Readit NewsIf you have a purely instrumentalist view of reality, where, as I said, your so-called knowledge is actually just a model of an unknown thing which you employ to predict the measurements you read out against a ruler or on a meter or something, then yes, we've made progress exactly of the kind you describe.
But I was trying to make a point about epistemology and ontology. Physics has actually been pretty catastrophic for ontology. I don't think its wrong to say that from the point of view of physics we simply do not know what anything actually is.
> I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.
Yes. But this is a fairly radical position historically and philosophically. Most people would say that there is more to existence than measurement and I while I share your instrumentalist sympathies, like most physicists, I don't see the philosophical case that we can have a consistent worldview if we denounce all knowledge not related to measurement as a total non-starter.
Think about what instrumentalism really means. When you utter the sentence the earth is an oblate spheroid, you are actually making an incredibly complicated set of statements about the outcomes of experiments. If we take the instrumentalist view the measurement doesn't actually tell us the earth is an oblate spheroid - it just tells us that if we make a series of measurements then they come out in such a way as to be concordant with a model of the earth as an oblate spheroid. Are you really prepared to give up the idea that the earth is a thing you can know about?
I actually rather think physics strongly encourages us to adopt the instrumentalist view, primarily because it seems so clear that physics has a local character. In GR there simply is no state of affairs whatever about what is happening "right now" except at the point in spacetime where you make a measurement. Really think about what that means. If we are standing at the north pole and make a measurement of some kind, how can it pertain to the earth as a distributed object in space when we know GR says there is no state of affairs pertaining to that object at the moment of the measurement?
GR tells us all about what the outcome of various measurements will be, but it also calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean. The instrumentalist is committed to the idea that the only thing we can talk about is the results of measurements. What the measurements operate on is just not something we can know. I think that's weird. Physicists often conflate their mathematical models with reality and that lets them think an instrumentalist view is sufficient: the measurements coming out such and such a way is taken as evidence that the universe is filled with objects consistent with the model. But that association is non-trivial in modern physics.
I agree in that sense that physics does not do well here. I actually think physics _cannot_ do well here. Physics (and the "hard" sciences more generally) are good at describing what something is, and how it interacts with things around it. We "know" by assembling individual pieces of information that form a consistent model, then declare that model to be true. When a piece of information outside of that model arises, we then have to call that model in question.
I do not "know" the Earth is spherical from direct experience. I do "know" it from other indirect means - reading, measurements, images from space and so on. I do not also think that Asimov is saying anything about how we know what we know - he just talks about how "science is wrong" is not a true statement. Science is always approximately correct, but how approximate is the question.
So perhaps I'm missing the point entirely here, but I don't understand your distinction of "instrumentalist knowledge" vs other kinds of knowledge. If you say physics cannot explain my knowledge that I enjoy watching the sunrise - then absolutely yes. That is not it's realm. In the same way that physics cannot explain the history of medieval China to me. A common issue among physicists is to assume that this is the only way to view the world, and I disagree with that. There are many systems of knowledge, and each is good at certain things. Rejecting one as the "global" system misses the richness of other kinds of knowledge building.
It isn't that I agree with the person who wrote Asimov the letter (in fact, based on his description, I frankly wonder if the letter writer wasn't my father). Its just that there is something subtly wrong with Asimov's view of the progress of scientific knowledge.
At least its extremely instrumentalist. If we think of knowledge as a sort of temporary mental state which lives between setting up a physical state and making a measurement, then, yes, knowledge has progressed in exactly the way that Asimov is saying. And that is nothing to sneeze at.
But like consider quantum mechanics. People still cannot make heads or tails of what the ontology of quantum mechanics is, despite some compelling stories. And that makes perfect sense since QM is not compatible with special or general relativity! So its dumb to try and make sense of what QM tells us about what is. So why not try to understand what the ontology of QFT is? This seems reasonable, since QFT is capable of making correct predictions (at least in the scattering regime) and is invariant. But no one on earth can write down a coherent mathematical theory of QFT, so interpretation is even more difficult than QM. And this is yet to even try to tackle with conceptual gap between GR and QM/QFT, where we genuinely are perplexed but at least have good reason to think that the final interpretation of QM or spacetime has to have something to do with the way that the two theories interact.
From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.
My personal understanding here is that really there are no electrons, photons, quantum fields, masses, gravity. There is just the single substance of the universe which we have learned to manipulate and predict with ever improving precision (in limited cases). Maybe that is knowledge? Doesn't always feel like it.
> From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.
I disagree with this entirely. The existence of QFT, and our knowledge of the inconsistency between say GR and the quantum realm does not negate the idea of photons and electrons as real, measurable quantities. The fact that we have GR does not negate the fact that we still use Newtonian gravity in regimes where it is sufficiently accurate.
All the new knowledge we have learned still is (and absolutely must be) consistent with our old knowledge that has been proven correct in the regimes that they were proven correct.
This is effectively what Asimov is saying (as I understand anyway) - the knowledge that the Earth is a sphere does not invalidate the assumption that the Earth is flat approximately and locally.
I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.
String theory can tell me that we have several dimensions etc but until we have a way to measure and check it remains a conceptual framework to make predictions, rather than a description of how things really are.
GR is much closer to a description. It told us about the precession of mercury, it told us to account for time dilation so we can use GPS satellites. It also predicted black holes, which were conceptually consistent but it's only been in the last ~ 5 years that we have the closest thing yet to experimental verification with the Event Horizon Telescope and gravitational wave measurements. If another theory comes along and explains all of GR with a different explanation for black holes, we will need still more accurate measurements to discriminate between the two theories. Knowledge is only as accurate as we can measure.
But do you think a 'safe mode' - where April does only non destructive operation like read/summarize/draft/move emails to a folder would help you build trust?
It's in our pipeline - we can prioritize it to mitigate that fear.
AI is still not at the point where I am comfortable letting it run free with my email, but a draft that I can read over and make changes to before sending it out is a game changer.
In my experience uv (haven't tried astral) doesn't quite fill the same niche, especially if compiled packages from other languages are necessary for your workflow (libboost for example)
I've been using it on my Mac M1 and I only notice the memory footprint when I have > 30 - 40 tabs open.
Is 500k brits for 1 week as good as 5k brits for 100 weeks.
Effectively with so much data aren't you getting a superposition anyway.
In statistical mechanics there's a concept of "ensemble average" and its provable that if you have a system, the average state of the system over say a 100 realisations ("ensemble average") run for 1 second each, is equal to the the average of one system run for a 100 seconds - under some assumptions of course.
I don't know enough a about human biology to make a statement about whether any of those assumptions will hold true, but maybe someone else will.
"We know that the ball will bounce back every time it is thrown at a wall. A single particle, however, will sometimes pass straight through an equivalent barrier in its microscopic world and appear on the other side. This quantum mechanical phenomenon is called tunnelling."
Is the particle just failing to collide with the wall since objects are mostly empty space? Or is something more spooky or interesting happening?
It so happens that when you solve for this problem, a ball bouncing against a wall, in this wave function paradigm then you end up with a non-zero probability that the ball appears on the other side of the wall.
I'm not sure if there is a deeper explanation at play here but that's how I understand it.