Regarding Objective Reality, E₈, and string theory (part I)

[pyesetz]

I should just pack it in and move to Blogspot.  This LiveJournal just isn't very furry.  Who am I kidding?  I don’t wear a fursuit, I rarely write furry stories, and the only fursonal drawing I ever bought got ruined during the move to Canada.  There is no place in this Fandom for “an anthropomorphized Homo erectus pretending to be a cat wearing a dogsuit”.  I never have any drama caused by my packmates’ unmentionably-disgusting fursonal habits.  And Wifey would have a fit if I ever did anything that SomethingAwful.com would consider *typical furry behaviour*.  No-sir-ree-bob, we run a prim & proper household here; there is absolutely no reason for Child Protective Services to impound our geeklets “for their own good”.  Well, yes, we do have open-air piles of corrosive dihydrogen monoxide crystals at our homestead, but that’s the government’s fault.  Why don’t they clean these things?  Get that DHMO off my lawn!  It was only a few weeks ago that a fellow down by Sarnia was enveloped by DHMO crystals and died.  There outta be a law!

So, um, Objective Reality.  As I’ve mentioned previously, I think that Objective Reality actually exists, but is beyond our ken.  We live in a Subjective Reality that corresponds to the real world (more or less, sometimes a lot less) but is always separate from it.  In contradistinction to Plato, who believed that the material world is merely a shadow of the Real World of Ideas, I believe that the objects in the universe are just exactly what they are, but our finite ideas about those objects are mere shadows of the infinite ideas that would truly describe Objective Reality.  Unfortunately for our egos, our ideas about our ideas are also mere shadows of the True meta-ideas about how the universe really works.  And so on, to infinity.  There is just no way to think our way out of our sub-reality and into the real world.

I like this religion because it allows me to dismiss out-of-paw some of the wacky ideas that are floating around the noösphere.  Anyone who thumps his Bible as “the complete Word of God” is obviously deluded, because the complete Word of God must be infinitely long and so cannot be captured by any book of limited pages.  There used to be a lot of well-respected physicists who thought that Newton’s F=ma was Reality, but of course it could only ever have been Approximation.  Today, there are probably some scientists who think that Einstein's F=ma ∕ √1−(v²/c²) is Reality, but we *know* that this too must be Approximation because it is a finite formula with only a few variables.  In Reality, everything in the universe depends on everything else for each of its properties.  For practical purposes we can safely ignore most things most of the time—but occasionally something that we thought could be ignored will turn out to have been critically important, such as the effect of Hurricane Katrina upon President W.’s war plans.  This is the conundrum of our existence: we must approximate because we cannot perceive Objective Reality, but “Reality bites” and so we cannot approximate without risk.

Another nice feature of this religion is that it explains the existence of Magic.  As a professional computer programmer, I could hardly profess my Faith in any clockwork-universe philosophy that rejects Magic.  How then could I explain what it is that I do all day?  Arthur Clark said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, which is sometimes paraphrased as "Magic is technology you don’t understand” (see Zekmalados’ comment here).  To connect this with Objective Reality, I claim that “Magic is useful activity based on approximations of the laws of physics that you don’t happen to know”.  Since the Real laws of physics are infinitely complicated, no one can know all of their useful approximations, so for each person there are things he can do that will be perceived by others as Magic.  With a little practice, you can learn to perceive your own activities as Magic even though you know the physics approximations that make them work.  Do you understand how the “quantum tunnelling” effect works?  You can use a cell phone anyway, but it’s Magic to you!

I’ll admit to a certain vanity in my thoughts about Magic.  I believe that I have more Magic in my right rear dewclaw than you could find in an entire conference room full of Harry Potter fans, but I realize that this belief is Approximation and some Potter fans actually do have the Talent.  Still, it is a useful thought because it helps me to feel superior to the Mundanes.

Regarding E₈ and string theory: Oh dear, this post is too long already.  Maybe I’ll get to those next time.  Meanwhile, here’s a random disconnected link to a certain author’s thoughts on similar subjects.

Comments

Realism

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for the post. FWIW, I agree emphatically with everything you say above. And trust to your computer smarts to link, not to the site as a whole, but precisely to those with the Label "Realism". Your attentive reading encourages me to keep posting.
Incidentally -- we should warn your serious readers, if they do go to the site, *not* to click on the label "humble woodchuck". No-o-o, don't go there! That would be very, very wrong!

-- Dr J

[shiver-raccoon.livejournal.com]

Oh, and here I thought that you were using MathML and that Opera supported it! Cheating with style (sheets), I guess :-)

[pyesetz]

It is unfortunate that (in serif fonts) the √ has a hook at the top which prevents it from merging seamlessly with the overbar.

Rather than "cheating", I would call it "art".  Art is the communication indirectly of that which cannot be said directly.  It is censorship that makes Yosemite Sam funny (the US gov't said he was not allowed to swear, no matter what the provocation).

[gedrean.livejournal.com]

Amusing.

Losing you from LJ would be a disservice indeed.

That said, the subject of the phenomena collectively collected in Magic is always interesting. I know of a group of fellows and ladies, whom without any form of communication know when another of their group is ill, or upset, or angry, or elated. They live a minimum of 1 US State in separation from each other (the closest pair is a distance from Nebraska to Boulder, CO). They say it is a bond, a link, something that was formed over time with practice. I call it magic, and can be convinced no other way, because I cannot in science see any way they could be connected as 3 out of the 5 of them HAVE NEVER MADE PHYSICAL CONTACT WITH ANY OF THE OTHERS (I mean not to shout, but to emphasize)!

For that matter, a central processing unit (CPU) or our microcomputer's processor! It contains within it billions and billions of transistors, yet I cannot fathom how it is they do their job to translate my hooking a USB keyboard at one end, and an Ethernet cable at the other end, to my having this typing fit upon this textbox which expands itself every time I reach another (now growing ridiculously long) line. I mean to say, I can understand how a transistor works, and understand that they must have a mass of logic to figure out, mathematically, what every thing happening must mean, but I cannot in my head connect all that logic to know that this is exactly why pressing this key does this. And I repair and assemble and (according to my degree, though not to my current level of success at it) program these things FOR A LIVING! (Admittedly not a successful one right now).

Also, objective reality. For example, I am in room A. In Room B, I have left an inanimate object whose state shall change, without question, at a precise time (this is significantly different from Schroedinger's Cat, because it is known the state will change). I will not be notified or aware of its state changing other than my knowledge of the time it should change. I do not observe the object, yet I know it still exists, however my mind must imagine myself looking upon it in order to comprehend its existence outside of my personal reality and its change of state. It is incredible to think that, unobserved, it remains in existence.

What if there was a place, let us assume a closed environment, with no observation inside whatsoever (except, theoretically, by a "god" or "godlike" figure, but I digress). In that place is an object, state unchanging, who cares the state. For us to imagine that this object exists WITHOUT imagining that we (or some other) must observe it and its location in this environment to understand its existence... can you imagine that?

Stay here, my not-quite-furry-enough-for-furry friend. There is only so much awesome left on LJ, and to lose you would be disappointing.

[pyesetz]

Thanks for your support!

It is unfortunate that LJ is not what it once was, but nothing lasts forever.

Many scientists confuse "event lacking any known mechanism" with "hoax".  Lots of things happen for which the mechanism is not yet known!

I actually do know a bit about how transistors work together to make CPUs, but I can't build one myself that runs at GHz speeds—that's a "black art" to me.

Are you unable to find work in computer repair these days?

Object permanence is the belief that objects continue to exist even when we cannot see them.  Some scientists believe that very few animals have the mental capacity for such a concept.

[gedrean.livejournal.com]

In replies:

Scientists believe sometimes if they cannot understand it it must be fake. That's ego.

Building a CPU out of transistors is itself a "black art" to me, simply because I could not figure out how all that logic translates... it's amazing.

No I am unable to find work in anything these days - but repair is especially hard.

I sometimes suspect that humans are one of the animals without the true mental capacity for that concept - we can work with the concept, but to wrap our minds around it is devastating sometimes.