plinky [he/him]

  • 562 Posts
  • 2.81K Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 8th, 2022

help-circle












  • Why? World doesn’t bend to perceptions, it simply is, but processes, those we observe, and there positive feedback loops would be our friendo not containing contradictions for this silly game.

    This side of black hole formation (and even there, for outside observer, the limits are in the possible metric deformation and resulting black hole is a resolution, hiding singularity from us forever (maybe, pending evaporation), big bang and universe evolution, and maybe some quantum effect im missing, we don’t have those, be it due to conservation of energy or whatever. Might just be they exist, then we’ll have to construct them, or they are outside of perceptions, making their existence trivial from science perspective (you can make a lot of predictions of things which cannot ever be observed, wouldn’t be science tho).

    Laws and equations don’t describe the underlying thing, they describe a model which sufficiently matches observations and makes predictions, which, core leap in philosophy of science we assume, are better matched to reality. You can always say reality is completely unknowable, but then - why science works, what changes with better model? Some outside creature making fun of us?


  • As there are no positive feedback loop systems, everything is dialectical (acting agent or process with a negative feedback loop is synthesized into describing system as a whole, both the actor and the limit, providing new holistic view)

    But no, dialectics is about processes, not facts, and thus in science a sane way for dialectics is theory developments among community (purely socially idealistic theory of science, if we take hegelian) or searching for limits of something (where “antithesis” starts to play a role), even in thought experiments, to find the counteracting forces or logic. Particle moving in empty space is not, per se, a process, in its own frame it’s stationary and without any reference you can’t even determine if it’s moving. not everything is useful to be thought about as a system or process, sometimes models do just fine job of describing stuff

    Like say a light reflection, without thinking too much about how it works you can perfectly well construct a shitty telescope, just knowing that angle of incidence and angle of reflection are equal. But then you can start thinking about process of reflection, would it work with 1 atom thin mirror (no), would it work with very thin stripes of metal (oops, got a rainbow), would it work with non metal (yes, but weird stuff with polarization), would it work with light intensity bigger than heat dissipation (also no), the process of reflection contains within it the limits of what you can do, but most of the time you don’t care about them, and simple law gives you enough info (but doesn’t describe those limits, and thus you construct a new law or model when you run into them, meanwhile underlying process was always the same)

    just as well you can construct materialistic social dialectics of science, for example you can’t make a looking glass without material advances in glass making and polishing stuff by some nerds in venice. you can invent most beautiful theories of light imaginable in ancient egypt, won’t bring you any closer to making lasers. science and applied engineering/materials exist in very tight (dialectical) relationships, you invent new stuff to investigate something, than new stuff is used somewhere else to discover something else, they coexist and push each other and limit each other