All science is modelling. Do you really think that is voltage your multimeter is measuring? Somewhere in your hardware (either explicitly in the software, or implicitly in the circuit design) is a model of how your multimeter is supposed to respond in the presence of a potential difference, something which is again derived from another model, electromagnetism, which is itself dependent on ideas about space and time from contained in special relativity.
All science is done by embedding empirical facts into paradigms which are thought to lend a coherent description of reality. This idea that you can have empirical proof wholly divorced from the framework in which you are doing the investigation is laughable.
Science does not work based solely on empirical facts. Science is embedding and explanation of empirical facts through theory, that is, through models.
Until our rights are restored at the border the TSA and everyone associated with them is guilty until proven innocent of every crime I read about, because I have no way of knowing otherwise. You put on the jack boots I assume you are abusing them.
I think we largely understand each other and where we disagree. You correct that I assume a principle similar to Occam's Razor to arrive at my position (although I wouldn't call it a leap of faith, in classical theology faith requires evidence or argument and represents a supernatural augmentation of these things, this is one of my bare faced assumptions, you almost certainly have your own and you wouldn't discredit faith by labelling them such).
You make a very interesting point about what you describe as the higher order sciences. I would actually concur with most of your assessment, getting at truth in sociology, etc. is hard. I would just apply it to every epistemology, not merely scientific naturalism. That said it isn't that I don't think there are objective truths in sociology or psychology, I just think they are very, very hard to get at.
Why not make more assumptions? Well because one of my assumptions is something like Occam's Razor;).
Anyway, I appreciate the discussion and value you taking the time to make clear your position. I think we have reached as much of an understanding of one another's positions as is likely to occur on a Slashdot post and will allow you the last word if you so desire.
Thanks for considering my reply, your position is interesting.
I think I see what you are saying but I believe I have have an experiential (not scientific, since as you point out science is predicated on some manner of truth) justification for asserting there are answers, the observation that the universe has consistent properties. You would no doubt point out that such a justification is subjective. You would be right. This is the crux of the matter. I believe that we are using subjective methods and processes to determine objective properties of the universe. The definition of science is subjective, the properties of nature it seeks to uncover are objective.
People can do anything and call it science. They can reject logical absolutes. They can assert there is no such thing as truth (in the sense either of us mean this word here, I'm going to start being sloppy with this word again now since I think you know what I mean and typing "the consistent nature reality" is just adding words at this point). This is not merely a problem with science, it is a problem with any epistemology.
Furthermore, my perspective is somewhat played out in the evolution of science and its history. Revolutions in the scientific epistemology like those spawned by Popper, Quine and Kuhn fundamentally changed in some regard the consensus idea of what the standard notion of science is. The scenario you suggest would be the case under my world view is precisely the one we have observed.
Science is subjective, because every epistemology is subjective, at least in the sense we are using the phrase here. Properties of nature can be objective and we can use subjective methods like science to provide arguments for the objective truth of those properties. Scientific reality is objective only in the sense that it tries to get at objective truths, not because the definition of the epistemology is objective.
With that said you and I can agree certain things about how we define science. We can agree that the universe appears to have certain, consistent properties and devise an epistemology which allows us to determine the nature of those properties. We would probably come up with very similar methods. We can agree there are answers to questions given our shared experience and assumptions. But that is all we, as subjective beings can do. You seem to think this makes our claims about objective properties of reality subjective, it does not. It simply make our means of determining the truth value of those claims subjective. If our choices of epistemology are poor (in the sense that they run counter to the stated, subjective goal we both share, getting at true statements) then we will arrive at claims which are false, in the sense that they are incongruent with the consistent properties of nature. This, for me at least, is what the word false *means*. This is not a higher ideal, it is our shared subjective ideal. We want to come up with statements which are consistent with our experiences, consistent with a world we perceive as having an objective nature.
The statement "Putting your hand on a hot iron is pleasurable and in no way harmful" is false because if you do it, you experience the opposite. The statement "bachelors are married" is false because nothing I experience in nature is its own negation.
However, this is not as you seem to suggest, a popularity contest. The objective nature of reality is not being denied here. If someone, or some group, decides to propose a version of science which you and I can demonstrate does not further our goal of deriving statements which are consistent with the objective nature of reality then we are under no obligation to accept them. If someone proposes that we should use an exclusively Aristotelian science then we can highlight how this version of science is not as good as the one we agree upon for furthering our own, subjective, goals.
I think a major point we now disagree on is this. The observation that nature has consistent properties (as you put it, that there are ans
Original poster isn't really asking about science but rather all epistemology. They aren't saying science can make sense of god, they are saying science doesn't make sense without god. Any explanation of why transcendental arguments for the existence of god (of which this is one) are false are going to be confusing because the transcendental arguments themselves are confusing. They are the kind of thing most people realise are flawed, but have a hard time picking holes in because the shear mind boggling number of logical fallacies they commit make them hard to unravel.
Science is necessarily subordinate to philosophy and if you think OP's argument is sound then if you value truth you should believe in god, regardless of the fact that science has no ability to analyse the deity he is proposing. If the OP's argument is sound then nothing makes sense without god. I believe my account of why the OP is wrong is reasonable, I will grant you it is hard to understand, but it is wholly reasonable. If you don't have an account, if you cant point out what is wrong with the OP's argument, then his beliefs are more rational than yours.
I think you have missed my point entirely. You have provided no account of what truth is because you have just relabelled the problem of what truth is as 'what god knows'. I am happy to admit I have provided no concrete account of why there appears to be a consistent objective reality (which is the real problem positing the idea of objective truth is trying to solve, since there appear to be objective, universal behaviours in nature). I never tried to provide such an account. It was never a problem for my world view, I'm happy to view the material universe as uncaused because the notion of a caused universe seems logically incoherent to me if by universe you mean 'all material things' and I have no problem with the properties of an uncaused thing being wholly arbitrary.
What I mean by a statement which is more true or less wrong is a statement I label as more true or less wrong. I can provide a definition which pertains to something I believe is an objective property of nature, but you will rightly point out while the property of nature may or may not be objective depending on the quality of my definition, my definition is still going to be subjective. This thing you keep labelling truth is not a thing. Truth is the label we have for the observed fact that there exist statements I can assert about the universe which appears to be consistent with universal properties of the universe. I don't have to provide an account for truth outside of providing an account for the language because the thing we are arguing about is not 'truth'. It is 'why does the universe have consistent properties?'
The best anyone can do is observe that the universe has certain properties which appear to be consistent. Asking why this is the case in the way you are doing so is begging the question because it assumes there is a purpose or reason behind the material universe which necessarily requires a subject to envisage that purpose, and hence implies the existence of a god (a god which as I have mentioned doesn't solve the problem, and cant create this aspect of the universe anyway since 'truth' would have to be a part of this diety entirely arbitrary nature which you then have to provide an account for because you required an account of this non material truth thing).
"The truth that you acknowledge exists only in an abstract model universe of axioms and statements. Is it difficult to imagine that truth might also exist in our universe?"
Yes, it is completely impossible for me to do this because I have never seen, in all my days, a concept made manifest in the sense you are describing here. I can imagine concept of a tree, but I have never seen an actual, physical, imaginary concept of a tree. I can conceive of truth, but there is no thing called truth because truth is a concept, not a thing. Name one concept you have seen made manifest in this sense! The entire idea should appear patently absurd to you by now. Can you show me a picture of a logical absolute, or of an abstract shape, or the feeling of love? Can you show me a picture of (or give me a recording of, or allow me to touch) truth?
Without a standard of truth less wrong is meaningless, this much is true. But we can give an objective definitions if you like (note that 'truth' is still subjective here, in so far as it pertains to an objective, universal property of nature, but we cannot assert that that definition is 'the standard'). But again that isn't the problem. The problem is 'why is does the universe have consistent properties'. This is not a problem for my world view because I infer there is just a material world, and I observe things have properties which are consistent. The question 'why is the universe consistent?' is as meaningless to me as asking 'what is purpose of the universe?' or 'what is objectively morally correct?'. All these questions presuppose there are reasons for things we have no reason to expect reasons for, at least in the sense the question is asked.
Your world view on the other hand has to account for why god's nature has
By your definition those statements which are true are completely arbitrary. God could have 'known' something entirely different. You have offered no account of why the truth is as it it is. As such your account of truth suffers from the exact same 'problem' as naturalism does. Only you have demanded an account of the existence of truth, and proponents of naturalism do not. Waving around the word transcendent doesn't get you out of this quandary either.
Science, as a method, has no purpose. Purposes are necessarily subjective and science as a method is not a subject. Scientists can have a purpose in performing science, because they believe it will result in the acquisition of beliefs that the label true, or at least less wrong.
What you are committing is the fallacy of reification. You have treated truth like it is a real concrete thing. Truth is not a thing. It is a property of statements. You cannot go and get me a 'truth'. I no more have to account for the 'existence' of truth than I do the existence of logical absolutes. I don't believe there is such a thing as truth. I believe that there are arrangements of matter which correspond to propositions, and further I believe that these propositions can be identified to have a property I call truth.
When you say 'there is an objective truth', what you are actually saying is that there is a material world independent of subjects. You have, through experience, inferred that there is a material world, and that it behaves in a particular and consistent manner. Statements you identify as congruent with that manner you have labelled truth, but it is not the label you assign ('truth') which is objective, it is the matter and its properties.
Simply put your objection can be reduced to 'naturalism cannot account for why there appears to be an objective reality with properties consistent across subject'. The problem is your account of these properties shifts the problem back one step without answering it, since I can simply retort to your explanation 'theism cannot account for why there is an objective mind of god with consistent properties'. You haven't solved the problem, you've just put it a pretty dress and taken it out for dinner.
I do not deny reality. I do deny that there is a thing called truth. Truth is a property of propositions, not a thing itself. Why you think this is antithetical to science I don't know, and if I am to you will have to explain.
I suspect this guy is out of luck. As you point out there are various ways in which this group could have botched things up that would violate either copyright law or the GPL, but he gives no indication that is the case.
From what I've read this guy may be thinking about this the wrong way. The reason these people are able to charge for this software (from a 'the market can support such actions' point of view, not a legal point of view) is they are offering support. In short his little bit of drupal code is providing jobs and gainful employment.
Me, I'd just put it on my CV and move on. If he really thinks $50 is too much to charge for support for this module write a review on his blog or something. Or offer support himself at a lower cost and undercut them.
Your elaboration is welcome, and everything you have said is essentially true. However I would advise you not to make assumptions about what others understand when they emphasise that they are simplifying.
I do have one minor correction though. You imply that angular momentum is a vector quantity, when in fact a bivector valued quantity (or antisymmetric second order tensor if you prefer). In three dimensions this quantity is dual to a vector (and is also called a pseudovector), but In more than three dimensions (as we are dealing with here for relativistic particles), there is no such duality. One way to think about this is in terms of planes in space. In three dimensions there is one unique line perpendicular to a plane (up to translations). In four dimensions this ceases to be the case. Angular momentum is the sweeping out of planes in space.
They can and they do, but the process does not have to occur instantly (although it will happen pretty darn fast by human time scales) and the probability of decaying via one of these processes may be very small indeed. In this case it seems (although I haven't really had a chance to read the paper) that other decay processes occur faster than any annihilation process, so those happen very rarely.
Why do they happen very rarely? Well it looks from the abstract that this is a excited state of the beauty anti-beauty system, so it probably has to shed some angular momentum before it can decay to any reasonably small number of elementary particles (angular momentum is a conserved quantity). This thing basically shoots off a photon (a quanta of light) and turns into another beauty anti-beauty meson called an Upsilon, which can then decay via an annihilation process.
In short a conserved quantity (probably angular momentum) makes it far more likely that this system will decay to a Upsilon rather than some final state which is the result of some annihilation process.
Why is angular momentum conserved? Because the laws of physics appear to be symmetric under rotations (simplifying a tad). Why is that the case? Hell if I know.
One poster has suggested that it is because the particles are not 'touching'. At this length scale the notion of a position of a particle is questionable at best. These are not localised things that are going in circular orbits. Another poster has suggested that quarks are just mathematical objects. This is true, but it is also true of every theoretical notion you have. Given that all you have in your brain is models of reality this position works just as well when applied to dogs and cats as it does to quarks and upsilons.
Intellectual bigot or not, the GP has a point. That Freud was ever considered a valid contributor to the field is a big fat black mark against psychology and the fact that introductory courses still mention his name with any purpose other than to ridicule his stupid, foolhardy, unscientific perspective is another.
Psychology is permeated by poor statistics (I read the journals), a poor understanding of experimental design and generally poor methodologies. Sure they make use of molecular neurobiology, multivariate statistics, etc. but many practising psychologists haven't a sweet bloody clue about those things in depth, especially when it comes to the stats. Are there practising genuine scientists in psychology, sure. Some fine, fine scientific work is done in the field, especially at the interface to neuroscience. Are far, far, far too many engaged in cargo cult science. Abso-fucking-lutely. Pick out 20 last authors and give them a test on the stats in their last paper if you don't believe that.
Psychology is in dire need of about 40% of the material being cut from the core curriculum and replaced by computational neuroscience courses, statistics and other hard scientific material to fill in all the half baked chaff that still gets taught as though it was worth a damn when the so called pioneers like Freud and Jung were spouting bullshit.
There is Gimpshop. It helps if you have someone who is familiar with Photoshop, but I don't think that solves the fundamental problem. Doesn't really help me since I really don't like Photoshop. I don't want GIMP to be like Photoshop, I want GIMP to be a more user friendly GIMP. Still I'm hopeful, the project is on board with the OpenUsability project, and I'm keeping an eye on future versions to see if things improve. I know there was talk of moving to an optional single window interface which would be nice, I still haven't got the knack of getting GIMP to lay itself out gracefully on my Xfce desktop and the multiple windows never really helped my workflow except on machines with very low resolution.
Nightmare is just my experience. I think it is because I'm not a graphic designer, but I'm still the guy who gets called in to help people with this kind of stuff. But if the guy you need to teach a program is that rare I would suggest maybe tweaking the interface paradigm a bit isn't too nuts.
Yes, you end up with a very powerful tool with a good work flow. That is why I use it. I never said GIMP wasn't powerful or that the work flow was bad (although I do have a few gripes there too), in some regards I would suggest it has even surpassed Photoshop. There is a reason it has a permanent spot on my hard drive.
It is still as easy to learn as trying to understand physics by starting with string theory. And it needn't be so. That was my point.
I'm sorry but the UI in GIMP is simply unintuitive and poorly designed for most casual to intermediate users needs. Prior to learning to use GIMP I'd only ever used Photoshop for removing red eye. I didn't really like it, but I could start using it pretty quickly. I've since used other software and can easily identify ways in which GIMP could borrow ideas to improve the learning experience. It is a matter of degrees, I can say the same for Photoshop (I actually don't like Photoshop very much, but I think that is just because I'm used to how GIMP does things), but GIMP is particularly bad. Sure, once you get into it, yes you have a pretty efficient work flow, but that was achieved at a needlessly high cost.
These people weren't trying to draw a circle because it was what they wanted to do. They were trying to draw a circle (or a box, or a straight line, etc) because they assumed it would be easy and a simple place to start. The smart ones knew that image editing is complicated and tried to get off the ground with something they assumed would be simple. Most users of raster and vector image editing / creation software make that assumption. What they wanted to do was remove a blemish from a photo or remove some lens flare or something similar.
GIMP's design makes the assumption you are rarely going to do anything simple in this manner (which is actually generally true, you rarely need to draw a circle). This is congruent with how people work, but totally the opposite to how they learn. This also means getting back into GIMP is a pain, because there are no easy routine tasks (besides cropping and rotating) to recut your teeth on.
These people were not dead set on Photoshop, I've met the graphics design type who are as you describe (although in some of those cases the are part of the 0.1% who need the extra bells and whistles that Photoshop provides). Gimpshop goes some way towards convincing people who are used to doing things in Photoshop that they can use the GIMP, but I don't think it helps with newbies and it doesn't fix GIMPS fundamental problem.
I regularly use GIMP. It is a great piece of software, but as a gift it would be a nightmare. The learning curve is horrid and it uses generally counter intuitive non-standard user interface paradigms. Maybe there is some rhyme or reason to why it is organised the way it is but I've never been able to determine it. Every person I know who has tried to learn to use GIMP has given up in 10 minutes because they couldn't draw a circle or persevered only because Photoshop costs cash. Paint.Net is supposed to be a bit easier to get into but I never needed to try because GIMP does everything I could ever need.
GIMP has come a long way plugin wise, and if you can code a bit in python then it is an awesome piece of software for image manipulation. Even if you cant, you can do pretty amazing things with it once you get going (I would suggest even most power users will find 99% of what they want in GIMP). But giving it as a gift would be be inviting frustration as best.
To make this an actual gift rather than an evangelising exercise I'd tailor the drives to each relative. Kids get games like Wesnoth or Tux Racer. Adults get stuff like Inkscape or some family tree software. Keep it simple, keep it fun. Don't put an office suite on there, I don't want to be reminded even tangentially of Clippy at Christmas. Same thing with web browsers unless Uncle Edgar really loves to surf questionable and 'this will keep his old Windows XP machine from getting infected'. Even then, might be worth thinking twice, maybe only if Edgar has been going on about how he hates his computer constantly getting infected. Thow in some themed CC wall papers. The kid who is into Space gets a some shots of nebula, the one who is into horses gets some ponies. Unless you know they have a Mac or Linux machine just give them the Windows installers. A gift is more likely to be appreciated if it is specific to the needs of the person in question.
I'd also keep a laptop on standby if you are going to give the kids different software and images, because if the kids do get a chance to go and play with their new toys (or just look at their nice wall paper) there may be one they especially like and that could lead to an argument if some kids have it and some kids don't. I wouldn't announce my intentions (that will cause people to devalue the gift and will make one seem cheap), but I also wouldn't let a needless argument develop.
I must admit I was confused too. The parent seems to be suggesting that the only thing that exists is matter (which is fine), then talking about arrangements as though they are real things. Arrangements can reasonably be argued to not be matter. I would have asserted that only the matter whose physical arrangement is correlated with what I label my thoughts is real, not the arrangement itself. Dismissing the idea of real abstractions only to assert the existence of real abstract arrangements seemed absurd to me.
I hope the irony of posting about the practicality of quantum mechanics while using what is almost certainly a solid state based device is not lost on other readers of your comment.
I'm a professional scientist who does a fair amount of maths and I don't remember my trig identities. Maths is iterative, but on concepts and processes not facts. What you learn is a way to think. No one could remember by rote enough facts to have any hope of actually passing a maths course, well no one worthy of passing the course.
Your instructors did fail you, but not by assuming you could remember last semesters material. They failed you by not teaching how to think about last semesters material so they could build on it this term. You should only have to remember a very small number of assumptions by rote, and even those wont really seem to be something you learnt by rote if you learn them right the first time because they will start to seem like reasonable assumptions to make.
Let us ignore our difference of opinion about what constitutes a genuine achievement for the betterment of humankind since while we disagree I can see how someone with a reasonable set of values can come to the conclusion that you have and I don't really consider it a major point of contention.
My point was not that Mr Jobs did not deserve recognition, he did. I would have expected most newpapers to have his obituary as the large full page entry on the day his death was announced (or the day after depending on if the paper had already gone to press). This could be rationally justified if your values are different to mine and while I might not like the fact that Mr Jobs got more attention than perhaps I feel he deserved I recognise that people can rationally disagree with me about what is important. That wouldn't be a big deal.
At the same time, while I might think that Dr Ritchie deserves an editorial and or something similar, I would accept that people with different values may disagree by degrees. Maybe in spite of my perception he ends up with only as much coverage as Mr Jobs in the previous scenario. Fair enough, I disagree but I don't get to call journalists on not doing their job properly because we are in the bounds of uncertainty and things are murky.
That was not what happened here. It was not even close to what happened here. What happened here was a reinforcement by the media of our absurd celebrity driven 'culture' where once again sensationalism and irrational sentiment got reinforced by 'journalists' just because they happen to like their iPhone.
The problem I have isn't in celebrating either of these two gentleman's lives. My problem is with the media not doing their damn jobs. My problem is with gushing inaccurate reports about what Steve Jobs achieved. The passing of a technology giant has been largely ignored by a incompetent media obsessed with celebrity.
I'm not going to bother celebrating Mr Jobs, but I wont begrudge others doing so privately or with their friends. Your iPhone being the way you like it is probably in part a result of his stewardship of Apple and it is okay to show appreciation for that. But I sure as hell am going to begrudge the media printing gushing, misleading, over-the-top obituaries about a man whose achievements were not in the betterment of all humankind, all the while failing to inform the public of the passing of a man of genuine accomplishments.
The public pays attention to celebrity and is ill informed about the technical professions in part because the media does such a piss poor job. This is just such another occasion. And this repeated failure to inform the public is not without consequences. If the public really thinks that it is the CEOs and celebrity marketing that make technology what it is and not the hard working engineers and scientists, then they will make bad decisions. Bad decisions in public policy, bad decisions in their own companies, bad decisions in their purchasing. We all suffer when the media does as poor a job as it does.
I think you are right to an extent, since I would say the same thing about English.
English is a confusing language that allows you to construct absurd sentences full of meaningless jibberish, largely irrelevant and far too long when there is a perfectly reasonable way to create a far more cromulent one.
See, horrid language. In the right hands, can be very expressive, but for the 99% of tasks that are mundane and functional, English is awful. Much prefer German (although it could do with getting rid of the irregular verbs and the gendered nouns). My problem with Perl is we aren't writing sonnets in it, we are writing little scripts. I really don't want something expressive for that.
But then I'm a bit of a Philistine whose primary appreciation for beauty is derived from strict order. I suspect that is why I like Python so much.
And to be fair to your example, if I do watch Jersey Shore for more than 3 minutes I begin to feel like English is entirely incomprehensible...
I'm a scientist and I'd love to get an IgNoble, heck I would put it on my academic CV. For a start they do pretty decent science outreach. Besides that, having looked at a fair few of the studies they consider / give awards to many are of the very highest quality. The only reason someone would be bat-shit enough to shove a asthma sufferer on a roller coaster is if they had an a priori hypothesis as to why it might improve their condition. The condition for getting an IgNoble is that the research makes you laugh, then makes you think. If nothing else that work combats the Sarah Palin 'Xty million dollars to study fruit flies" moron brigade by reminding people that just because research sounds funny or odd doesn't mean it isn't of value and certainly doesn't mean it isn't of practical use.
Physicists coined the term counterfactual definiteness because counterfactual definiteness is not realism. CFD implies, under certain conditions, the statement that things like the momentum and energy of a particle have objective reality. This is in no way the same thing as scientific realism in general.
Particles are an abstraction, they do not have to be objective things for scientific realism to hold (in fact, if CFD is violated then particles themselves have no objective reality in the sense we are using the term). For scientific realism to hold there must exist at least one objectively real thing, it does not have the be particle properties or the particles themselves.
The notion that things are only real when interacting is obviously flawed even in the absence of quantum mechanics. The universe cannot (by definition) interact with anything (unless you are going to start invoking things like gods), but most people would agree the universe has objective reality. If you build a definition of 'existing' which is as you describe it, then from the perspective of modern physics the universe does not exist. You have not only killed realism, you've killed reductionism too. Given that, I would argue a preferable interpretation of a violation of CFD would be that observables (like number of particles, or mass, or energy) are interaction dependent (I dislike the term observation, it is fundamentally vitalist even though you have not used it in that way), and therefore not real.
No need to invoke the wavefunction collapse or discuss wave-particle duality (the latter of which is actually irrelevant in this case, wave-particle duality is a way of expressing the fact that people have a hard time understanding how subatomic structures behave, there is no real duality there, every particle is just a quantum system which always behaves like a quantum system, never like a wave, never like particle).The violation of CFD alone is enough to make notions like 'the energy of a particle when not interacting' meaningless.
http://www.hedweb.com/everett/everett.htm#believes - Most of the polls I encounter suggest a little over half the physicists you meet are many worlders. The main reason for this is because Bell's inequality forces one to choose between locality and CFD, and most options that violate CFD are either stupid (many minds or Copenhagen) or confusing and philosophically displeasing (stuff like quantum logic). Violating locality tends to make physicists turn green and puke on your shoes. Amusingly enough one of the nice things about many worlds is that it preserves scientific realism, since one can view the wavefunction as real (in fact the wavefunction of the universe is then just about the only real thing left).
Not really sure why you think counterfactual definiteness is analogous to realism. It just says some of the things you might label as real are not. It doesn't, for example, say that matter in the sense materialist philosophers use the word, is not real, and quantum mechanics is a theory of the interaction of that matter, and therefore pertains to something one could justifiably call a real thing. Scientific realism is left wholly intact, if a little vague as to what the nature of the objective reality it pertains to is. All this would do is undermine the already silly notion that things like space, momentum, or energy are real. As far as I'm aware most physicists already threw CFD under a bus when they embraced many worlds, so the idea that momentum or space are real in the sense you appear to be using the term was effectively dead years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
All science is modelling. Do you really think that is voltage your multimeter is measuring? Somewhere in your hardware (either explicitly in the software, or implicitly in the circuit design) is a model of how your multimeter is supposed to respond in the presence of a potential difference, something which is again derived from another model, electromagnetism, which is itself dependent on ideas about space and time from contained in special relativity.
All science is done by embedding empirical facts into paradigms which are thought to lend a coherent description of reality. This idea that you can have empirical proof wholly divorced from the framework in which you are doing the investigation is laughable.
Science does not work based solely on empirical facts. Science is embedding and explanation of empirical facts through theory, that is, through models.
Until our rights are restored at the border the TSA and everyone associated with them is guilty until proven innocent of every crime I read about, because I have no way of knowing otherwise. You put on the jack boots I assume you are abusing them.
I think we largely understand each other and where we disagree. You correct that I assume a principle similar to Occam's Razor to arrive at my position (although I wouldn't call it a leap of faith, in classical theology faith requires evidence or argument and represents a supernatural augmentation of these things, this is one of my bare faced assumptions, you almost certainly have your own and you wouldn't discredit faith by labelling them such).
You make a very interesting point about what you describe as the higher order sciences. I would actually concur with most of your assessment, getting at truth in sociology, etc. is hard. I would just apply it to every epistemology, not merely scientific naturalism. That said it isn't that I don't think there are objective truths in sociology or psychology, I just think they are very, very hard to get at.
Why not make more assumptions? Well because one of my assumptions is something like Occam's Razor ;).
Anyway, I appreciate the discussion and value you taking the time to make clear your position. I think we have reached as much of an understanding of one another's positions as is likely to occur on a Slashdot post and will allow you the last word if you so desire.
Thanks for considering my reply, your position is interesting.
I think I see what you are saying but I believe I have have an experiential (not scientific, since as you point out science is predicated on some manner of truth) justification for asserting there are answers, the observation that the universe has consistent properties. You would no doubt point out that such a justification is subjective. You would be right. This is the crux of the matter. I believe that we are using subjective methods and processes to determine objective properties of the universe. The definition of science is subjective, the properties of nature it seeks to uncover are objective.
People can do anything and call it science. They can reject logical absolutes. They can assert there is no such thing as truth (in the sense either of us mean this word here, I'm going to start being sloppy with this word again now since I think you know what I mean and typing "the consistent nature reality" is just adding words at this point). This is not merely a problem with science, it is a problem with any epistemology.
Furthermore, my perspective is somewhat played out in the evolution of science and its history. Revolutions in the scientific epistemology like those spawned by Popper, Quine and Kuhn fundamentally changed in some regard the consensus idea of what the standard notion of science is. The scenario you suggest would be the case under my world view is precisely the one we have observed.
Science is subjective, because every epistemology is subjective, at least in the sense we are using the phrase here. Properties of nature can be objective and we can use subjective methods like science to provide arguments for the objective truth of those properties. Scientific reality is objective only in the sense that it tries to get at objective truths, not because the definition of the epistemology is objective.
With that said you and I can agree certain things about how we define science. We can agree that the universe appears to have certain, consistent properties and devise an epistemology which allows us to determine the nature of those properties. We would probably come up with very similar methods. We can agree there are answers to questions given our shared experience and assumptions. But that is all we, as subjective beings can do. You seem to think this makes our claims about objective properties of reality subjective, it does not. It simply make our means of determining the truth value of those claims subjective. If our choices of epistemology are poor (in the sense that they run counter to the stated, subjective goal we both share, getting at true statements) then we will arrive at claims which are false, in the sense that they are incongruent with the consistent properties of nature. This, for me at least, is what the word false *means*. This is not a higher ideal, it is our shared subjective ideal. We want to come up with statements which are consistent with our experiences, consistent with a world we perceive as having an objective nature.
The statement "Putting your hand on a hot iron is pleasurable and in no way harmful" is false because if you do it, you experience the opposite. The statement "bachelors are married" is false because nothing I experience in nature is its own negation.
However, this is not as you seem to suggest, a popularity contest. The objective nature of reality is not being denied here. If someone, or some group, decides to propose a version of science which you and I can demonstrate does not further our goal of deriving statements which are consistent with the objective nature of reality then we are under no obligation to accept them. If someone proposes that we should use an exclusively Aristotelian science then we can highlight how this version of science is not as good as the one we agree upon for furthering our own, subjective, goals.
I think a major point we now disagree on is this. The observation that nature has consistent properties (as you put it, that there are ans
Original poster isn't really asking about science but rather all epistemology. They aren't saying science can make sense of god, they are saying science doesn't make sense without god. Any explanation of why transcendental arguments for the existence of god (of which this is one) are false are going to be confusing because the transcendental arguments themselves are confusing. They are the kind of thing most people realise are flawed, but have a hard time picking holes in because the shear mind boggling number of logical fallacies they commit make them hard to unravel.
Science is necessarily subordinate to philosophy and if you think OP's argument is sound then if you value truth you should believe in god, regardless of the fact that science has no ability to analyse the deity he is proposing. If the OP's argument is sound then nothing makes sense without god. I believe my account of why the OP is wrong is reasonable, I will grant you it is hard to understand, but it is wholly reasonable. If you don't have an account, if you cant point out what is wrong with the OP's argument, then his beliefs are more rational than yours.
I think you have missed my point entirely. You have provided no account of what truth is because you have just relabelled the problem of what truth is as 'what god knows'. I am happy to admit I have provided no concrete account of why there appears to be a consistent objective reality (which is the real problem positing the idea of objective truth is trying to solve, since there appear to be objective, universal behaviours in nature). I never tried to provide such an account. It was never a problem for my world view, I'm happy to view the material universe as uncaused because the notion of a caused universe seems logically incoherent to me if by universe you mean 'all material things' and I have no problem with the properties of an uncaused thing being wholly arbitrary.
What I mean by a statement which is more true or less wrong is a statement I label as more true or less wrong. I can provide a definition which pertains to something I believe is an objective property of nature, but you will rightly point out while the property of nature may or may not be objective depending on the quality of my definition, my definition is still going to be subjective. This thing you keep labelling truth is not a thing. Truth is the label we have for the observed fact that there exist statements I can assert about the universe which appears to be consistent with universal properties of the universe. I don't have to provide an account for truth outside of providing an account for the language because the thing we are arguing about is not 'truth'. It is 'why does the universe have consistent properties?'
The best anyone can do is observe that the universe has certain properties which appear to be consistent. Asking why this is the case in the way you are doing so is begging the question because it assumes there is a purpose or reason behind the material universe which necessarily requires a subject to envisage that purpose, and hence implies the existence of a god (a god which as I have mentioned doesn't solve the problem, and cant create this aspect of the universe anyway since 'truth' would have to be a part of this diety entirely arbitrary nature which you then have to provide an account for because you required an account of this non material truth thing).
"The truth that you acknowledge exists only in an abstract model universe of axioms and statements. Is it difficult to imagine that truth might also exist in our universe?"
Yes, it is completely impossible for me to do this because I have never seen, in all my days, a concept made manifest in the sense you are describing here. I can imagine concept of a tree, but I have never seen an actual, physical, imaginary concept of a tree. I can conceive of truth, but there is no thing called truth because truth is a concept, not a thing. Name one concept you have seen made manifest in this sense! The entire idea should appear patently absurd to you by now. Can you show me a picture of a logical absolute, or of an abstract shape, or the feeling of love? Can you show me a picture of (or give me a recording of, or allow me to touch) truth?
Without a standard of truth less wrong is meaningless, this much is true. But we can give an objective definitions if you like (note that 'truth' is still subjective here, in so far as it pertains to an objective, universal property of nature, but we cannot assert that that definition is 'the standard'). But again that isn't the problem. The problem is 'why is does the universe have consistent properties'. This is not a problem for my world view because I infer there is just a material world, and I observe things have properties which are consistent. The question 'why is the universe consistent?' is as meaningless to me as asking 'what is purpose of the universe?' or 'what is objectively morally correct?'. All these questions presuppose there are reasons for things we have no reason to expect reasons for, at least in the sense the question is asked.
Your world view on the other hand has to account for why god's nature has
By your definition those statements which are true are completely arbitrary. God could have 'known' something entirely different. You have offered no account of why the truth is as it it is. As such your account of truth suffers from the exact same 'problem' as naturalism does. Only you have demanded an account of the existence of truth, and proponents of naturalism do not. Waving around the word transcendent doesn't get you out of this quandary either.
Science, as a method, has no purpose. Purposes are necessarily subjective and science as a method is not a subject. Scientists can have a purpose in performing science, because they believe it will result in the acquisition of beliefs that the label true, or at least less wrong.
What you are committing is the fallacy of reification. You have treated truth like it is a real concrete thing. Truth is not a thing. It is a property of statements. You cannot go and get me a 'truth'. I no more have to account for the 'existence' of truth than I do the existence of logical absolutes. I don't believe there is such a thing as truth. I believe that there are arrangements of matter which correspond to propositions, and further I believe that these propositions can be identified to have a property I call truth.
When you say 'there is an objective truth', what you are actually saying is that there is a material world independent of subjects. You have, through experience, inferred that there is a material world, and that it behaves in a particular and consistent manner. Statements you identify as congruent with that manner you have labelled truth, but it is not the label you assign ('truth') which is objective, it is the matter and its properties.
Simply put your objection can be reduced to 'naturalism cannot account for why there appears to be an objective reality with properties consistent across subject'. The problem is your account of these properties shifts the problem back one step without answering it, since I can simply retort to your explanation 'theism cannot account for why there is an objective mind of god with consistent properties'. You haven't solved the problem, you've just put it a pretty dress and taken it out for dinner.
I do not deny reality. I do deny that there is a thing called truth. Truth is a property of propositions, not a thing itself. Why you think this is antithetical to science I don't know, and if I am to you will have to explain.
I suspect this guy is out of luck. As you point out there are various ways in which this group could have botched things up that would violate either copyright law or the GPL, but he gives no indication that is the case.
From what I've read this guy may be thinking about this the wrong way. The reason these people are able to charge for this software (from a 'the market can support such actions' point of view, not a legal point of view) is they are offering support. In short his little bit of drupal code is providing jobs and gainful employment.
Me, I'd just put it on my CV and move on. If he really thinks $50 is too much to charge for support for this module write a review on his blog or something. Or offer support himself at a lower cost and undercut them.
Your elaboration is welcome, and everything you have said is essentially true. However I would advise you not to make assumptions about what others understand when they emphasise that they are simplifying.
I do have one minor correction though. You imply that angular momentum is a vector quantity, when in fact a bivector valued quantity (or antisymmetric second order tensor if you prefer). In three dimensions this quantity is dual to a vector (and is also called a pseudovector), but In more than three dimensions (as we are dealing with here for relativistic particles), there is no such duality. One way to think about this is in terms of planes in space. In three dimensions there is one unique line perpendicular to a plane (up to translations). In four dimensions this ceases to be the case. Angular momentum is the sweeping out of planes in space.
They can and they do, but the process does not have to occur instantly (although it will happen pretty darn fast by human time scales) and the probability of decaying via one of these processes may be very small indeed. In this case it seems (although I haven't really had a chance to read the paper) that other decay processes occur faster than any annihilation process, so those happen very rarely.
Why do they happen very rarely? Well it looks from the abstract that this is a excited state of the beauty anti-beauty system, so it probably has to shed some angular momentum before it can decay to any reasonably small number of elementary particles (angular momentum is a conserved quantity). This thing basically shoots off a photon (a quanta of light) and turns into another beauty anti-beauty meson called an Upsilon, which can then decay via an annihilation process.
In short a conserved quantity (probably angular momentum) makes it far more likely that this system will decay to a Upsilon rather than some final state which is the result of some annihilation process.
Why is angular momentum conserved? Because the laws of physics appear to be symmetric under rotations (simplifying a tad). Why is that the case? Hell if I know.
One poster has suggested that it is because the particles are not 'touching'. At this length scale the notion of a position of a particle is questionable at best. These are not localised things that are going in circular orbits. Another poster has suggested that quarks are just mathematical objects. This is true, but it is also true of every theoretical notion you have. Given that all you have in your brain is models of reality this position works just as well when applied to dogs and cats as it does to quarks and upsilons.
Intellectual bigot or not, the GP has a point. That Freud was ever considered a valid contributor to the field is a big fat black mark against psychology and the fact that introductory courses still mention his name with any purpose other than to ridicule his stupid, foolhardy, unscientific perspective is another.
Psychology is permeated by poor statistics (I read the journals), a poor understanding of experimental design and generally poor methodologies. Sure they make use of molecular neurobiology, multivariate statistics, etc. but many practising psychologists haven't a sweet bloody clue about those things in depth, especially when it comes to the stats. Are there practising genuine scientists in psychology, sure. Some fine, fine scientific work is done in the field, especially at the interface to neuroscience. Are far, far, far too many engaged in cargo cult science. Abso-fucking-lutely. Pick out 20 last authors and give them a test on the stats in their last paper if you don't believe that.
Psychology is in dire need of about 40% of the material being cut from the core curriculum and replaced by computational neuroscience courses, statistics and other hard scientific material to fill in all the half baked chaff that still gets taught as though it was worth a damn when the so called pioneers like Freud and Jung were spouting bullshit.
There is Gimpshop. It helps if you have someone who is familiar with Photoshop, but I don't think that solves the fundamental problem. Doesn't really help me since I really don't like Photoshop. I don't want GIMP to be like Photoshop, I want GIMP to be a more user friendly GIMP. Still I'm hopeful, the project is on board with the OpenUsability project, and I'm keeping an eye on future versions to see if things improve. I know there was talk of moving to an optional single window interface which would be nice, I still haven't got the knack of getting GIMP to lay itself out gracefully on my Xfce desktop and the multiple windows never really helped my workflow except on machines with very low resolution.
Nightmare is just my experience. I think it is because I'm not a graphic designer, but I'm still the guy who gets called in to help people with this kind of stuff. But if the guy you need to teach a program is that rare I would suggest maybe tweaking the interface paradigm a bit isn't too nuts.
Yes, you end up with a very powerful tool with a good work flow. That is why I use it. I never said GIMP wasn't powerful or that the work flow was bad (although I do have a few gripes there too), in some regards I would suggest it has even surpassed Photoshop. There is a reason it has a permanent spot on my hard drive.
It is still as easy to learn as trying to understand physics by starting with string theory. And it needn't be so. That was my point.
I'm sorry but the UI in GIMP is simply unintuitive and poorly designed for most casual to intermediate users needs. Prior to learning to use GIMP I'd only ever used Photoshop for removing red eye. I didn't really like it, but I could start using it pretty quickly. I've since used other software and can easily identify ways in which GIMP could borrow ideas to improve the learning experience. It is a matter of degrees, I can say the same for Photoshop (I actually don't like Photoshop very much, but I think that is just because I'm used to how GIMP does things), but GIMP is particularly bad. Sure, once you get into it, yes you have a pretty efficient work flow, but that was achieved at a needlessly high cost.
These people weren't trying to draw a circle because it was what they wanted to do. They were trying to draw a circle (or a box, or a straight line, etc) because they assumed it would be easy and a simple place to start. The smart ones knew that image editing is complicated and tried to get off the ground with something they assumed would be simple. Most users of raster and vector image editing / creation software make that assumption. What they wanted to do was remove a blemish from a photo or remove some lens flare or something similar.
GIMP's design makes the assumption you are rarely going to do anything simple in this manner (which is actually generally true, you rarely need to draw a circle). This is congruent with how people work, but totally the opposite to how they learn. This also means getting back into GIMP is a pain, because there are no easy routine tasks (besides cropping and rotating) to recut your teeth on.
These people were not dead set on Photoshop, I've met the graphics design type who are as you describe (although in some of those cases the are part of the 0.1% who need the extra bells and whistles that Photoshop provides). Gimpshop goes some way towards convincing people who are used to doing things in Photoshop that they can use the GIMP, but I don't think it helps with newbies and it doesn't fix GIMPS fundamental problem.
I regularly use GIMP. It is a great piece of software, but as a gift it would be a nightmare. The learning curve is horrid and it uses generally counter intuitive non-standard user interface paradigms. Maybe there is some rhyme or reason to why it is organised the way it is but I've never been able to determine it. Every person I know who has tried to learn to use GIMP has given up in 10 minutes because they couldn't draw a circle or persevered only because Photoshop costs cash. Paint.Net is supposed to be a bit easier to get into but I never needed to try because GIMP does everything I could ever need.
GIMP has come a long way plugin wise, and if you can code a bit in python then it is an awesome piece of software for image manipulation. Even if you cant, you can do pretty amazing things with it once you get going (I would suggest even most power users will find 99% of what they want in GIMP). But giving it as a gift would be be inviting frustration as best.
To make this an actual gift rather than an evangelising exercise I'd tailor the drives to each relative. Kids get games like Wesnoth or Tux Racer. Adults get stuff like Inkscape or some family tree software. Keep it simple, keep it fun. Don't put an office suite on there, I don't want to be reminded even tangentially of Clippy at Christmas. Same thing with web browsers unless Uncle Edgar really loves to surf questionable and 'this will keep his old Windows XP machine from getting infected'. Even then, might be worth thinking twice, maybe only if Edgar has been going on about how he hates his computer constantly getting infected. Thow in some themed CC wall papers. The kid who is into Space gets a some shots of nebula, the one who is into horses gets some ponies. Unless you know they have a Mac or Linux machine just give them the Windows installers. A gift is more likely to be appreciated if it is specific to the needs of the person in question.
I'd also keep a laptop on standby if you are going to give the kids different software and images, because if the kids do get a chance to go and play with their new toys (or just look at their nice wall paper) there may be one they especially like and that could lead to an argument if some kids have it and some kids don't. I wouldn't announce my intentions (that will cause people to devalue the gift and will make one seem cheap), but I also wouldn't let a needless argument develop.
I must admit I was confused too. The parent seems to be suggesting that the only thing that exists is matter (which is fine), then talking about arrangements as though they are real things. Arrangements can reasonably be argued to not be matter. I would have asserted that only the matter whose physical arrangement is correlated with what I label my thoughts is real, not the arrangement itself. Dismissing the idea of real abstractions only to assert the existence of real abstract arrangements seemed absurd to me.
I hope the irony of posting about the practicality of quantum mechanics while using what is almost certainly a solid state based device is not lost on other readers of your comment.
I'm a professional scientist who does a fair amount of maths and I don't remember my trig identities. Maths is iterative, but on concepts and processes not facts. What you learn is a way to think. No one could remember by rote enough facts to have any hope of actually passing a maths course, well no one worthy of passing the course.
Your instructors did fail you, but not by assuming you could remember last semesters material. They failed you by not teaching how to think about last semesters material so they could build on it this term. You should only have to remember a very small number of assumptions by rote, and even those wont really seem to be something you learnt by rote if you learn them right the first time because they will start to seem like reasonable assumptions to make.
Let us ignore our difference of opinion about what constitutes a genuine achievement for the betterment of humankind since while we disagree I can see how someone with a reasonable set of values can come to the conclusion that you have and I don't really consider it a major point of contention.
My point was not that Mr Jobs did not deserve recognition, he did. I would have expected most newpapers to have his obituary as the large full page entry on the day his death was announced (or the day after depending on if the paper had already gone to press). This could be rationally justified if your values are different to mine and while I might not like the fact that Mr Jobs got more attention than perhaps I feel he deserved I recognise that people can rationally disagree with me about what is important. That wouldn't be a big deal.
At the same time, while I might think that Dr Ritchie deserves an editorial and or something similar, I would accept that people with different values may disagree by degrees. Maybe in spite of my perception he ends up with only as much coverage as Mr Jobs in the previous scenario. Fair enough, I disagree but I don't get to call journalists on not doing their job properly because we are in the bounds of uncertainty and things are murky.
That was not what happened here. It was not even close to what happened here. What happened here was a reinforcement by the media of our absurd celebrity driven 'culture' where once again sensationalism and irrational sentiment got reinforced by 'journalists' just because they happen to like their iPhone.
The problem I have isn't in celebrating either of these two gentleman's lives. My problem is with the media not doing their damn jobs. My problem is with gushing inaccurate reports about what Steve Jobs achieved. The passing of a technology giant has been largely ignored by a incompetent media obsessed with celebrity.
I'm not going to bother celebrating Mr Jobs, but I wont begrudge others doing so privately or with their friends. Your iPhone being the way you like it is probably in part a result of his stewardship of Apple and it is okay to show appreciation for that. But I sure as hell am going to begrudge the media printing gushing, misleading, over-the-top obituaries about a man whose achievements were not in the betterment of all humankind, all the while failing to inform the public of the passing of a man of genuine accomplishments.
The public pays attention to celebrity and is ill informed about the technical professions in part because the media does such a piss poor job. This is just such another occasion. And this repeated failure to inform the public is not without consequences. If the public really thinks that it is the CEOs and celebrity marketing that make technology what it is and not the hard working engineers and scientists, then they will make bad decisions. Bad decisions in public policy, bad decisions in their own companies, bad decisions in their purchasing. We all suffer when the media does as poor a job as it does.
I think you are right to an extent, since I would say the same thing about English.
English is a confusing language that allows you to construct absurd sentences full of meaningless jibberish, largely irrelevant and far too long when there is a perfectly reasonable way to create a far more cromulent one.
See, horrid language. In the right hands, can be very expressive, but for the 99% of tasks that are mundane and functional, English is awful. Much prefer German (although it could do with getting rid of the irregular verbs and the gendered nouns). My problem with Perl is we aren't writing sonnets in it, we are writing little scripts. I really don't want something expressive for that.
But then I'm a bit of a Philistine whose primary appreciation for beauty is derived from strict order. I suspect that is why I like Python so much.
And to be fair to your example, if I do watch Jersey Shore for more than 3 minutes I begin to feel like English is entirely incomprehensible...
BigDog can already jump, end of the video on this page has an example:
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1168947/unbelievable_boston_dynamics_bigdog_march_08/
I'm a scientist and I'd love to get an IgNoble, heck I would put it on my academic CV. For a start they do pretty decent science outreach. Besides that, having looked at a fair few of the studies they consider / give awards to many are of the very highest quality. The only reason someone would be bat-shit enough to shove a asthma sufferer on a roller coaster is if they had an a priori hypothesis as to why it might improve their condition. The condition for getting an IgNoble is that the research makes you laugh, then makes you think. If nothing else that work combats the Sarah Palin 'Xty million dollars to study fruit flies" moron brigade by reminding people that just because research sounds funny or odd doesn't mean it isn't of value and certainly doesn't mean it isn't of practical use.
Physicists coined the term counterfactual definiteness because counterfactual definiteness is not realism. CFD implies, under certain conditions, the statement that things like the momentum and energy of a particle have objective reality. This is in no way the same thing as scientific realism in general.
Particles are an abstraction, they do not have to be objective things for scientific realism to hold (in fact, if CFD is violated then particles themselves have no objective reality in the sense we are using the term). For scientific realism to hold there must exist at least one objectively real thing, it does not have the be particle properties or the particles themselves.
The notion that things are only real when interacting is obviously flawed even in the absence of quantum mechanics. The universe cannot (by definition) interact with anything (unless you are going to start invoking things like gods), but most people would agree the universe has objective reality. If you build a definition of 'existing' which is as you describe it, then from the perspective of modern physics the universe does not exist. You have not only killed realism, you've killed reductionism too. Given that, I would argue a preferable interpretation of a violation of CFD would be that observables (like number of particles, or mass, or energy) are interaction dependent (I dislike the term observation, it is fundamentally vitalist even though you have not used it in that way), and therefore not real.
No need to invoke the wavefunction collapse or discuss wave-particle duality (the latter of which is actually irrelevant in this case, wave-particle duality is a way of expressing the fact that people have a hard time understanding how subatomic structures behave, there is no real duality there, every particle is just a quantum system which always behaves like a quantum system, never like a wave, never like particle).The violation of CFD alone is enough to make notions like 'the energy of a particle when not interacting' meaningless.
http://www.hedweb.com/everett/everett.htm#believes - Most of the polls I encounter suggest a little over half the physicists you meet are many worlders. The main reason for this is because Bell's inequality forces one to choose between locality and CFD, and most options that violate CFD are either stupid (many minds or Copenhagen) or confusing and philosophically displeasing (stuff like quantum logic). Violating locality tends to make physicists turn green and puke on your shoes. Amusingly enough one of the nice things about many worlds is that it preserves scientific realism, since one can view the wavefunction as real (in fact the wavefunction of the universe is then just about the only real thing left).
Not really sure why you think counterfactual definiteness is analogous to realism. It just says some of the things you might label as real are not. It doesn't, for example, say that matter in the sense materialist philosophers use the word, is not real, and quantum mechanics is a theory of the interaction of that matter, and therefore pertains to something one could justifiably call a real thing. Scientific realism is left wholly intact, if a little vague as to what the nature of the objective reality it pertains to is.
All this would do is undermine the already silly notion that things like space, momentum, or energy are real. As far as I'm aware most physicists already threw CFD under a bus when they embraced many worlds, so the idea that momentum or space are real in the sense you appear to be using the term was effectively dead years ago.