On 3/6/20 7:32 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: > Your own argument about structuring our understanding of atomic structure as > if electrons literally orbited a nuclear body, substituting electromagnetic > forces for gravitational, now takes up the argument on my behalf <ptouie>.
*My* argument?!?! Noooooo. I don't believe I ever made that argument. My argument was that atoms don't touch because the word "touch" is nonsense in the context of atoms. On 3/6/20 7:32 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: > Regarding your original point of "the distinction between reality and our > language/understanding", my newest "insight" is how CT allows/helps > mathematicians to draw parallels (analogies, mappings) between different > mathematical domains entirely based on their structural similarities, and > apparently how this has allowed one field's insights to be applied to > another. This is directly supportive of how I see metaphor to be useful... > it helps us apply existing understandings in one domain to another. Right. I agree that metaphors (or, specific kinds of metaphor like isomorphism or commuting categories) *work*. But the question is whether they work all the way down. The "Do atoms touch?" video makes a good argument that (some) particular metaphors have scope, inside which, they're fine, outside which they fail. To argue that metaphors work all the way down, we'd need to show that at least one metaphor works all the way down (and up). To me, this is perilously close to the simulation hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis. You might also be approaching something like Platonic math or Tegmark's mathematical universe ... or physics as information ... or any number of metaphysical claims about reality. You may even be approaching Peirce in his distinction between existence and reality, where real things need not exist. So, some of your metaphors may exist and others may not, but as long as everyone agrees those metaphors work best ... "hang together" best, then they're real (enough). I don't know. But it seems to me you're working very hard to confirm your bias that metaphors are fundamental. It would be more parsimonious to simply allow that, however useful, they are not fundamental. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
