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Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
Perhaps its more the perspective of an anthropologist. I am looking at the physical artifacts and activities of scientists, as well as the way the world and people's lives change, and asking, “What is taking place here?”
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Fair enough, as long as you recognize what
you are doing. The problem is when you make claims about what
others (i.e., physicists) are, or are not, doing (i.e., not making models). I find that claim highly unsubstantiated, to say the least.
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There are models, metaphors, analogies, and representations, here, but is the best description of the products of science is that it produces copies of the world it studies?
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Why did you feel the need to replace the perfectly satisfactory word "models" with the highly incorrect word "copies"? If you did it to make your objection sound more reasonable, it would be prevarication.
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It is not clear in such a case how being in possession of a replica of something makes one knowledgeable about the original. Owning a cheap knockoff of the original Rubik's cube wouldn't help one in solving the original cube.
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That's simple reasoning from analogy, and a horrendous one at that. In actual physics, "owning cheap knockoffs" of actual physical situations is of
tremendous value, we do it all the time, and is pretty much the core pursuit of entire subfields like astronomy. Look up "cosmological principle", for example, for a perfect example of the extreme value of a "cheap knockoff".
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The computer does produce representations, of course.
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Precisely.
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The computer becomes part of the overall loop involving the golfer and the golf course.
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If I program a robot to strike a golf ball using the stroke calculated by a computer simulation, I hardly see how there is some "overall loop" that I need to take into account. No, we have a simple model of the interactions of a club, a ball, and a green, and we use that model to calculate what stroke should sink the putt. This is a model, pure and simple. If it works, the putt goes in. Why you insist in complicating that is beyond me. What possible benefit can be derived from seeing this as part of some elaborate feedback loop involving golfers and experiences? Why not include the golfer's family, upbringing, political views, and religion-- surely they all affect the putt.
You see, your position boils down to saying "a model is useless because it doesn't include all that", but the fact is, that's exactly why a model is use
ful. Which brings us right back to the importance in physics of the concepts of objectivity and mind-independent reality. Your views on behavior are not only not physics, they are pretty close to the
opposite of physics.
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Overall, then, the computer's function is not to model, but to increase control sensitivity to particular features in the environment.
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And it achieves that by.... ? (Modeling.)
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I think that the LHC and the like perform the same function for physicists. The LHC puts them in command and control of the environment in ways they could not be otherwise.
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Indeed it does, and we
extract that value by using models.