The Worlds of Baron Munchausen: Ablating natural laws with fiction, and rebuilding coherent worlds around persistent anomalies

AuthorsKriger, Boris (Information Physics Institute; Institute of Integrative and Interdisciplinary Research, Toronto). ORCID: 0009-0001-0034-2903 Resource type: Publication / PreprintLanguage: English Description A tall tale can be refuted, or it can be taken at its word. This paper takes the second route. It treats each adventure of Baron Munchausen as a datum from a world in which the event is not a miracle but an ordinary consequence of law. Asking what would have to hold for the tale to be true, and for our world to be the fiction, turns a body of fiction into an experimental instrument. Every coherent tale knocks out one or more of our laws, much as a gene knockout removes one gene and asks whether the organism still lives. A law that some coherent tale removes without losing coherence is contingent; whatever no coherent tale removes is a candidate for the ineliminable core of description. The paper calls this procedure the ablation analysis of laws. Main results: Realizable equals describable. If a world is not identified with the substrate on which it is built, the realizable worlds coincide with the describable ones, so the only limit on the conceivable is the floor of description. Persistence implies coherence. An observer that survives a long horizon on a viability budget certifies that its record is compressible, and therefore generated by a short set of laws. A world whose laws change at every step, the limit of a dream, kills its observers. The cost of a miracle is a directed information distance between law-sets. It is asymmetric: a simpler world sees a richer one as more miraculous than the converse. One world or many. The least number of worlds needed to host a corpus of tales is the chromatic number of its incompatibility graph. Laws indexed to a scale or to an agent can lower it at a stated cost in description. The bootstrap and the bog. A circular justification is admissible exactly when its self-consistency map has a unique fixed point. Pulling oneself out of a bog by the hair fails because the corresponding map is the identity. The liar removes bivalence, not identity. An anomaly protocol. Error and artifact are excluded by independent channels. A null-search theorem decides between an unseen entity and a change of law. Refute or model. Refuting a testimony that is incoherent with our picture of the world yields at most π log e bits for a claim of prior probability π. Modeling the coherent world in which the testimony is true contains refutation as one of its outcomes and adds the chance of discovery by reattribution, so modeling dominates refutation up to its cost. False models can have true consequences; this is a priced form of Feyerabend’s “anything goes.” The evidence comes in four parts: A coded corpus of sixteen Munchausen episodes. It needs two worlds under universal laws and one under narrator-indexed laws, and it never violates causal order or the identity of the witness. Organisms and laboratory media in which several of the baron’s laws already hold: planarian regeneration, sea-cucumber evisceration, and light stopped and stored in ultracold atoms. Historical anomalies: Neptune, the planet Vulcan, the neutrino, the OPERA timing artifact, meteorites and rogue waves. A simulation of observers in worlds whose regularities have finite lifetimes. Applications are drawn for scientific methodology, ablation of models in artificial intelligence, survival bounds for agents, self-consistent theories, and consistency management of large narrative worlds. The paper is prepared for submission to Foundations of Science. Keywordsablation of laws; truth in fiction; Baron Munchausen; Munchausen trilemma; minimum description length; Kolmogorov complexity; information distance; persistence; coherence; viability; anomaly; null search; impossible worlds; liar paradox; bootstrap; fixed point; predictive processing; reattribution; Feyerabend; philosophy of science Related identifiers (cites) 10.13140/RG.2.2.33499.12320 — Ineliminable Minimal Projection Theory and the DICT primitives of description 10.13140/RG.2.2.26532.64648 — The Retrospective Drift Theorem 10.13140/RG.2.2.32239.39843 — Time as a Viability Set 10.13140/RG.2.2.20426.53446 — A Code of Practice for Introducing Entities in Cosmology 10.13140/RG.2.2.19707.27689 — Invariance Is Not the Substrate 10.5281/zenodo.20100022 — Orders of Orthogonality 10.13140/RG.2.2.15448.87045 — Anomaly Hunting by Untargeted Cross-Partition Analysis 10.13140/RG.2.2.18101.84968 — Volume VIII. The Carrollian Initial State Cosmology 10.13140/RG.2.2.32912.98561 — The Carrollian beginning of a counter-rotating elliptic universe License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. This is my suggestion; change it if you publish under a different license.