XPost: comp.ai.philosophy, rec.arts.sf.written   
   From: droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com   
      
   For your reference, records indicate that   
   Simon Laub  wrote:   
      
   Since you’re posting to an AI group rather than a physics group, I’m going   
   to assume you care more about *thinking* about these things from a SF   
   perspective rather than coming to the solution that exactly matches our   
   reality.   
      
   >    According to some physicists there is no   
   > reality beyond what is revealed by an experiment, an observation.   
      
   Only physicists of low intelligence would say that.  The reason scientific   
   progress has been so monumental to the human species is just the opposite:   
   underlying reality has time and time again used “observation” to hide its   
   true nature.  We advance when we discover our observations are   
   fundamentally *wrong*.   
      
   > Indeed, when the science sounds like fiction,   
   > it has been difficult to move on from the science, - and explore and   
   > play with reality in say science fiction. Surely, there must be   
   > some firm ground somewhere in order for us to move forward?   
      
   Speculative fiction can start from anywhere, as long as the story is   
   internally consistent.  Hard science has its place, but a lot can be said   
   about the human condition in worlds built from complete fantasy.  For   
   example, I have stories where time travel and quantum superpositioning   
   are intertwined.  I don’t know if *this* reality works anything like   
   that, but it’s fun to explore *a* reality that works that way.   
      
   And, really, that’s how all scientific theories function.  They model the   
   rules of *a* reality that matches observation.  But all observations are   
   inherently imperfect, and our thinking itself may be mistaken.  The classic   
   problem of AI is the question of whether or not the human mind can possibly   
   be complex enough to understand itself.  The nature of the Universe   
   presents that same paradox.   
      
   >    Rovelli's way out is to tell us that nothing has any properties   
   > at all until it interacts with something else.   
      
   Then what is doing the interacting?  What governs the rules of that   
   interaction?  This is why limiting yourself to what you can observe is not   
   the way to understand the Universe.  Underneath it all is the question of   
   how there can be something instead of nothing.   
      
   I laugh every time I’m watching a movie or TV show and there’s a scene   
   where a person (e.g, a detective) goes to another person’s house and   
   knocks on their door, and the person is *right there* to answer it in a   
   second or two.  What can be said of the “properties” of that sort of   
   universe?  World building is *hard*, and you don’t do yourself any favors   
   if you approach it with the assumption that nothing is happening in that   
   world unless your observer is involved.   
      
   >    For Rovelli truths lies in the idea that everything   
   > exists solely in the way it affects something else.   
   > Just as relations make up the ''I'', in society, culture etc.   
      
   I don’t see how that is insightful.  In computer and other networks, there   
   are nodes and the edges that connect them.  Neither *is* the network, so   
   it’s a mistake to try and reduce it to either one.  Likewise, in physics   
   it is almost certainly a mistake to try to say anything is *just* a   
   particle or wave or field or interaction.  A far more fruitful approach is   
   to poke around for answers to how the network of reality is actually built.   
      
   --   
   "Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."   
   River Tam, Trash, Firefly   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)