Comments on “Clouds and eggplants”

Thank you! Yes, I’m planning a paperback version of it.

Thank you! The code for expanding those got lost a few days ago in a write-write conflict, when I changed my workflow for editing the server code and forgot what I was supposed to do.

Fixed now. But I need to get more serious about standardizing the workflow.

Thanks; I deleted the sentence. There’s a relationship between the indefiniteness of statements and the indefiniteness of objects that I had in mind; but this was not the place to explain that!

Thanks, excellent question!

The reason for singling them out is that if you say “there are no absolute truths,” rationalists immediately say “you are badly wrong, mathematics and particle physics are absolutely truly true.” They do have a point, although whether it’s actually correct is unclear.

What’s important is that it’s almost always an irrelevant distraction, because even if mathematics and particle physics are absolutely true, that absoluteness can’t be extended to encompass facts about breakfast-sized phenomena. In other words, reductionism mostly doesn’t work.

So acknowledging that “maybe those truths are absolute” saves one from getting into pointless metaphysical arguments.

There is some sense, at least, in which some mathematical truths, such as 2+2=4, are absolute. There was a recent massive twitter brawl about this. It generated much more heat than light, but did bring up some interesting points. Many serious mathematicians came down on the side of “not necessarily absolutely true, depending.” I made a small contribution in a thread starting at: https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1291402267829006336

So even small-integer arithmetic may be somewhat nebulous in some sense. It seems to be a different sense than the nebulosity of breakfast, however.

Similarly, experiments showing measurements agreeing with quantum theory to a dozen decimal places suggest that there’s some sense in which something like it is really truly true. On the other hand, we know the current theory can’t be right, and also it’s not clear what “really truly true” would mean. And, more importantly, even if a version of quantum theory were absolutely true, that doesn’t seem to have any meaningful implications even for most of the hard sciences. Even in chemistry, reduction to quantum is mostly not possible in practice, and probably never will be.