Published on December 17, 2024 2:05 PM GMT
Many people who find value in the Sequences do something which looks to me like adopting a virtue called "align your map to the territory." I recently was thinking about experimental results, and it got me thinking about how we don't really know what the territory is, other than the thing we look at to see if our maps are right. Everything we know is map. What we know consists of a variety of models that describe aspects of reality, and we have to treat them like reality to get anything done. It wasn't relevant to my post at the time, but it occurred to me that it doesn't really matter what reality is, because my values live at a higher level of abstraction with my sense of self. Don't get me wrong, it matters that I know that reality exists. If reality says something different than my models do, then I need to change my models. However, I'm beginning to believe that reality has no importance or value beyond that. The stuff I care about happens to run on some hardware which I need to have decent models for if I want to take actions to protect that stuff, but I'm done once I understand the hardware well enough to protect the stuff. I wanted to write about that a bit, because I had internalized a way of thinking which says that everything is a model without explicitly thinking about the consequences.
That was an awkward set of statements to write because I am a particle physicist. I take joy in figuring out how matter works. I have developed a picture of reality which I very much did not evolve to intuit. This is a roundabout way to convey the sentiment behind the statement "quantum mechanics is weird" while also holding the idea in mind that it very much seems to be the way that the universe works on small scales, and so we don't want to think of it as a strange, alien thing to run away from as soon as possible.
Anyway, I believe that the electromagnetic interaction gives us the physical framework for everything we directly interact with in reality, and the field theory which best explains the electromagnetic interaction paints a picture of seas of virtual particles and other such things that do not directly affect the things I can do in the world with my own hands. There is nothing my brain can cause my fingers to do which cannot be explained by classical physics. I will not have a perfect model of my fingers if I ignore quantum mechanics. It is possible that a charged particle from a cosmic ray makes my finger spasm one day, but the normal working order of my finger doesn't need to be explained at a level that close to reality. Even saying "that close to reality" may be implying that quantum mechanics is more territory than it is. Quantum mechanics is map. It is very good map, and it even includes directions for deriving the classical limit map that predates it and that still works very well for anything I can do with my fingers, but quantum mechanics is map. There is still confusion in quantum mechanics, and the territory is not confused.
All of this is to say that I am aware of maps which sure seem more aligned with the territory than the models I make of my surrounding furniture and walls in order to navigate my house, but nothing I care about lives in those models. Sometimes I have to pay attention to those "lower-level" models because they contain threats to things which I care about, but the things I care about are things like the people in my life and my record collection and my understanding of quantum mechanics. Yes, you need to have atoms before you can have vinyl. Yes, you need to develop humans by purely mechanical means before you can have human values. However, if it were possible to take all of the things I care about and upload them into a lower resolution simulation of the environment that they depend on (the Planck constant is very small relative to scales I directly care about), then I would be ambivalent about that if my "higher-level" abstractions still worked the same way. I don't need the specific underlying reality we have to be happy, I need the abstractions that I evolved to see myself in. Aligning my maps to the territory is a means to the end of tweaking the territory so that my maps include me standing on a pile of utility. I admit that I derive joy from the alignment itself, but I would derive that joy no matter what the territory looked like if my neural structure was the same on any level of abstraction.
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