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Response#1

Response#3

Response#2

Interesting how you are so confident that this didn’t occur, yet you don’t even know what I’m referring to, meaning you just felt the need to come here and attack me to farm upvotes… yes this website is literally just reddit 2.0. Just wait for the downvotes on this post. You will see not 1 upvote besides the default one, because there is not 1 person on this community who can admit that posting for no other reason than to attack someone’s character is not bad behavior.

Response#1

Response#1

Okay then say it. Prove it right now. Admit to these things in your response to me:

1. The mathematics of a theory does not necessitate the philosophical interpretation of it. (good discussion on this topic)
2. The mathematics are compatible with other interpretations. (good discussion on other ways of interpreting SR specifically; a poll showing that there is no consensus on how to interpret QM)
3. I am not a science denier “know-it-all” for being convinced by a few mathematical and logical arguments in the literature that a different way of interpreting it is more logically consistent. (papers such as this one and this one and this one and this one; I’d also recommend checking out this article for a brief overview)

Notice that I am not asking you to agree with my interpretation. Only that you drop the talking point that I am somehow a “know-it-all” or a “science denier” for holding it, just because I find the arguments in these papers convincing.

If you don’t find them convincing, all I am asking is you to stop hurling personal attacks and claiming I am pushing some crackpot theory or that I “don’t want to take criticism” (even though literally all I’ve been begging for is criticism, but all I get in response are personal attacks!), and actually show where you think these papers make an error and where the reasoning is wrong so you can change my mind.

If you genuinely don’t think this way then it should not be hard for you to just respond saying you agree to those three points.

Update#1: Supposedly no one thinks this way, yet I’ve received 5 downvotes and yet not one person agreeing to these three baseline points. I’ll just keep patiently waiting until it eventually happens… any day now… You all can happily prove you guys don’t think this way with a simple response of “I agree”. I’m sure it’ll happen if I just keep waiting patiently enough…

Update#2: Up to 10 now. Supposedly no one thinks this way, yet not 1 person can agree to these three points.

So then why does everyone here universally agree that I need to have faith in “the field” and am arrogant if I don’t believe in a particular philosophy that has no empirical evidence to support it just because a lot of people in “the field” do? How is that not faith?

Mathematics gives you empirical predictions, and so you only change the empirical predictions if you change the mathematics. But the same body of mathematics can be interpreted in various different ways. If we want to think about what the mathematics implies about reality, we have to apply a layer of philosophical interpretation, in order to comment on how to think about the mathematics.

But the same body of mathematics can be thought about in multiple different ways, and since the body of mathematics itself is not changing, then the empirical predictions do not change, so you cannot resolve the disagreement empirically.

The facts of physics do not oblige us to accept one philosophy rather than the other.

— John Bell, “How to Teach Special Relativity”

It seems to me then that the only position is to resolve it logically. You need to make an argument about how to think about it. Even if you are a pure positivist who just says “shut up and calculate,” that’s still a philosophical stance on how to think about the mathematics and it still needs a justification. Sure, it’s not an empirical justification, but you should still be able to give reasons as to why you believe what you do, and show it is logically consistent.

When I say I’m not convinced that the dominant stance of SR (which philosophically interprets what is directly measured by rods and clocks is directly equivalent to ontological space and ontological time) is actually that logically consistent, so I make an argument as to why a different way of thinking about the same mathematics is more logically consistent, I am told by just about everyone here that I need to just shut up and have faith in “the field” and believe the dominant philosophy (which, again, interprets what is directly measured by rods and clocks is directly equivalent to ontological space and ontological time), or else I’m accused of being “arrogant” and a “know-it-all.”

That is the overwhelmingly dominant consensus of just about everyone who has replied and downvoted this post, that I must have faith in the dominant philosophical paradigm, even though no empirical evidence can establish it.

Even if you truly are a complete pragmatist, well, your opinion is arguably only popular in QM. There is a lot of “shut up and calculate” in QM, but not much for interpretations of SR. Most everyone agrees with a single interpretation, and so you would also be “disagreeing with the field,” and not just myself, so that attack on me popular in this thread seems to be rather bizarre.

They’re also tasty.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed in all the replies here is how quickly you people fall back to pure positivist utilitarianism.

You insist I should believe your personal, non-empirical metaphysical interpretation of the mathematics underlying the theory, i.e. your own way of how to “think about” the math, but when I point out that the unmodified math is compatible with different ways of thinking about it, you suddenly flip-flop to pure positivist utilitarians.

Suddenly, we shouldn’t be interpreting the math on a philosophical level at all, we should just be concerned with what is “empirical” and “falsifiable” and stop philosophizing over questions of “what if real.”

You all want to have your cake and eat it too: you want to insist that I am wrong for not agreeing with the dominant philosophical interpretation of SR, but also, whenever I point out there are alternative ways to think about the same math, you switch to a positivist pragmatist utilitarian so that you can dismiss it unless it makes different empirical predictions (and thus changes the math) from standard SR.

Of course, if you were true pragmatists, then you wouldn’t be upset about me not agreeing with the dominant philosophical interpretation of the mathematics underlying SR to begin with. If you truly believed in “shut up and calculate,” you’d shut up and calculate, rather than being so defensive over a person believing in a different way of thinking about the same body of mathematics without modification.

It’s just a very convenient way of pushing a particular philosophy but then swapping to a different standard when it is criticized so that you then don’t have to defend it.

Anyways, I’m not going to reply to you further than once if your reply is just a personal attack that doesn’t address the substance of the argument. I’m not particularly interested in the kind of debate pervertry that people here are obsessed with. If your reply does not address my point and is just a hostile attack on my character, I’ll give one response and that’s it, you will then be added to my muted list.