[FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

[uǝlƃ ☤>$]

Very nice! I was completely ignorant of that history. If anyone has the full Weinberg paper and is willing to send it to me, I'd be grateful. I've managed to download the others.

This post should probably stop there, on a pro-social "Thanks!" 8^D But Eddington monkey that I am, I'm constitutionally incapable of such. So I  have to disagree with only 1 aspect of your post. The point about phenomenal Lagrangians, swapping out symmetry for conservation, [re]normalization (in this obtuse domain *or* the banal scaling or regularizing of data), etc. is very much on topic for the thread.

While SteveS' response to EricC is well done, it isn't adversarial enough for me. I wrote an incompetent response arguing something similar to the argument that triggered Dave to accuse me of talking like Rupert Sheldrake. In my unposted draft, I argue that only identical modelers can produce identical models. And the upper bound on accuracy of a model reverse engineered from a real artifact is set by the similarity between the original modeler and the one doing the reverse engineering. None of that changes the fact that the models *must* mismatch the world. (And if you buy Wolpert's argument, if they don't mismatch the world, then there's only 1 of them. I.e. they'd be identical. And if you buy Robert Rosen's argument from parallax, it would take an infinity of reverse engineered models to well-approximate the original model.)

But your salvo, here, does provide us with another option for thinking about parallax ... something akin to equivalent efficacy, a way for models to nearly-complement each other such that it's justifiable to put blinders on and work with the more tractable near-complement when it's useful to do so. This echoes and gives pragmatic strength to arguments made by Jon (re: near equivalent adjointness) and SteveS' constant reminders about utility.

I still think this focuses too strongly on *duality* rather than plurality, though. I'm too ignorant of renormalizable theories in physics to know whether there are multiple "complements" amongst which we can flip to and fro, searching for the most "natural"/convenient representation, like a dilettante programmer choosing a programming language for a given task. We certainly have that in the more banal forms of normalization of, say, databases. And that 1st page from Weinberg (and the history as you lay it out) seems to indicate there are, at least, other/older methods, however sloppy. The flex and slop suggested by both SteveS utility and Jon's adjointness *feels* to me like an argument for pluralism over mere dualism.

On 12/3/21 4:16 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> So what’s left to be irritating enough to deserve comment, on this question, in the Wiki page’s “balance”.  They comment that some people feel that the infinities were “merely an artifact of human ignorance” as opposed to something “real”, or however they put it.
> 
> This, to me, invokes the language people have been bandying about for entropy for decades: is entropy a “real aspect of natural phenomena”, or “merely an artifact of human ignorance”?  (That language is uncalled-for there, too, but that is for other threads, in which my participation is now mercifully dead and buried.)
> 
> That way of saying it isn’t strictly wrong, of course, but let me offer an alternative rendering of the same strict meaning that carries a connotation that I think is more relevant:
> 
> "The interpretation that `all Lagrangians are phenomenological Lagrangians', within which infinities never arise in the course of doing calculations, entails the conclusion that humans have not yet worked out a complete and final theory accounting for all aspects of the nature and hierarchy of matter."
> 
> Gosh, stop the presses….
> 
> 
> Of course, I know that wasn’t what the main thread was about, and was merely a drive-by shooting in your post.  Don’t know where this leaves your assertion about physicists as monists.  I think I don’t understand why anyone who claims to be a monist bothers to say anything, since the act of choosing one word rather than another, or writing any sentence, would be obviated if all things are one thing.  I assume the physicists can just ignore all that and keep trying to do work.
> 

-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ