What if the laws of the universe changed overnight Veeky Forums...

Observable in the sense that, if it happened, you would be able to see that it had happened. Not in the sense that I consider it personally believable.
It is only as meaningless as your own unwillingness to consider its implications.

10 replies to ask, "Can you give an example?" is not the level of dialogue or the level of creativity I was expecting to get from Veeky Forums after two hours of exposure to the idea. I was honestly hoping that I wasn't the only one that contemplates alternate forms of macroscopic causality in terms of their physical models.

if it changed thermodynamics so i could get superpowers i would be bretty happy tbqh familia

We would all be dead so probably wouldnt feel anything

Your idea is NOT original or creative. It's senseless dribble by someone who's beginning to take steps into philosophy of science but has no idea of what he's doing.

To help you out, you aren't asking about science and nothing you're talking about has any implications on science or "reality", whatever you position on that is, and especially not in "macroscopic causality" or physical models. It would be good for you to look up introductory texts on philosophy of science, Descartes/Kant/Kuhn/Popper are classics.

Assume Understanding the implications of a universally destructive event is trivial. Assume it isn't. Some information preservation in necessary for it to be macroscopically observable.
>NOT original or creative
I never said nor implied that it was. I want to know what others think about the idea of it actually happening, not how new it is. The idea of it actually happening is something we can actually think about, form hypotheses over, and test in the event that it ever happened. It may even be repeatable if it happens more than once.

you're way too dense, and insist on this topic being valuable for some reason
what are you expecting to find? what do you want to gain by making nonsense hypothesis you can't hope to test? you can't know how the universe works, you can only make models that approximate local observations

I dont see how we would be able to comprehend our current universe if we existed in another one with fundamentally different rules. So I imagine everyone would go insane trying to reconcile their memories with physical reality

>what are you expecting to find?
At this point? I'm expecting to find, much to my disappointment, a world devoid of the reasoning skills required to quickly determine the physics at play in any given random world.
>what do you want to gain
Dialogue. Veeky Forums either has the level of epistemology necessary to participate in this thoughtstream or you don't. Personally I would be ecstatic to find that there was a whole new world to discover. It would be interesting to me to see how the physicists determined that the physical laws had actually changed, rather than simply discovering a new depth to the existing laws of physics like has occurred thus far. It poses an interesting measurement and data recording problem. How do you determine that it was the structure of causality itself that changed?
>you can't hope to test?
I can because being a game programmer means that I can construct alternate models of physics. It should theoretically be possible to simulate a type of world capable of containing complex sentient and switch models halfway through, no? Or do you consider consciousness incomputable?
>you can't know how the universe works
I disagree.
>you can only make models that approximate local observations
For any given experiment, yes, absolutely. On a larger scale, we can actually measure the consistency between various experiments and I do think it would be possible to actually detect a shift in the laws of physics, or else prepare for such an event and find a way to measure it should it ever happen. On a more abstract level, the universe could be shifting through multiple modes of slightly varying laws and we just haven't had the mind to figure out how we would test such a hypothesis yet. I think we've come far enough in our collective reasoning abilities that we could design a system to detects shifts in physics even before we've figured out what all those shifts entail.

It's a complex epistemological problem that I think has many interesting implications.

Yeah I think Veeky Forums is more your speed

Changed how exactly?

>espitemology
Really fucking gutsy of you to throw that word around when you didn't bother to take an introductory class on it.
You don't know what you're talking about, and your question isn't as deep as you think it is. It is, again, senseless dribble by someone who starts wandering into philosophy of science but doesn't know what he's doing.

I pointed you what you can read if you actually care, but you clearly don.t

Good, solid prediction. Testing that hypothesis would require attempting to immunize certain individuals to the effects of a total reality shift and hope that they'll help us adapt our current version of sanity to the versions of sanity that we'll have to discover in the new world.

Let's take it another step up and assume that we can still think and reason in a familiar manner, but our memories of how logic used to work aren't left behind in the old universe where we can't access them.
Possibly, but I don't think they have that strong a grasp on the history of science, specifically.
Good question! Let's say under Hypothetical 1 that electromagnetic waves no longer exist and light has a fundamentally new mechanism behind it. Let's assume that everything else appears to be the same, and maybe 10% of electrical devices no longer function as flawlessly as they currently do.

How disruptive would this be to your beliefs as a rational scientist type?
>as deep as you think it is
Bits and pieces, friend. Attack bits and pieces of my argument, not my character. If you think none of the implications I provided is profound, or if you think these aren't real problems that scientists had to face when they originally began testing Einstein type models or that the literal text of my argument properly represents the depth of epistemology but my own psyche is at fault for assuming a greater depth of meaning than is actually there, then please explain where and how and why you think that of my approach or my argument.

Yeah all I'm reading is babble that suggests you have completely failed to understand the implications of what you are suggesting.

This is a philosophical question based on extreme hypotheticals, there is nothing a "scientific opinion" could reasonably contribute

>there is nothing a "scientific opinion" could reasonably contribute
Thank you. That's the first thing you've said that actually means something unrelated to your attempt to ascertain the quality of my reasoning faculties. If you would like to explain why you think as you do of me or this topic, rather than blankly asserting it as if some random user ought to be an authority on what's reasonable or not, that is, if you want to actually back up your argument rather than simply state it, I'm all ears.

Thank you for your opinion. I understand why you feel that this is an anti-scientific idea and why you consider it unscientific to leverage an opinion on the matter and I accept your stance as one that a scientist could potentially hold. I don't not think it is the only stance a rational scientist could hold on the matter and I will ask that you respect that others may have a different opinion of the subject. Not me, specifically, but other lurking anons. You have made your stance quite clear, I think, so if you would be so kind as to let others weight in, I would appreciate it.

In any case, I appreciate the candor it takes to confidently state that you don't think this is a topic on which a scientific opinion could reasonably be provided. I would have liked to appreciate other parts of your posts, but your hasty judgment of me as an /x/phile was anti-conducive to me thinking that your feedback on my character was at all accurate or even remotely informed.

Since this thread is already up in flames, I guess I'll bite on the bait. The observable laws of physics may change, but mathematics would not. If some sort of new physics emerged, we would simply write down what we observe in the language of mathematics, and viola you have your new laws of physics. It would not be as profound as you're making it out to be, and no scientists would lose sleep over it because we don't have any inherent emotional investment in the laws of physics being one way or another.

The problem with the way you approached this thread and the reason why Veeky Forums has issue with it is because as rational beings we speak in terms of things that are well defined. Saying "What if the laws of the universe changed" is not well defined at all, and as such is essentially meaningless dribble.

The issue is that you are trying to dress up what is essentially a fantasy fiction idea into some kind of meaningful philosophical enquiry. Your question is the basically the same as asking what a Veeky Forumsentist would do if he suddenly woke up in Narnia with all his memories of his previous life. While that is perhaps an interesting question, the way you asked it was pretentious as all hell

Also I think you have me confused with some other poster because the only statement I made about your character was to describe your previous post as meaningless babble

Mathematics is all self referential. If the universe changed the parts of math that apply to reality would also change

Thanks for that post. It felt honest, on topic, and unrelated to my character.

>we don't have any inherent emotional investment in the laws of physics being one way or another
That actually comes as a bit of a surprise. I'm still going to wait for other anons to weigh in, but that's actually a sentiment that probably doesn't get across to /x/ types very often. I can see how this thread might have looked baity, but I did seriously mean to pose the question in a scientific context.

If your genuine feeling is that it's a meaningless question as I specified it in the OP, that's actually something I can use and reflect on. I did realize that the question was a bit open-ended/undefined, but I didn't really have a better way to ask it without first understanding Veeky Forums's general thoughts on the matter. I feel you've provided those general thoughts and your feedback is valid.

I guess the only other thing I wish to say is that I wanted to avoid asking something to specific, like, "What if light wasn't caused by electromagnetic waves?" That's a trivial example by comparison to depth of question I'd intended to ask and it's not one I would really need to ask Veeky Forums about anyway. I meant to focus on the more abstract implications of a reality shift. I can see how that might have run a bit more contrary to your normal mode of thinking than I'd originally intended.
>what a Veeky Forumsentist would do if he suddenly woke up in Narnia with all his memories of his previous life
Yes, but not just what you would do as a narrative, but what you would do in your capacity as a scientist. Would you try to spread the scientific method in that world or would you basically just give up on doing science because reality is obviously not what you thought it was? I'm trying to get a sense of how scientific people would be at the boundary between worlds. If I were to ask /x/ I'd just get a narrative/personal response, which is not what I'm looking for here.

A scientist, acting as a scientist, would investigate. What kind kind of answer were you expecting?

>meaningless babble
I sort of felt you were probably a different user, but the same concept applies. I don't really know how to respond to that kind of phrasing aside from taking it as an insult/attack. I don't really see what about that post was meaningless or "babbly" at all.

I seriously don't know how else to ask for honest feedback and criticism here.

>the way you asked it was pretentious as all hell
Well fuck. Right in the feels. I don't know how to avoid that.

Mostly starting with and That is the level of dialogue I was looking for. Even was a bit too close to /x/ levels of dialogue for my comfort.

I was sort of expecting a slower thread.

Well, actually if you look at the (relatively recent, last hundred or so years) history of science, this sort of problem is what scientists were faced with. It had been assumed that light was an electromagnetic wave, and we had equations (maxwells equations, etc) that sufficiently described the propagation of those waves. Everything was all hunky dory until the experiments revealing the quantum nature of light. It had seemed like the laws of the universe had suddenly changed over night; light was no longer an electromagnetic wave, but also a particle, and rectifying this was of course a huge problem. The solution was the creation of a mathematical model of reality that we call quantum mechanics.

Even today, the relativistic models of the laws of physics don't totally mesh with the quantum models, so it's still a big issue. But ultimately what makes us so much more powerful in as scientists these days is level of advancement of mathematics, compared to the rest of history.

In reality, asking a question like "what if the laws of the universe changed?" is really a question that scientists are and must be prepared to answer at any given time. Any it's possible that we can observe something experimentally that seems to be completely different from what we traditionally thought was going on. The current "models" of physics are only the extent of our understanding so far. It's eventually going to change some how.

Well, its still a fairly pointless philosophical question

>fairly pointless
Yes, I was hoping that would make it easy for Veeky Forums to just ignore it, save for the few who felt like it was worth talking about because it was interesting.

Thanks, that's kind of how I felt on the matter so it was annoying to be told it was a meaningless idea.

For something like the nature of light, that kind of ideological upheaval was strictly necessary. There was no other direction to go but "deeper" into what could make something like that possible. It's not that the world changed on a mascroscopic level as we could see with the naked eye and commit to memory, it was the ideological equivalent of what I think I'm trying to ask.

I guess what I'm asking really boils down to this:
mangapark.me/manga/ajin-chan-wa-kataritai

It's interesting because he approaches Ajin in a scientific manner. The mechanism behind why the Yuki Onna can freeze her bodily fluids isn't known, but he still manages to figure out that it was sweat freezing rather than bathwater getting frozen. It also goes into pretty nice detail about how that affected the psyches of Yuki Onna from ages past.

My question isn't so much about the Yuki Onna or the vampire or even the succubus so much as the Dullahan. Obviously we don't live in a world where physics allows any of these types of physiology, but given god-like ability to design physics, it'd be possible to make a world where it was. I guess I want to ask more about how much faith you'd have in the scientific method supposing reality shifted to make that kind of physiology possible. Is there any such shift (or sequence of shifts) that could make you essentially give up on science and further understanding of reality?

>but given god-like ability to design physics, it'd be possible to make a world where it was.

Welcome to the realm of being a Mathematician.

> Is there any such shift (or sequence of shifts) that could make you essentially give up on science and further understanding of reality?

Not really, because the goal in understanding reality is itself that understanding. Understanding and discovering the laws of physics is like learning how the pieces fit together and interact. Aside from that you get engineering which takes that knowledge of how the pieces work together and uses it to build new things. While a certain kind of physiology may not occur naturally, that doesn't mean that it can't be engineered and created to occur artificially.

The scientific method is a tried and tested method for results. It, again, is independent from the actual results and laws of physics. (It's just a methodology).

Furthermore, should the laws of nature "shift", that shift itself would be looked at as a property of reality.

>that shift itself would be looked at as a property of reality
Thanks, I think that more or less answers my question. I don't know why, I just needed to know that truly curious types were out there and could be found without having to go through a paywall or something. It's not like I didn't think that would be the answer or that there weren't people like that on Veeky Forums, I just needed to feel it for myself. /x/ doesn't really give me that vibe in any direct sense. Thank you for responding and taking the time to type it all out for me. I can't say how much it means to me to know you're out there because I don't fully understand the desire myself.

Yeah, I mean I understand. The reason your main posts were met with such hostility was due to one like I said before with the well defined thing, and two we get a lot of shitposters here asking similar things in similar ways with no actual intention of being open to discussion. In the science fields, being able to ask the right question (in the right way) is often just as if not more important than the answer.

/x/ people aren't "curious" at all, they don't want to understand something for the sake of understanding it. Being curious requires you be able to take a knife to your understanding and perception of things and hack away the shit when necessary. Being "like so totally open minded" that you'll believe in anything only shows that you're not curious about the nature of reality, you just want to satisfy your ego in an escape from reality.

Well on /x/, between all the competing types of bigotry it can be a real battle to get even a basic dialogue going with someone who either shares or is tolerant of your beliefs, so the scientific model just ends up feeling like just another bully on the block trying to shut down all discussion of beliefs.

I guess you get used to treating every conversation like a battle and it ends up clashing with being open and civil other places. I know you aren't closed minded people but it's hard to just let go of the idea that you're just there to be skeptical and deny any possibility of discussion. I know that that really isn't what it's like consciously, my brain is just lagging behind and making me nervous. It's hard to just accept this dialogue and respond like I want to because I still feel like I've done something wrong and I need to apologize or something. Being from /x/? How dare me! I really wanted to avoid making it sound like a trolly question but I guess it takes more than just switching tabs sometimes.

I dunno I just feel really lost and overwhelmed right now.

Well, the essence of science IS skepticism. Most people are so afraid of something happening to their beliefs, they have an intrinsic emotional attachment to them so when the skepticism of science comes into contact with it, it's like taking a blade to the person. Socrates said that it was the mark of an intelligent mind to be able to entertain an idea or belief without accepting it as true or false.

Plus, /x/ as a board likes to have a "holier than thou" kind of attitude on shit with no basis. I used to browse occasionally years ago when I was big into occultism, but incidentally it was that interest in occultism which lead me to science and mathematics. That being said, that community is toxic.

Then on top of that we get shitposts like "Hi /x/ here, the earth is flat and you can't prove otherwise" or "ANCIENT AYYLMAOS, DUDE WEED" or "QUANTUM PHYSICS PROVES CONSCIOUSNESS CREATES REALITY" and after a while it all gets very tiring.

Each board has it's own mannerisms and subtleties in how it posts and interacts, and it's usually very easy to spot an outsider.

>likes to have a "holier than thou" kind of attitude
It's not that we like to have it, but it's the only way to cast an image that makes it seem like there's no way you're going to change our beliefs so don't even try. It's purely a defense mechanism to force people to leave us alone long enough to allow us to discuss out beliefs in peace. People's natural intolerance will never go away so we don't ever get a chance to let our guard down. If we don't push the most intolerant subset of people away with that kind of attitude, they'll just feel like they can shit all over us without limit.

Well, aside from trolls who just want to stir shit up, the best way to defend your beliefs is to know how to argue (in a logical sense) your points. Make sure you know what it is you believe in and are arguing, in and out. In the scientific and philosophical community, you don't attach any emotional or personal offense when someone challenges your ideas or argues against you (given that they have a valid argument that is logical and coherent, that is. see: pic related)

Right, but remember that the board is full of bigots.

There really are no good options here.

So's the world, it's good practice.