that I am allowed to have the thoughts I wanted to have from the beginning. There are all sorts of ways I seem to invent to do this. Doing differently, every single time, every new way of working through 'thought', what's the original point?

What do you think? Let's compare notes.

I've thought about it a lot.

I think your experience of thought is worth a lot more than anything I could tell you about it. (Yes, I planned that out.)

Doing differently, every single time, every new way of working through 'thought', what's the original point?

Is it fun? If it's not fun, then don't do that. Also, as far as a "point" goes, that is up to you. Let me testify to you, as an atheist, that you can find meaning in life by living it "meaningfully." Do that enough, and you will find it. Physical and aesthetic activities with others help a lot. Sharing food and experiences with true friends is key.

What do you think? Let's compare notes.

See the thread above.

The concept of 'baked in'.

I sort of find doing stuff with words fun, sometimes. It's a creative endeavor, but also fairly rigorous.

Otherwise, stare off into space, and wonder if the terrible things I don't want to happen have happened yet.

Food, experiences, aesthetics, pleasure, hedonism. I study Zen quite a bit. I don't find it fun. It's just a way to reveal truths to others because,they can't be revealed directly and accepted at face value, for some.

Words are memes. Ideas are baked in. Connections dance in patterns. Math and logic form the foundation. Mind tests for correctness. Self, universe, theory. Universe is infinite, self knowledge - finite (or is it?). Theory unites with self, universe serves as reality check. Theory united with self, is this equivalent to the universe?

What is mind? The experience of everything you've ever experienced, collapsing in on itself.

https://youtu.be/1PT90dAA49Q

What happens after that? That, I find interesting. Post modernism, maybe. Where are the new words, new theories, new patterns? Dance on top of all that exists.

The experience of everything you've ever experienced, collapsing in on itself.

I usually experience paroxysms of guilt from the embarrassment of everything stupid I've ever done.

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iur/?f=1&image_host=http%3A%2F%...

What happens after that? That, I find interesting. Post modernism, maybe.

Well, if there is a new wave of reason, then a backlash of unreason is not unexpected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwZ651i5vls

I used to be like that, but, life is too short to allow embarrassment to paralyze you. If you go through it often enough, you develop a sort of numbness to it. I'm sure I can still embarrass myself, but I try not to dwell in that micro blackhole. PTSD has taught me that if you are constantly focused on those patterns, you will see them in everything. So you might wind up feeling like you are embarrassing yourself constantly even though external reality has no validation mechanic to prove this. Are people saying you are embarrassing? And should you care, if they do think this? That judgement is their own burden.

You can keep wondering, but to me that's the same as thinking everything is traumatic because the reality of the present is 'connected' to the memory of the past. All those links, you can keep stepping back into them until you feel like, "I am reliving this again", but, that happens frequently enough and I dunno.

Labeling things stupid just means you have less tools to work with when a stupid thing might actually be the more smart thing to work with. Doesn't mean you won't make mistakes. As far as intelligence is concerned, I'm not sure any human is intelligent enough to be it while knowing what it is.

It's hard to make time symmetry (and thus conservation of energy) "disappear", though.

Energy is not conserved in general relativity in the general case due to the expansion of the universe.

Physicists have already shown that Time symmetry isn't absolute.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yArprk0q9eE

We already know that conservation of energy isn't absolute. It is, however, a very powerful analysis tool, just as Euclidian geometry is a very powerful powerful analysis tool. It's very accurate on certain scales, however, that's not how the universe works if you look closely enough.

There probably isn't a plain time symmetry, but maybe there is CPT symmetry. Lucky 10000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPT_symmetry

He's talking about time-translation symmetry, not time-reversal symmetry, which is the T in CPT.

Good point!

A quick check makes me think that one has fallen quite recently(?): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.2539v2.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_translation_symmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal

Edit: Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/52has4/what_is_...

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.08001v4.pdf

Periodic, discrete symmetry holds, continuous is toast. Interesting.. Maybe there should be a rule of thumb (XKCD?) that says for any intuition one may hold, some researcher somewhere is, at ``this'' moment (in some measuring system) constructing a contrived situation that will break it via some contrivance that is strange in inverse proportion to the homeliness of the intuition? ....And some talky-site-poster (me in this case) is preparing to make it yak about it?

These don't break fundamental time translation symmetry, anymore than regular crystals break fundamental space translation symmetry (which is equivalent to conservation of momentum). The fundamental versions of these symmetries are that the laws of physics are unchanged under such changes.

These are merely systems such that the system itself lacks such a symmetry. This will indeed allow a change in the "effective" laws of physics (like electrons having different effective mass in metals or semiconductors than in free space, and quantized momenta), and give something interacting with the system the illusion that energy or momentum is not conserved. But this is only an illusion: momentum and energy of something interacting with the system are exchanged with the system.

This shouldn't be mysterious though -- a time changing potential already didn't preserve the energy of what it's interacting with, and a crystal can absorb momentum as a whole without any local disturbances that could be seen by a particle in it (e.g. Mossbauer effect). But the upshot is that what counts as a symmetry depends on what's fixed under your analysis vs what's part of the state space.

Thanks for the details and big picture. Very nicely put.

There may as well be no territory, the only thing relevant is the map and how it reacts to probing.

the only thing relevant is the map and how it reacts to probing

Sounds like Postmodernism to me. If you think it's not, then let me point out that you can just substitute "text" for "map" and you're pretty much there.

There must be something underlying the maps, because so many of those maps have turned out to be wildly wrong, completely barking up the wrong tree. It's not even that they didn't answer the questions correctly -- they were so wrong, they were asking nonsense questions in the first place.

There is a nice little allegory by Raymond Smullyan, where some ancient philosophers are debating what keeps the world from "falling down." I think it's in "5000 BC," and is the story by that name.

https://www.amazon.ca/5000-B-C-Other-Philosophical-Fantasies...

Scientific maps are wrong when they are shown to be inconsistent or incomplete. Of course people can make mistakes.

I was responding to, "There may as well be no territory, the only thing relevant is the map and how it reacts to probing."

If there are only maps, then when map A is wrong, I can just make my own map B for which map A is a good map. In that case, no map is falsifiable, and all maps are equally valid. It's Postmodernism!

> As far as we know, conservation laws are not baked into reality.

I think that's going too far. As far as we know, the symmetries could be baked into reality. And, via Noether's Theorem, so therefore are the conservation laws.

> I think that's going too far. As far as we know, the symmetries could be baked into reality.

Are you aware that the symmetries have been falling and that physicists been retreating? First, parity symmetry fell in 1956, resulting in a retreat to CP symmetry, which also fell. Now we're to CPT symmetry, which implies that there is no time symmetry, which in turn has been verified by physicists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yArprk0q9eE

Well, it implies that charge symmetry, parity symmetry, and time-reversal symmetry are different aspects of the same thing. I'm not sure that's quite "falling", though.

It is falling. The old theory was that these were 3 fundamental facts in the universe. The modern theory is that there is 1 fundamental "triangular" fact, not derivable from simpler facts. That makes the Universe more fundamentally complicated than previously thought.

And furthermore, it's not simply that any given random kind of particle is either "Yes or "No" on each of the 3 corners, while constrained to be "Yes" on the combination. There is a strong bias toward Yes in all three points -- which is even more asymmetry than was previously thought possible. (A fact that samples at 100% true or 50% true is far more symmetric than sampling at 98% true -- the bias needs a deeper explanation, or more fundamental parameters of the universe)

You just admitted that charge symmetry, parity symmetry, and time-reversal symmetry are incomplete. I'm quite sure that the old mental models which held those to be absolute did "fall."

You seem to want to play "gotcha" games with my wording. I admitted far less than you seem to want to make my words say. And if you're going to try to manipulate what I said to make it fit the axe you're trying to grind, then I'm done talking to you.

You seem to want to play "gotcha" games with my wording.

It's not a game. You ironically committed the Map/Territory error, in a Map/Terriotry discussion. A condition of underlying reality where a given symmetry exists, or only appears to exist, can't fall. It either is or isn't. But the mental model -- the Map -- using symmetry can indeed be shown to be false and fall.

And if you're going to try to manipulate what I said to make it fit the axe you're trying to grind, then I'm done talking to you.

I did no such manipulation. I bet you can't substantiate that with reasoning and quotes. In any case, I am well satisfied to let 3rd parties read and decide for themselves.

(Ironic in the Alanis Morrisette sense, not the hipster sense.)

Those are different symmetries.