I certainly mean the second set of things: scoped, bounded, etc. But I think I also want to mean aspects of the first as well. Here, it is clear that I am using templates from within things we (think we) have solved in physics, and maybe biology, as models for what I expect scientific progress to look like more generally. At the least, because it has to contain the physics that has these aspects, but also because there seems every reason to expect them elsewhere.
To be less vague and cryptic (I hope): If I ask what we can do correctly within some domain of physics, it often amounts to predictions that come from the collected action and interaction of a fairly small collection of coded laws. And in some cases, some parameters that we just take as inputs, but don’t have “explanations” for. Even within the Standard Model, though, what we have are finite-dimensional effective theories at a few energy scales down in the observable range. Even if you think it will just be quantum field theory with renormalization all the way down (which there is good reason to distrust would be enough), there is still a vast range of scales we have no good current ways to probe, which can be filled with a large number of parameters that get aggregated at low energy and that we have no way, from low-energy observations alone, to disaggregate. But it could be worse than that, it seems to me: Consider what we would have tried to do with only classical physics, if we had (put aside the wrong ordering of the experimental timing), known the existence and masses of protons, neutrons, and electrons. We would have had no alternative to supposing that the masses of nuclei were the sums of the masses of their components, and that the masses of atoms were the sums of masses of their nuclei plus some electron masses. Quantitatively, the above prediction would have been only modestly wrong. Indeed, the whole masses of the electrons would have been smaller than the errors in the mass-predictions for the nuclei. But look what we had to do to improve those predictions: Everything that had been a number in classical physics became a distribution in quantum mechanics, and all interactions had to go to infinite order and get renormalized, and on and on. There was this vast machinery of underlying structure, most of which vanished into a few aggregate parameters at the low scale, but which we had to model correctly to get the right values for those parameters. Apologies for the last few paragraphs; they didn’t address your actual question, and went off on a tangent about the structures in physics that impact my thinking. Back, then, to us and the state of our science: What are we doing at any given stage? We use these few tokens, with whatever math we have for them, to calibrate the whole system to some collection of observations. It’s always very limited. In the case of the discovery of QM, we got a lesson that we were omitting infinite-dimensional spaces of structured things that we turned out to need. If I am right, to use that one past learning event as a model for future expected reformulations, then I expect that whatever it will take to deal with QM and gravity is likely to reveal a whole mess of unexpected new infrastructure, to calibrate to the current (still finite) set of parameters we use. If we think about more complex sciences, like biology, and we think of each new “scientific law” as some kind of compressed description of regularities in an aggregated system, it seems likely that the potential for distinct and irreducible new patterns to be characterized will be infinite, kind of like the eligible patterns in number theory are presumably infinite. At any given time, we know about and try to use a collection of them that is finite and usually small. So that was what I intended in saying that, in science as in everyday behavior, we act like small finite-state machines, which coarse-grain our momentary involvements in the world in ways that leave real differences unresolved and unsensed. Then, to that I attach my own prejudice that the dimension of the real details we don’t notice is probably infinite. But each stage of our progress will always be by some finite increment, so presumably the unknown will remain infinite. > On Dec 3, 2025, at 11:38, glen <[email protected]> wrote: > > Dense and and flat at the same time. Well done. I know you meant this for > Nick. But I have 1 question that would help me understand. When you say > "finiteness", "finite beings in an infinite world", and "been infinite > forever", do you mean it in the mystico-pop culture sense? Or are you using > it in a technical sense, like the difference between {1,2,3} versus {1,2,3,…}? > > Because if I swap out your use of "finiteness" with scoped, bounded, > separate, disjoint, or such ... that 1 thing can be distinct from another > thing, then almost all of what you write snaps into place. But I'm afraid of > preemptive registration. > > On 12/3/25 3:37 AM, Santafe wrote: >> [snip] >> 4. It is ultimately the problem of finiteness, and of carrying out inductive >> behavior, that leads me from the above claims, to the “as if” >> characterization of the role of an “objective posture” in our discourse and >> our behavior. I acknowledge that Glen didn’t want to sign off on a notion >> of the “real world”. But speaking just for myself, I obviously go through >> the day acting as if there “is” a “real world” “out there” all the time. >> And I assume that the reason our common language gave me a discourse to >> refer to such things is that most-everybody else goes through life feeling >> much like I do about it, and acting much like I do. Indeed, I would argue >> that we cannot do otherwise, because for practical purposes we are >> induction-committers: finite beings in an infinite world, who cannot help >> but coarse-grain endlessly variable circumstances into limited categories, >> and then use the limited categories as indices for our responses. I settle >> on that act of performing an inductive continuation as the central feature >> of us that, if we want to refer to it, will lead to language about the real >> world, more or less like the language we find ourselves having inherited, >> and using. >> 4a. On the (still inductive) belief that the moments of my life actually >> flow in a sequence roughly like I think they do, and that the wakeful >> moments of my life aren't all a grand hallucination, which only those on LSD >> recognize in its true nature, and the rest of us are blind to — mea culpa >> here for my stance on the matter — I take a certain Darwinian (or >> reinforcement-learning) view that there is only some stability to any of >> these inductions, enough that we ever have a reason to need to refer to >> them, because the structure in the events that happen likewise has elements >> of stability that we can sync onto, metaphorically like a phase-locked loop >> (from electrical engineering) uses its tendency to synchronize to find the >> periodicity in a signal that it can lock onto. My reasoning here is clearly >> circular: in refusing to reject the premise of a “real world”, I am using >> patterns of structure I form within my discourse about that world, to refer >> to myself within it, and assign commonalities to me and to the rest of it >> that warrant my referring to the rest of it. This is what the mystics >> regard as error on my part: that we have all been infinite forever, and that >> we therefore never needed to settle for induction. Oh well; I don’t know >> what to do with them. >> 4b. But at last I at least have a language in which to say how objectivity >> attached to the earlier discourse about the stability of assertion and >> activity. This “source of stabilization” for my inductive behaviors is >> effectively what I tag with the name of “the objectively real”. Then, my >> own nature as an induction-committer is the thing I tag with this notion of >> an “objective frame” that I take on w.r.t. all the dimensions of variation I >> effectively regard as ignorable while I am doing my finite-state >> induction-committing thing. I suppose that the two different tags have >> something to do with each other, to the extent that my inductions are stable >> and present to me as having some structure to refer to, and not just being a >> structureless random walk. >> Anyway, sorry to pile more onto the last. Whenever your current project >> lets go of you, if you aren’t sick of (my version of) all this, it can be >> added to the silage. >> Eric > -- > ¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ > ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω. > > .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... > --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,LW3jLXJgYPPF1NAXuE6SJYtvAuO2mowBCr45v1ez1ezi6tP2-NwCHnLzYwhcjWxBcIvNVIIabm_3Wh_8FcrqBv45RItkX3fK3b3mkeidIRBwh-kGOwQ,&typo=1 > to (un)subscribe > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,k69NNNIfToggBNK80Ih-ECjm8QKT0cPIwHYwGq0dqmuPs-tI1CDIM3zfhuM0HGpp1Z7uaAbj5w3t-AgA1ZVRFmV6jGvzBqC1QdTeifKB83IO_O4GZfzh&typo=1 > FRIAM-COMIC > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,HVWeiKoAba_EDWGrZXF1sVasDSD27gE9JwBoMe0Zwu1SNV5G1nOnNcQZXzLgueIeM4qX5RZq2_VMmABqln7C8aqqKrkwrOY20m5I1VKD58Hc2lNObz-JCRnkAg,,&typo=1 > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,G7iy44a75qxR-JJpn8u-1xfNT2OqxNRkssT-iKA5wuT77ldInDS8aL_AtK7d58jN8UnRNY-USvPscxyn9HCD3cTdCbVQFmM7Hqy6DiE6hrRAuDIkvtdYd7ndXQ,,&typo=1 > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. 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