Hacker News Reader

Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that Tegmark is advocating a particular approach to the entirety of physics, not simply quantum mechanics. Taken to an extreme, a further criticism of instrumentalism (due to Alan Sokal) is that the concept of "dinosaur" becomes nothing more than a fanciful way for paleontologists to come up with predictions about which fossils they will discover next.

I'm not sure I agree with you that "instrumentalism" is an adequate description of the position of Tegmark outlines. Instead of neglecting to assign an ontological status to anything, Tegmark appears to be assigning an ontological status to the mathematical structures themselves.

View on HN

[...] Tegmark appears to be assigning an ontological status to the mathematical structures themselves.

Which appears to me similar to rejecting the idea of an universe that just somehow came into existence or existed forever and introducing a god as the source of the universe but still leaving you behind with the same questions as before but now attached to the god instead of the universe.

And I personally don't really buy into the idea of mathematical structures existing independent of humans or the universe or whatnot anyway. Humans bring mathematical structures into existence, they postulate the axioms and explore the consequences. That pieces of the universe are isomorphic to this or that mathematical structure and therefore show similar properties and behaviors is either accidentally or because a mathematical structure was explicitly designed to mimic certain aspects of the universe, at least as far as I am concerned.

The only way to get out of this mess is self organization. Without a self governing process that causes atom crystallization you will always end up with some problem of beginning and end. Then the hole big bang theory is also counter factual: http://www.cosmology.info/newsletter/2014.05.pdf

The BSM-SG model gives a very logical explanation how galaxies come to be and the high order matter we can measure (proton/neutrons/electrons/positrons).

It does not give you an answer tho, where the 2 types of fundamental particles come from, but their pure existence in mass quantities is enough for a galaxy to be born, or in our case, many many galaxies.

>the concept of "dinosaur" becomes nothing more than a fanciful way for paleontologists to come up with predictions about which fossils they will discover next.

I'm having a hard time understanding this criticism. What use do we have for the concept of "dinosaur" other than as a means of predicting future discoveries and building a predictive theoretical model for our environment?

For most people, the concept of "dinosaur" has a meaning beyond what use we have for it. Most people (some religious fanatics excepted) believe that dinosaurs really did exist, i.e. they would assign an ontological status to the concept of dinosaur.

The instrumentalist attitude, conversely, is to refuse to assign any meaning to things beyond their predictive power. I suppose you could say that one identifies "what is" with "what use do we have", so in a sense your question presupposes an instrumentalist approach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com