Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical? - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 April 2008 07:06AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 April 2008 08:56:45AM 4 points [-]

Scott: Nor can I! Wise Bayes-Master, I was simply trying to follow your own dictum that an inability to imagine something is a fact about us and not the world.

Great NP-Lord, we have to draw the boundary somewhere. I draw the line at imagining that atoms are not made of nucleons, that apples are fundamental, or that electrons have individual identities.

Okay, I realize that's probably a little too extreme... but only a little. I think it's worth distinguishing different degrees of unimaginability; between unimaginable surprising new facts, and unimaginable contradictions to laws you already know. We could find out tomorrow that the fundamental fabric of spacetime is made of spaghetti. That's unimaginable to me, but maybe it's just a limit on my imagination. But to find that charm quarks turn out to obey Newtonian mechanics instead of Special Relativity would blow my mind right out of my skull.