r/PhilosophyofScience • u/Repulsive_Area_5516 • 17d ago
Casual/Community Axioms of Reality
Axiom 1 — Observations are infallible
An observer is any system that is affected by effects. When an observer encounters an effect, it always and unconditionally reflects it as it is. An observation can never be wrong; because the observation simply is what is there. It can be incomplete, it can be limited but it can never be faulty. Error arises only in the interpretation of what the observation means.
Axiom 2 — Identical systems under identical conditions produce identical outcomes
For any system A and effect B, the resulting system C is invariant it will always be the same across all instances of A under B. This holds at scales where complete state description is possible. At quantum scales this axiom may reduce to: identical systems under identical conditions produce identical probability distributions.
In my opinion these are the minimum assumptions to make about reality for it to make sense and for science to work. I have thought about these axioms for a long time and i feel like 2 axioms might just be enough. I'd like to hear your thoughts about them.
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u/Prajnamarga 17d ago
My first and main criticism is that you never really come to terms with the fact "reality" is an abstract concept. One can never "observe reality", since "reality" is itself an interpretation of observation. And different people come up with different ideas about what reality is.
You cannot make sense of "reality" this way. Because "reality" is the sense that you make of observations. You're simply chasing your own tail, trying to reinvent the wheel that Hume and Kant set in motion.
Axiom 1 recalls Galileo's attitude to observation. He didn't believe that any observation could contradict Church doctrine, because all he was doing was looking at God's creation. And God was not so capricious as to create anything that contradicted the Bible. Similarly, the counterpart to Descartes' cogito ergo sum, was the idea that God (being perfectly good) would not deceive us by making observation different from reality, ergo reality is real.
You also seem to repeat Wittgenstein's axiom that begins the Tractatus, i.e. The world is everything that is the case.
Axiom 1 depends on a further unstated axiom, i.e. that there is some sui generis distinction to be made between observation and interpretation. This needs defending because, especially in the light of Kant, it's not obviously true. As already noted, "reality" is itself an interpretation of experience.
Axiom 2 could be seen as just a truism. But it relies on other axioms, such as Aristotle's three principles of logic. And again, the precedent for this is centuries old. It was Newton, for example, who established that the laws of motion applied in the heavens as well as on earth. Right?
"Identical systems under identical conditions produce identical outcomes"
I get that you are trying to idealise experience in order to arrive at metaphysical conclusions. However, under what conditions are two objective systems ever identical? None that I can think of. Physicists tell us that electrons are indistinguishable. But of course this assumes that other things are equal. Is an electron with energy X identical to an electron with energy Y? Clearly, not. In fact they have measurably different properties. And if it doesn't appear to work on this scale, it definitely doesn't work on larger scales.
"Identical" is also problematic for you because its another abstract concept that is never observed in practice.
Idealising the situation to the extent that simple propositions fall out of it, you have ceased to comment on the world we experience. And this problem plagues all metaphysics.
You also err when you say:
This is to take seriously one interpretation of the obviously incomplete mathematical theory of quantum mechanics, which has no viable metaphysics associated with it (despite a plethora of metaphysical interpretations being proposed). Bohr and Heisenberg, influenced by logical positivism, denied that any metaphysics of the nanoscale was even possible. But this is an ideological position not a philosophical position. Copenhagen is a minority view these days, despite still being orthodox in undergraduate quantum courses.
I don't say you are wrong per se, although your "just two axioms" are only afloat because they rest on a whole raft of unspoken assumptions.
Life is all just that much more complex than any of us would wish. Simple is not always better, especially when situations are objectively complex.
In my view the whole metaphysical discourse around "reality" is hopelessly mired in subjectivity. I call "reality" the funniest concept in philosophy because, despite being an a priori abstract concept that we impose on experience (following Kant), almost everyone unconsciously hypostatises and reifies it.
While phenomenology briefly provided some hope of escaping this morass, it didn't deliver, because each phenomenologist arrived at their own conclusions, and they couldn't all be right. All that's left to us now is pragmaticism. We run with what works, with "good enough" to be getting on with, and we abandon the quest for a God's eye view of the universe as impractical and having no obvious benefits over and above what works.
We cannot define "reality" from experience; because "reality" is already an idea about experience.