Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
What’s the most basic ambiguity you entertain about the nature of the world? For eg: world is progressing vs declining. A dichotomy you actually care about that creates active conflict in your thinking, but you really don’t know which kind of world you’re in.
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necopinus
@necopinus.eth
In terms of my broader thinking: Is reality fundamentally discrete or continuous? In terms of my day-to-day life: Is "happiness" a valid metric for making decisions and judging their consequences?
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
@msms
+1 for continuous. The guy who wrote this (https://aeon.co/ideas/is-nature-continuous-or-discrete-how-the-atomist-error-was-born) has some books/a lens which really rewired my thinking :)
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necopinus
@necopinus.eth
> Fields are not fundamentally granular. Fields aren't fundamentally continuous either. The discrete/continuous question is whether the underlying metric is discrete or continuous. IMHO, I think the best evidence is that the underlying metric is discrete. But the long-term implications of that are really depressing.
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
@msms
Not familiar enough with quantum stuff to get what you mean by "the fundamental metric". But I am interested in what you're counting as evidence, and especially why you think its long-term implications are so sad-face...
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necopinus
@necopinus.eth
By "metric" I mean the properties you measure. Distance, energy, time, etc. There's no reason you can't have a field over a discrete space!
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