So I was taking a piss before I went to bed last night and (carry on, I don't talk too much more about this) I looked down and saw the toilet bowl and thought: What the hell do I mean Things are defined by the things around them? How can I seriously say that the universe has some deeper structure? And as I pissed and stood how could I possibly believe that there was anything other than what I could see?
I was banging on the other day about deeper structures and the nature of reality -- but what do I really mean by saying that a cistern is a cistern because of all the things it isn't? I mean, yes, in my perceptions I can only identify things which have associated not-things, obviously, but deeper than that: That toilet is a collection of atoms and electrons and forces and goodness knows what else. I know, to a degree, why hard things are hard and why wet things are wet (although the latter's a little more difficult). I understand that some people know more than me about this.
It's fairly easy for me to understand that the nature of reality is to me only unknown because I haven't been trained in how to study it, just like the more advanced areas of Physics. And what I know from studying Physics is that the advanced levels are just more of the same: It's all seesaws and levers, even though I may not understand it.
If I couch these explanations in Physical terms they make more sense: Reality is physical, there is nothing else. There may well be more than we can see, but there's nothing special about that -- it's just detail, more of the same. Deep structure might well be super string theory, but it doesn't concern me.
Emergent properties are natural from any complex system; they have rules and behaviours, but there's nothing special about that, either. A toilet doesn't exist in the universe any more than a person exists on the front of your television.
Now things make more sense: What more is there to believe than this?
So I was taking a piss before I went to bed last night and (carry on, I don't talk too much more about this) I looked down and saw the toilet bowl and thought: What the hell do I mean Things are defined by the things around them? How can I seriously say that the universe has some deeper structure? And as I pissed and stood how could I possibly believe that there was anything other than what I could see?
I was banging on the other day about deeper structures and the nature of reality -- but what do I really mean by saying that a cistern is a cistern because of all the things it isn't? I mean, yes, in my perceptions I can only identify things which have associated not-things, obviously, but deeper than that: That toilet is a collection of atoms and electrons and forces and goodness knows what else. I know, to a degree, why hard things are hard and why wet things are wet (although the latter's a little more difficult). I understand that some people know more than me about this.
It's fairly easy for me to understand that the nature of reality is to me only unknown because I haven't been trained in how to study it, just like the more advanced areas of Physics. And what I know from studying Physics is that the advanced levels are just more of the same: It's all seesaws and levers, even though I may not understand it.
If I couch these explanations in Physical terms they make more sense: Reality is physical, there is nothing else. There may well be more than we can see, but there's nothing special about that -- it's just detail, more of the same. Deep structure might well be super string theory, but it doesn't concern me.
Emergent properties are natural from any complex system; they have rules and behaviours, but there's nothing special about that, either. A toilet doesn't exist in the universe any more than a person exists on the front of your television.
Now things make more sense: What more is there to believe than this?