blotter_paper

You know how after the last big civilization all-out-war it turned out that the losers had secretly engaged in gross scientific experiments on humans? I think it would be naive to imagine that the winners didn't do so as well, they just didn't have their file cabinets put on display to retroactively justify the extreme violence that the world had just witnessed. Governments do scary things in basements, and they keep those basements as secret as possible -- we only get to see behind the veil when a government falls and an opponent successfully takes their files/scientists and that opponent has an incentive to make those files public. Not having brains attached would be a huge improvement over the current state of the art, in my opinion; I believe that we're probably already living in a world far more dystopian than the imagined one being discussed.

From the about section (emphasis added):

>Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks.

[...]

>Limitations

>480 characters per reply ASCII only because it works everywhere

I could see this being a xenophobic thing, but I could also see it being more about the limited character set (for minimalism). I'm not making a claim about the motivations, but either way your desire seems counter to his vision.

Reputation?

Could you expand on that last sentence? I haven't had coffee yet, and I'm legitimately failing to grasp which regulations you're referring to.

>So in your view, anything that is a composite of two or more primitives is by definition "made up".

Yes. If we start calling higher order configurations "real" then we have to contend with all of the potentially imaginable subdivisions of the noumenon and either grant them all realness or find some arbitrary criteria upon which to deny some of those subdivisions the property of realness. If we grant that an insect is a real thing then I get to make up a new word, say, "kokirombo," that describes the front two-thirds of a grasshopper combined with the left half of a ladybug, some air, a pinch of grass, and the rear bumper of a 1998 Ford Taurus. You can come up with some arbitrary standard by which your gerrymandering of reality is allowed and mine is not, but there isn't anything that makes your standard more valid than mine. In practice we typically use usefulness as our standard for categorizing things, but dogmatically claiming this as the criteria for realness leads to absurd positions.

>Therefore, given a standard definition of natural numbers [1], any number except zero is made up?

I still haven't necessarily accepted zero as not being made up, but I think your Succ function implicitly depends on one being defined as well.

>They are actually, within the domain for which they are valid.

Strongly disagree. If you believe in quantum mechanics then you believe that things move probabilistically. I'm obviously arguing that every scale except the smallest is made up, but even if we hypothetically accepted the validity of larger scales then we would have to admit that there is an ever-so-vanishingly-small chance that any given cannonball will spontaneously jump three meters to the left thus deviating from it's Newtonian trajectory. The fact that you could launch cannonballs from now until the heat death of the universe without seeing this effect at a scale you would typically notice is inconsequential, Newton's equations are still merely a useful approximation and they are not isomorphic to the behavior of the noumenon.

>Then define "made up".

That which is not a part of base reality. If base reality were operating using the same rules as Conway's game of life then cells would be real, but gliders would be made up. Since Conway's game of life actually runs in a simulation on some computer or another, cells are also made up.

>Suppose it is merely a useful tool. This tool then necessarily has a structure that's isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon, otherwise it wouldn't actually be a useful tool.

Newton's equations are now accepted as an approximation; they are not isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon, yet remain useful when firing cannons. Myths and legends have been useful in compelling people to wage wars and donate to charities, yet we do not suppose that this usefulness means they are isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon.

Perhaps fermions and bosons correspond very closely to real parts of the noumenon, but they could also be a phenomenon which is emergent on top of something else -- as made up as chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics.

No prob, but if mdszy reads this I want to explicitly note that this is not meant as a caricature of their statement, I'm just trying to distill my meaning down into the most simple terms I can muster.

Alice buys a status symbol instead of donating to a charity. Bob says "Alice, stop and think about whether you care more about status symbols than charities!" Even if I agree with Bob's implicit condemnation, I can still see how Alice would feel attacked by the wording. Perhaps Bob wants Alice to feel attacked (this could be an attempt to jar Alice into recognizing her own greed), but it does Bob no good to not understand how he might be perceived by Alice. If Bob understands how he will be perceived then he will be able to craft his message in more useful ways -- ways that I would expect to be significantly friendlier on average, but which may sometimes actually be more combative. Ignorance of the perspectives of others does the message writer no good.

I also feel like I agree with your point, which is significantly more empathetic and less realpolitik than mine.

I wouldn't say that being found in nature means that something is not made up. Issus coleoptratus evolved gears long before humans invented them, yet gears seem purely phenomenal -- I wouldn't expect the noumenon to have anything directly corresponding to gears in it, "gear" is just a useful concept we have that lets us categorize part of an insect or a bicycle (both of which are made up themselves, of course).

There may be discrete math in the noumenon, but I'm not convinced of that. For all I know the noumenon could be dealing in something else entirely, and math might just be a really useful tool we came up with (like classical physics, and probably modern physics). Math is the simplest case you can make, but I don't see a compelling reason to accept it as a given.

Strongly disagree.

While I don't disagree with my reading of your statement (which may differ greatly from your intent -- I'm not sure), I also don't see it as another way of putting my last comment; I was attempting to make another point entirely.

I, for one, both agree with your perspective and see how the last sentence of your original comment could be taken as engaging in a "political slapfight" (a pretty vague term) when viewed from the other side. I think being able to view the world from the eyes of the other is a useful skill, even when the other is a literal fascist -- I'm not even arguing that you should necessarily come across differently, just that you should understand how you may come across to people with different perspectives.