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[AnssiH]

This isn't true- you are AGAIN confusing classical mechanics as a model with an INTERPRETATION of classical mechanics. What definitions or axioms do you feel arise from undefendable approximations? I'm becoming certain that while you are familiar with DD's analysis, you are unfamiliar with classical mechanics as an area of MATHEMATICS.

 

I'm not very familiar with mathematics, but how I interpret your claim is that when you take the definitions, disregarding their connection to reality, they are self-consistent.

 

And that in your opinion that fact proves that the analysis is flawed.

 

What I'm saying is that there is quite well defined premise to the analysis. It does not say all self-consistent models are valid physics. It says self-consistence from the given premise leads to the expression of physics. I.e. the raw data (the content) must become seen that way. "If it looks like a duck, it's a duck"

 

To every assertion that classical mechanics is self-consistent, you bring up approximations, which cannot exist WITHIN the model, ONLY when applying the model to reality.

 

...or upon realization about where the interpretation of those observations about reality came from. Different topic. This is entirely an issue related to how the definitions arise in the first place.

 

Further, you seem to think the model is built on thousands upon thousands of assumptions, which is also not true.

 

That comment also was meant refer to building of a world model, from unknown data. I know you immediately view that issue as a "relating the model to reality" type of problem, but from the perspective of this epistemological analysis, it is something that must occur when any specific definitions are arrived at.

 

I'm not misinterpreting the purpose- I am attempting to show by counter-example its incorrectness. As to the major error- dick takes his symmetry constraints and moves to his "dirac-type" equation as if this is the only way to implement these symmetries.

 

That has not been asserted (that it is the only way)

 

If you think the description of pixels in an image will have the same description as if you take a dozen steps back and see the image as a whole (analog vs. digital), you are mistaken.

 

Hmmm, certainly we interpret things differently from different distances, but I have no idea what sparked you to make that comment. Suppose reality is a spacetime, and suppose that spacetime keeps getting scaled larger, then what would tell that fact to the inhabitants of the spacetime? If you scale up the entire presentatoin of reality, who is there to watch it happening?

 

Further, Dick is talking about ANY data and ANY self-consistent models that attempt to explain that data- and his analysis implies (via his equation) that any self-consistent explanation of any set of data should have some scale invariance.

 

No he is not saying that at all. First of all he is talking about very specific scale invariance, and he is saying that the [imath]x,y,z,/tau[/imath] representation of the explanation would have the scale invariance to it. The transformation to that representation may not be very straightforward.

 

The problem is that you and dick cannot fathom the idea of what NOT having scale invariance would mean- and so you assert its impossibility.

 

It means that you suppose the existence of something that does not get scaled. When by definition the scale invariance referred to the data plotted about the entire universe.

 

I don't assert that the counter-examples I have indicated are particularly obvious, and often an outside perspective will see things the creator of the work will not. I spent several years of my life working on a model I thought was brilliant, when I went to publish, a reviewer pointed out several (as it turns out insurmountable) flaws. c'est la vie.

 

If DD wants his work to be taken seriously, he needs to figure out a way to answer direct questions with direct to-the-point answers. Responding over and over again by paraphrasing the work is a bit silly.

 

Indeed, and I think this forum thing is not the best place to communicate this, because the real issues get buried under a lot of noise. I'm not surprised that his replies have been blunt, because it is clear to me that people are not really understanding what he is talking about. Once you point out a real issue, as oppose to some interpretation problem that is almost impossible to investigate, he will respond properly I'm sure... This problem is not really new to any discussion about epistemology and ontology I guess (clear communication is very difficult), and here is the added problem that people who are more used to communicating those types of issues, are typically not used to math (I guess you can put me somewhere in that category?).

 

At any rate, I'm the last person you see getting excited over an argument about what reality is. I have concluded long time ago that it's kind of arbitrary as to what one chooses to believe in. What is nice is that DD is really just talking about logical mechanism. It is something that is important from the point of view of general learning mechanisms (that is completely unsolved problem at this time, largely due to those same problems of "you can never really know anything"). And it is something that can only either be valid, or invalid by itself, and there is no role to belief in there.

 

-Anssi