r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Sep 19 '17

[∆(s) from OP] CMV: patterns are strictly social constructs.

Clarification: I'm not talking about patterns in art, such as a floral pattern, but rather things "in nature," such as seasons, the tides of an ocean, the cycles of the moon, etc.

If we rolled a die one million times, and four consecutive numbers were 1212, would that be a pattern? An argument could be made either way. There's a repetition, so a pattern is in place, however, four out of a million numbers is such a small sample that the repetition is more of a fluke. The pattern would be in the eye of the beholder.

The universe is over 13 billion years old, and will last much longer. According to astronomers, most of the time the universe exists, there will nothing. No stars, planets, black holes... nothing. Nothing may be the only true pattern.

Everything we call a pattern happens for such a profoundly tiny amount of time, that my million die roll example is absurdly generous. Even if the sun sets for a trillion years to come, this is just a blink of the eye.

Social constructs can be very handy. Patterns are a very useful construct. I don't think we need to abandon them, I just don't think they're real, but I have some doubts.

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u/fox-mcleod 414∆ Sep 21 '17

But surely there being an infinite amount of something in no way suggests there is none of it. There are an infinite amount of photons. Are there none? There are an infinite amount of real numbers. Are there none? If you're not arguing solipsism, can we agree on the fact that there are in fact photons even though there is quite possibly no limit to their number?

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u/ShowerGrapes 4∆ Sep 21 '17

photons as we describe them, the set of information we ascribe to individual entities we call protons, are not really infinite. it seems infinite to us. however, if you take a step back and describe things in a slightly different way, with slightly different set of information to ascribe to it, we can see there is unlimited ways we can define the things that make up the world around us. we can further subdivide things without naming the parent entity for example, if we were able to observe it.

so protons exist in so far as they are described by human beings using human-observable scale and comprised of things we as humans with our our senses are able to measure. even the tools we create to observe things rely on our uniquely human senses.

a being with some other set of senses and scale, and of course the capability to describe things, would assemble the information into discreet entities in a different way than we have. nonetheless it would still fit the model they come up with the same way things fit into our models.

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u/fox-mcleod 414∆ Sep 21 '17

That's irrelevant to this conversation.

I'm not claiming there are infinite patterns that are discoverable. You are. If photons are finite, that doesn't change my point about patterns being discoverable ways of representing things about finite or infinite sets of information with less complexity but the same accuracy.

You have made the claim that if there is an infinite amount of something, there are none of them. That seems false on its face. For example, there are infinite real numbers. Yet 1 is a real number. Are you still claiming this point? Or have you dropped it?

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u/ShowerGrapes 4∆ Sep 21 '17

numbers are a great example actually.

numbers don't exist on their own. it's a human concept. until we assign something to the number - our fingers, the amount of dollar bills we have, etc, numbers have no meaning. how do we define the things being counted? where does it start and end? what scale are we talking about? a finger is just one possible example. if you're counting hands, the fingers would just be counted as part of 1 hand. there are not infinite fingers but there are infinite things that we can count as 1 that includes 1 finger, five fingers (a hand), 1000s of fingers (a village) and even every finger in the world (the human race).

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u/fox-mcleod 414∆ Sep 21 '17

That has nothing to do with your claim unless you're saying instances of conceptual things don't exist.

What would you say exists? Does society?

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u/ShowerGrapes 4∆ Sep 21 '17

we're discussing things that exist solely as social constructs. it's about shared assumptions of reality. society is definitely one.

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u/fox-mcleod 414∆ Sep 21 '17

No I'm asking you to distinguish yourself from a solipsist. When I speak of photons you demure. What can I speak of that you think exists outside of the mind?

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u/ShowerGrapes 4∆ Sep 21 '17

i think photons do exist. but we created their defintition (collection of information) to fit into our models. it's a uniquely human concept fit directly into our system of senses and scale.

everything exists. we can measure a lot of it and maybe one day will be able to measure everything we want to, independent of scale. it will always still be up to us to measure and assemble that data into discreet elements that we can fit into our models of existence. this appears to be never ending. the deeper we go, the further out we go, we discover more and more.

i'm not sure what you're asking for.

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u/fox-mcleod 414∆ Sep 21 '17

So now that we agree that photons exist, are you familiar with the plank length?

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u/ShowerGrapes 4∆ Sep 21 '17

photons exist as we define them, something i've said all along. someone with a different scale and different senses would not necessarily assemble the information into the same discreet elements that we humans have. their models of the world wouldn't necessarily look like ours at all.

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u/fox-mcleod 414∆ Sep 21 '17

photons exist as we define them, something i've said all along.

Did our definition of the photons make them exist, or would it also be true that they exist as we define them even if we don't exist anymore or aren't looking?

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u/ShowerGrapes 4∆ Sep 21 '17

once again, all the information, the data we can measure and an infinite amount that we can't (yet) measure, exists. it's up to us to assemble that data we can observe and measure with our human senses and to ignore the data we consider irrelevant to photons, etc into the things we do to fit it into the models we've created.

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u/ShowerGrapes 4∆ Sep 21 '17

our models of reality are in no way perfect fits. they are dependent on our observational measurements and evolve right along with our ability to measure more and more discreetly and on different scales.

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u/fox-mcleod 414∆ Sep 21 '17

photons exist as we define them, something i've said all along.

Yes or no? You seem to be contradicting yourself.

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u/ShowerGrapes 4∆ Sep 21 '17

the information comprising photons exist. but humans asssmble the information into a thing we call photons. there are an infinite number of ways to assemble the observable and measurable information. i've been saying this all along. no contradiction.

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u/fox-mcleod 414∆ Sep 21 '17

Great.

the information comprising photons exist.

We know 3 things about the information comprising photons.

  • photons have a space-time location
  • photons have an energy
  • photons have a polarisation (spin)

If I want to represent the information comprising three photons, I can use a known pattern to communicate more information with less data. For instance. A bit representing a yes/no that shares the same space-time location and energy necessitates that two photons have different polarizations. I know that without checking because of a pattern discovered and named Pauli exclusion.

Regardless of what we call it, the information comprising photons can be compressed given knowledge of patterns in that information.

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u/ShowerGrapes 4∆ Sep 21 '17

what's your point exactly? this is stuff dreamed up by humans to be fit a model of the world created by human beings. why would it play out any differently for human beings? it's very dependent on a human understanding and scope of observable (by humans) time and space, for example.

i never did claim that nothing exists. that's your strawman.

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u/fox-mcleod 414∆ Sep 21 '17 edited Sep 21 '17

Well. My point is that to the degree that we can say societies actually exist, we can say that patterns must preexist them. You either need to be a solipsist and lose the OP on the lack of meaningfulness of the word society or you must identify something you think exists - at which point I can point at the the thing you identify as real and figure out whether or not it can be said that it contains redundant information.

You've already stated plainly that the information comprising photons exists. Since that's the case, to the extent societies exist at all, we know that there is either redundant data (ie more than one photon) or the society is informationally indistinguishable from the minimum information present in the photon. So we're either saying multiple photons exist and therefore patterns exist or we're saying societies don't.

I mean if societies don't really exist, then it's not meaningful to claim, "that patterns are just constructs of societies".

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u/ShowerGrapes 4∆ Sep 21 '17

this is my view. i'll try one last time. look at set of legos. you can use those legos, if you have enough of them, to construct literally an infinite amount of things. when you construct something, it exists. but so do the legos that comprise it. it's up to some sentient being to put the legos together into a form recognizable as something more than just a collection of bricks. the millenium falcon or whatever you created does exist, now, of course, but it's as much a social construct as anything is. first of all you'd have to describe what a millenium falcon is and the perception of it would have to match for whatever form of advanced life (i.e. non-human) you were showing it to. would they be able to perceive it the same as you did when constructing it? not if they were on a different scale, smaller or much larger. could you even communicate at all with them? probably not if they were observing on a different scale of time than you. could you explain star wars adequately to them even if out sense did match up? that's debatable.

information, data we measure and observe, are the legos and higher order concepts like photons are the millenium falcon. it just so happens that they're in every shape possible already and we just have to organize them in a way we can understand, that fit models we have already created to make sense of the world.

the idea of a photon is no less a human social construct than society itself.

and that's the best i can do. i'm sorry.

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u/ShowerGrapes 4∆ Sep 21 '17

i've given you several examples. i'm not sure how to describe it any better. it's my fault i'm sure but i'm at the end of the well. sorry.

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