Will_Newsome comments on Were atoms real? - Less Wrong
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Comments (156)
I'm not sure that does much to unpack what scientists were investigating, when they held scientific debates about the reality of atoms.
Nor to explain what we're trying to ask, when we say "is the physical world actually real?" "In what sense does the world exist?". Humans feel like there's a question there; I feel like there's a question there; but I'm confused as to what exactly I'm trying to ask. It would be nice to dissolve the question, so that there's no blank spot left in my head where "is real" or "exists" used to live. As noted in the article, I'm hoping that looking at specific scientific controversies might be a useful warm-up, and might help more than just remembering that the map is not the territory.
Could you expand on why you feel like there's a question there? What does 'physical' mean? (Is it a distinction between your perceptions being the result of a high-resolution computation where other brains or stars or non-observed phenomena are also computed in detail and sent to your brain and a low-resolution computation where lots of computationally expensive details are left out and replaced with just barely imperceptibly simplistic high-level generators? That is, a physical universe would be detailed/expensive, whereas an... er, algorithmically simple/inexpensive universe would be algorithmically simple/inexpensive (speed prior-wise). Or were you thinking of a different distinction?)
For awhile I tried to make a distinction between existingness and realness (everything exists and nothing exists as made clear by ensemble universe theories, but, say, only directed acyclic graphs are real, or only things of decision theoretic significance are real, or what have you), but eventually I felt like I wasn't getting much traction from it. I've had a lot more luck with a distinction between 'right' and 'good'.
What was your motivation for this distinction? Also, can you summarize the progress you made?
In person some time, I've already bitten off more than I can chew with my 'memes are real, dualism is correct' meta-contrarianism elsewhere in the comments. Sorry Anna...
Tangentially, the usual distinction is that 'right' applies to actions and 'good' applies to states of affairs, with some slippage.