Maps are models of the territory. And the usefulness of them is often that they make predictions about parts of the territory I haven’t actually seen yet, and may have trouble getting to at all. The Sun will come up in the morning. There isn’t a leprachaun colony living a mile beneath my house. There aren’t any parts of the moon that are made of cheese.
I have no problem saying that these things are true, but they are in fact extrapolations of my current map into areas which I haven’t seen and may never see. These statements don’t meaningfully stand alone, they arise out of extrapolating a map that checks out in all sorts of other locations which I can check. One can then have meaningful certainty about the zones that haven’t yet been seen.
How does one extrapolate a map? In principle I’d say that you should find the most compressible form—the form that describes the territory without adding extra ‘information’ that I’ve assumed from someplace else. The compressed form then leads to predictions over and above the bald facts that go into it.
The map should match the territory in the places you can check. When I then make statements that something is “true”, I’m making assertions about what the world is like, based on my map. As far as English is concerned, I don’t need absolute certainty to say something is true, merely reasonable likelihood.
Hence the photon. The most compressible form of our description of the universe is that the parts of space that are just beyond visibility aren’t inherently different from the parts we can see. So the photon doesn’t blink out over there, because we don’t see any such blinking out over here.
Maps are models of the territory. And the usefulness of them is often that they make predictions about parts of the territory I haven’t actually seen yet, and may have trouble getting to at all. The Sun will come up in the morning. There isn’t a leprachaun colony living a mile beneath my house. There aren’t any parts of the moon that are made of cheese.
I have no problem saying that these things are true, but they are in fact extrapolations of my current map into areas which I haven’t seen and may never see. These statements don’t meaningfully stand alone, they arise out of extrapolating a map that checks out in all sorts of other locations which I can check. One can then have meaningful certainty about the zones that haven’t yet been seen.
How does one extrapolate a map? In principle I’d say that you should find the most compressible form—the form that describes the territory without adding extra ‘information’ that I’ve assumed from someplace else. The compressed form then leads to predictions over and above the bald facts that go into it.
The map should match the territory in the places you can check. When I then make statements that something is “true”, I’m making assertions about what the world is like, based on my map. As far as English is concerned, I don’t need absolute certainty to say something is true, merely reasonable likelihood.
Hence the photon. The most compressible form of our description of the universe is that the parts of space that are just beyond visibility aren’t inherently different from the parts we can see. So the photon doesn’t blink out over there, because we don’t see any such blinking out over here.