= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Luke_A_Somers comments on Scott Aaronson's cautious optimism for the MWI - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (70)
This is one of those times it really is useful to pull out definitions... and for any reasonable definition of 'territory' and 'map', that's self-evidently true. Our models, even if correct, are underdetermined to the point that they cannot completely explain everything. Therefore, there's something else. That's what we call the 'territory'.
Whether the territory is vastly different from our models or simply more detailed, they do not coincide. And on the word 'independent' - well, the territory contains the map, so there's no short-circuit if the territory has map dependence.
Again, that's the realist approach. The minimum one can state is much less certain than that: all we know for certain is that carefully repeated experiments produce expected results. Period. Full stop. Why they produce expected results (e.g. because there is "something else" that you want to call the territory) is already a model. It's a better model than, say, Boltzmann brains, but it is still a model. The instrumental approach is to consider all models giving the same predictions isomorphic, and, in particular, all experimentally indistinguishable territories isomorphic.
It's on par with cogito, ergo sum. I don't know everything, therefore something else exists. I don't feel obliged to cater to people who are unwilling to go along with this.
No obligation on your part was implied. I only suggested tabooing the word "exist" and replacing it with what you mean by it. I bet that you will end up either with an equivalent term, or with something perception-related. So your choice is limited to postulating existence, including the existence of something that isn't your thoughts (the definition of realism), or using it as as a synonym for territory in the map-territory model created by those thoughts. There are fewer assumptions in the latter, and nothing of interest is lost.