RE: Do electrons exist?
April 6, 2019 at 3:16 am
(This post was last modified: April 6, 2019 at 3:19 am by bennyboy.)
(April 6, 2019 at 3:12 am)robvalue Wrote: I’ve given up having any objective criteria for what it means for something to "exist". All definitions end up being circular.
Like you say, all we can do is model to the best of our ability. We give names and attribute behaviour to parts of our models. If they can help us to predict future events in some way, then they are useful. But really all we're doing is trying to trace a drawing we can never see properly with big fat lines.
Well put.
Modern physics is my reason for choosing idealism over materialism-- the semantics of material as "stuff" are so stretched that its seems we're just tracing big fat lines over big fat lines.