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Diet calories are an example of anti-reification: an abstraction made real via a non-abstraction. A measure of homeostasis shifts in a complex dissipative system that rhymes enough with a unit of literal energy to be approximated by it. Like using pulse rate to measure time.
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I follow a bunch of people who get REALLY mad about diet calories being used as though they were like literal calories. It’s hilarious because they’re so right they’re wrong. Anti-reification in a complex system is something like a fractal-hermetic heuristic. “As above so below.”
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This is an unpopular opinion, but I think this conflation of real and homeostasis “calories” is a GOOD thing and one of the ways we can make sense of complex systems. The trick is to recalibrate the 2 calories when dynamic regimes change.
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This is actually a common procedure in designing feedback controllers for complex systems. You have a family of tuned simple linear laws that overlap along the nonlinear range of system behavior. Kinda like automatic gears in a car give you a smooth acceleration response.
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There’s lots of other examples of anti-reification. It’s a sort of scale-free mathematical metonymy. If I use notation “ar” for anti-reification: Pulse = ar(clock time) Body temperature =ar(98.4 degrees) CO2 level in atmosphere = ar(400ppm) and rising
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