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”
Well, for me, 99% is not good enough. I want 100% compatibility, not just with what I observe in my day-to-day life, but with all empirical evidence ever gathered and recorded by humanity.
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…
You’re explaining the process you believe leads to people employing Occam’s razor. That doesn’t justify the usage of the razor. This is basically an is/ought thing. You describing an “is” (the process that causes it) doesn’t get you to an “ought” (that the razor should be logically employed in all cases).
Also, as I said, one can mount a strong argument against Occam’s razor in this case.
Particularly, special relativity without assuming an absolute rest frame is not logically compatible with non-local effects, yet quantum mechanics is non-local. The physicists Frauchiger and Renner directly proved in a paper published in Nature Communications that this leads to a time-paradox without specifying an absolute time-ordering of events.
Well, they argued there are two other ways to avoid the time-paradox as well. One is to just claim quantum mechanics is wrong, which I don’t think it’s wrong. The other is to posit that there is a multiverse, because maybe two observers describe the same system in contradictory and logically incompatible ways because they are actually describing two different branches of the multiverse.
However, Jeffrey Bub in his paper “Two Dogmas’ Redux” shows mathematically that this doesn’t work, because the paradox can be proved to be completely confined to a single branch of the wavefunction, so it cannot be resolved by considering higher branches. While Frauchiger and Renner posit that the multiverse may solve the problem in their paper (and indeed say this in many interviews), Bub proved they are wrong, and it is still inconsistent.
The only logically consistent conclusion, then, is that there is an absolute time-ordering.
When I said I could mount a strong argument against it, my point was not merely that I’d throw out Occam’s razor in this case. If I offer no meaningful alternative, then it doesn’t really strengthen my case that one can mount a reasonable defense.
But my point is stronger than that. I am pitting two different assumptions against one another: (1) Occam’s razor, and (2) the view that your worldview should be logically consistent. I am pointing out that applying #1 in this case violates #2, and that I believe #2 is more important here.
Can I prove it’s more important? No, but I think I could convince a lot of people who were willing to listen.
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.
Well, for me, 99% is not good enough. I want 100% compatibility, not just with what I observe in my day-to-day life, but with all empirical evidence ever gathered and recorded by humanity.
You’re explaining the process you believe leads to people employing Occam’s razor. That doesn’t justify the usage of the razor. This is basically an is/ought thing. You describing an “is” (the process that causes it) doesn’t get you to an “ought” (that the razor should be logically employed in all cases).
Also, as I said, one can mount a strong argument against Occam’s razor in this case.
Particularly, special relativity without assuming an absolute rest frame is not logically compatible with non-local effects, yet quantum mechanics is non-local. The physicists Frauchiger and Renner directly proved in a paper published in Nature Communications that this leads to a time-paradox without specifying an absolute time-ordering of events.
Well, they argued there are two other ways to avoid the time-paradox as well. One is to just claim quantum mechanics is wrong, which I don’t think it’s wrong. The other is to posit that there is a multiverse, because maybe two observers describe the same system in contradictory and logically incompatible ways because they are actually describing two different branches of the multiverse.
However, Jeffrey Bub in his paper “Two Dogmas’ Redux” shows mathematically that this doesn’t work, because the paradox can be proved to be completely confined to a single branch of the wavefunction, so it cannot be resolved by considering higher branches. While Frauchiger and Renner posit that the multiverse may solve the problem in their paper (and indeed say this in many interviews), Bub proved they are wrong, and it is still inconsistent.
The only logically consistent conclusion, then, is that there is an absolute time-ordering.
When I said I could mount a strong argument against it, my point was not merely that I’d throw out Occam’s razor in this case. If I offer no meaningful alternative, then it doesn’t really strengthen my case that one can mount a reasonable defense.
But my point is stronger than that. I am pitting two different assumptions against one another: (1) Occam’s razor, and (2) the view that your worldview should be logically consistent. I am pointing out that applying #1 in this case violates #2, and that I believe #2 is more important here.
Can I prove it’s more important? No, but I think I could convince a lot of people who were willing to listen.
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.
Have you taken into consideration that you are just dumb as rocks?
what do you mean like that? like a computer chip?