[jojogeo]

Ahhh this is fantastic thank you; it _is_ hard to reconcile whether problems come with the original topic or whether they are introduced by the abstraction that we _need_ to make in order to quantify a thing/explain it to ourselves and others.

Regarding the downcast/upcast; I think it _can_ be possible to do this successfully;

> I have a glass, I throw it at a hard surface. What will happen? Well (duh) the glass will (most likely) break.

This hypothesis completely ignores nearly 100% of all relevant physics and the laws surrounding the problem; the arrangement of air molecules, the arrangement of the molecules in the glass, the physical forces governing me, it reduces the entire equation down to some really basic napkin physics.

But; does the outcome work? Has my interpretation of the universe and its physics actually predicted what will happen?

Probably a stupid example, but I think that a lossy picture of the universe can still yield a correct answer.

I can't physically run a simulation of the entire universe in my brain, as my brain is part of that same universe. Lossy representations/models are a necessity in the thinking-ham bound world in which we exist.

[jdw64]

You're right. But consider this: the geocentric model perfectly predicted planetary positions for centuries, and it was certainly useful. But could we say it was the essence of the universe? In the end, it's a useful model within limited cognition, but whether it's 'fundamental' is a separate question.

I think the key is that different phenomena require different approaches, and even if you interpret a single phenomenon through multiple mental models, none of them necessarily captures its essence. Ultimately, it's about which mental model is shared by a 'group'—not about what's fundamentally true.

We currently share the model of computation, but whether that makes it fundamental is a different story.

As a programmer, I'd put it this way: no matter how well an API describes the backend, the backend itself is not the API.

Here, the API is human knowledge, and the backend is the world