Re:Thirty Years of ‘Against Measurement’
by Brian_K_White on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:45PM
(#25308527)
Unless you can imagine yourself up a chair from nothing, it's not imaginary.
Nothing changed when we discovered microscopes and cells. One day your skin is a solid piece of material and a disease is the result of a bad smell. The next day both are made up of a zillion cells.
This is no different. So what if the macroscopic chair is made out of the interaction between a bunch of different forces? It changes nothing. Molecules, atoms, and sub-atomics were already imaginary, in that you can only deduce them from tool-assisted and indirect observations, not see or feel them directly. "this iron isn't solid, it's a mass of atoms." "oh ok". "oh hey the atoms are made out of these other sub-atomic things..." "oh ok". So now the sub-atomic things are really just forces. So what? Now suddenly at this next level of theory it's all unreal?
It wasn't already unreal? Or it's suddenly no longer behaving as real? Neither of those are true. It's no more or less real than yesterday, and it behaves no more or less real than yesterday.
What's imaginary is this attempt at a new distinction.
Nothing changed when we discovered microscopes and cells. One day your skin is a solid piece of material and a disease is the result of a bad smell. The next day both are made up of a zillion cells.
This is no different. So what if the macroscopic chair is made out of the interaction between a bunch of different forces? It changes nothing. Molecules, atoms, and sub-atomics were already imaginary, in that you can only deduce them from tool-assisted and indirect observations, not see or feel them directly. "this iron isn't solid, it's a mass of atoms." "oh ok". "oh hey the atoms are made out of these other sub-atomic things..." "oh ok". So now the sub-atomic things are really just forces. So what? Now suddenly at this next level of theory it's all unreal?
It wasn't already unreal? Or it's suddenly no longer behaving as real? Neither of those are true. It's no more or less real than yesterday, and it behaves no more or less real than yesterday.
What's imaginary is this attempt at a new distinction.