PhilGoetz comments on Reality is weirdly normal - Less Wrong
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Comments (81)
Uh, most of these are demonstrably false, so the koan does not seem overly useful.
The list of rules has been growing awfully quick, and there is no guarantee that it is finite. Here is the latest list of the basic rules, already quite compressed. And it does not even describe any macroscopic phenomena, which have their own rules, some more ad hoc than others. Thus there is no indication that "the territory" can be fully described by a map with "a short list of simple rules", though some subsets of it certainly can.
If you think that the above is simple, I shudder to think what you consider complex.
"exceptionless rules" is either vacuous or false. We observe plenty of phenomena we don't know the rules for. If the koan means that "but the rules are still there even for these exceptions, we just don't have them on the map yet", this meta-model seems to contradict 1.
Uniformity across space and time does seem to apply, roughly, to the observed universe, but plenty of models in the modern high-energy physics suggest that the laws and values we observe and deduce might be an accident of some local false vacuum state, or just one of many options in the chaotically inflating multiverse.
Local determinism is only saved in QM by postulating that "everything possible happens, even if we can never observe it", and even this locality is severely challenged by the EPR/Bell. Even if "the cosmos" were deterministic, it is still not necessarily predictable, both due to chaotic effects and due to potential inherent Knightean uncertainty related to the uninteracted parts of the Big Bang.
Anyway, I agree that the "weird rules" are there first to explain the (weird and non-weird) observations, but I disagree with the narrow interpretation in the wiki
The purpose of the rules is actually to change reality, at least as we perceive it. While we are not (yet) able to change some "fundamental" laws, we certainly affect reality by learning (and changing) some of the others.
That doesn't appear to be a list, or a rule, or anything meaningful, since it has no equality or inequality symbols.
Your main point seem basically correct. I think RobbBB is trying to get at something meaningful, but is heading in the wrong direction with his demand for definitive, exceptionless, deterministic rules. It's all about information, and information accommodates exceptions and non-determinism.
Yeah, sorry, this is just the Lagrangian of the Standard Model of particle physics, it's used to calculate probability amplitudes. That's where you get the equal sign.