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Perplexed comments on Variable Question Fallacies - Less Wrong
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Comments (32)
I believe you missed my point entirely.
I was simply discribing why Hunga Huntergatherer might not have realized that it is the earth that goes round the sun.
Hunga's map is still extremely useful, particularly for getting your bearings. The old saying "the sun rises in the east and sets in the west" is still useful even though it is the earth spinning to create the effect rather than the sun actually moving around the earth (which is implied in the saying).
It's worth noting that Hunga's map is included in Amara's map, not eliminated by it. Albert's map also includes Barry's map, just like Einstein's map of gravity includes Newton's map.
They're all still just maps though, and should be treated as such.
It's maps all the way down.
The map is not the territory.
True, but what you imagine to be territory may just be another layer of maps.
If you need to think that there is a territory down there somewhere in order to keep from drowning in relativism, then go ahead and think that. But be careful not to imagine that you have actually seen the territory. You haven't. All you have access to (by way of science) are some mighty fine maps.
The map is not the territory, and the territory is not the map. My hypotheses about it might be wrong, but the territory is still the territory. How would a map determine my experimental observations?
That is a great quote from The Simple Truth. And what is more, it is perfectly responsive to what I was trying to say. Thank you.
As you may already know, Eliezer quoted that passage in Quantum Non-realism because QM makes it necessary to modify that argument slightly. The trouble is that in QM, your experimental results are no longer "determined" or at least not in the same sense. Oh, I agree with the basic message of that Quantum Non-realism posting that QM creates no problems for realism that MWI and a little fine print can't fix. But I think that the fact that QM forced a change to the argument does suggest that there may be even more changes needed down the road.
If you want to call the whatever-it-is 'reality', that is fine with me. The whatever-it-is is definitely different from the best map that you know of. But it is possible, is it not, that the whatever-it-is is the whole tower of maps - including the maps you know of and the maps you don't even imagine yet.
A map doesn't determine observations. A whole tower of maps determines observations (modulo the necessary QM/MWI fine print). In much the same way that map-towers determine theoretical predictions. Maps, predictions, and observations are all made out of the same kind of 'stuff'. There is nothing mysterious about it. You only get into trouble if you somehow begin to imagine that experimental observations are somehow built out of some kind of 'reality stuff' which is ontologically different from map-tower stuff. They are not. Observations are very theory-laden.
Logical positivism had all this stuff covered fairly satisfactorily by 1970 or so (IMHO) but then somehow there was a change in the Zeitgeist and everyone agreed that positivism is dead. I am a contrarian who thinks something like it can be revived - along with a number of more academically serious anti-realist philosophers working in philosophy of science.
Is there any real evidence of this? I hear interesting conjecture but not one bit of evidence.
You know the saying, big claims require big evidence. These are very big claims.
Not to my mind. In fact, I'm not sure they are 'claims' at all. I'm suggesting a different way of looking at things - a way which has advantages and disadvantages. I think the advantages dominate. Your mileage may differ.
If I did make claims, it was in the last paragraph where I suggested that anti-realism is both a respectable and a populated position in ontology and philosophy of science. The wikipedia article should provide links to sufficient evidence to back those claims.
The Wikipedia article wasn't all that helpful other than to give a better idea of what the term means.
There seem to be two major types of anti-realism - one seems to be the idea that nothing is objectively real, and the other that no matter how much indirect evidence we have we can never know what is objectively real.
The first position doesn't seem to be useful for much of anything (to me, anyway), and the second seems to be pretty close to what "the map is not the territory" is all about, with the claim that the map well never be able to perfectly reflect the territory.
Since you like to argue about the map/territory, I can only assume you believe nothing is objectively real.
Am I misunderstanding you?
It would probably be more productive to assume that I have seen no evidence that anything is objectively real, and that I have noticed no particular advantage to forming a belief on the subject in the absence of evidence.
And since I don't expect to see or hear any evidence on the question any time soon, I follow Occam's advice and try to think of how I can live without that belief in the real existence of something called 'territory'.
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
How does one make maps into a tower? What would such a tower of maps look like? How is this different from a "territory" containing a tower of maps?
I am taking the word 'map' to mean pretty much the same as what philosophers of science refer to as 'theories'. And 'territory' to mean 'reality'. So by a 'tower' of maps, I mean a series of theories, each reducing to a 'lower-level' theory. For example, one map might be a theory of infinitely divisible material bodies with state properties like density, temperature, and elasticity. At the next level down in the tower of maps, we might have an atomic theory with 92 elements. Next a theory in which the elementary particles include electrons, neutrons, and protons. Next down, we have the standard model with QCD. Then some super-symmetric Kaluza-Klein GUT. Etc.
Is there a base-level theory ('map') that reduces to an underlying 'reality', rather than to a lower-level map? I suppose we will never know - can never know - whether such a reality exists and what it 'looks like'. Certainly, we never know whether our current lowest-level map is the final one.
The thing that strikes me is that a 'reduction' is really a relation (a morphism?) between maps - an association between the entities and observables at one level with those at the next level down. In doing a reduction, we are constructing in our minds a relation or morphism between maps which also exist in our minds. I am simply saying that if you postulate a new kind of thing - a 'reality' or 'territory' that exists outside our minds, you may solve some philosophical puzzles, but you create others. For one thing, we need to have two kinds of reduction in our epistemology - one taking maps to territories, and one taking maps to maps. I say, "Why bother! Let's follow Occam's advice and stick to maps rather than adding this new entity - the 'territory' - without necessity."
I hope that explanation helped.