#gated truths

[mentalisttraceur]

For anyone who followed since I last rambled about it, I bathtub-philosophered my way to the conclusion that the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics is basically another gated truth kinda like utilitarianism is.

Like, that people just can't conceive what it means from just reading the words.

That it requires thinking about the nature of the world enough to have some realizations about the hard inevitable limitations of measurement.

But a couple tips:

It has nothing to do with consciousness. At all. When it says "observation", idea-fit "interaction". For "observer", idea-fit "anything in the universe that interacts with the modeled thing".

It is not an interpretation of what the wave function really physically is, it is an interpretation of the wave function as a mere accounting mechanism for inescapable uncertainty and incomplete knowledge.

[mentalisttraceur]

For all of its flaws and limitations, humanity is a good filter and validator of ideas.

At least now that it is connected by the internet into one big network with extremely low latency.

There is really valuable stuff that it fails to propagate, but that is often gated truths which we wouldn’t understand until after we figure them out by other means anyway.

[mentalisttraceur]

In many ways, I am a peddler of gated truths (which is like being a snake oil salesman, except I always get to say that if my words aren't delivering the wisdom I promised, the problem is you).

What sucks about that is that sometimes no cognition funnel small enough to fit into a reasonably consumable chunk is going to be able to engender the necessary internal experiences.

For at least some gated truths, stories can be delivery mechanisms for those experiences. If stories get us emotionally invested, pull us along and get us to simulate experiences to the point of genuine reaction. But that needs far bigger investments for both sides of the transmission to craft and process.

So for a lot of the things I want to say, part of the depth almost certainly must come from the experience and introspection of the audience.

It would be easier to just leave it at that. To just say either you get it or you don’t, and if you don’t maybe you will, but sucks if not.

But my ideal is to lay down as many hooks and as much guidance for that experience as possible, so that minds like past me who read it are better prepared to consolidate the first blips of that experience into the right epiphany, rather than brute-force suffering their way through many more experiences until they can extract the signal from the noise.

[mentalisttraceur]

What you have to remember is that any wise idea out there has probably been explained or argued or defended to you before. Just by people who didn't get it, who wrongly rationalized why it was right, who were tribal and uncritical in their support of it.

[mentalisttraceur]

Ever since I realized that every mention of the Copenhagen Interpretation on Wikipedia or popular discussion seems to be wrong about what it actually is, this has widened the range of how much I have to distrust as possibly wrong for reasons of being too gated.

Except that distrust is itself gated - it is frustratingly hard to explain as being justified, or even to convey what the shape of it is, unless you already know what it is like to know how wrong people tend to get things enough to experience a similarly shaped distrust when reading claims about what is known.

And now that I think I see hints of something like that with Bell's Theorem and this whole superdeterminism (probably just a very physicsy angle on what choice inevitability looks like from the flawed or too "in-system" intuition where choices are not inevitable) thing, that only threatens to widen that further.

I am so tired.

One day when I am no longer emotionally distressed by what I perceive as errors and when I am no longer outcome-sticky towards the benefits of successfully reaching agreement, it won't tire me so much, but for now it does.