Often when a good Sci-Fi movie, show, or book comes out, the nit-pickers start pointing out inconsistencies.
But is reality itself perfectly consistent and free of nits?
Yes and no.
I’m convinced that Ligers are a special effects failure. And I’m pretty sure Dick Cheney is some kind of continuity error.
As always, the platypus remains proof that whether or not the Universe is consistent, the writers were baked out of their wits at one point.
If reality is inconsistent then inconsistency is a property of reality and therefore inconsistency is entirely consistent - so yes reality is entirely consistent, I think :smack:
It depends what ideas and perspectives you consider canon.
Of course not - why else would we park on the driveway, and drive on the parkway? Am I right, folks? I’m here all weekend!
As far as anyone knows. Whenever scientists find what appears to be a contradiction, they operate under the assumption that either the theory they are using or the observation they’ve made is in error, or being misinterpreted, and that the underlying reality is a consistent whole. So far, they’ve always been right. It’s questionable if an “inconsistent reality” could even survive, or come into being at all.
You’ll need explain what you mean a lot more clearly.
Until you do I suggest that we work with a definition that “If the Earth were a plot/script, would the reader find the point incredible (in the literal sense of the word) or completely inexplicable”
In that case then without a doubt the Earth has nits.
My favourite example is the existence of monkeys in the Americas. Monkeys evolved in Africa, long, long after it separated from South America. The only explanation we can come up with for the existence of monkeys in South America is that a pregnant female floated across the freakin’ Atlatic Ocean on a log swept out to sea in a flood. A journey of over 1, 000 kilometres.
If this were a movie script that sort of explanation would be held up as the worst sort of plot-hole-filling fanwankery. Seriously, the author can’t do better than a pregant female just happening to drift across a thousand miles of ocean and just happening to wash up on a beach that had a suitable habitat for survival? And not a single other species of animal has ever managed the same thing in the history of the planet? Fanwanking bullshit. Jungles have monkeys, and South America has the biggest jungles so the author wrote in monkeys. She overlooked the fact that in an earlier book she had specified that South America had been isolated for millions of years so all those goofy ground sloths and armadillos and marsupials could exist there.
Similarly the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand leading to WWI. The most incredible series of implausible events and failed assassinations culminates when one of the assassins, who failed earlier and was on his way home, happens to be buying lunch in a deli when the Archduke’s car happens to be reversing lowly up the same street after happening to get lost. The assassin runs outside and shoots him dead.
The whole scenario would be laughable if it were a movie plot. So many incredible coincidences and highly trained people acting in completely implausible ways then solved by a dues ex machine ending that makes Tolkien’s eagles look well scripted. There’s no way anyone would buy it if it were a movie script.
So no, reality isn’t free of bugs. Sometimes it really does look like someone has written in that WWI started after the Archduke was assassinated, or that explorers found monkeys in the Amazon, without realising just how badly that contradicts earlier chapters.
Which is perectly circular. We know they are always right because we find that every contradication is due to either the theory they are using or the observation they’ve made being in error, or being misinterpreted. And we know that the theory they are using or the observation they’ve made is in error, or being misinterpreted because we know that reality is consistent. And we know that reality is consistent because we find that every contradication is due to… 
Not that I disbelieve it, but the fact is that there is no way to say whether they are right. It’s axiomatic in the scientific principle that reality is governed by consistent rules that can be divined by the human mind. There is no way possible to actually establish that is the case without resorting to circularity.
For example if SouthAm monkeys really are a continuity error, how would you prove it? We assume that a pregnant female rafted the Atlantic because we assume that the underlying reality is a consistent, and we seek the simplest explanation under that assumption. That happens to be the highly improbable idea that a pregnant female rafted the Atlantic but we have to assume that it happened because if it didn’t the underlying reality is inconsistent.
Or to look at it the other way, what if reality really were inconsistent, and monkeys appeared in South America because the law of “jungles need monkeys” was applied. That law is inconsistent with every other law that we know of, but we would have no way of knowing that it didn’t exist. But science demands that we accept consistent laws of evolution and continental drift, and so we do. Even to the point of inventing unprovable, implausible fanwanking explanations to shoehorn an observation to fit with that axiom.
In my experience no. But that may be due to the observer and not that which is observed. Especially when the observer is indulging…
I thought reality was a holograph of something. A holograph of what, the cover of Discover Magazine never mentioned.
That’s not circular; it’s just the way that works. Scientists assume that the underlying reality is consistent, they progress; they don’t assume that, and they don’t progress. The ultimate justification of science isn’t that it fits any particular philosophical view of the world, but that it works.
If you mean in the sense one can prove a mathematical result, no; but then, science doesn’t deal with that level of certainty. In the sense that assuming the universe to be consistent is both the simplest assumption ( Occam’s Razor ), has always fit the facts, and has always been the most fruitful approach, then it’s about as proven as anything in science gets.
Actually, no, the “fanwanking” is on the other side. Since the hidden assumption in your scenario is not only that continuity errors occur, but conveniently only occur when and where they can’t be detected. If reality is unstable or inconsistent, then than instability has, for example, avoided deleting Europe, or destabilizing the Sun; it hasn’t caused lizard people with non-Terran DNA to be discovered in the Amazon, or the Earth to be hollow in violation of physics.
Nine years ago, we planted a cherry tree. We lined it up centered on the dining room bay window. Both my wife and I remember this. At dinner, I always sit at the end of the dining room table with my back to the window, so I never pay attention to exactly where it is. When I look at it when I’m outside, I’m only ever thinking that I wish it were bigger. My wife isn’t big on noticing details sometimes unless she’s specifically thinking about them. No one else cares.
Fast forward nine years to this past Sunday. I happen to be sitting at the other end of the table (we had guests over). I’m looking out the bay window, and the tree isn’t even close to being lined up. It’s two or three feet to one side.
Clearly, reality shifted a bit while the exact location of the tree wasn’t being pinned down, or perhaps I slid into a parallel universe while I wasn’t paying attention. The tree wasn’t planted where it is now, but it could have been planted there, so it’s not a huge disruption to reality.
But it is an inconsistency.
Reality is consistent but very, very badly written and directed.
Heck, it’s enough to make some people thing there’s nobody running the show at all!
Yes reality is perfectly consistent. Our perceptions of it are not.
“God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.”
-A. Einstein
It’s not circular at all. They don’t know that they are always right. They know they are right until they see some contradiction that prooves them wrong. If it turns out that the observations are not in error, then the theory is and needs to be changed.
An example would be Newtonian physics. It works fine until you start observing things moving very fast. Like close to light speed fast. Then Einstein had to come up with Relativity, which has to take into account Newton’s observations. That works great until you start looking at really small stuff. So they had to come up with quantum mechanics. Now they are trying to tie it all together.
Absolutely not. The plot holes in reality are absolutely gigantic.
For example, in order for the plot of the 19th and 20th century chapters to make any sense at all, you have to believe that the United States of America existed on principles of freedom and democracy. Yet the author also mentioned that the United States practiced slavery until 1865. That’s a clear contradiction that no one makes any attempt to reconcile.
That’s why I’ve stopped paying attention to people who point out minor consistency errors in fiction. There are so many major consistency errors in reality that the most realistic fiction authors are those who have major inconsistencies. (Hugh Cook, for instance.)
You’re not saying anything about reality, you are talking about how people REPORT on reality.
Reality is entirely consistent ontologically, epistemic inconsistencies do not impact that.
So maybe in reality the United States wasn’t founded on principles of freedom and democracy, maybe it was, or maybe that’s just a bunch of fluffy rhetoric that is meaningful in some sense and not meaningful in some others. But those inconsistencies are a part of the actual reality which is what did and does and will occur. The inconsistency comes in the retelling, and is not a function of the actual being.
You don’t give science enough credit. As msmith537 this “assumption” is continuously tested. Given the evidence that it is valid, it is not at all inappropriate to demand strong evidence against it.
When an inconsistency with a theory is found, a consistent reality demands we have a new theory that both explains the old and the new data, without special cases. (F=ma except on alternate Thursdays.) That we’ve been able to do this is strong support for the consistency of reality.
It’s not like there is a conspiracy to cover up actual inconsistencies - anyone strongly proving one can start getting a tux fitted for their trip to the Nobel ceremony.