Re:Is the Schrödinger Equation True?
by eyelidlessness on Monday January 11, 2021 @06:19PM
(#25739457)
> Physics isn't special in this regard, though.
Yep. I immediately started thinking about how this “real”/“not real” dichotomy applies to programming. We write programs that confidently declare not only that they’re defining facts for the purpose of the computation, but transferring them and interoperating with other such stated facts. But they’re all abstractions, they’re all convenient fictions we use to describe, model and hopefully send electricity through minerals to achieve the result we defined.
Even stepping a bit away from the physics involved, just considering the humans who do lithography and are closest to reality, their mental model and work is still an approximation of that reality that’s effective at their level of abstraction.
And this doesn’t just apply to human-mechanics interaction. It’s something my messed up brain thinks about with human-human interactions all the time. We have mental models of how the electrical impulses travel through our fellow animated bags of meat, but they’re not just approximations they’re often very flawed. But we still interact and we hopefully don’t become overly obsessed with the underlying details we don’t and probably can’t fully grasp.
Yep. I immediately started thinking about how this “real”/“not real” dichotomy applies to programming. We write programs that confidently declare not only that they’re defining facts for the purpose of the computation, but transferring them and interoperating with other such stated facts. But they’re all abstractions, they’re all convenient fictions we use to describe, model and hopefully send electricity through minerals to achieve the result we defined.
Even stepping a bit away from the physics involved, just considering the humans who do lithography and are closest to reality, their mental model and work is still an approximation of that reality that’s effective at their level of abstraction.
And this doesn’t just apply to human-mechanics interaction. It’s something my messed up brain thinks about with human-human interactions all the time. We have mental models of how the electrical impulses travel through our fellow animated bags of meat, but they’re not just approximations they’re often very flawed. But we still interact and we hopefully don’t become overly obsessed with the underlying details we don’t and probably can’t fully grasp.