this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
263 points (90.7% liked)
memes
22623 readers
3187 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
no, i don't think that the "common man’s position has to be abandoned". In fact, i think that people should be allowed to believe that the earth is flat. 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" (i.e. navigates the person through their daily lifes). You only need to know that the earth is a globe if you're doing international trade, geopolitics, or spaceflight. For every other application, it does not matter.
You are right here.
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, programming. Now, if you want to write software, you have to keep to some meaningful physical constraints, such as: Be simple, don't waste computing resources, be energy-efficient, make the code run fast. These circumstances urge you to use the simplest possible model (of how the physical world works) that works for your practical applications.
So, occam's razor really comes from the urge to optimize the software that runs in our brains for simplicity and speed. It does not come for no reason. And that is why indeed, yes, occam's razor follows from being pragmatic.
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.
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.)
Have you taken into consideration that you are just dumb as rocks?
what do you mean like that? like a computer chip?
No, literally rocks