But if you want to call out individuals for being arrogant or whatever (as your characterizations #1 and #3 strike me), then just do it. This generalizing seems silly.

Why can’t I generalize something that is general? It is basically everyone here.

Science is supposed to be a humbling enterprise, because nothing humbles us more than the power and mystery of nature itself. If you need to knock someone down a peg, that’s fine, and part of a long tradition. If they have the evidence to back up their claims or explanation, burden is on them to show it.

Different topic. The issue here is explicitly not on the empirical sciences, but on the philosophy of science.

I beg of you people to stop misrepresenting something I have stated a dozen times over and over again. The issue here is not a concern over the empirical predictions or even the mathematics of any current scientific theory.

The issue is that people falsely equate their specific metaphysical interpretation of the theory as a necessary and unambiguous consequence of the mathematics. But it is not, these are separate topics entirely. The philosophy of science is not the same as the physical sciences.

For example, there is no consensus on how to interpret quantum mechanics among academics, so obviously the interpretation cannot be necessitated from the math or else everyone would agree on the interpretation because everyone agrees upon the math. But if I were to post a disagreement about an interpretation, like saying I don’t believe particles are literally in two places at once, I’d be flamed as a “science denier” here, even though this is a disagreement over how to interpret the mathematics and not the mathematics itself, and so it involves no denial of any of the empirical results.

No one here can have a genuine discussion, I’ve yet to find one person willing to admit that it is not “science denialism” and “crackpottery” and “posting my own crackpot theory that if you think it’s so good you should submit it to a journal” when I literally just want to discuss interpretations of existing theories and not a new theory.

Just look at this post: https://lemmy.world/post/51802501/25778258

I asked people there just to admit that wanting to discuss interpretations of existing theories based upon proposals in the published academic literature and the veracity of those proposals is not inherent crackpottery, and I have received 20 downvotes and not one person agreeing that it is not crackpottery. When that post gets one person who agrees to those basic points then I’ll agree it’s not everyone.

But, until then, yes, I can generalize, because it is generally everyone.

I don’t care to hear your rationalization of this behavior. If you try to rationalize that, then you just admit you are not interested in a discussion either, and so I will not follow up.

Response#1

Response#1, implying I’m a crackpot with “obviously deserved publication” implying this was all just some “crazy idea” out of my head when the post was about already published papers in prestigious journals, including Nature Communications, that I wanted to discuss. I’ve muted a lot of people today.

Response#1

Response#1

Response#3

Response#2

Interesting how you are so confident that this didn’t occur, yet you don’t even know what I’m referring to, meaning you just felt the need to come here and attack me to farm upvotes… yes this website is literally just reddit 2.0. Just wait for the downvotes on this post. You will see not 1 upvote besides the default one, because there is not 1 person on this community who can admit that posting for no other reason than to attack someone’s character is not bad behavior.

Response#1

Response#1

Okay then say it. Prove it right now. Admit to these things in your response to me:

1. The mathematics of a theory does not necessitate the philosophical interpretation of it. (good discussion on this topic)
2. The mathematics are compatible with other interpretations. (good discussion on other ways of interpreting SR specifically; a poll showing that there is no consensus on how to interpret QM)
3. I am not a science denier “know-it-all” for being convinced by a few mathematical and logical arguments in the literature that a different way of interpreting it is more logically consistent. (papers such as this one and this one and this one and this one; I’d also recommend checking out this article for a brief overview)

Notice that I am not asking you to agree with my interpretation. Only that you drop the talking point that I am somehow a “know-it-all” or a “science denier” for holding it, just because I find the arguments in these papers convincing.

If you don’t find them convincing, all I am asking is you to stop hurling personal attacks and claiming I am pushing some crackpot theory or that I “don’t want to take criticism” (even though literally all I’ve been begging for is criticism, but all I get in response are personal attacks!), and actually show where you think these papers make an error and where the reasoning is wrong so you can change my mind.

If you genuinely don’t think this way then it should not be hard for you to just respond saying you agree to those three points.

Update#1: Supposedly no one thinks this way, yet I’ve received 5 downvotes and yet not one person agreeing to these three baseline points. I’ll just keep patiently waiting until it eventually happens… any day now… You all can happily prove you guys don’t think this way with a simple response of “I agree”. I’m sure it’ll happen if I just keep waiting patiently enough…

Update#2: Up to 10 now. Supposedly no one thinks this way, yet not 1 person can agree to these three points.

So then why does everyone here universally agree that I need to have faith in “the field” and am arrogant if I don’t believe in a particular philosophy that has no empirical evidence to support it just because a lot of people in “the field” do? How is that not faith?

Mathematics gives you empirical predictions, and so you only change the empirical predictions if you change the mathematics. But the same body of mathematics can be interpreted in various different ways. If we want to think about what the mathematics implies about reality, we have to apply a layer of philosophical interpretation, in order to comment on how to think about the mathematics.

But the same body of mathematics can be thought about in multiple different ways, and since the body of mathematics itself is not changing, then the empirical predictions do not change, so you cannot resolve the disagreement empirically.

The facts of physics do not oblige us to accept one philosophy rather than the other.

— John Bell, “How to Teach Special Relativity”

It seems to me then that the only position is to resolve it logically. You need to make an argument about how to think about it. Even if you are a pure positivist who just says “shut up and calculate,” that’s still a philosophical stance on how to think about the mathematics and it still needs a justification. Sure, it’s not an empirical justification, but you should still be able to give reasons as to why you believe what you do, and show it is logically consistent.

When I say I’m not convinced that the dominant stance of SR (which philosophically interprets what is directly measured by rods and clocks is directly equivalent to ontological space and ontological time) is actually that logically consistent, so I make an argument as to why a different way of thinking about the same mathematics is more logically consistent, I am told by just about everyone here that I need to just shut up and have faith in “the field” and believe the dominant philosophy (which, again, interprets what is directly measured by rods and clocks is directly equivalent to ontological space and ontological time), or else I’m accused of being “arrogant” and a “know-it-all.”

That is the overwhelmingly dominant consensus of just about everyone who has replied and downvoted this post, that I must have faith in the dominant philosophical paradigm, even though no empirical evidence can establish it.

Even if you truly are a complete pragmatist, well, your opinion is arguably only popular in QM. There is a lot of “shut up and calculate” in QM, but not much for interpretations of SR. Most everyone agrees with a single interpretation, and so you would also be “disagreeing with the field,” and not just myself, so that attack on me popular in this thread seems to be rather bizarre.

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.

I’m only saying the language we use to describe reality is socially constructed and “fuzzy.”

I am a direct realist, I believe you can perceive reality directly for what it really is. You just cannot capture what it really is in words. My words describing my dog will always be “fuzzy.” But if I just go look at my dog and hug my dog and don’t think words at all, nothing about that is fuzzy.

The raw perceptions are real, and each perception really is equivalent to the totality of all that there is. That may seem weird to say, because if I cannot see you right now, then does that mean you don’t exist? No, I can see you right now, just not in fine detail. Your body has mass, and that mass has a gravitational pull, and as you move, as your heart beats, it sends out gravitational waves. These are too subtle for me to notice but technically they do make an impression on me as well as slightly move everything around me, and if somehow I could notice, collect, and process all of that information, I could derive where you are purely from what is right in front of me right now.

But, in practice, I can’t do that. When we change vantage points, we don’t go from black-and-white experiencing things to not experiencing things. It’s an infinite gradation, where we go from seeing things with high fidelity to low fidelity. Things we see with high fidelity are easy to notice, process, contemplate, etc. But things we see with low fidelity are much more difficult to notice. But noticing something is not the same as not seeing it. If I watch a film and don’t pay attention at all to the background characters, so if you later ask me what was the color of the shirt of one of the background characters, and I report I did not know, that doesn’t prove I did not see it, I just didn’t pay attention to it. Even the stuff in front of me that is too subtle to pick out and notice, I am still seeing it, in the sense that, mathematically, it really does make a slight different on the impression on my virtual cortex.

In everything experience, we really do see all of reality at once. We just don’t see it all in equal levels of fidelity, and changing vantage points changes only the fidelity of what we are perceiving, to make certain things easier to notice. But every perception implicates the whole.

That is a point of view that is basically impossible for most modern philosophers to understand because they are obsessed with representionalism which falsely conflates experience (reality) with consciousness (awareness), which are entirely different things. They treat everything we experience as part of consciousness, but since reality is obviously independent of consciousness, then that makes reality itself independent of experience, and if you can’t experience it, then how can you even know it exists? This then devolves into idealism, solipsism, the hard problem, the mind-body problem, etc.

But I reject the whole framework because experience and consciousness are not the same thing. Experience is just direct reality for what it really is, in its full totality. It does not enter consciousness unless I become aware of it and start thinking about it.

They’re also tasty.

What I am disagreeing with is that the “physical worldview” even comes entirely from the empirical evidence to begin with. The empirical evidence gives you a body of mathematics, but you have to apply another layer of philosophical interpretation on top of the mathematics to get to a “physical worldview.”

I thus am arguing that the same body of mathematics, and thus empirical evidence, without any modification at all, is compatible with multiple “physical worldviews,” i.e. different “ways of thinking about it,” and I am arguing that my way of thinking about SR is actually more logically consistent than the standard way.

Energy being conserved is not just practically wrong but empirically wrong, as you said yourself, on large scales you can observe it being wrong and energy conservation failing. I am explicitly talking about different ways of viewing the same body of mathematics where there is no empirical method to distinguish between the two interpretations.

A simple example is fields. Most physicists believe the mathematics of fields, involving the assignment of a set of numbers to every point in space, corresponds to an ontological field, whereby they imagine an invisible object piloting particles around. They always speak of the fields as objects in the world that “cause” things to do something.

But we could equally argue that the mathematics of fields is just a way of describing the dispositions of particles. That is to say, the particles just move on their own. There is no invisible entity piloting them around, but this is not to deny the mathematics of fields, but rather, to interpret the mathematics of fields as a way of describing the dispositions of particles.

The mathematics of fields and the ontology of fields are not the same thing and the former doesn’t necessarily imply the latter. And so we can interpret the same body of mathematics, and thus empirical evidence, without denying the mathematics of fields at all, but only denying the ontology of fields. This would not lead to any new predictions, but it would give you a different way of “thinking about” the same body mathematics.

(I didn’t downvote you FYI. The other person did.)

One interesting thing I’ve noticed in all the replies here is how quickly you people fall back to pure positivist utilitarianism.

You insist I should believe your personal, non-empirical metaphysical interpretation of the mathematics underlying the theory, i.e. your own way of how to “think about” the math, but when I point out that the unmodified math is compatible with different ways of thinking about it, you suddenly flip-flop to pure positivist utilitarians.

Suddenly, we shouldn’t be interpreting the math on a philosophical level at all, we should just be concerned with what is “empirical” and “falsifiable” and stop philosophizing over questions of “what if real.”

You all want to have your cake and eat it too: you want to insist that I am wrong for not agreeing with the dominant philosophical interpretation of SR, but also, whenever I point out there are alternative ways to think about the same math, you switch to a positivist pragmatist utilitarian so that you can dismiss it unless it makes different empirical predictions (and thus changes the math) from standard SR.

Of course, if you were true pragmatists, then you wouldn’t be upset about me not agreeing with the dominant philosophical interpretation of the mathematics underlying SR to begin with. If you truly believed in “shut up and calculate,” you’d shut up and calculate, rather than being so defensive over a person believing in a different way of thinking about the same body of mathematics without modification.

It’s just a very convenient way of pushing a particular philosophy but then swapping to a different standard when it is criticized so that you then don’t have to defend it.

Anyways, I’m not going to reply to you further than once if your reply is just a personal attack that doesn’t address the substance of the argument. I’m not particularly interested in the kind of debate pervertry that people here are obsessed with. If your reply does not address my point and is just a hostile attack on my character, I’ll give one response and that’s it, you will then be added to my muted list.

In simple terms, what I am saying is that:

1. Despite common misconception, the No-Communication Theorem doesn’t rule out non-locality, but only communicable non-local effects, meanings those you can directly observe and build a superluminal telephone. That’s impossible, but it doesn’t rule out inferred non-local effects which you can infer from the data which aren’t directly observed.
2. The dominant philosophical interpretation of the mathematics underlying special relativity is fundamentally incompatible with anything non-local because it leads to time-paradoxes, and Bell’s theorem ultimately very indirectly through inference proves such time-paradox must exist.
3. The paper by Frauchiger and Renner proves a specific case of this, where two observers make a measurement at time t+1 to make an inference about the unmeasured system at time t, and that two observers come to entirely contradictory and mutually incompatible conclusions.
4. Since both observers cannot be logically correct at the same time, one must be right and one must be wrong, but saying who is right or wrong depends upon the time-ordering of two space-like separated events, so to assume one person is right and one person is wrong, you must assume that there exists an absolute time-ordering.

Since the state at time t is not observed to begin with, then knowing who was “correct” doesn’t really matter, so you don’t even need to know what the absolute time-ordering is, i.e. you don’t need to specify a specific absolute rest frame. You just have to assume one exists at all, which then licenses you to assume that a single answer to the question of the particle’s state at time t exists in nature, which resolves the paradox on its own.

And, I have went through the academic literature, there simply are no other solutions even provided other than these three: (1) quantum mechanics is wrong, (2) some complicated philosophical story about why we should not care if a physical theory of nature contains internal contradictions when trying to describe objective reality, or (3) there exists a multiverse.

People insult me for not “trusting the field,” the scientism as you call it, but those are literally the only three other options that “the field” has provided me, and no one in this thread can defend them because they know they are even worse answers to the paradox. Supposedly, they want me to mindlessly trust “the field,” but can’t tell me even which position of “the field” I’m supposed to be mindlessly trusting. There isn’t even a consensus in academia on how to resolve this paradox, so I don’t even know what they want me to be trusting, and nobody can tell me, because the people responding don’t even understand what I am talking about.

Sure, being a pure pragmatist, “shut up and calculate” kind of guy, who only cares about pure practicality and engineering at the end of the day and simply is not bothered by philosophical questions, such a person would find what I say a complete waste of time to discuss.

But then… why not apply that thinking to SR as well? Why not take a “shut up and calculate” approach to SR?

Why do I need to believe a particular philosophical story and a set of metaphysics in how to interpret the mathematics underlying SR?

People seem to do this with QM as well. They will put forward an interpretation that makes little sense, you point out it makes sense, then they fall back to “shut up and calculate.” But why did you put forward and insist upon that interpretation to begin with if you are anti-interpretation?

Just look at the downvotes and replies. People are very upset that I am not agreeing with the standard philosophical interpretation and the standard package of metaphysics that is placed on top of the mathematics, and am merely pointing out that the same mathematics are not only compatible with a different philosophical interpretation, but there is a lot of good reasons to take that other one more seriously as more logically consistent.

But the response I then get from many people actively upset that I dare question the dominant philosophical interpretation is to fall back on pure pragmatism and insist all that matters is what can be “empirically” shown, what is “falsifiable,” and that “science is not a search for truth.”

Sure, but then… why care at all if I interpret the same body of mathematics differently? If it’s not a topic you even care about it shouldn’t bother you.