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Re:Neural Networks and the Chomsky Hierarchy [DeepMind, 2022] by naasking on Monday January 23, 2023 @03:01PM (#34494161)
> (but we already know that there's no such thing as an "objective underlying structure" from elsewhere from quantum mechanics and also from relativity)

No we don't. Don't confuse the map with the territory.

Re:Neural Networks and the Chomsky Hierarchy [DeepMind, 2022] by BlueTemplar on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @09:25AM (#34503906)
In the sense that physics is about "map-making", not the "true nature of reality", and has been for a while now (since it split from philosophy ? since the beginning of postmodern physics in 1905 ?).

Even philosophy has pretty much given up that claim : with Gödel/Church/Turing having blown up to smithereens the positivist project of a "theory of everything" for mathematics, and Wittgenstein/Kuhn/Derrida/Foucault/Chomsky having redirected the rest of philosophy towards "the naming of things".

And that project had been ironically doomed from before its start anyway : Descartes both laid the groundwork for it by elevating epistemology to "fist philosophy" and for solipsism - which, while a dead-end, cannot be ruled out !

(Also honorable mention for Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe I guess, which, in a way, indirectly achieves the claim by positing a mathematical multiverse so vast that "our" reality can only be contained inside it.)

So the only discipline left that still lays claim on Truth and the True Nature of Reality is theology. (Note that this is how Descartes "solved" the problem of solipsism.)

Re:Neural Networks and the Chomsky Hierarchy [DeepMind, 2022] by danbruc on Thursday January 26, 2023 @06:57AM (#34530613)
Physics is map making, but from that your claims - subjective nature of reality, no objective structure - do not follow, at best you could claim that physics has nothing to say about the nature of reality. And I have doubts about that, at least to some extend. What kind of answer would you expect for a question like what is the true nature of an electron? You can describe the properties of an electron, what more do you want? What is a thing above and beyond the sum of its properties?
Re:Neural Networks and the Chomsky Hierarchy [DeepMind, 2022] by BlueTemplar on Friday January 27, 2023 @08:01PM (#34553950)
The tricky issue here is that "the electron" itself is a specific model that only makes sense under some paradigms...

There's also a point in how one paradigm might be ontologically radically different compared to the previous one... but what science cares about more is the new paradigm being a "tighter fit" between its new models and the results of the new experiments.

Also, beyound a single "thing", it's when we start considering collections of things that the situation can get very tricky very fast, like chaotic behavior from something as simple as 3 masses under the Newtonian paradigm ! (See also : "emergence")

Or the concept of temperature : it doesn't go "down" to the "true nature of reality", but is a statistical one that is not even always defined, yet is still quite useful.

But yet again I would like to emphasize how in several subfields of physics we now are in a situation where we had to give up an objective viewpoint of the situation for a subjective one, and where the information itself that we have about a system (aka negative entropy) is another variable in a super system that includes us (and our instruments) and the system being studied, and we are forced to consider that supersystem instead, or at least also, in order to go "deeper".

(It's also impressive how in some cases we now study "turtles all the way down" situations, with models having an infinite number of correction steps that we can cheat around thanks to the use of advanced mathematics. But maybe in the future these will be seen as trivial as we see the Zeno paradox today ?)