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Originally Posted by Len Moran
The crux of this seems to be defining the actual. You define it as the “here and now”
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How about this: think of the here and now as part of the larger actual that extends off into the distance. You don't need dualism to say what you want to say. There doesn't have to be a model-reality with a real-reality hidden somewhere behind or underneath it. Science was supposed to have split from the view where we think that behind all the events we see in front of us, there are gods on Mt. Olympus or whatever directing it all. That is, science was supposed to have moved away from occult explanations where the real stuff was hidden underneath or behind the scenes. We don't need such a dualistic view to highlight the fact that science can always improve.
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- so, prior to GR, Newton’s laws were the “actual” but post GR are these laws seen as a simplification/model or are they still an "actual"? Is GR an “actual” waiting to be a simplification/model?
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Which of these tuna casserole recipes is closer to the "actual"?
Tuna Casserole Recipe 1
Tuna Casserole Recipe 2
Newton and GR are two recipes or techniques for (among other things) predicting the positions and motions of bodies. Don't think of Newton's theory as just ink markings in a book. Think of a student who has drilled on the subject and then proceeds to calculate for us where to look for a given comet in 90 days time. That student is not moving closer to or farther from anything. He is doing something. It will either work well for him or it won't—for any number of reasons.
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I suppose that if one thought science was able to reach an “actual reality”, then one would be justified in saying that each step along that road could be the “actual”, but that surely is a huge speculation to make. It seems to me that as long as we cannot be confident with regard to the ultimate completeness of scientific explanations, then they can only ever be a model.
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Notice that with the approach I am using here, we don't need to speak in terms of model and actual to illustrate that science is rarely, if ever, certain. We can be wrong for many reasons. We might be sloppy or careless. We might make a mistake. The quality of our observations might be poor. Our methods might be untested or not well developed. We might use a formula in inappropriate circumstances.
Suggesting that we are wrong because we possess a model that does not accurately represent reality overlooks all those factors. Blaming scientific failure on a model is an extremely simplistic metaphor. That strategy works to our advantage in general circumstances, so, I am not saying we shouldn't use the term “model” interchangeably with “theory.” But we may need to remind ourselves now and then that it is just a metaphor.
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The degree to which the model can be thought of as representing the “actual” is I think a very difficult question, which is why I think essentially it is a case of models all the way down to the fundamental levels of nature. And what do we find at that fundamental level?, well, a notion of reality that is mind independent and inaccessible.
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Stated more straightforwardly, there may be some aspects of nature that we never master.
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I can see how one may consider the predictive element of (say) Newton's laws will always be valid within its domain (unlike the rather transitory nature of descriptive elements) and from this perspective it could be thought of as always being an "actual", but after all said and done it is still an incomplete representation.
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Newton's book does not represent nor stand for anything else. It is a bunch of ink markings on paper. Altering the shapes of the markings does not move it closer to or farther from anything else, nor does it make it a more complete or less complete stand-in for something else.
Except figuratively speaking.
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But the very fact that we employ differing models logically points to a distinction between the models and a deeper reality.
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Or that there is more than one way to skin a cat.
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In the case of my example (the electric field) engineers can observe the RF energy through instruments, they can observe that the adding, moving or changing the antenna elements can affect the energy levels received, and those measurements could be shown to relate directly to a concept of an electric field as a real propagating electric wave (ignoring the magnetic component). But what does this observation really relate to in a scientific (not engineering) sense? The changing electric field is not a familiar observable notion like ripples on a pond, it is a concept based entirely on notions that are not part of our every day life (our macroscopic reality). Those notions have been created by science as a means of representing measurements that we perform at a detector.
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I'm going to try to strip out some of the dualism inherent in that:
The engineers don't observe RF energy “through instruments.” They observe the instruments and how they change as they alter the environment. They don't “relate the observed behavior to a concept of an electric field.” They calculate and cut antenna element lengths and configure antenna array geometries to maximize the needle positions on their instruments, to reduce the amount of static relative to signal coming out of the speakers, and so on.
The way they treat antennas and the rest of their RF equipment may be similar to the ways they treat water waves and oscillating springs, but their techniques are not pictures, models, or representations of water waves or anything else.
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I have no idea if those notions have a close resemblance or not to the underlying reality that allows us to observe a correlation between a source and detector separated in vacuum. Ken G pointed out that there are three different models that scientists use to explain this correlation, which one of them is correct? They are all correct of course in that they are all usable models of an underlying reality that underpins our macroscopic notion of EM radiation propagating between a source and sink.
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You start out saying you have no idea if these notions have a close resemblance or not to the underlying reality, and then you say that they must be models of that reality. So far, nobody has really pointed out in this discussion what the model is and what the underlying reality is supposed to be, so it is not clear why we should think the two share a relation of representation.
Briefly, the techniques work as well as they do because they were tested. Good science is good procedure.
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We are never in touch with absolute reality other than through human representation, this is my point -
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What about those times when you bang your toes on the damn coffee table leg?
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and that human representation can only be a model since we can never access the absolute directly.
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There is more than one way to skin a cat, but that doesn't mean that cat skinning must then be a model or representation of skinned cats or some underlying skinned cat or whatever.
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That I wouldn’t appreciate the role of science in our lives seems unlikely, what I did lack from science was a sense of what it was supposed to be telling us - notions of a reality consisting of “material” objects as particles or “photons in flight” seemed a bit fanciful to me. Yet I was aware that the science worked, so what was this scientific reality? Well what physics has told me is that there is a distinction to be made between scientific reality and the absolute. The latter exists in the absence of sentient beings, but at the most fundamental level is of a form that is inaccessible through science. The former gives rise to human representations that we label as atoms, photons etc, or in other words they are models.
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That all sounds more like philosophy than science.