31–40 of 362 posts
Do you know the concept of space-time, block universe, B-theory of time, etc? How physics assumes that the laws of physics don't know the notion of "now"? And how physicists usually start every calculation with "let X denote the set of events", all the past and future events? Isn't that depressing? The future is true, even if we can't know it. (Even in a finite, discrete and deterministic universe, which we can compu…
Do you know the concept of space-time, block universe, B-theory of time, etc? How physics assumes that the laws of physics don't know the notion of "now"? And how physicists usually start every calculation with "let X denote the set of events", all the past and future events? Isn't that depressing? The future is true, even if we can't know it. (Even in a finite, discrete and deterministic universe, which we can compu…
No? Why would it be?
It's not that the past is not true. The past is true, what was reported is not. We know very clearly where the problem lies. The media is a lie. Headlines like "she'll never walk again" sells more than "she'll be fine".
But I agree with the point that it's not "the past" that's at fault here, it's unreliable sources of information.
Do you know the concept of space-time, block universe, B-theory of time, etc? How physics assumes that the laws of physics don't know the notion of "now"? And how physicists usually start every calculation with "let X denote the set of events", all the past and future events? Isn't that depressing? The future is true, even if we can't know it. (Even in a finite, discrete and deterministic universe, which we can compu…
Is this story made up though?
Do you know the concept of space-time, block universe, B-theory of time, etc? How physics assumes that the laws of physics don't know the notion of "now"? And how physicists usually start every calculation with "let X denote the set of events", all the past and future events? Isn't that depressing? The future is true, even if we can't know it. (Even in a finite, discrete and deterministic universe, which we can compu…
What to read on the slice universe?
That's the view that all that exists is the present. What we call the past is what used to be present and what we call the future is what one day will be present, but neither the past or future exist so long as they are not the present.
It's not that the past is not true. The past is true, what was reported is not. We know very clearly where the problem lies. The media is a lie. Headlines like "she'll never walk again" sells more than "she'll be fine".
Your statement is only partly true. The article just says "I found out that I broke the other driver’s spine, and she’ll never walk again" - so you're reading into it that he read it in a newspaper, but maybe it was just hearsay from someone who talked to someone who worked at the hospital who had talked to the doctor who may have treated her (or maybe someone else who also had a car accident that day)? I think the v…
The underlying story is somewhat interesting. The author went through life with a lot of unnecessary guilt and suffering because he was carrying around a false narrative, and it is true that false narratives happen. But the larger conclusion he tries to draw from it seems really problematic:
>History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation.
But this is NOT the moral of the story in my view. The moral is that one can have an erroneous belief about what happened, and THAT can cause a lot of problems. The author even experienced feeling better when he learned what ACTUALLY happened, not when he decided on a new interpretation of events. Because his original belief about the event was NOT an interpretation of events, it was an erroneous belief about what the events were.
And in fact, in the anecdote, learning the "factual events" was everything.
In general, I struggle with the idea that calling something that's just factually wrong "an interpretation". That seems to stretch the word "interpretation" to the point where it stops being useful. If I am convinced that Napoleon was, in fact, a black man, do we really want to call that an "interpretation of events". What events am I interpreting? None, I would argue. I'm just making things up. Just like someone made up that the woman in the story broke her spine. It just never happened. It's not an interpretation of anything.