Does quantum physics say nothing is real?
https://qr.ae/pveT31
First answer is ok, second is just spouting old names like they mean anything.
But the general answer I get from those who know this stuff is NO. It doesn't say anything like that. When I get into the philosophy about it I get stuff like "well that depends what you mean by reality", after that I pretty much tune it out.
Though on the off side...does it really say that? From what I've been told there are so many interpretations of QM that you can pretty much just have it say whatever you want.
Nice try, but I dont think most eminent physicists would agree with you. Just to name a few:
Niels Bohr: "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself."
Eugene Wigner: It will remain remarkable that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of consciousness is an ultimate reality.
John Wheeler: human consciousness shapes not only the present but the past as well.
Martin Reese (Astronomer Royal): The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.
Penrose: Somehow, our consciousness is the reason the universe is here.
Stephen Hawking: In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. Even the universe as a whole has no single past or history.
Ill spare you, but I have many more quotes like this from prominent physicists.
First answer is ok, second is just spouting old names like they mean anything.
But the general answer I get from those who know this stuff is NO. It doesn't say anything like that. When I get into the philosophy about it I get stuff like "well that depends what you mean by reality", after that I pretty much tune it out.
Though on the off side...does it really say that? From what I've been told there are so many interpretations of QM that you can pretty much just have it say whatever you want.
Comments (453)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136684/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/
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https://qr.ae/pvepjo
But to a mechanic of quantum, the reality is wave forms, or not even that. I don't know what reality looks like on a quantum level. And I surmise that a mechanic would be hard-pressed to describe it to me in a way that would make sense to me. (Through nobody's fault: mine, the mechanic's, or the quantum's.)
The upshot is, that in our perception reality is solid-like, and it's nothing to sneeze at. It is a substantial way of looking at things, solids as reality, because to most of mankind that is the only available way.
That mechanics look at it as a dense wave form, is okay, but it's neither here nor there, for me as a real person.
Start with the easy part - you know that things, at least some things, are real. You wake up in the morning. Get dressed, brush your teeth. Have some coffee, maybe eat breakfast. Go to work. You know that your clothes, your toothbrush, coffee, pop tarts, your car are real. You know that because those are the kinds of things we created the concept of "reality" to apply to. Quantum mechanics doesn't change that.
The danger with QM is that people get the physics and metaphysics all wrapped around each other. Drastically different physical principles apply to sandwiches and surfboards than apply to subatomic particles. The world works differently at different scales. Why would we think that wouldn't be true. Different metaphysical regimes apply at different scales. That's the thing about metaphysics - there's not just one appropriate view of reality. The philosophical lesson of QM is that what works at human scale doesn't work at all at nano-scale.
See. Easy.
Heck, photons and light waves are not visible on the quantum level. You think you see one, and poof, it's not even there. And without photons and light waves you can see nothing.
No.
Quoting T Clark
:clap: :party:
Quantum mechanics is very robust mathematically. But once you get into interpretations of what it actually "means," then it is as much about how good your imagination is, as anything else.
If you search for "real" in your Schaum's Outline of Quantum Mechanics you will find nothing, save mentions of the real number system. "reality" is in the domain of speculation by both experts and quantum mysticists.
On the other hand, among those physicists who are aquatinted with philosophical accounts of realism and anti-realism, most consider themselves philosophical realists.
So... our scale in the universe cannot be randomized in physical processes, even if we can witness randomness and strange probabilities at quantum scales.
Your last paragraph which scale are you referring to by our scale and which physical processes?
Randomness produced at the quantum level = randomness and classically defined phenomena on the macro level. And vice versa
But then again I know next to nothing about QM so.....
Our scale = us, human-sized things observing our surroundings.
Physical processes = physics at our human scale, i.e Einsteins theories etc.
Quoting Deus
Not sure what you meant by this? It's an increasing probability certainty of cause and effect the larger in scale you go from the smallest to the largest.
That would be my guess. Were I a physicist I would be in that camp. Actually, I probably wouldn't care one way or the other.
There is something to it. I started a whole discussion about it. I think the concept of objective reality can be very misleading. On the other hand, in some situations, it is very useful, e.g. the scientific method. Another example - our everyday life. Trees don't cease to exist when we're not looking. Somebody said something about how reality is what's left when nobody's there.
Whether or not there is or isn't objective reality is a metaphysical question. As R.G. Collingwood wrote in his "Essay on Metaphysics," metaphysical questions don't have yes or no answers. Metaphysical claims are not true or false. They are more or less useful in specific situations. As I noted previously, the idea of objective reality is probably not very useful at quantum scale.
Though TBH referring to other people as a useful fiction scares me. It sounds...lonely.
What makes your sources any more authoritative than all the other thousands of voices out there, including mine. As I said, it's not a physics question, it's a metaphysics one. The failure to recognize the difference between everyday or scientific reality and metaphysics is the biggest failure of most posters on the forum.
I've had my say. If you're not convinced, or even interested, I can't think of anything else that might make you think twice.
That's a very well put and useful paragraph TC.
Thank you.
Because we believe in the uniformity of nature and the unity of science.
Are there really different "laws of nature" at different scales? Really? That sounds crazy to me. What doesn't sound crazy is that different methods of approximation work at different scales, and it's not even hard to think of examples of that, just based on selecting granularity. But that's a change in how we approximate what's happening, not a change in what's happening. We all know that regular Newtonian mechanics works pretty darn well for a lot of purposes, and is in some sense always false.
And yes of course there are differences between how a crowd of 50,000 behaves and how a group of 5 behaves. Yes, scale matters. But it should be explicable how you crossover from one scale to the next even if there is no simple, non-fuzzy boundary. We should still have a single theory of group behavior and changes in behavior should track changes in the size of the group for good reason. The crowd of 50,000 is made of the same bits as the group of 5. As the quantity of people increases, new properties of the group become salient, in a predictable way, I should think. And so it is with our world of medium-sized dry goods and the critters of the subatomic zoo they're made of.
We observe a lot of stability; we know there's nothing like that in what our stable stuff is made of, so I assume those instabilities somehow combine to produce larger scale stabilities. (I assume it's vaguely similar to how fundamentally stochastic processes predictably result in Gaussian distributions and power-law distributions, and so on, all the randomness yielding order.) That's not a change in the rules, but a predictable result of the rules, and the rules that apply only to stable stuff (if there are any of those, even as approximations) are also a predictable result of the rules down below.
Anyhow, that's why at least one person (me) would think that wouldn't be true, based entirely on my assumptions and with hardly any knowledge of quantum theory at all. I've just never understood the "it's just a matter of scale" view as if Mother Nature checks the size of what she's dealing with and then picks the appropriate rule-book to follow for that size object. That leaves the events at different scales isolated from each other in a way I find incomprehensible.
:100: :up:
Quoting T Clark
There are ways of accommodating within a a single metaphysics the situation in physics that the world appears to work differently at different scales. For instance, one can argue, as the followers of Quine do , that facts and value systems ( accounts of the world) are inextricably bound together. Thus, it is not just the human and nano scales of physical description that cant be fully integrated. It is also the myriad descriptions of reality within the various subsegments of the biological and social sciences. Whatever we study within one approach responds also to other theories and procedures, but with
different new precision. Since it responds to various systems, it cannot be how one system renders it.
Alternative approaches develop separate webs of precise findings. Precision develops within each
web, but they are not consistent with each other
Quine rightly saw that the order of nature cannot be just one of these "webs." Although they can be internally consistent, they cannot be reconciled. Even if they could be, we know in advance that more of them will soon form. Since we know it in advance, we can assert it in advance:
Nature ..... can respond with surprising and precise detail, but differently to different approaches.
The responsive order provides a "reality" to check against. We can check each approach (procedure, performance, set of experiments, measurements) against the feedback of an equally precise "reality." But there is no way in which we could "check" so as to decide between these "realities. Eugene Gendlin, The Responsive Order )
Notice that the concept of fact-value inseparability is a unitary metaphysical conception describing a situation of multiple accounts. You will find that almost all philosophers treat metaphysics as a way to synthetically unify disparate accounts at the most general level of thought.
Just to clarify, in terms of our folk notions of reality, QM goes far beyond saying that things work differently on a small scale. QM suggests that there is no distinct reality outside measurement events (which don't require consciousness, but human activity is a kind of measurement.)
So when you say physicists are realists, that doesn't necessarily answer the OP. If the OP had some sort of Newtonian picture of the world, then the answer is yes, QM says that a fair portion of that absolute realm is not real.
This is squarely false. It is a physics question. There are a number of quantum theories which vary considerably in how they explain quantum experiments, and none of them confirm your folk notions of reality.
You have misrepresented the scientific field in this thread and should by no means be talking down to anyone else.
I don't see how this substantively differs from what I wrote. It seems like there's just a language tweak that allows you and Quine to bundle a bunch of different metaphysical approaches into a single mega-metaphysics.
I have no problem with that I guess, I just find it less clear than the way I describe it.
I disagree. Please explain how I am "talking down."
I get that. And you're wrong. QM is not a matter of "different rules for small things."
Check into any quantum theory. And stop talking down to people.
But nature clearly isn't uniform. It behaves differently depending on where you choose to look - baseballs or bosons.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And science clearly is not unified. We have broken it down into a hierarchical list of different sciences depending on scale and principle of organization. There have been long discussions of that hierarchy here on the forum. I think the important message is that reductionism works - each higher level behaves consistently with the level below - but constructivism doesn't - you can't generally predict behavior at a higher level from principles of the lower level. Example - you can't predict the behavior of biology from chemistry.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
At some level I think you're right, although I'm not sure it's always possible. I think there has been a lot of work to figure out how the quantum world transitions to the classical one. That seems like a valuable thing to know, but I don't think it changes my position.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I doubt you and I would disagree with each other on a practical level. I think our metaphysical language is just different. When it comes to metaphysics, my rule is to use whatever works. Not everyone agrees with that.
I disagree. Please explain how I am "talking down."
Can you not read something about QM and become enlightened on the topic?
Please explain how I am "talking down."
That's not really the topic of the thread. Here, look at me being helpful to you:
Yes, this is the view I find incomprehensible because the whole point is that our big stable things supervene upon the small unstable things. It's not like we can keep them in separate rooms with separate rules, like the rooms of a preschool.
Right.
Helpful video. I now "understand" the experiment @Andrew M was trying to explain to me over in the truth thread, and it sadly or happily connects to the discussion I'm having with @Metaphysician Undercover about past, future, alethic modalities and determinateness. Was so hoping I could stay out of quantum stuff, but I guess I'll have to give up that dream.
I haven't watched all of this, because I try not to think about quantum mechanics, but Alastair Wilson has interesting things to say about the relation between physics and metaphysics as someone near the frontlines.
I think we're lucky we live in a time when physicists agree that physics has a philosophical dimension. I don't think that was true a few decades back.
All of the Spacetime videos are good, and he builds from easy to more advanced over the course of several videos, which helps.
There is no single folk notion of reality any more than there is a single philosophical or scientific notion of it. There are so many variants of realism that different philosophers adhere to that it is possible to accommodate QM within one or more of them. It is true that the most traditional conceptions of the real can be ruled out by QM ( naive realism) but then we reach some difficult territory.
As far as the quotes in the OP making what is observed dependent on the existence of the observer, this shows an assimilation of Kants work on noumenon and phenomenon , concept and sensation, and the inaccessibility of the thing in itself. But embracing Kantianism only rules out older conceptions of the real , like Newtons. This is why one can find a hodgepodge of realism and anti-realism within a single account of QM.
True. My point was that if we want to answer the OP successfully, we should tune into what he or she is thinking of as reality.
Quoting Joshs
I don't think so. The Copenhagen interpretation (especially John von Neumann's view) is not Kant. There is no thing in itself. There is no determinate thing prior to wave function collapse, and we have a clear idea of the math that describes what's there prior to collapse.
Depends who you ask, Rovelli will have a different take than Sean Carroll, who differs from X and Y and so on. But quantum physics studies the extremely small. Would we then also say that QM tells us there is no pain in my fingertips? Of course not.
We err when we take these sciences and apply them in domains way beyond the intended reach.
The authors of the Copenhagen Interpretation werent simply duplicating Kant, but theyr were strongly influenced by him:
Many philosophers and physicists have recognized a strong kinship between Kant and Bohrs
thinking or a direct Kantian influence on Bohr. In the thirties C.F. von Weizsäcker and Grete Hermann
attempt to understand complementarity in the light of neo-Kantian ideas. As von Weizsäcker puts it many
years later, The alliance between Kantians and physicists was premature in Kants time, and still is; in Bohr, we begin to perceive its possibility. A series of modern scholars (Folse 1985; Honner 1982, 1987; Faye
1991; Kaiser 1992; Chevalley 1994; Pringe 2009; Cuffaro 2010; Bitbol 2013, 2017; and Kauark-Leite 2017)
has also emphasized the Kantian parallels. Although these scholars find common themes, they also disagree
to what extent Kantian or neo-Kantian ideas can be used as spectacles through which we may vision Bohrs
understanding of quantum mechanics. On the other hand, Cuffaro (2010) holds that any proper
interpretation of Bohr should start with Kant, and that complementarity follows naturally from a broadly
Kantian epistemological framework.
(Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics)
After discussions with Weizsäcker and Hermann in Leipzig in the 1930s, Heisenberg attempted to ground his interpretation of quantum mechanics on what might be termed a 'practical' transformation of Kantian philosophy. Taking as his starting point, Bohr's doctrine of the indispensability of classical concepts, Heisenberg argued that concepts such as space, time and causality can be regarded as 'practically a priori', in so far as they remain the conditions for the possibility of experience and even of 'objective reality', though they are not universal and necessary in a strictly Kantian sense.(Heisenberg and the Transformation of Kantian Philosophy)
That quote isn't saying that Bohr was influenced by Kant. It's just saying people have noticed parallels. Wherever those parallels may be, the fact remains that there is no thing in itself in the Copenhagen interpretation. It's actually 100 times more bizarre than anything Kant ever thought up.
The idea that we can learn about reality by examining a priori conceptions of time and space is Einstein. If Heisenberg echoed that sentiment, it doesn't indicate Kantian influence.
:100: :fire:
Quoting frank
Now look who's talking down ... Projection is a hell of a drug. :roll:
I'm a hypocrite. Shoot me.
Yeah?
Quoting frank
It says that and also speculates on a direct Kantian influence on Bohr. So it is suggesting both. And I would suggest that those quoted believe the parallels between Kant and Bohr are close enough that it really doesnt matter whether Bohr ever read Kant. The point is that these authors believe there is strong overlap in their ideas. You apparently disagree.
Didn't exactly demonstrate that, did it?
Kant suggested we're creating that which we call reality. John von Neumann (I think more so than Bohr or Heisenberg) believed something similar. The reasons are pretty different though.
I just disagree that the Copenhagen interpretation can be characterized as an "assimilation of Kant.".
Ive been reading NIELS BOHR'S CONCEPT OF REALITY by Henry J Folse. He provides evidence that Bohr was an entity realist , a position that seems to represent a pre-Kantian form of realism.
Natural phenomena, as experienced through the medium of our senses, often appear to be extremely variable and unstable. To explain this, it has been assumed, since early times, that the phenomena arise from the combined action and interplay of a large number of minute particles, the socalled atoms, which are themselves unchangeable and stable, but which, owing to their smallness, escape immediate perception. Quite apart from the fundamental question of whether we are justified in demanding visualizable pictures in fields which lie outside of the reach of our senses, the atomic theory was originally of necessity of a hypothetical character; and, since it was believed that a direct insight into the world of atoms would, from the very nature of the matter, never be possible, one had to assume that the atomic theory would always retain this character. However, what has happened in so many other fields has happened also here; because of the development of observational technique, the limit of possible observations has continually been shifted.
We need only think of the insight into the structure of the universe which we have gained by the aid of the telescope and the spectroscope, or of the knowledge of the finer structure of organisms which we owe to the microscope. Similarly, the extraordinary development in the methods of experimental physics has made known to us a large number of phenomena which in a direct way inform us of the motions of atoms and of their number. We are aware even of phenomena which with certainty may be assumed to arise from the action of a single atom. However, at the same time as every doubt regarding the reality of atoms has been removed and as we have gained a detailed knowledge of the inner structure of atoms, we have been reminded in an instructive manner of the natural limitations of our forms of perception.
( Niels Bohr 1929)
Could you explain what that means?
Quoting frank
"entity realism" asserts the real existence of unobserved entities.
Entity realists think that when we accept a theory we have warrant for believing that the objects and events spoken of in nonobservational theoretical terms really do exist as the unobserved causes of observed phenomena; whereas antirealists hold that acceptance of a theory justifies no such belief.
https://qr.ae/pveiQl
This stuff too:
https://qr.ae/pveiQo
Oh. Think about Schrodinger's cat. That about sums up what the Copenhagen interpretation says about unmeasured entities. Today we say measurement doesn't have to involve a conscious entity. Did Bohr know that in 1929? I don't know. It's something that was established long after Bohr's time, but he may have had that intuition.
That's exactly right! What do I have to do to convince you that there's nobody here but me?!
You don't just have my word, you have my argument, which I've made over my past posts on this thread. The heart of that argument is that the question of what reality is and whether or not objective reality exists is not a scientific question, it is a metaphysical, i.e. a philosophical, one. The answer to the question is in philosophy, not science. Scientists are not generally very good metaphysicians.
There's not much more I can say. If you don't get it or you disagree, there's no place else for this conversation to go.
Also - note the poster in the second Quora link you provided agrees with my position, although Quora is not generally considered an authoritative source. You'll find all sorts of inconsistencies and disagreements there.
Which link was that one?
There aren't any quantum theories that assert solipsism afaik.
I think many people see in the speculative work of QM an opening for idealism (which some people interpret as solipsism).
Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup says something like QM demonstrates that materialism is incoherent - all which exists is mind (consciousness), held and made coherent by a form of cosmic consciousness ( - not the god of traditional theism, closer to Schopenhauer's notion of pure will).
From his blog:
[i]In quantum mechanics we have the idea of the wave function Schrödingers equation which is an expression of all the states that are possible, and when we take a measurement, we say that it collapses this is a bad term, I know, but it is ubiquitous, so I shall use it into a particular state. But a measurement is already a representation an appearance. It is what happens when the world as it is interacts with us. What we can measure is never going to be the world as it is in itself.
So what quantum physics is telling us is that matter has no stand-alone reality. Matter is how the world appears to us when we measure it, when we interact with it, when we observe it whatever word you prefer to use. As to what is behind that appearance, we cannot visualise it as anything material or physical because all the parameters used to exhaustively describe what we call material things are observables. The best we can know about the world as it is, is the quantum wave function, which is a statistical thing a wave of possibilities.
This is what we have to get through our heads. Quantum mechanics has been around since the early 20th century, but we have been stubbornly refusing to accept what it is showing us. If we abandon the need to preserve the intuition that matter has a stand-alone existence, then everything that we consider a great puzzle in quantum mechanics the great paradoxes of non-locality and indeterminacy, etc. immediately resolve. There is no great mystery here. The mystery is our stubbornness in trying to hold on to a failed intuition.[/i]
The clue is in the notion of universal mind. All of reality is held by this mind and you and all beings are 'dissociated alters' of this one great cosmic consciousness. Solipsism by contrast is the argument that only you exist. For Kastrup and perhaps Schopenhauer, it would be closer to say you don't really exist, so solipsism isn't even on the table.
Brains-in-vat / simulation hypothesis.
Quoting Darkneos
I've not immersed myself in this world but would you know off hand just who are the candidates supposedly behind these notions of simulation? Is it generally some kind of organic programmer, or are we part of an endless recursion of IT simulations?
https://qr.ae/pveiQl
I'm aware of his argument. I join the forum that was linked from his website, but when I started arguing how their line of reasoning inevitably leads to solipsism none of them could give a good argument as to why it's not. IMO the guy is too stupid to really understand the conclusions his view leads to.
Kastrup just speculates something he cannot validate, a universal mind. Not to mention badly butchering quantum mechanics by thinking consciousness is involved at all.
Idealism inevitably leads to solipsism. Berkley couldn't escape it and neither did Kastrup.
There are many interpretations of quantum mechanics. It is my understanding that there is no empirical way to determine which, if any, are correct, even in principle. Questions which can't be answered empirically are not science.
That's not true.
From the August 2022 edition of "Skeptical Inquirer." Thanks to @Gnomon for the quote.
Pigliucci is a philosopher of science at City College of New York.
I've said it before. I'll say it again. Questions about the nature of our reality are not science.
Not sure how you are getting that. Can you describe how idealism leads to solipsism? For me idealism may lead to deism or theism.
There's no way yet. It hasn't been established that there's no way in principle.
:up:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I see that Wilson combines Many Worlds and David Lewis' modal realism. Lewis gave a lecture on quantum mechanics in 2001 titled, "How Many Lives Has Schrödinger's Cat?" He discussed one possibility of evidence for Many Worlds (see also discussion here):
Do you think the idea of a collapse is on the way out?
It's seems clear to me from the quote that Pigliucci means it can't be done. Before I read that, I had thought it was still an open question. Perhaps that's true, but, to me, it's beside the point. You wrote "You're wrong." I showed you a credible opinion by a qualified person that says I'm right. Although I'm willing to acknowledge that the issue may not be resolved, I think I've established that the position I've advocated in this discussion is a reasonable one.
If someone claims we don't presently have the means to test theories, that's just an observation, and a correct one.
If someone wants to claim that no quantum theories can be tested even in principle, that's a positive claim and requires some support. It's a strong claim, so it needs strong support.
You just misunderstood the quote, that's all. No biggie.
It's clear to me I've made my point no matter how obstinate you are. Nuff said.
As Banno would say, you're unavailable for learning. :sad:
Berkeley says "to be is to be perceived" and this seems to presuppose "self-perceived being" that cannot perceive other selves only ("ideas of") bodies, etc (i.e. as @Banno has said, IIRC, 'idealism implies that only what can be known (directly) is real and therefore solipsism only oneself is real because one only knows oneself as / to be a self'). Of course, subjective idealism is only one flavor ...
I think, in the Western tradition, idealism-solipsism goes back to, or starts with, Neoplatonism wherein only the One is real and all others are merely "emenations" (ideas) of One (nous) in the Eastern tradition, Brahman-maya or Eternal Dao-ten thousand things or etc the"ipse" is god ("the monad"), not an ego. Anyway, I gave 'solipsism presupposes idealism' a go here
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/724292
Quoting Tom Storm
I haven't a clue but I've recently speculated about that on a thread discussing 2001: A Spece Odyssey.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/741138
Quoting T Clark
:fire:
Interesting. Though not fully versed with Berkeleys thought i get the general gist. But if youre right in his representation of the idea of god then something needs to be said regarding coherence and predictability as you mentioned.
Coherence I take to as signifying meaning from the subjects point of view and where this falls short so does predictability as you put it.
Though meaning in terms of modern science can be subject to interpretation as per quantum mechanics or even relativity as postulated by Einstein but even this is not as strange as QM
"Within modern philosophy there are sometimes taken to be two fundamental conceptions of idealism:
- something mental (the mind, spirit, reason, will) is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality, and
- although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything that we can know about this mind-independent reality is held to be so permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind (of some kind or other) that all claims to knowledge must be considered, in some sense, to be a form of self-knowledge.
Idealism in sense (1) has been called metaphysical or ontological idealism, while idealism in sense (2) has been called formal or epistemological idealism. The modern paradigm of idealism in sense (1) might be considered to be George Berkeleys immaterialism, according to which all that exists are ideas and the minds, less than divine or divine, that have them."
The Nous is the first emanation of the One. It's along the lines of the divine mind. There's no solipsism in there.
That is your conclusion frank. But again its subject to interpretation if there is only divine mind and were all manifestations of it then solipsism has a case.
Should I elaborate ?
Isn't that still solipsism? As I point out, whether god or my ego, only that "self" is real to itself.
Nice my line of thinking goes similar to yours in the post right above yours.
The human mind is supposed to be a dim reflection of the divine mind. How do you pull solipsism out of that?
Also you misspelled emanation.
Yup I considered this would be part of the counter-argument.
The answer, well my answer is this. As the mind is a product of the divine then the argument is this and now I have to quote an old text is it the bible ?
Man was created in the image of God
Edit: Genesis 1:27
So a human is a tiny god?
Id happy settle for son of God. Turning water into wine is a nifty trick
Nah, the One is not conscious on its own, and creation spreads out, further and further from intellect into the darkness of matter. Then starts a return journey to the One. This is the original Eternal Return. There's no solipsism in there.
Maybe. I'm struggling to see it however and I'm not an idealist. I guess you're saying there is no functional difference.
So I understand solipsism to be the argument that only my mind exists and everything is 'created' by me. The second version of idealism seems to hold the idea that external reality exists, as do other minds but there is nothing but consciousness and all his part of a great mind.
You're saying that Quoting 180 Proof
Is there not a difference... but perhaps they have similar implications. I think I need an essay on the subject. :groan:
To many assumptions on your part for me to address fully.
Regarding the spread out into the darkness of matter as its part of the one then its part of the whole.
Therefore if there is only one then we come back to solipsism.
Though ego might dismiss the existence of other which is where solipsism falls short.
Hey, I'm not an idealist/solipsist either so ... :sweat:
Thinking about it, I edited my previous post to read "Questions about the nature of our reality are not science." The original seemed a bit ambiguous.
:up:
https://qr.ae/pveiQl
Though to be fair the post also says it says nothing new about QM and in the previous experiments like it (and including this one) we can't draw any hard conclusions. But that won't stop sensationalist titles from emerging.
Wigner's friend is one of the problems associated with wave function collapse. It may be that there is no "collapse."
Objectivity need not - does not - require that we all see the same thing. It does require that our explanations be consistent.
Massimo Pigliucci and I disagree.
Then, if objectivity owes itself to its perception then the requirement of explanation is not required ?
That is if observation is universal. Otherwise frameworks are required which Einstein provided.
The challenge QM gives us, at least with the Copenhagen interpretation, is nature of a system that's in superposition. The problem is that it has no particular state. This isn't what we usually imagine when we think about the universe.
This interpretation isn't necessarily correct, but it's an example of what QM suggests about the reality of our universe.
What?
I understand your confusion. If perception was all there was then assume we had no outlet for explanation. Perception and not just cognition would explain emergent behaviour of the laws of physics. The constants and the variables.
But it isn't.
The point is this Ozzie, explanation is only an aid to understanding reality for Perception achieves the same thing without it.
Then explanation can only be useful if its aim of being the descriptor of such observation is as accurate as perception was to those laws it tries to comprehend.
I'm not going to play at physics. I'll leave that to physicist.
Quoting frank
But that's not right. The ball will fall with a particular acceleration. That is a system with a particular state. There's detail needed here, and it is indeed quite difficult to create superstitions.
Certainly, any jump to "nothing is real" is unjustified.
That you think this is why you have so much difficulty with these notions.
There are perceptions, and there are things perceived. The only situations in which you doubt this are those such as when you are posting on PF.
Because then we have a problem as to doubt what I perceive is to admit that its a convincing holograph with state properties.
Is the most you can perhaps say, 'the nature of materialism isn't what we though it was' ?
Quoting Banno
Indeed. One wouldn't dream of claiming to know how to pilot a fighter jet, yet people with no expertise, are indefatigably certain about theoretical physics and reality.
Then what will? And thanks to his bullshit its better to doubt then be certain, for certainty could also be BS.
Probably the idea of a physical collapse is on the way out, though I'm not sure it was ever in in the first place. Whereas the idea of a formal collapse is as prevalent as ever (in Copenhagen and neo-Copenhagen interpretations). From Wikipedia:
Quoting Wave function collapse - History and Context - Wikipedia
Also from physicists Peres and Terno:
Quoting Quantum Information and Relativity Theory - Peres, Terno
The nature of materialism? Or of matter?
This old armchair is solid, yet mostly space. And saying this is no contradiction, just a concatenation of descriptions taken from quite different circumstances.
Even if the chair is in some superposition - and I'm not convinced that any physicist worth their pay would make such a claim - the chair remains very real.
I guess 'matter'.
Quoting Banno
Yeah. It makes no difference to our use of a chair or our world in general.
But doubt presupposes certainty. One can doubt something, but one cannot coherently doubt everything. Descartes never doubted the language in which he framed his meditations.
But that's an old and well-worn discussion, and doubtless you are already familiar with Wittgenstein's On Certainty.
So hav we a new direction in which to move?
Unless you want to build chairs that you dont want to break easily under certain conditions I.e collapse as QM alludes to
No new direction at all. Wittgenstein thought aligns itself quite well with the Copenhagen interpretation of QM.
What, really real or emergently real?
What ontological commitment are you wanting to make in terms of reality. How much inconvenient metaphysics did you mean to sweep under the carpet?
It is right that reality looks different at different scales of interaction. And so that makes us ask which scale is foundational and which is emergent.
After that comes the realisation that all scales must be co-emergent. Which is where the metaphysical conversation really starts to fly.
But back to lumpen materialist statements about asses interacting with armchairs.
Just real. Arses on armchairs.
Quoting apokrisis
What is foundational depends on what one is doing.
(Congratulations on using "arse", not "ass")
So no actual science. Just "ordinary language reality". The view suitably constrained to make predicate logic seem the philosophical theory of everything. Same old, same old. :up:
Quoting Banno
You are conflating epistemology with ontology when the question becomes about what Nature is doing.
Rookie error.
As a matter of convention, I think it makes sense to think of interactions at human scale as foundational, at least for bookkeeping purposes. It was at that level that the whole concept of reality was established. It's at that level that most people experience reality directly. It's at that level where noting weird is going on.
I know it's prevalent. I was asking if it's declining in popularity.
Not that I'm aware of.
There is an argument to be had there. We can build the subjective anthropomorphic view into our metaphysics.
But how is that to be done in a way that simply doesn't serve to contradict all attempts by physics to then take the objective "view from nowhere" as its highly productive metaphysics? And what happens when that unreasonably effective route has to turn around and recover its own subjective point of departure?
That is how all the quantum mysticism arises. If the foundation is the human observer making measurements regardless of whether it is with their wide bum, or a clock and ruler then how does this "classical" picture account for whatever emergently leads to the collapse of the wavefunction?
So a commonsensical everyday metaphysics of "medium sized dry goods" and "bums in armchairs, cats on mats, stones kicked in the street" doesn't either lead to the objectivity science seeks, nor give it a secure place to make its return. As usual with Banno, it is naive realism concealing naive idealism.
There just "isn't a problem" we are told. Reality is whatever "I" see. It is "my" experience of it from doing all the things that "I" want to do.
And as I reminded elsewhere recently, Newtonian mechanics was deeply weird when the classical view of physics was actually crystallised in differential equations. It was not at all natural once you go beyond the everyday of billiard balls bouncing around a baize table.
Newton just junked Aristotle's impetus and Descartes' corpuscles. He enshrined Leibniz's teleological principle of least action. He did a whole lot of things that defied what had seemed commonsense principles.
Have you ever tried making sense of action and reaction as a symmetrically opposed pair of force vectors? Or is it only me that saw that as the answer to how rockets worked in a picture book when I was 7 years old and thought, hey, that's a completely bogus metaphysics! :razz:
So you were on the nose with your earlier remark about scales of observation. But my point here is about taking the ontology seriously once you have indeed sorted out your epistemology.
And naive realism that dissolves into naive idealism without even being aware of it is not a sorted-out epistemology. It is 1950s plain speaking bullshit.
It's what's happening to Schrodinger's cat when he's not being observed that's the problem. :razz:
I think I'm trying to address a different issue than you are. It bothers me when everybody, even scientists, keep saying that the quantum mechanics is weird. It's not weird. It's just how things work. Why would you expect events at scales of 10 or 15 orders of magnitude smaller than ours to act the same way they do up here?
So, QM doesn't make the world weird. Apples are still apples and they still fall when you drop them and crunch when you chew them. Canada geese still honk and shit on your lawn. Nothing in your daily life get's any less real. There's no reason to get all excited.
On the other hand, I recognize there is a need for a broader context. Once everybody chills out we can work that out. Focusing on the weirdness of the quantum world makes it harder to understand. You can see the effects of that in this discussion.
Quoting apokrisis
I think it arises from people thinking that QM somehow undermines their experience of the world we see every day.
Quoting apokrisis
The law of conservation of momentum always made sense to me, although I'm sure I wasn't aware of it when I was 7. Or Newton's laws either. I'm even more sure I didn't know what metaphysics is. You clearly were a prodigy.
Quoting apokrisis
As I said, I see the human scale standard as a convention. A place to stand while we take our measurements of phenomena much larger or smaller or much more or less energetic then where we grew up.
It's a philosophy forum, so, yes.
Quoting apokrisis
Better, the mooted distinction between epistemology and ontology is here misplaced. Always, already interpreted.
:clap: :smirk:
Quoting Banno
What? :chin:
If you're saying the distinction made between epistemology and ontology is arbitrary and unnecessary, I agree. If you're saying something else, I don't know what it is.
It is the flat contradictions in the causality that creates the angst. Sure, you can take the epistemic or modelling perspective that says we simply construct the pragmatic story that captures sufficient truth at each level. So shut up and calculate.
But this invokes an ontology of emergent properties. And so you are just moving the metaphysical questions back to that next grounding level.
For example, you can get into the hierarchy theory debate about whether emergence is all about supervenience - so microstate realism about emergent macrostates - or instead the kind of Peircean holism that I always promote.
So why is quantum reality nonlocal and classical reality local? Why is quantum reality indeterminate or vague, and classical reality definite or crisp? Is it just epistemic accident we arrived at such contrasting causal axioms, or is it instead the big clue that shows there is a directly reciprocal relation in which reality emerges from the manifestation of that causal dialectic.
There is a productive conversation to be had about an ontology in which it is opposition that nature must manifest. Hence making the argument that this famous causal contradiction between the classical and the quantum is what a dialectical metaphysics predicts, rather than an unfortunate feature that more reductionist metaphysics must eliminate.
Where folk are opining about classical and quantum models of reality.
If you want to participate productively in such a thread, then leave your lumpen realism behind. Lets get properly metaphysical. Stop hiding behind Wittgensteins skirts.
Quoting Banno
So philosophy is taking everything at face value rather than digging into it. I realise that is indeed your philosophy. It is why you simply assert a position and avoid presenting some actual argument.
Have you noticed how folk tend to rely on this distinction as if it were an argument? I don't understand that. Ontology and epistemology are not like ought and is...
What am I missing?
Geez louise. Don't be such a doink. Answer the ding dong question.
To the extent I understand what you're talking about, it makes sense. I'm starting to get a feel for your description of how hierarchy's work - the idea of downward constraints and holism. But on the other hand, who cares? Sure, you do and I do and a bunch of other dorks do. Scientists and philosophers seem as confused about this as the low-lifes here on the forum. As I wrote, I think the taint of mystery and weirdness makes it harder for people to figure out what's up.
I don't even disagree with anything you said. I guess I just place the emphasis differently. People should realize the world is the world, not what they think it is or want it to be. They should get used to it.
... but more like (the study of) constants and functions, respectively.
The Nobel Prize in Physics is being awarded this year to three scientists who have shown locality to be false.
I don't yet know of any experiments that have shown counterfactual definiteness to be false.
Thanks. So you, Banno, and others come crowding on to these kinds of threads to show that you dont take deep and interesting questions seriously. You know better because you havent learnt either the physics or the metaphysics. Ignorance of the subject matter becomes your trump card.
Cmon. You can do better than that.
Definitely not. As Ive said in other threads, thermal decoherence is a robust explanation for how a wavefunction can be so contextually constrained that it is as good as a collapse. You could say the outcome is still probabilistic, but the probability becomes 1 (or 0).
The human observer thus collapses the wavefunction by imposing such constraint - after first also preparing a system that is unconstrained and isolated from thermal noise.
So the collapse doesnt seem like such a mystery anymore because the quantum maths has had a statistical mechanics module bolted on. The noisy thermal environment that is always present is included in the probability calculus.
The weirdness is reduced to the nonlocality or contextuality of the act of decoherence. In a limited and probabilistic sense, the constraints must transcend space and time to exert their effect. So you get retrocausal effects like the quantum eraser.
This is only starting to be taken seriously recently. I cited Emily Adlams work.
So there is weirdness to tackle. And the deep aspect has been put off for a long time. Spatial nonlocality is an everyday fact now. But temporal nonlocality still really screws with peoples classical prejudices about causal,order.
But hey. That boat already sailed with special relatively you would have thought.
Not quite. Bell's Theorem showed that QM is incompatible with local realism, i.e., either QM or local realism is false. By experimentally establishing the violation of Bell inequalities, these scientists showed that local realism was false. The rejection of either locality or realism (counterfactual definiteness) is an interpretational issue.
For example, Bohmian Mechanics rejects locality. Copenhagen and Many Worlds reject counterfactual definiteness.
It's not that QM is supposed to make you second guess your first hand experiences. It's the assumptions we use to contextualize those experiences which are challenged by QM (and Relativity of course.)
It's just not the case that something odd is happening at the small scale, but this has no bearing on the way we conceptualize the universe as a whole.
This isn't an idealism vs. realism debate. You're right that much of that debate takes place outside the realm of science, but that could very well change in the next century, so let's not imagine that we've reached the pinnacle of understanding. We haven't. We're just somewhere on the trail.
In the meantime, we have QM telling us that the world we live in is definitely not what our ancestors thought it was. Much of what they counted as real, just is not.
Yes. Entangled particles are correlated, but that doesn't imply a non-local influence (i.e., action at a distance).
Physicist Asher Peres, who held the Copenhagen interpretation, noted that "Bells theorem does not imply the existence of any nonlocality in quantum theory itself. In particular relativistic quantum field theory is manifestly local." (longer quote here).
Some people do use the term non-local to describe entanglement, in the sense that if you measure one particle, you know immediately what the measurement on the other (non-local) particle will be. But that's because you know what QM predicts; it doesn't imply a faster-than-light-speed influence. Also, per relativity of simultaneity, the order of the measurements may be different in each particle's reference frame.
Are there any proposed experiments that could show which of locality and counterfactual definiteness is incorrect, or is it entirely dependent on an untestable interpretation?
I think there are varieties of idealism that cogently complement QM. Critical Idealism, in particular, does not assert the primacy of either the mental or the material, but holds that what is fundamental is the reciprocal interaction of the mental and the material. This is difficult to deny, since it is never possible to isolate a fact from a knower.
I think I've shown I do take interesting questions seriously and I am very interested in these questions. As I noted, though, I think the gee whiz gets in the way of the science and philosophy. "Gee whizz" is not metaphysics, but in QM, it is treated as if it were.
Also, I didn't mean to include you among the dorks on the forum, although it came out that way. I have always thought of you, Fdrake, and Streetlight as the voices I can trust in math, science, and related philosophy.
One of the points I've beaten till it's black and blue is that metaphysics is not universal. We don't need a one-size-fits-all universal metaphysical foundation. For me, metaphysics should be applied piecemeal. It's a tool to help with thinking and understanding - a tool box. When you're doing reductionist science, maybe pull out the materialism and realism. When it's math, pull out the idealism. When you're trying to see how it all fits together, you might need holism or even mysticism.
Quoting frank
As I understand it, metaphysics and science are different kinds of things. One is the ground, foundation, of the other, especially if we include epistemology in with the metaphysics. Given that view, metaphysics and science will never meld into each other.
I agree we are nowhere near the pinnacle, if there even is one.
Quoting T Clark
Do we really need to sort metaphysics out to talk about QM and reality? When we discovered that the sky is not a rigid dome, we discovered that heaven, as we had conceived it, isn't real.
Newton worked within a framework of absolute space and time that we now know isn't real.
QM says some of our assumptions about reality have to be wrong.
Quoting T Clark
The first ontologists were doing speculative physics. The two have already melded. There is a kind of metaphysics which is just language on holiday. It's fun to follow its convoluted paths, but it's ultimately pointless. Science is almost never pointless, so we might draw a distinction between that pointless kind of metaphysics and science.
Opportunity to quote Ryle's quip, on being elected Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics, that a chair in metaphysics is like a chair in tropical diseases doesn't mean you're supposed to be in favor of it.
Much more respectable business these days, of course, than what he had in mind.
Except that 99.99999% of the time we do live within a framework of absolute space and time.
Quoting frank
QM says that things work differently at small scale than they do up here where we are.
Quoting frank
As I wrote previously, for me, metaphysics and science are completely different things.
But your body and brain depend on being able to harness quantum chemistry. Life and mind start at the quasi-classical nanoscale of molecular machines where proteins can beat the classical odds by employing quantum tricks.
So without the ability to harness things like quantum tunneling, enzymes and respiratory chains wouldnt work. Photosynthesis wouldnt exist. Sensory receptors would be impossible.
I think you are just too dismissive of the quantum realm. It is how there could even be the classical realm as its other.
It is crazy that nature even exists in one form. It is doubly crazy that a second form hatches emergently from that. It is triply crazy that even the quantum form has to be emergent - or at least that is an implication of the success of quantum field theory.
So stand back and marvel of all that we have discovered - some of it only very recently.
And the success of a cake recipe depends on chemical reactions which take place when you add heat to processed chemical and biological material. But I just want to eat a piece of cake. I know I sound flip, but I'm serious about this. When I'm figuring out how long a train takes to get from Preston MD to Cincinnati OH I don't need to think about relativity. That's a trick example. There is no rail service to Preston.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not dismissive at all, at least not of the science. I am a bit dismissive about overcomplicating the metaphysics. I think you and I have a different understanding about the value and use of metaphysics. I guess that's metaphysics too, or maybe meta-metaphysics.
Quoting apokrisis
I do. I marvel all the time.
There is no absolute space and time, so no, we don't live there.
:lol:
You and I see things differently. I doubt there's any middle ground in our views.
I think that means you're wrong. :nerd:
I'm not surprised at your conclusion.
But just not at the metaphysics of being apparently. So why hang around these threads to tell folk that?
Its not like I would join a cake making site or train travel blog to talk about the wonder of an existence that is founded on its own dialectical necessity. We reject the mechanical only to find the mechanical is what then must be recovered in the quantum limit of that rejection. We reject the global to embrace the local only to find the global is what then must be recovered in the relativistic limit of that rejection.
It is fine to carve out your own domains of expertise and interest. But once you go looking for a place where you can assert a stance of lumpen realism - an anti-metaphysics agenda - then you are now engaging in the very thing you claim to be rejecting.
Sense the pattern? Like a moth to a flame, you are being drawn to a dialectic where you might recover lumpen realism in the limit of everyday, unphilosophical, mundanity.
The logic of the dialectic is so strong, nothing escapes it. The desire to reject metaphysics is itself what must manifest metaphysics as the other which has been placed at the greatest possible distance.
A lack of gee whiz is the blunting which then defines what is antithetically the sharp.
You are caught in the web of denying there is a web to be caught in.
Why?
Sitting opposite each other at table, you see the fork on the left, I see it on the right.
Are you saying that because we see it differently, there is no "objective" statement as to the position of the fork?
But that's not right.
Interesting (I guess 'analytical') approach. :chin:
Quoting apokrisis
No doubt true of cataphatic "anti-metaphysics".
That's not what it means. The point is that we are both seeing the fork and can confer it objectively exists. That's what it means to be objective, no matter what side you're sitting on. What you are referring to isn't even in the ballpark of what I mean as it is still objective.
The point of the Wigner's Friend is that both can see the different responses to the same thing and be right, meaning we aren't seeing the same thing yet aren't wrong, at least on the quantum stage not the macro stage.
Your example doesn't come close.
Don't think that's how it works. None of that is crazy and it sounds like you're misrepresenting quantum mechanics. The stuff that's crazy only applies at that level. It doesn't apply to our level, hence why it's crazy.
What does any of that mean?
It's the world that's wonderful. I love metaphysics, but I see that it's just a bunch of stories people have made up to explain it to themselves. We get to choose the one that works best right now and right here. Why shouldn't I tell people how I see it.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't reject metaphysics at all. Along with epistemology it's the part of philosophy that interests me the most. As I've noted elsewhere, it represents the essence of intellectual self-awareness. I've said it dozens of times here on the forum - metaphysical claims have no truth value.
:100:
The point of the forks is that we both can see the different responses to the same thing and be right, meaning we aren't seeing the same thing yet aren't wrong, right there at the table.
The example is spot on.
I don't see that it has anything to do with QM.
Is it reductionist metaphysics? I wonder if I've overstated my case.
Like I said not even close.
Have you studied biophysics?
But how much of it can you see?
Quoting T Clark
What? They are how we can even derive counterfactuals to test. They are the axiomatic basis of truth claims.
Uhh no they aren't. Metaphysical claims don't have truth values, they are all unfalsifiable and have no impact on reality.
Quoting apokrisis
A little, but again that's not quantum physics. Doesn't apply here.
That ceased to be a viable claim in 1966.
de Vault, D. & Chance, B. Studies of phosynthesis using a pulsed laser. i. Temperature dependence of cytochrome oxidation rate in Chromatium. Evidence for tunneling. Biophys. J. 6, 825 (1966)
And is a quite ludicrous statement now. Biophysics has all the receipts.
Electron-transfer chain in respiratory complex I
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05779-y
Yeah, it is. One fork. Left, right.
You haven't made a case for a difference, which leaves the suspicion that you only wish to hide your views behind QM verbosity.
Instrumentalist? Neo-pragmatist? ...
The multiplicity of first person views is what underwrites the unity of the third person point of view.
But then we know how your plain language lumpen realism always conflates this familiar dialectical distinction.
What Banno sees as plain as the nose on his face is what the whole world ought to see with equal incuriosity. :wink:
So if the supposed lesson from quantum mechanics is that different folk see things differently, then it is something we already knew to be the case.
Further, that does not count against there being descriptions that apply for any observer. Objectivity is not so much about our all seeing the same thing, as it is about our sharing an explanation of what we see, even if what we see is different.
Like the fork being on the left for you, and on the right for me.
It's a small point, trivial, one supposes, but it might show how QM doesn't deny reality so much as confirm it.
To reiterate, it's not quantum physics. Again Biophysics isn't quantum physics.
Again, no. This isn't difference. It's the same object. I explained what I meant with my example. In this case it would be like two people observing and one saying they see a fork and another a spoon. It's not just a simple position change but something entirely different.
Get it through your head.
Hohooo! That is false. (There is one truth value already.)
"My spirit is green." metaphysical claim.
"My spirit is green and my spirit is not green." Metaphysical claim that is necessarily false.
"My spirit is green or my spirit is not green. " Metaphysical claim that is necessarily true.
:100: :clap: :strong: :up:
The statement is not a contradiction, it's conceptually incoherent (i.e. not even false).
You are false again. This is an axiomatically wrong thing to claim what you claimed. If you deny the validity of the law of the excluded middle on a philosophy site, then you are truly wrong.
EDIT:
I did not claim contradiction. I claimed that it is necessarily false.
You are 1. wrong and 2. you are trying to explain your report card by mixing apples with oranges.
My one unending, drum beating message for almost all the time I've been on the forum has been that metaphysical statements are not true or false. They have not truth value. They are only more or less useful in specific situations. I've written exactly that statement dozens of times in many different discussions.
Quoting apokrisis
Agreed. Axioms are statements not subject to empirical verification. Thus they are not true or false.
@180 Proof says your statements are "conceptually incoherent." I say they are meaningless. I think we're both saying the same thing.
What's an example you reach for to explain this idea? (This is Collingwood, right?)
Though I don't get this one:
[quote][Subjective reality is a local perspective adapting to context. This is complementarity in QM. Each causal relation resulting in a contextual interaction is objective. This is a condition to be a valid complement in QM. The generalization of all local positions and contexts is also objective. The shift from local subjective to general objective is split by uncertainty principle.
When you understand Copenhagen Interpretation correctly, questions like this do not occur. They become the play things of those who haven't graduated from philosophy to empirical reality./quote]
What I am saying is that you don't need meaning to be necessarily true or necessarily false.
The point here was truth value, not meaning.
The greenness of spirit is not something you can prove; but you can't prove anything to be true or false in the physical world, in a sense. (think of how senses could be deceptive and report to us a false picture of reality.) Truth, absolute truth, can only be done in an a priori way. And for that you don't need a truth that applies to the physical world.
For instance, 1+2=3. There is no physicality in this, this is all conceptual. Yet it's true.
ETC.
You guys, T. Clark and 180 Proof are hung up on something that I don't think has anything to do with what the truth value of anything else. I mean, I don't know what your problem is. The claim by 180 Proof, or by T Clark was that metaphysical claims can't be evaluated for truth or falsehood. I said, that's false, and proved it. You now come back saying that a thing that has no meaning can't be true. That may or may not be true, but saying that a case that a thing that has no meaning AND the case that the thing has meaning is necessarily false.
You start to argue about that? On what basis?
Yes, Collingwood. Example - materialism, realism, physicalism, idealism, anti-realism, monism, dualism, solipsism, and all the other ontological isms are metaphysical positions. Determinism and free will are also. I don't know if Collingwood would agree with these examples or not, but he's dead so I can say what I want.
Yes. I might quibble with one or two points, but that is generally consistent with how I see things. Where is it from?
To say that these are metaphysical positions, you have to define "metaphysical" first.
I would agree if you said "these are conceptual positions", or "intangible positions", or even "non-physical positions".
However, saying that they are metaphyscal positions is a false. Metaphysics is not a concept, it is a bunch of thoughts (originally, at least), that Aristotle came up with, which he could not categorize.
So are you saying, that the list you said are things that can't be categorized in the categories established by Aristotle?
I have encountered no other useful, workable definition of "metaphysics". Ask any philosopher what it means. I have, and they all said "well, it is not defined."
What "metaphysics" has boiled down to, is a popular term for something irreligiously supernatural, something kind of other-wordly. This is the best acceptable use in the vernacular of common informal English. Is that what you meant?
On the basis that the examples you gave, e.g. "my spirit is green," are not metaphysical statements.
... and yet still agreeing that if they swapped places then they would also swap observations. The one would see the spoon, the other the fork.
Ok, you missed the point. Not my problem.
The examples you gave are also not metaphysical statements.
As far as I'm concerned, you've not "proved" anything yet, gmba.
They agree as to what is the case.
Gotcha. But those are positions not statements. I assume you don't only mean statements like "materialism is true"; that's a weird sentence anyway, and hardly a statement of the position of materialism. Would you look for statements that maybe make up the position we call "materialism" and mark all of those statements as neither true or false?
I just like to see concrete examples. What's it look like in practice? Do you find yourself pointing to specific statements and saying "That's metaphysical and therefore not truth-apt"?
Does a statement's not being subject to empirical verification entail that it cannot be true or false? Smells like positivist spirit! So in the spirit of the detractors of logical positivism, I can now ask whether your claim that a statement's not being subject to empirical verification means that it cannot be true or false, is itself true or false or neither?
More proof of your intellectual blindness.
A presupposition is an assumption that establishes the context for a philosophical discussion.
This from "An Essay on Metaphysics" by R.G. Collingwood:
[i]An absolute presupposition is one which stands, relatively to all questions to which it is related, as a presupposition, never as an answer.
Metaphysics is the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking...
...the logical efficacy of an absolute presupposition is independent of its being true: it is that the distinction between truth and falsehood does not apply to absolute presuppositions at all, that distinction being peculiar to propositions...[/i]
I think you are being disingenuous in your posts. You have participated in discussions in the past where these issues were discussed, so you should be familiar with the distinctions that are being made, even if you do not agree with them.
You talk past my point about counterfactuals. Metaphysical claims are empty if they are "not even wrong" as theories. But if they claim something measurable, then you have something to compare and contrast.
To say reality is continuous is on its own pretty meaningless. But saying it is continuous rather than discrete is where we can start figuring out how to start measuring that. That's why Fermilab built a holometer.
The Peircean wrinkle is that such dichotomies must themselves emerge into being. Or at least that is his metaphysical claim when if comes to his logic of vagueness.
But hey. That only means you can now oppose vagueness to crispness. You have established counterfactuality at that deeper ontological level one that speaks direct to emergent holism as the counterfactual alternative to brute realism.
Now the scientific prediction is that the discrete and the continuous must be scalefree emergent states of reality. They become the mutually opposed limits on physical being.
And suddenly decoherent quantum physics and the Planck scale reciprocal constants make much more sense. That is exactly what we see in the conformal lightcone structure of the Universe. Integration and differentiation - as the continuous and the discrete emerging over all available cosmic scales.
That's where you are wrong. They can be true or they can be false inasmuch as they apply to reality falsely or truly. But their true falsehood or truth lies in their a priori adherence to rules of logic.
This discussion may resemble other discussions. But my "catch" was that you said metaphysical statements can't be true or false. That is false.
(Thanks, by the way, to show the one definition of "metaphysics" that you want to use. I don't doubt that this definition can be used if all in the discussions accept it. I would accept it, if I understood it. But it does not take away from the fact that a metaphysical statement is NOT exempt from rules of logic. That includes a necessary adherence to the rule of the excluded middle.)
No to the experiments. But it's worth noting that Bohmian Mechanics and objective collapse theories aren't interpretations, they are distinct theories. So in principle, they are testable against QM.
That leaves comparing the pros and cons of QM interpretations and theories per the constraints of no-go theorems such as Bell's Theorem. Here's a recent Bell-type no-go theorem (relevant to Wigner's Friend) that states all the assumptions:
Quoting A No-Go Theorem for Observer-Independent Facts - Caslav Brukner
Assumption 3 is the superdeterminism loophole. Assumption 4 is counterfactual-definiteness.
I'm getting way behind on responses and comments are coming in from all directions. I don't think this will answer all the questions out there, but it may answer some of them. It may at least make it clear what I mean when I talk about metaphysics. It comes from a post I made in the "Metaphysics of Materialism" thread a few months ago.
R.G. Collingwood wrote that metaphysics is the study of absolute presuppositions. Absolute presuppositions are the unspoken, perhaps unconscious, assumptions that underpin how we understand reality. Collingwood wrote that absolute presuppositions are neither true nor false, but we wont get into that argument here. I would like to enumerate and discuss the absolute presuppositions, the underlying assumptions, of classical physics/materialism. In my OP, I specified only presuppositions relevant to science before 1905 would be included. Here is a provisional list.
[1] We live in an ordered universe that can be understood by humans.
[2] The universe consists entirely of physical substances - matter and energy.
[3] These substances behave in accordance with scientific principles, laws.
[4] Scientific laws are mathematical in nature.
[5] The same scientific laws apply throughout the universe and at all times.
[6] The behaviors of substances are caused.
[7] Substances are indestructible, although they can change to something else.
[8] The universe is continuous. Between any two points there is at least one other point.[/quote]
[9] Space and time are separate and absolute.
[10] Something can not be created from nothing.
My intention is not to reopen this discussion. I won't participate if anyone else decides to do so. I am only trying to show what I mean when I say metaphysics.
Prediction - This will not end well.
Yes, but it's an epistemological problem AFAIK. So, I wasn't asking whether, if a statement has no possibility of empirical verification, we can know it to be true or false, but whether we can know that it could not be true or false.
You participated heavily in this exact discussion four months ago.
Can you clarify what you mean.
Quoting apokrisis
According to my formulation, metaphysics does not include things that are measurable. Can you give me an example of what you mean.
Okey doke. Here's a link to that discussion. Having a look at Collingwood. Cheers.
While I defer to your knowledge of science, I would point out that the question as to whether QM has metaphysical interpretations is not itself a scientific question, which means that no matter how great your scientific knowledge, that will not put you in any better position to answer it. Philosophical questions generally are not susceptible of definitive answers; if they were philosophy would have long since been done and dusted.
So, a non-epistemic "true or false"? :chin:
Interesting. Is this right? Could we not say that the physicist Sean Carroll (for instance) is in a better position to answer whether QM has metaphysical implications, primarily because he actually understands QM, which is surely the first and most necessary prerequisite to answering this question? And presumably he would see far more clearly than others what the actual gaps in QM are likely to be, where the science 'runs out' and the point where the metaphysical interpretations can begin.
Assuming that's a thing people do.
But knowledge and understanding are on a scale anyway, so it's tempting to say that you only need to know enough about how QM works to know what kind of theory it is and how it intersects with metaphysics, so there should be a level of detail below which physicists will care, but for philosophers these are differences that don't make a difference.
In theory, but in practice a lot of us just aren't clear what sort of animal QM is.
Quoting Tom Storm
But on the other hand, will he recognize metaphysics, or where metaphysics should go, when he sees it? Or will scientists always perceive gaps as places to be filled in with more science later? The working hypothesis ought to be the latter. I doubt there is ever a clear point at which you can't do any more science, and it's probably best not to think, even in theory, that there is a lawn for us to chase them off. So maybe not recognizing the opportunity to go metaphysical is a feature rather than a bug.
So I'm back to thinking that philosophy is defined as whatever's left over, that it's whatever science hasn't been able to do much with yet. A mere science incubator or nursery! as it always has been. Maybe that's okay if we take that role seriously and try to raise good responsible little sciences.
What does it mean to go metaphysical. The word is being used a lot, but do we all have the same understanding of it?
Drawing a hard line between domains of human inquiry seems a mistake. Im happy when folk just show some good knowledge of the history of metaphysics and then take a certain kind of scholarly approach that melds logic and evidence. It is an attitude of rational inquiry that seems easy enough to recognise when it is being employed.
Then if we must draw a tighter line - one meant to rule out theism, idealism, logicism, and other forms of speculation with low empirical content - then we can say we are natural philosophers, starting from the viewpoint that the Cosmos is something of the nature that science typically believes it to be. A deliberately loose definition, but one that emphasises how one ends up having to think about things in the light of the models of reality that prove unreasonably effective.
Even within science, there is plenty of metaphysical speculation that just seems plain woo to me. This is the maths gone made type thinking that gives you the many worlds interpretation, the ergodic principle, the cyclic universe, and so on.
The reductionist and mechanical basis of most scientific models does then lead to these exploding landscapes as the model dont incorporate their own bounding constraints. They are not holistically closed in the way that a systems description requires.
So from my point of view, much of the metaphysics within physics is fundamentally muddled because physicists are unused to thinking outside this particular box.
But in terms of being freely speculative, I dont think you could find any other fields like cosmology and particle physics that really let rip in an institutional way. It is the hot zone of metaphysical speculation, even if only sometimes for the also institutional reason that Big Science needs excuses to keep its Big Funding rolling. :lol:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Many may see the job of philosophy is to be anti-science - its challenger rather than its supporter.
That critic role is also helpful - especially when informed and focused on Scientism.
Quoting apokrisis
:up:
Not really.
Again, no. that's not what's being said here. You're just not getting it. We are TALKING ABOUT a SPOON being seen by one person while ANOTHER PERSON is looking at the same object but seeing a FORK and BOTH being RIGHT. That's the analogy. You're making this harder than it has to be.
Biological processes take place at a level above that which quantum physics operates hence quantum physics has nothing to offer in the realm of biology. Even googling biophysics shows it doesn't deal with quantum physics.
Also that paper you cited doesn't mention tunneling. It just thinks there is evidence for it but doesn't prove it.
Like I said, not sure what you're smoking.
Ick.
But I have sometimes thought there might be a role for philosophy if rigorous inquiry is possible for some domain that for some reason is not quite amenable to natural science. Mathematics and logic are bit like this, and in old books, but not newer, were often labeled sciences. And I have entertained the possibility that phenomenology could have such a character.
Quine had this idea that philosophy is the handmaid of science, and I never found that convincing either.
Quoting apokrisis
Agree, it's just hard to explain in what sense philosophy is a type of inquiry, lacking candidates with wide support for what its domain is. Inquiry into what?
Quoting apokrisis
That's an appealing suggestion.
Really? I can't seem to find a reference. Do you have one handy?
Gosh, in so many words? I dunno. I'm tempted just to say "everything."
Once epistemology is naturalized, and ontology defined as identifying what entities your theory commits you to, it seems the role of philosophy is to tidy up logical issues that might get in the way of, if not the practice of science, then the understanding of science.
The nature of mathematics and logic, for instance, are things that mathematicians and scientists are not to be bothered about; we philosophers will deal with that on their behalf. If mathematicians need sets, for example, even if we're not happy about it, we'll deal with the philosophers who say they can't have them.
I honestly think there are statements almost directly to this effect, early and late, but it's the whole tenor of his work, to my mind. Plenty of philosophers ignore aesthetics, for instance, or ethics, but I always thought Quine didn't so much ignore them as exclude them. Do you read him differently?
Yep. But surely that is because what it has in common is the skill we call critical thinking. So it is inquirys general best method. And that allows its domain to be anything and everything.
Check the history of metaphysics as it became natural philosophy and then science, we can see that it was based on the dialectal pincer movement of mathematical structure and observational evidence. Critical thinking is forming the general theory that accounts for the particular evidence.
So there is a method of inquiry. And we would then want to freely explore its every possible application.
That is why I see pragmatism as the core of the philosophical project - the right balance between the logicist and empirical tendencies.
AP can get too lost in wonder at the power of predicate logic, for example. Ironically that means it must set itself against dialectical logic as being too metaphysical as a boundary-policing activity.
PoMo can get lost in the observational wonder of phenomenology, affect and existential being. So it must ironically other even the structuralism which was its pragmatic departure point. It employs dialectics, but only to wring contradiction paradox from the resulting metaphysics.
One is the free play of syntax, the other is the free play of semantics. My usual point in any philosophy thread is that you need semiotics as a theory of meaningful utterances where syntax and semantics are in an enactive modelling relation with whatever world is under discussion.
No I.
Well said, sir! :100: :fire:
I think that's what we all want, and maybe why the mid-century titans of analytic philosophy, Quine and Sellars, each claimed the mantle of pragmatism at some point.
Quoting apokrisis
There's history there, not all of it pleasant. But it is a simple fact that it is the analytic crowd that took modern science seriously, from Russell onwards. The more Hegelian continental tradition (at least because more Marxist) turned its back on science, or arrogated to itself the task of fixing science, rebuilding it as something else.
The generally pro-science sympathies of analytic philosophy, on the other hand, never fit comfortably with the linguistic turn, so there's a longish period when science is not particularly welcome in either camp. That seems to be all over now. I'm not convinced the continental tradition can find its way back, but analytic philosophy has changed a lot from the mid-20th.
Maybe it will embrace your dialectic yet. Maybe it already has, but it's hard to recognize in those funny clothes.
I'd say that "where the science 'runs out' and the point where the metaphysical interpretations can begin" is precisely the point where scientific expertise also runs out. In any case my point was only that the question as to whether QM has metaphysical implications is not a scientific question, but a philosophical one.
Feynman, if I remember correctly, reportedly said "if you think you understand quantum mechanics then you don;t understand quantum mechanics" which I take to mean that no one understands what is really going on, but obviously not that no one understands the math.
Understanding the math, though, is just understanding the math, and a similar question to the QM/ metaphysics question has been around for thousands of years: the question as to whether mathematics has any metaphysical implications, and that question remains controversial to this day, with mathematicians and philosophers on both sides of the debate. I don't think it is a question that mathematics expertise can help to answer.
Quoting 180 Proof
I had thought that the existence of unknowable truths is uncontroversial.
Yep. Pragmatism is essentially AP. It aims at univocal truth claims by employing logic. But Peirce enlarged that logic (as well as laying foundations for predicate logic as well).
So I always find value in AP. At least it states its arguments clearly and provides examples that can substantiate its points.
Also, as Cheryl Misak recounts, Peirce had a subterranean influence on AP, even if one of limited fruitfulness in the end.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Sure. Dichotomies are meant to lead on to trichotomies in Peircean logic. Division paves the way for the holistic unity of opposites.
But in PoMo hands, dialectics became just about the paradox that every definite thing has its definite other hence all truths are relative and fluid.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And what was the linguistic turn but a caricature of semiotics?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Ive not seen that as yet. And besides, I am not a Hegelian so I only used dialectics as it is what folk are more familiar with. To be a Peircean requires fixing all Hegels misteps. Or at least the long messy trail of confusion left by his disciples and interpreters.
And even Peirce has to be detached from his theistic and mystical leanings. My Peirce is the one know to sciences like biosemiotics. :smile:
Not so, especially with QM where what is being metaphysically interpreted are mathematically expressed statements.
Some things just cant be put into words or pictures and only said as math. Quantum field theory in particular.
Yes, that was just what I had in mind. So, how is it then possible to interpret it metaphysically (semantically)?
On my reading of the current situation in anglophone philosophy, which is admittedly limited, Ramsey cuts a wider swath than Wittgenstein. For what that's worth.
[9] Space and time are separate and absolute.
[10] Something can not be created from nothing.[/quote]
These reflect my world view almost completely.
I would add 2.1. that entities can be made up based on physical substances, but being entities of... what? emotions, the "I" (eye) feeling, the senses, sensations... these are definitely based on physical substances, but they create motions of physical substances that can't be explained by rules that govern physical substances alone; they can't be explained by the laws of the physical universe. Such movements are a man approaching a woman to make love to her. A dead man will not approach a woman to make lover to her. Or a crab approaching a food item to eat it. A dead crab will not approach the food item. In these instances there is motivation that is not possible to explain by the laws of the physical universe alone, while at the same time the motivations are not supernatural, and they are not supernaturally originated. They don't have substance, but they have a presence. Go figure.
I could not call these points [1] through [10] metaphysics, rather, points of belief.
My points are not good reasons to start a discussion over. That you call them "metaphysics" and I call them "points of belief" is a minor, very minor difference.
2.1. could be discussed or argued, but I won't be so military about it as I was when we talked about "metaphysical statements have no truth value".
Excellent question. If maths doesnt take its semantics with it, then yes, it isnt equiped with its own interpretive machinery. You seem to be back into mental pictures and constraining formulae of words.
When it comes to physics, the maths is a mechanics. So there is, in fact, the necessary inbuilt ontology. Speak in differential equations and the meaning of that can be understood in terms of the kind of machines that result.
Engineering became humanitys great new metaphysical project!
Its truth was comprehended in the equations thus made flesh - or at least metal and rubber. Who needs words and pictures when a Ford Mustang or Omega watch tells you something.
But to be serious about QFT maths, you are now talking about differential equations that speak to the observational properties of a stack of particle fields in infinite Hilbert space. Just a dialectical calculus of creation and annihilation operators acting on some vacuum expectation.
Time and space are absent. So are particles. You are reduced to talking about ripples of excitation by which an electron field might produce its disturbances in a photon field. And trying to picture this is what you are told not to do as that is how you fall down rookie potholes. It will stunt your progress when it comes to using the QFT maths to dream up new kinds of particles that might be discovered at the LHC.
But of course, you still have to have intuitions to do even that. And even more so if you cant content yourself with the idea that shut up and calculate at least still produces spectacular engineering from QFTs esoteric equations.
The best Ive come across for trying to give a lay account without screwing the maths is Matt Strasslers site - here is a post on virtual particles for example
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/virtual-particles-what-are-they/
But definitely that is a deep question. If we are to be able to reject QMs overly mechanical metaphysics, then it would have to speak to us in ways that get beyond the production of technology.
This is why I draw attention to the quantum biology that is indeed showing us how QM manifests in terms of biosemiosis. Living things might make for more convincing semantic objects than mechanical hardware.
Yep. His star has risen rapidly. But is it for his work or his biopic potential - lost young genius and all that?
However, it is a good thing.
Indeed, but I'll venture there are many ways of not understanding something - ignorance is not all equal, take Socrates.
Quoting Janus
Don't disagree and you're probably right, but I think ignorance can come in theorised and untheorized forms and this is likely to make a significant difference in the steps you take in overcoming that ignorance.
Bless you, young man! :fear:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I only meant I could not find where he might have said this. Nit picking. :wink:
It's an interesting moment. Quine had very strong nominalist leanings, did not want to allow sets into his ontology, but "To be is to be the value of a bound variable." We quantify over sets in our theories (i.e., models), so to accept that we are committed to their existence is a *pragmatic* decision par excellence.
The work. Deflation about truth. Subjective probability. Ramsey sentences. Other odd bits here and there.
Quoting Darkneos
Why? Isn't it obvious that at quantum scales real vs. unreal is unhelpful, especially since these notions are defined at human scales?
Yes, that was just what I had in mind. So, how is it then possible to interpret it metaphysically (semantically)?
Thanks, a lot to think about there...I'll take a look at the paper you linked but I won't be surprised if it's above my pay grade. :smile:
:up: Makes sense to me...nothing to disagree with or add...
:ok:
https://qr.ae/pvepjo
There's not much else for us to discuss then.
Indeed.
It's enough to make you suppose they've misspoken.
What an odd statement. I think it says more about you than it does about the rest of us.
Note how all but one of your ten principles are examples of haunted-universe doctrines.
So
Quoting T Clark
If we come across something that is not understood, we do not reject (1), but look further afield for the explanation.
That we can do this is a result of the all-and-some structure of (1), which might be paraphrased as "For every event there is an explanation". This structure renders it neither verifiable nor falsifiable.
However, Quoting T Clark
does not lend itself to that analysis.
That's a cognitive imperative, isn't it? Sometimes called the law of explanation.
In previous discussions I've pointed out that it seems to be equivalent to Quoting T Clark
...a cause being an explanation. This relates back to the puzzling differentiation between ontology and epistemology. Who was it again who understood such things as methodological imperatives? Lakatos?
Th logical structure remains the same, "For every x there is some y", rendering it neither verifiable nor falsifiable, as Watkins shows, and hence metaphysical in his Popperian sense.
Have a link to the Watkins paper?
Nvm, searched it up
Quoting T Clark
So it appears that (2) and (9), both subsequently, if not falsified then at least re-cast, are not metaphysical in that sense.
So it appears that TClark's metaphysical notions might be recast as methodology.
(1) Keep looking for explanations
(2) Dropped
(3) Keep looking for scientific explanations
(4) Keep looking for mathematical explanations
(5) Phrase your explanations so as to have the widest applicability
(6) Keep looking for causes
(7) If something disappears, assume it has changed form and look for it somewhere else.
(8) Dropped
(9) Dropped
(10) Keep looking for explanations as to where things come from.
What's the title?
Quoting Banno
Does the link not work? Try
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2251532
Would you object if they said the self, or identity in general, is a useful fiction?
Thanks!
To say that other people is a useful fiction is not to say others or the self (since we are all in that fictive sense other people) are not real, and is no different than saying the self or any identity is a useful fiction; so what's the problem?
It is EXACTLY saying that others are not real by suggesting they are a fiction in the first place.
Thats an affected response, based on an assumption that fiction = not real = non-existent. To refer to someone as a useful fiction is to put aside as irrelevant the question of a definitive reality. Who or what I am is much more complex than my observable reality, and so I would expect nothing less from others. To assume that what I know of others is definitive of who they are would be inaccurate. It is therefore a useful fiction in relation to the complexity of who they are, allowing for the uncertainty with which I would approach them.
A useful fiction is like an heuristic device - at this metaphysical or quantum level it doesnt matter whether or not something is real, but whether it is useful for accurate understanding and interacting with the world. This useful fiction is merely the story we know so far: subject to misinterpretation, distorted perspective and our own ignorance, affect or intentions.
Energy is another useful fiction. Its a word we use to describe a relational structure that isnt real in the definitive sense. Its calculable with an arbitrarily assigned value, which we can then apply to our interactions with the world, so long as we understand or are agreed on its value, or its useful relational structure of quality and logic. We understand there is more to it, but no amount of words can fully describe that understanding, and the math works refers to the interaction with our world, not to the logic alone.
Until half way through your first paragraph I was revving up to engage in a dispute. But as I read on, I was really impressed. I think you have expressed my understanding of metaphysics much better than I have myself in my previous posts in this thread. I don't know if you think of what you've written as metaphysics. Whether or not you do, I think you have described the fundamental relationship between we humans and whatever constitutes reality.
As for the "useful fiction" designation, this is nothing new. 2,500 years ago they might have called it the illusion of the self. It's true it's a bit cold, but a lot of eastern religions and philosophies observe humanity from a distance.
You will notice that Ive referred to the level as both metaphysical and quantum - the difference as I see it is only in how energy, logic and quality are attributed along an arbitrary subject-object divide. Quantum physics brackets out the qualitative aspect of experience, while most other metaphysics bracket out either energy (affect, eg. TTC) or logic (eg. spirituality). Essentially, it is the perceived embodiment of self that is bracketed out.
Quoting T Clark
I think it needs to be cold in order to understand others without judgement either of ourselves or others. When we act, we do so necessarily from a position of affect, and judgement is implied. But in truth our intentions stem from a pre-judgemental understanding of humanity in a broader context, with all of its limitations and potential, and inclusive of both self and others. Were simply presenting the most probabilistically useful of many possible responses - errors and inaccuracies are to be expected, and how one responds in turn (inclusive of timing, effort and attention) could aim to improve the accuracy of understanding overall (regardless of self), or to focus on maximising their own perceived, current and relative position. Both could be considered cold if youre evaluating based only on affect.
https://qr.ae/pvepjo
Then there is stuff on quantum monism that he clearly doesn't understand (in fact I don't think he even understands it at all) since quantum monism is a form of quantum realism not either or. Though thats all I understood from the bottom link.
https://platofootnote.wordpress.com/2016/10/11/the-problem-of-wave-function-ontology/#:~:text=There%20are%20two%20types%20of,level%20is%20a%20field%20in
It should also be noted that the many worlds view of QM he seems to be favoring is a minority view.
Yes. We are all in this story together.
OK, I disagree, but I can't be bothered arguing with you, since it seems obvious you lack subtlety, and like to opine on subjects you know little about (QM).
Quoting T Clark
Exactly!
One argument might go: "it's all simulation, therefore nothing is real"; but then, the simulation would be what is real...
So that's no use.
The suggestion that we live in a simulation is surely facile...?
By no definition of the word fiction is your interpretation supported. It's tacking on too many things that aren't supported by it.
Quoting T Clark
Not according to him.
If "it's all simulation and therefore nothing is real", then the simulation is also not real. :smirk:
It's why I dont get why folks would refer to others as a useful ficiton.
Yeah, an inconsistency that shows the logic of the argument to be fundamentally flawed. That there is stuff - reality - is fundamental to any discussion.
Quoting Darkneos
It's a real simulation, not a pretend one...:wink:
Are you arguing that there are no real simulations...?
Back to the incoherence in the title: if nothing is real, then this very discussion, about what is or isn't real, cannot get going. Universal scepticism undermines itself.
I think it's arguable, I would even say obvious, that we do live in a collective representation that we have all been inducted into since birth via socialization. It doesn't follow that nothing real is going on, or that there is nothing "outside" of that collective representation, but it does follow that anything we can say, propositionally speaking, can only be in the terms of that collective representation and only finds its relevance within that context.
On the other hand. in terms of our perceptual lives, we all live outside of that representation (even if we never notice it); whatever we can say propositionally is always in terms of collectively generated abstractions which are hopelessly inadequate to the complexity and subtlety of living perception. Anyone who has ever practiced meditation, consumed psychedelics or seriously practices (for example) the discipline of writing poetry or painting notices that this is immediately evident.
Have a read of this by the same author and see what you think.
To which we might add Davidson's point that if we never leave the representation then the notion that it is a representation is pointless. As with universal scepticism, the very idea of ubiquitous representation undermines itself.
Covering old ground.
But we do "leave the representation" all the time, as I noted, in our perceptual lives. It is necessary to remember that, lest a sense of the importance of the inner lives of individuals be lost. Looks like the so-called "old ground" has not been sufficiently excavated and examined.
...as if this were a distinction that could be made firm. You yourself point out that it "only finds its relevance within that context".
Don't both you and @Darkneos start at individual phenomena, and so never escape solipsism? It's not a representation that is collective, but the world; Perhaps there is no "inner" life, any more than there is an "uninterpreted" reality.
But at least now the tread has moved from physics to metaphysics.
It's a distinction which is self-evident. When I say it only finds its relevance within that context, I am speaking strictly of propositional discourse. I would not say that about the arts and the inner lives of individuals in general. Why you apparently would want to deny or eliminate the inner lives of individuals or deny their significance is beyond my understanding.
Yes, the so-called "external world" is a collective representation, but the internal world is not. I don't deny that our common culture may enrich, and certainly mediates, at least in "ordinary" states of consciousness, the inner lives of individuals, but it seems to me it goes both ways; the inner lives of individuals also enrich our common culture, in fact without those inner lives and imaginations there would be no common culture of any value to speak about.
Even arguing that your phenomena are noumena is just wrong. All you have is sense experience with no way to truly verify it thus making the external world (or the lack of one) belief only. It's the one thing I despise about it.
But again it's still just more misunderstandings about quantum physics and in the end trying to cop out of solipsism which his words support with an argument that is just wrong.
So no, his words still back that he is suggesting others aren't real. If you read through it all you'll see he doesn't really say otherwise, just mentions "under this view X would be wrong" but that doesn't make the view true nor does that invalidate his previous points or post.
You say I lack subtlety but I think at this point you're just digging and running into the same issues of trying to get him to say other that what he is clearly implying. Sometimes things just are what they appear.
When you take first-person phenomena - observation - as your starting point, including others becomes problematic, as it seems you have found.
But instead, if one starts with the world as a collaborative construction from its contents, that there are other folk is not problematic.
So i'm suggesting that a reliance on phenomenology leads to solipsism.
Never a good place to start.
Quoting Janus
I'm not. I'm asking why the posited inner life could not be as much a social construction as the self.
No, paying attention to your perceptual life and practicing phenomenology are just alternative approaches to knowledge; nothing to do with solipsism or dogma of any kind except perhaps in your feverish imagination.
Quoting Banno
Not for you apparently. Do you consider yourself an authority to speak on behalf of others?
Quoting Banno
Social construction is too strong. Just as the real (what would still be if there were no humans) is not entirely socially constructed (a point which you as a realist must surely agree with) so our perceptual and inner lives (what would be in the absence of other humans) are not entirely socially constructed. "Constructed" is an unhelpful and even misleading term: 'mediated' is better.
Again you misunderstand just like with the Wigner's friend experiment.
I'm not saying I start from solipsism because I don't believe in it. Solipsism is pure belief, not fact. Starting from first-person phenomenon doesn't make including others problematic. Quite the opposite in fact as it's a more expedient explanation than why everything is the way it is and why others like you are around, etc etc. In short NO, starting from a first person perspective including others doesn't become problematic, and no I didn't find that. Where did I ever say that?
But like I said that's not my starting point, I'm just about about what the guy I linked to's logic leads to.
[quote=Gorgias]Nothing exists.
Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it.
Even if something can be known about it, it cannot be communicated.
Even if it can be communicated, it cannot be understood.[/quote]
Hey! A dead cat from QM sings"nothing is real" ...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5lUZvNljHU8
Im not arguing against the implication that other people arent real as such, because I dont think its as important as you might think. Im arguing that what IS real with regard to the notion of other people is merely evidence or measurements of their existence in potentiality: other people exist and are useful (different to convenient) in this non-real, non-verifiable, conceptual or fictional structure in terms of how we interact with the world.
Real does not necessarily determine existence. This is outdated thinking. Energy and other people are far more complex than mere measurement/observation would suggest. Recognising this enables us to manage our uncertainty and prediction error.
Youre oversimplifying. If I write a biography based on limited information I have about someone long dead, gleaned from multiple second and third-hand sources, we would call it non-fiction, but is it therefore real?
Nor am I saying that you presume solipsism, but that it is a consequence of the presumed primacy of experience.
Is that what they call a rhetorical question? :smile:
To be serious, I consider all approaches to be semiotic, either explicitly or implicitly or even despite themselves, just in virtue of the fact that they all work with signs and symbols. Each approach yields its own set of possible results, or in a dialectic key, its own set of theses, antitheses and syntheses. I don't tend to think in terms of one size fits all, but that said, for any given aim, it certainly seems some approaches will work better than others.
The advantage lies in making explicit that truth or reality are what the process of inquiry arrives at in its asymptotic limit. True is true, and real is real, once any further quibbling ceases to make a pragmatic difference. Once we cease to want to act differently.
Applying that to the OP, you could say the purpose of quantum theory is to recover Newtonian mechanics in its classical limit. That is what guides the framing of the maths.
So it is not about which is true - that Newtonian mechanics is true, or that quantum field theory is true.
It is about the dialectical certainty of being able to define how one is to be found in the dichotomous limit of the other.
Reality is both local and nonlocal. Or as is better put these days, it is local and contextual. Quantum theory takes us forward in being able to treat these two as opposing limits on ontological being - something we can concretely measure, and indeed recover from each other as measurable limits.
Of course, QFT still needs to be united with GR as the dichotomy of the contents and the container under QG. Or a quantum gravity theory of everything.
So the bottom of quantum theory has yet to be reached. We can recover the Newtonian classical limit from both QFT and GR, but not in a way that yet satisfies folk in a full QG sense.
Anyway, if classical physics appears to deny nonlocality, and quantum physics appears to demand it, then this is just a dialectical metaphysics in action. And Peircean semiotics like any systems approach is designed to live in that precise intellectual space.
I would argue otherwise. Solipsism is a massive leap of faith more than realism and violates Occam's Razor.
It's sort of important that they are real since it affects how we treat and regard them. A lot of bad has been done by those who have a habit of making others appear to be less than.
Real does determine existence and I don't know where you got this notion that it is outdated. Never heard anyone suggest that. I'm not even sure how you're dragging energy into this. What is real is what can be determined to exist, that's how we know dreams are not real and can safely dismiss a nightmare (well usually).
Who said anything about less than? I keep bringing up energy because it exists at the same level you are trying to dismiss as less than. You can try to dismiss a nightmare, but it still exists as part of your experiences. What youd be doing is trying to exclude, isolate or ignore the experience by devaluing the information it offers.
The way I see it, not real doesnt mean less than. Real is a quality of existence, but not necessarily a value judgement. Treating the information we have about other people as not necessarily real as such, in this world of online forums, social media and AI, is arguably more accurate than being dismissive of any interaction unconfirmed as real. You cant be certain that anything you read or observe here about me is real. I am a useful fiction to you, whether you recognise that or not, as you are to me. For me, that means I treat you as MORE than the information I have about you, not less.
When we read about a character, we treat them as MORE than the description we have. When we interact with a fictional character, we flesh out the limited information we have AS IF they were a living, thinking, feeling human being.
IT offers no information, it's not real. It has no consequences in reality, it doesn't hurt you, its not energy. It's just a phantom. It does not EXIST.
Quoting Possibility
Not always, we remember they aren't real after all.
Quoting Possibility
Well you aren't a useful fiction because you are real as am I. I really think you're trying to make what he said out to be better than it actually is. He's pretty much implying others aren't real if you're regarding their existence as a useful fiction. And when you regard something as not real then you open the gate to essentially permitting everything against it, which makes what's on his home page all the more odd.
Not real does mean less than. I mean you don't see legislation or rights for NPCs for fictional characters right?
https://www.quora.com/Does-Physics-say-there-such-a-thing-as-an-Objective-reality/answer/David-Pearce-18?ch=10&oid=127587573&share=e3f024b6&srid=hHqf38&target_type=answer
Most people dont question what they mean by causation too much, and think that the observation of something (e.g. a particle) causing that things location is odd. But if you have a nuanced view of causation it doesnt necessarily mean that a particle doesnt have a location before it is observed.
Now a counterfactual way of thinking about causation is A way of thinking about causation (e.g. that if the cause didnt happen then neither would the effect) but perhaps this suggests we update our ideas about causation rather than reality.
I see no difference with small scale and the macro world in that regard.
:up:
I agree that it represents our ignorance, but I would say it is about our ignorance of what it means to be located in a place. Our macroscopic intuition about things always being in specific places is shaky at best when we get down to the quantum level, so I lean towards our intuition on location being the ignorance.
A number of experiments (such as the double slit experiments) have shown that it is not simply a case of electrons being in a particular location, but we don't know exactly where, thus we describe it as a probability distribution. Rather the uncertainty is a more fundamental thing than just us not knowing.
So I would suggest our ignorance is not about where exactly the electron is (like in your analogy), rather we are ignorant about what it means for the electron to be somewhere exactly.
So it's just what some posters have been saying - at quantum scales, the notion of position/location (of particles) breaks down i.e. mapping macroscopic concepts onto the microscopic world is problematic, oui?
Still with an updated understanding of what cause means I dont think this should be as science-deranging as it seems.
Oui.
An analogy of one interpretation is to imagine a wave in a pond. It makes no sense to say the wave is at one particular location at coordinate (x,y). All of the troughs and crests are part of the wave, there is no exact location where it solely exists, it exists over an area.
However if you drop a buoy in the lake, you can now measure an amplitude for the wave at a specific location at coordinate (x,y). You have now interacted with the wave at a specific point, and are able to measure it there.
However this is just one interpretations. A lot of quantum physicists subscribe to the "just shut up and calculate" philosophy. They trust the math, they trust the experiments, but they do not trust their intuition in being able to understand what this all actually means.
Something I have wondering about recently is whether perhaps math is simply a better language to understand quantum mechanics than English, as English (and all other ordinary languages) are encumbered with too much normal macroscopic experiences and intuitions built into the way they are used. While math is, perhaps, a bit more aloof. Just a passing thought.
Here's Heisenberg on the issue:
Quoting The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory - Werner Heisenberg
Now consider the introduction of negative numbers:
Quoting Negative number, History - Wikipedia
The math was entirely adequate but there was no natural picture, hence a lack of understanding. However, if negative numbers are thought of as the inverse of positive numbers, then they can be visualized. For example, credits and debits in banking. Or walking forwards and backwards.
As Gauss noted:
Something similar may be the case for quantum mechanics.
I find language is often underestimated! Maths is good in its domain for sure, but I think true understanding only comes from the clarity of a well constructed sentence.
It is important, therefore , to analyse words like to be, to cause and to mean to see what theyre really getting up to!
The issue of imaginary numbers is different though. It is an issue of there being two distinct conventions, yet each convention is correct in its own field of application. In the one case there is no square root of a negative number, in the other case there is. This means that there is two completely distinct ways of conceiving negative numbers, and not a simple matter of negative being the inverse of positive. It is how the negative are conceived to relate to the positive, that creates the problem, i.e. it is not a straight forward inversion due to the role that zero plays.
I would agree with this most of the time. It is well known among teaching circles that getting a student to explain their understanding of a concept (in a natural language of course) is the best way to know they do actually understand the concept. It certainly helps understanding to put concepts into words, in most instances.
The question I have is what about concepts that are completely unlike our experiences? In these instances does my above paragraph, or your quoted one still stand true? I'm not sure.
For example, if time is actually something completely other than what we experience it to be, then you might run into problems truly understanding what "cause" means. Meanwhile you may be able to mathematically formulate something that does not run into any such problems. And perhaps the meaning you seek is there in that mathematical formulation.
I don't think so. It remains true that negatives do not have *real* square roots, and that's the same as saying that if your domain is discourse is restricted to real numbers they have *no* square roots. The complex plane is a perfectly natural extension of the real line.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not following this at all.
I don't follow this. If, within the domain of real numbers, negatives do not have square roots, then the complex plane, within which negatives do have a square root, is outside the real line, something different from it, and not an extension of it.
There are also two distinct conventions for natural numbers and integers (which include negative numbers). With integers, a larger number can be subtracted from a smaller number. With natural numbers, it can't.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
With complex numbers, the negative is still the inverse of the positive. But the picture is more general. That is, an inversion is just a particular kind of rotation (namely, 180° on the complex plane).
Yes, distinct conventions for numbers is a real issue, which I take as evidence against Platonism. How could a number be a single object, if there are different conventions for meaning?
Quoting Andrew M
But negatives are not the inverse of positives, that's the point, and it's what the fact that there is not a square root of a negative number indicates. The problem is that zero occupies a position on the number line. If it was a simple inversion, the count would go from one to negative one, as the two directions would be the inverse of each other. But there are two spaces between one and negative one. So zero occupies a place in the count, it plays a real role, and this is why the negatives are not a simple inversion of the positives, because that would rule out a position for zero. And it is also the way that we conceive of zero, as a divisor between the haves (positive) and the have nots (negatives), that makes us say that two negatives multiplied together must make a positive, but we do not say that two positives multiplied together must make a negative.
See the mathematical definition below.
Quoting Additive inverse - Wikipedia
A picture for this is that walking forwards three steps and then walking backwards three steps returns you to your initial location. 3 is the additive inverse (or opposite) of -3.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
See the quote above. Zero is the additive inverse of itself.
-"Does quantum physics say nothing is real?"
-I will try to keep my post simple and short without technical terms and complex concepts.
No............
That's the "additive inverse". It does not mean that negative numbers are the inverse of positive numbers in a general sense, only in the operation of addition. Without that qualification it wouldn't make sense to say that a thing (zero) could be the inverse of itself, because there would be no inversion involved there.
"Additive inverse" is the relevant sense here. I don't know what you mean by "a general sense". Do you have a link to a definition?
Hee hee. Welcome to MU, the school of bizarro math, where up is down and black is white. There's only one teacher and he never studied math himself, but he knows what he knows.
OED: invert: reverse the position, order or place of.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
Thank you.
Obviously, negatives are not treated as the direct inverse of positives, because two positives multiplied together produce a positive number, and the two negatives multiplied together also produce the same positive number.
Such as reflecting the positive number line over the origin and reversing the sign of the reflected numbers. In other words, positive and negative numbers are opposite numbers.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Multiplying two negative numbers is equivalent to multiplying two positive numbers and then reversing the sign twice. Which means the final result will be positive.
For example:
Which is to say, 3 * 2 = 6. -6 is the opposite number to 6. And, in turn, 6 is the opposite number to -6. So the final answer is 6.
:smile:
Think nothing of it (much as you do with math).
In the past I have implored you to write up your math musings and send them off to prestigious journals. The math world languishes without benefit of your folk wisdom. Have you ever followed up on that suggestion? Your fame and fortune await.
As I explained, this is an incorrect description because zero is a part of the number line. If zero was not a part of the line, we could say there is two distinct lines, as you seem to be implying, negative and positive lines, one the reflection of the other. But that is not the case. What we have is one line, of which zero is a part. The existence of zero, as a number, means that numbers do not have an opposite number. If numbers have an opposite, what is the opposite of zero?
As I quoted from here earlier, zero is its own opposite. Which is to say, -0 + 0 = 0. You can even type it into a calculator and see for yourself.
Sorry Andrew, but "opposites" don't work that way. A thing is the same as itself, it cannot be opposite to itself. "Opposite" requires two.
So, according to you, your preferred definition of opposite precludes the mathematical definition of opposite. Even though the subject we are discussing is mathematics.
I really don't think you've provided any "mathematical definition of opposite". But if the mathematical definition of "opposite" allows that a thing is the opposite of itself (as zero is the opposite of zero), then yes, I would say that my preferred definition of "opposite" (the common use of the term) precludes the mathematical definition.
Quoting Andrew M
I suppose you ought to produce this mathematical definition of "opposite" so that we can judge whether zero is truly opposite to itself, by that definition. Or whether it is really the case that your preferred definition of "inverse" renders the common definition of "opposite" as inconsistent.
Here's a brief demonstration to help you understand what I am saying. Assume the smallest possible positive number is directly opposed, or inverse, to the largest possible negative number. In other words, we get as close to zero as possible on both sides, and maintain a balance of opposition between the two sides.
Now, let's assume that the quantity represented on each side is so near to nothing (zero) that we might be inclined to round it off. If we do such a thing, then the two quantities on each side become equal to each other, and the same as each other, as zero, instead of opposed to or inverse of one another.
Clearly, two inversely opposed and balancing quantities is not the same thing as one quantity, because that would mean that the positive number closest to zero is exactly the same as the negative number closest to zero, rather than having the two opposed to each other.
Actually he says he doesn't believe other people don't exist.
I have, twice. But here it is again with the relevant parts bolded:
Quoting Additive inverse - Wikipedia
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, I understand. On your definition, the mathematical expression "-(-0)" would be invalid. Is that your intention?
Why isn't there a -0?
[hide="aside"](I think I've actually heard somewhere of systems that have some use for a -0, but I can't remember what that would have been. Probably wasn't pure mathematics but some database shenanigans.)[/hide]
That question can be rephrased: why does -0 = 0?
The usual mathematical approach to such a question is to try negating it and seeing what happens.
You should try that. What happens if you have a -0 unequal to 0?
So other people exist as per whoever "he" is! :up:
Good is the opposite of bad.
Hot is the opposite of cold.
Yes is the opposite of no.
Same is the opposite of opposite?
That's not a definition of opposite, just a use of "opposite" which clearly demonstrates what I said. Your definition of "inverse", as "additive inverse" renders the meaning of "opposite" as inconsistent with common usage. You've demonstrated that by using this definition of inverse, zero is opposite to itself. But a thing being opposite to itself is contrary to common usage of "opposite".
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
A better thing to try is to consider what happens if a thing is allowed to be opposite to itself. Opposites are commonly the two defining extremes of a measurement scale, hot and cold, big and small, etc.. If we stipulate that the two extremes are the very same thing (like zero relative to the scale), then we have no way to distinguish whether some thing which we're trying to measure, but is off the end of our scale, is off the top of the scale, or off the bottom of the scale, because we have set the conditions whereby the two are the very same (zero relative to the scale).
And maybe we do it differently for numbers. What's the opposite of 0? If you take it as "none" then its opposite is "some" which is not a number. What's the opposite of one? In many everyday uses, that's "many" or "several", that is, more than one. What's the opposite of 7? Of 94? What?! I mean, you can always just take 'opposite' as 'complement' within the domain, so the opposite of zero is non-zero, the opposite of 94 is {x in Xs | x =/= 94}, given some domain of Xs.
In math we also have inverses, additive and multiplicative. They're opposite-ish, the way equivalence is equal-ish.
Word games full of sound and fury . . . :roll:
I dunno, I don't really feel that way. I find pre-theoretical intuitions interesting and important. No math without 'em.
I read just the other day that a common counting system (among non-literate peoples) is 1, 2, 3, Many. Don't know if it's true, but if so we've come a long way.
Quoting Darkneos
Late to the party here. I haven't read beyond the first page of posts. But I don't see where the key word has been defined in terms of quantum physics. Hence, the thread has migrated off-topic to loosely relevant notions of "opposition". Anyway FWIW, I'll add my two cents worth on the fraught topic of Reality, which underlies many of the heated disputes on the forum. We seem to split between a narrow physical definition, and a broader metaphysical meaning of "Real".
The early quantum scientists argued among themselves about the same existential question. In his 1958 book, Physics and Philosophy, Werner Heisenberg discussed Descartes' division of the world into "res extensa" (matter) and "res cogitans" (mind). Werner concluded that "the position to which the Cartesian partition has led with respect to the "res extensa" was what one may call metaphysical realism. . . . This is to be distinguished from practical realism." That dichotomy forces us to distinguish between two different uses of the word "real". Then he noted, "actually the position of classical physics is that of dogmatic realism".
Today, some philosophers bow to the empirical authority of Classical Physics, and define "Real" in terms of 17th century Materialism. But a few still see a role for Platonic Idealism ; especially since Quantum Physics emerged, and undermined some of the unproven assumptions for the primacy of matter. For example, the ancient philosophy of Atomism has now crumbled under the onslaught of Quantum reduction into a meta-physical world of amorphous fields of statistical Probability, populated by dimensionless points that are labeled as Virtual Particles.
Despite the philosophical concerns of Quantum pioneers, most physicists today tend to treat "virtual" particles as-if they are "real" lumps of matter, instead of immaterial mathematical concepts of warping "excitations" in a local zone of non-local empty-but-plastic space. So, they are doggedly holding on to the outdated classical definition of "Real". Meanwhile a few contemporary philosophers & scientists are redefining "Real" in the metaphysical terms of Quantum queerness. So, what do you mean by "Real" : pragmatic or philosophical? :smile:
How can we know what's Real? :
In a world of idealistic & imaginative humans, how can we know what's real, and what's fantasy? The scientific method was designed for just that purpose. But it originally assumed a clear distinction between Fact and Fiction. Unfortunately, such a precise dichotomy is no longer realistic, since the thoroughly attested Quantum Theory describes the invisible foundations of our observed universe in terms of entities that are literally-unreal abstractions, verifiable only by inference from paradoxical lab results. In my own personal experience, I have never seen a wishy-washy-waving quantum particle or felt the spooky chill of a quantum field brimming with ghostly unborn particles. Hence, I have to trust the professional physicists who assure me that what I see with my natural senses is not the ultimate reality.
http://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page11.html
Note__ The pioneers of Quantum Theory were perplexed by their inability to apply Classical notions of physical reality to what they were finding in their sub-atomic experiments. Niels Bohr: "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself." That last line is prescient of John A. Wheeler's assertion that "We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe".
Realism vs Realistic :
A pertinent philosophical distinction is between Objective reality and Subjective ideality. Or in more technical terms : Phenomena (reality as we know it) and Noumena (ideal reality). Of course, we can only guess at the latter, based on models created from our sense impressions. We only sense the tiny part of Cosmos that is within the limited reach of our physical senses. But our rational minds have allowed us to expand the range of our knowledge of reality. So, we are now aware of an unseen realm, not of ghosts & fairies, but of waves of potential and particles of possibility. To a classical physicist such literal non-sense would sound fantastic. But we moderns now accept such fantasies, because our priests of physics can work miracles, by calling upon the powers of the underworld. Im kidding, of course, but its literally true. For example, flash memory works its magic by producing particles that can pass through solid walls (Quantum Tunneling)?¹.
http://bothandblog7.enformationism.info/page54.html
This was the point I was making in the first place. Additive inverse is different from multiplicative inverse, because neither represents a true inversion, they're inverse-ish, each in its own specific way.
How does he know other people exist?
A curious statement. All the years I've practiced math I can't recall using "opposite" in this way. But I suppose some do.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Indeed. Centuries ago.
The mathematical answer to that question is different from the philosophical one, oui mon ami?
:cool: but ...
Major Edit : "Opposite" is perfectly fine when discussing positives and negatives. One of the meanings of opposite is "across from". Consider the number line with zero as the value between the positives and negatives. +5 is across from -5. Opposite works.
That doesn't resolve the problem, which relates to zero being a number, as having a place on the line. Is zero across from zero?
I suggest that these false inversions, which are inversion-ish, rather than true inversions, are what create the appearance of symmetries in the application of the mathematical principles which describe something which is not a true inversion as an "inversion". Then symmetries are taken by some philosophers, to be something real, existing in the universe, instead of just a product of the mathematics, and misleading descriptive terms. This has opened a whole new field of speculation into an assumed phenomenon known as "symmetry breaking". But the symmetries are just fictional, imaginary, produced from the misuse of descriptive terms, and so that speculative field of symmetry breaking speculates about the activity of things "symmetries" which don't even exist.
Okay, I'll give it a go. But you usually dig your heels in and refuse to hear otherwise when it comes to math. Try to have an open mind.
I could offer an intro to group theory to prove zero is an inverse of itself, but I don't think that's going to sway someone so math-phobic. Let's stick with the idea in my previous post : Can we agree that "opposite" sometimes means "across from"?
To be across from something means to be reflected in a line, point, or plane. Even when facing a friend at a table we can be said to be reflected in an invisible plane between us (actually reflected in a line to preserve left- and right-handedness).
What's of interest is what happens to points lying on the line (or point or plane) of reflection. Under the reflection, such points do not move! Thus a point on the surface of a mirror will reflect onto itself!
When a reflection in zero is performed on a number line, every point maps to it's negated version, but zero maps to itself. In other words, zero is across from (opposite to) itself.
If that perspective is valuable to you, then great. It wouldn't be valuable in say, electronic engineering, where zero volts or ground is neutral. You really can't have it that zero volts is also positively or negatively charged.
I think that same situation will hold in most of the ways we use "zero.".
If the domain of mathematics has some other use for the word, I wonder what it could be.
Thank you.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Since the unary negation of zero (-0) is a perfectly valid operation, I disagree.
Note that your objection can equally be levelled at "add", which is conventionally defined as "join (something) to something else so as to increase the size, number, or amount."
"3 + 0", and "3 + -1" don't increase the initial number, yet that kind of addition is commonplace. It's a good example of how an idea can be generalized.
Dividing by one is a further example, where "divide" is conventionally defined as "separate or be separated into parts".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
They are different kinds of inversion. What would a "true inversion" be?
Quoting Real Gone Cat
Great example!
"Zero has an inverse" is true IFF zero has an inverse.
Problem solved.
Assuming you have the semantics of "inverse" to hand, which evidently we don't. In mathematics, it's stipulated. It can be stipulated in other contexts as well.
The trouble comes of what fills the role of stipulation in everyday usage of a natural language.
I don't know. There are jargons everywhere, in sports, in the law, in engineering, in medicine, etc. But I don't think there's much stipulation going on.
The original creator of C-language spent most of the introduction of his book complaining that C is not a language because "language" refers to the use of the tongue, and your tongue is useless in computer programming. He was already subject to a jargon that developed somewhat organically.
Yeah that's what I meant.
I'd forgotten Dennis Ritchie talks about that, but computer scientists (not coders) spend a fair amount of time thinking about semantics. When Jim Backus and his team at IBM invented the first high-level programming language, they had to simultaneously figure out what such a thing would be, and also invented a formal way of specifying its grammar, the Backus-Naur Form still used today.
I once made a program in machine language and burned it into proms. I'm guessing the higher level syntax would follow necessity to some extent? The purpose was to speed things up so that bigger, more elaborate programs could be written. There's stipulation in that, I guess, with necessity as a rudder.
What is math's rudder? What necessity would inspire us to talk in terms of +0?
Yeah that's a funny thing. Math often allows degenerate cases to pass through for the sake of generality. If you need to say every integer has a sign (for whatever reason) then you'll need 0 to have a sign. Which one? That strikes me as a deep question, in the sense that your reason for giving it a sign is probably not powerful enough to dictate which sign; you'll need some other reason for saying which, and that reason is likely to be "deeper" if you see what I mean.
Something like this problem comes up with 0[sup]0[/sup]. We have one rule that would assign it the value 0, and another that would assign it the value 1. Which one should win is an interesting question.
Deeper into what? Cognitive imperatives?
No, I was thinking more fundamental mathematical principles, or how mathematics as a system works. Things like harmony, symmetry, orthogonality, duality, that kind of stuff. You might want signs just for convenience, but there will have to be a deeper coherence to how a signed number system works, and that's where you'd look to decide whether 0 is +0 or -0.
I have no idea what you're talking about (BS in Electrical Engineering, higher degrees in Mathematics).
How a reflection is constructed :
Given a point of reflection A, let B be any point in the infinite domain containing A (the domain can be a line, plane, or space). Draw line AB and let x be the distance from A to B. Find point B' on AB which is distance x from A but on the opposite side of A from B. Then we say B' is the image of B under a reflection in A.
If you admit that the definition of "opposite" includes "across from", then clearly B' is opposite B with respect to A.
Now consider point A itself. Following the construction given above, A' (the image of A) will be the same point as A (here, distance x=0). That is, the reflection of A in A is A. Thus A is opposite to itself with respect to A.
So, let the domain be the number line and replace A with 0. Clearly each negative number is the image of its corresponding positive value under a reflection in 0 (and vice versa). Now here's the kicker : 0 is a reflection of itself. I.e., 0 is opposite (across from) itself.
By the way, 0 is neither positive nor negative, so let's drop that nonsense now.
Actually [math]0^0[/math] is called indeterminate and has no value. Any rule you're trying to use to assign a value is not applicable.
Do you know of any practical use for this information?
Aren't those things features of how the human mind works?
I was addressing the idea that 0 cannot be across from itself. Now you want applications? I don't get you at all.
I'll take that as a "no"
Why do you need an application? That was not the question being addressed. Most of your posts address the nature of 0 and mine have as well. What are you aiming at?
Meaning is use.
Then I take it you don't recognize pure math as having meaning. I wonder what this implies for philosophy?
If what you're saying is meaningful, there should be some use somewhere.
I take it you know of no practical use, but maybe there are non-practical "pure math" uses. If not, then what you're saying is mumbo jumbo.
Aah, so math only has meaning if applied. Then why have you spent an entire page exchanging banal musings about the nature of 0 with Srap and others?
Hmmm, let's see ...
Farmers, doctors, lawyers, scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, ... Which of these has the least practical use? Which could society lose without blinking?
You're the one who seems to be insisting that the rules you've mentioned have no use even within the realm of math itself.
Interesting.
No, I don't think so. Not exactly.
We have some basic intuitions about collecting and counting, about geometry, and so on, and we build mathematics out of those by making choices, our axioms, and then those axioms have logical consequences.
That means the consequences are implicit in what we made, but not in us as its makers; the properties of buildings are different from the properties of builders.
But really to get there I have to say that I don't think logic is just in our heads, anymore than the physics that underlies structural engineering is. And I don't.
I also don't think our intuitions about counting and geometry are just in our heads, but that doesn't matter for the point I'm making. I think.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
Okay. But isn't that just to say either there's no math that defines a value for it or that you're unfamiliar with math that does.
To just say, nope, is like saying negative numbers don't have square roots, or, for that matter, that 2 doesn't.
Math is a big place.
As for 0 carrying a sign, we could have such a system. 0 could be canonically positive and I don't think it would affect anything.
Also consider what happens if you're solving an equation and get all the way down to x = -x. You can see the answer, or you can take another step or two and get x = 0. Which means you can substitute back into the equations you had before, and in particular into x = -x, so that now says 0 = -0. You can make that go away, if you like, but even to do that you have to accept -0 as well-formed. And in fact, I could see having 0 = -0 be a theorem of a system that allowed 0 a sign, or even a definition of zero, that it is the only number for which this is true.
Math is a big place.
If you're talking about the axioms that protect set theory from paradoxes, you're right. There's nothing intuitive about those axioms. It's debatable whether math really needs set theory as a foundation, though. That's the danger of fiat. Once you're free of any rudder, anything goes.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
This discussion revolves around the use of the word "opposite" in math. Apart from integers - the focus here - it arises in discussions of geometry, like a side opposite the hypotenuse, or in a complex vector field with an indifferent fixed point - on one side an attractor and on the other or opposite side a repellor. And so on.
Why not use a pair of these? [math]0+\text{ }0-\text{ }{{0}^{+}}\text{ }{{0}^{-}}[/math]. They are commonly used in math. You could come up with the first being infinitesimals just to the right of zero, etc.
There are your "opposites" of zero.
Does quantum physics say anything about this?
How you know they don't?
Come one man, we're both to old for that nonsense. Of course they exist.
No, not just those -- and they're not just to ward off paradox but are an attempt to capture our sense of how collections work, not the most naive sense, of course, but after we've been out on the road with it a while. But Euclid had axioms. Peano gave axioms for natural numbers. Axioms are everywhere in math.
It's known that classical logic is insufficient as a foundation for mathematics, but I remember reading somewhere that all you need to add is Hume's Principle, which is that two sets have the same cardinality if there's a bijection (a one-to-one correspondence) between them.
Quoting frank
You'd prefer category theory? Nah, you just mean math doesn't need any foundation. And that's obviously true both as an historical and as a practical matter. But there is value in having the foundation. Sets are the lingua franca of mathematics, so they enable making connections, leveraging techniques developed in one context in another, and so on. I think they clarify the use of special axioms too, because there is the common set you can take for granted, and you get your little branch of math by specifying some *additional* constraints. Doing topology, for instance, feels a lot like doing set theory, but with just a handful of other properties in play, and out of that you can develop a rich set of properties and theorems for spaces.
Citation please.
Don't know about quantum physics having multiple types of 0, but doubt it.
Quoting jgill
No good. [math]0^+[/math] and [math]0^-[/math] are used in limit notation to indicate one-sided limits but have nothing to do with opposites.
Picky picky. Of course they don't. But in the spirit of this discussion they could. There are enough ambiguities in math to satisfy MU. Take [math]f[/math] for example. What does it mean? A function? A constant force? Depends on the context. [math]f=f\left( x+1 \right)[/math] ? How about 4x/5y-1 ? If these guys want to play around with nonsense don't poop in their sandbox. :cool:
Are you arguing that some undiscovered branch of math looms out there waiting to give new meaning to well-established results? Possibly but very unlikely.
By the way, no one says negative numbers don't have square roots. What they DO say is that negative numbers don't have real square roots.
Actually, [math]0^0[/math] is an interesting case. Cauchy made the claim that it was indeterminate in 1821 and most calculus texts today echo that idea. Certainly the limit as [math]x\rightarrow0^-[/math] is undefined. But there are some contexts in which assuming [math]0^0=1[/math] helps to facilitate certain theorems.
Hee hee, very droll. Lost my sense of humor for a minute there.
Those aren't a matter of our choices though. They reflect cognitive imperatives.
That was our question: Do mathematicians stipulate like the architects of artificial games? Or do they follow imperatives that we all share?
No one says it *now*. Wait, actually we don't tell little kids about imaginary numbers, so I guess we do still say it. We don't have to though, because we have the theory in place, and maybe one day we'll teach the complex plane in grade school.
They clearly are a matter of choice or there wouldn't be non-Euclidean geometry.
I guess we aren't on the same page here. :victory:
Another jokester. Lord, I must have left my sense of humor in the car.
There's choice in axioms at least in the sense that we can select which of our intuitions to build on. We don't have to do everything all the time.
So I can say
If an axiom, then based in or captures an intuition.
without being committed to
If an intuition, then captured in an axiom.
See?
Then there's no real stipulation going on. The mathematician is guided by which of his intuitions he wants to explore. That's the only choice involved. Is that what you're saying?
I don't know. What's "real stipulation"? Does that mean "arbitrary"?
If so, no, I don't think the foundations of mathematics are entirely arbitrary. It's not just a game we made up.
But the selection process means not just including but excluding. Think about when you learned to do proofs in geometry. There may be things about a figure you can see are true, must be true, but if you can't show it given only certain premises and inference rules, you can't use it. That's not really much different from your teacher drawing an equilateral triangle on the board and not marking the edges as of equal length. Your intuition is that they're equal, but you're expected to ignore that and treat this triangle, equilateral though it may be, as generic.
If I stipulate that zero can be positive or negative, I'm inviting you to agree that we will talk about it that way. The agreement is the basis of the way we speak, not some intuition that we share.
Where we share intuitions, I shouldn't have to stipulate anything. Those intuitions ground our language use.
I'm saying you might have many intuitions about shapes or counting or collections, and I ask you to rely on only a selection from among those. (They may not even all be consistent.)
Agreement in the selection is effectively agreement about the content precisely because what we're agreeing to select among are the semantic contents of our intuitions.
I would agree that we do have directly opposing intuitions. Does this show up in math so that a decision has to be made about which side we'll use as our basis?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
If math is self consistent, this is like deciding whether we want to play golf or basketball. No stipulation is taking place.
If math is self contradictory, then we could have stipulation. I'd have to invite you to agree with me.
Which do you think is happening?
No.
Quoting frank
Here's one way stipulation could enter our play: I don't play golf, but I know roughly how it works. If you know no more than I do, we'll have to make up some rules as we go and agree to them. We'll hope we're getting it roughly right. Our sense of the basic idea isn't enough to get us through an entire round of golf with the sorts of complications that inevitably arise.
Here's another: we could take elements of basketball (teams, a playing area with goals at either end) and elements of golf (small object struck with a special kind of stick) and combine them to make something like hockey or field hockey. Hockey wasn't on your list before so it's not something we can straight up play based only on intuition; we have to make up the rules based on some things we understand from other games.
Prima facie, doing mathematics is not like, say, speaking your native language. Mathematical objects are things we investigate, and make discoveries about. It may resemble playing a complex game like go or chess where you can understand the rules and still not be able to predict what will happen, but the rules of math are only logic and some ideas about counting and shapes and collections that we get, I think, from the real world, so the content isn't exactly arbitrary.
Not at bottom, but we can do things. If you take your ideas about shape and agree not to think about size the way you usually do, to forget that things can be measured, you get a sort of generalization of geometry, and that's topology. You can still talk about types of shapes, and see that there are still some rules about which shapes still count as similar to others, and that these were implicit in the way you did geometry, but by treating shapes in this special way, you get a sort of alternate version of reality in which donuts and coffee cups are the same sort of thing. That's based in our intuitions, but in a selective way. We do the same sorts of thing with numbers, in constructing algebras.
I feel like I'm just not getting the opposition you see here.
What nonsense? It's the natural endpoint of suspicion/doubt. If you get on a slide, you're bound to reach the bottom, oui?
It sounds like you're saying mathematicians might stipulate things for the sake of advancing the field?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I was just looking for the necessity behind stipulation in math. I think you're saying it's partly cognitive imperatives where we're exploring the contours of the mind, and then some other stuff. :up:
The analogy really does not work Real Gone Cat. A reflection is light rebounding back off a reflective surface, which you represent as a plane. If there was a spot on the reflective surface, a point on the plane, which reflected back on itself, "itself" being a point on the reflective surface, would reflect it again. back on itself, and again and again. This would create an endless back and forth between the spot and itself. This is like having two mirrors in front of each other, accept that your proposal builds this right into the single plane, or reflective surface..
If such spots existed on the surface, each spot would effectively annihilate the capacity of the mirror to properly reflect at that point because the reflection would get absorbed into the infinite back and forth with itself. So if the rules of mathematics allow that zero "maps to itself" in this way, this would effectively annihilate the integrity of the concept "zero", as such a reflective surface (separation) between positive and negative, just like a spot on the mirror reflecting back and forth on itself would absorb the light and not reflect outward, ruining the integrity of the mirror as a reflective surface.
I think this is what is alluding to. If we allow that "zero" implies both positive and negative (in a self reflecting way) in common applications, instead of neither (as we actually do), this would destroy the integrity of "zero"
Quoting Andrew M
This is exactly the point, there is no such thing as a true inversion. Inversions are not real things, just like symmetries, they are ideals. So in the realm of the ideal, like mathematics, we can stipulate, or propose something like "an inversion", or "a symmetry" and we can convince ourselves that such proposals or stipulations provide a real, or true representation. But when we get down to the nitty gritty, of analyzing the representation for accuracy, we see the flaws, the differences between the supposed representation and the thing represented.
When we see the existence of such flaws in the representation, we ought to acknowledge that the ideal, the proposal or stipulation, is not meant to be a representation at all. The ideal, in this case "the inversion", or "the symmetry", is not meant to represent reality in any way, it is a tool which we apply toward reality, in a sort of comparison. We can then see where reality varies from the ideal
We can learn from this process of comparing the proposed ideal to reality, but it is necessary to determine where there are flaws in the proposed or stipulated ideal, i.e. where the proposed ideal is less than ideal. This is necessary because we need to know whether it is the case that the differences between the proposed ideal, and the reality, are due to the reality being less than the ideal, or the proposed ideal being less than ideal. When reality appears to be different from the ideal, we tend to think that this is because reality is less than ideal. But if there are deficiencies in the proposed ideal, it could be the case that reality is more ideal than the ideal, because the ideal is really less than ideal.
So in this case, we can see that the proposed ideal, is really less than ideal, because the proposed inversion is contaminated by the presence of zero on the number line. As would say, the zero is a piece of poop in your mathematical sandbox in this proposed "inversion". Allowing zero on to your number line makes your inversion between positive and negative numbers less than ideal.
This is entirely your own invention. Give one citation to support this. Just one.
This is an example of you digging in your heels. You're so math-phobic you have to invent concepts out of the blue to justify your stance. But "you know what you know".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Point out where I said zero is both positive and negative. Here, let me help you :
Quoting Real Gone Cat
Suppose you have a bag of apples you intend to give away.
There are two courses of action open to you:
(1) You can give someone the bag of apples, so that your hands are empty.
(2) You can give out the apples that are in the bag, and keep the empty bag.
There are two perfectly distinct results here: in one you have nothing; in the other, you have an empty bag. In both cases you have no apples.
It's understandable that you might not be inclined to say that a person who has no apples has a certain number of apples, namely 0. What you'd prefer is to say that they do not have any apples. There is no quantity that they have at all, and calling 0 a quantity is an abuse of the idea of quantity. That's understandable. The same with measurement: to say that a person who takes one step to the right has moved that amount is fine, but it is an abuse of the idea of distance to say that a person who has not taken a step at all has moved 0 steps to the right, to the left, whatever direction you like.
What justifies us extending concepts of quantity to include 0?
It's the bag, the difference between not having a bag at all and having a bag with nothing in it. 0 ends up playing a prominent role in positional number systems because the positions in such a number system are like bags laid out on a table into which you can put at most a certain number of items. But the bags are fixed; you do not remove them when they are empty.
Similarly, when we do algebra, we use containers for values, variables, and it may be possible for a variable to hold no value at all, that is, 0. But the mathematical functions we apply to a variable are defined so that they go through even if turns out the variable held a value of 0, or no quantity at all. You just have to follow some rules, so that you don't mistakenly divide by 0, which makes neither mathematical nor intuitive sense, as in this famous 'proof' that 1 = 2:
[math]\mathrm{Assume}\ a = b.\\\begin{align}a^2 &= ab\\a^2 + a^2 &= a^2 + ab \\2a^2 &= a^2 + ab \\2a^2 - 2ab &= a^2 + ab - 2ab\\2a^2 - 2ab &= a^2 - ab\\2(a^2 - ab) &= 1(a^2 - ab)\\2 &= 1\end{align}[/math]
[math]0=\{\text{ }\}[/math] ? :roll:
There's something odd about 0. It's a mudblood!
There's a lot written there. Let me know what you think needs to be supported, and I'll address it. Do you not believe that a reflection is light rebounding from a surface? Or what exactly is it that needs to be supported? Do you not believe that if a spot on the reflecting surface reflected back on itself, that this would create an endless back and forth of the light reflecting between the spot and itself, analogous to two mirrors facing each other?
Quoting Real Gone Cat
Yes, digging in my heels to stand up for what is real, rather than to fall for some smoke and mirrors deceptive proposal from someone like you. Whether you call your proposal math, physics, or some other type of science, I will stand up against it when it is obviously untrue.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
It's implied by the very position you are arguing. The negative numbers are said to be inverse of the positive. And by your analogy, the negative "reflect" onto the positive. So if zero "reflects" onto itself, it must be both negative and positive. There is no other possibility when we are talking about the negatives reflecting, or being "across from" the positive, if zero "reflects" onto itself, then it must be both. If zero is across from itself, like the negatives are across from the positives, then you are describing it as being both negative and positive.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You are not quite representing the complete extent of the issue here. The problem is not in calling zero a quantity. That is an acceptable move. The problem is in accepting the consequences of this move, what it implies about the nature of "quantity" when you allow zero to be a quantity.
When zero is a quantity then it falls into the same category as the negative numbers and the positive numbers. Each number signifies a quantity and so does zero. Then we cannot express the numbers as having a mirror opposite, or inverse, the negative numbers being inverse to the positive, because there is a number, a quantity, which has no inverse, zero.
So if the desire is to represent the negative numbers as an inversion of the positive, then we must represent 0 as distinct from the numbers, just like the reflecting surface, or mirror, is something different from the arrangement of light. This points to the difference between cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers. If, what is expressed by a number is a position in an order, rather than a quantity, then zero can be apprehended as a complete lack of order, and this distinguishes it from the numbers which represent order, but then it cannot have a position with the other numbers, on the number line.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Your use of "value" here seems ambiguous. A value could be a quantity, or it could be a position in an order (hierarchy, or priority). You have not clarified which of these "the bag" in your example, represents. At first you talk about "position", such that the empty bag has a position. But then you say that a value of zero has no "quantity". To me, the latter makes sense, but not the former. It makes sense to say that the empty bag is a container with the quantity of zero apples. The empty container represents that quantitative value.
But the case of position is not so straight forward. If a position is represented by what's within the bag, then the bag itself is not representative of anything, and all bags are the same, as irrelevant. So the empty bag represents a position, through its emptiness, and that must be no position whatsoever (no order). This implies that the empty bag, zero, or no position relative to the order, has no place on the number line, or, is equally well positioned relative to any place. And that it has no place is well represented in practise by the fact that we can count forward or backward starting from any number, we do not need to start at zero. The counterintuitive thing though, is that we should not ever hit zero in counting like this. So if we count down from 2, it should be 1 next, and -1 after that, skipping the habitual "0" here, because zero has no place in the order.
This all relates to how we apprehend point zero, or t-minus zero, in the temporal sense. If we relinquish the idea that there is an exact, zero point, we can remove zero from the number line all together. Then 1 and -1 are directly opposed to each other, and the presence of the two mark the division between positive and negative, as the first position on each side.
It is neither. The negation of zero (a number without a sign) is zero (a number without a sign). The number does not change.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You need to be more specific. What flaws and differences?
The point is that this cannot be called a "negation". If the thing, zero, is the very same prior to, and after, the proposed "negation" then there has been no negation. "Negation", by definition, creates a statement which is distinct from that which is negated. There cannot be a "negation" with the negation being the very same statement as that which was negated. This cannot be called a "negation".
Quoting Andrew M
Uh... we're discussing one right here, for example, the role of zero.
Do you also hold that adding zero to a number cannot be called "addition" because the number is the same before and after?
Or that dividing a number by one cannot be called "division" because the number is the same before and after?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yet "negation", defined as zero minus a number, can be just that. Just as addition that includes zero and negative numbers is more general than addition of only positive numbers.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Where do you get this from? This is not how mappings work. They don't repeatedly occur. Sure, two mirrors angled just so with space in between them will create an infinite regress, but that is not what is happening here. Here, we're considering a single plane of reflection, and a single reflection (a single mapping). You've invented a situation that doesn't exist.
I imagine you're a wonderful person, so it pains me to have to say this : usually, discussing math with you is like discussing the phases of the moon with a flat-earther. You really have no idea what mapping, or inverse, or almost any other math term means. And you have no interest in learning.
What's truly odd is that you're lack of understanding is at the most basic level. You stumble on understanding simple facts about the integers and zero. The Chinese and the Hindus understood the nature of zero thousands of years ago, and even late-to-the-game Europe has known about zero at least since Fibonacci's Liber Abaci. No one debates this stuff anymore.
Hey, I'm going to throw some group theory at you. Try not to let your head explode.
A group is a set of elements ([math]G[/math]) and a binary operation ([math]*[/math]) on those elements that satisfies 4 conditions :
Theorem : In a group, the identity element is its own inverse.
Proof : By condition 3, [math]e*e=e[/math] (given any element - including the identity element - performing the binary operation with that element and the identity will result in the given element). Thus by condition 4, [math]e[/math] must be the inverse of itself.
In the discussion we've been having, the integers (positive, negative, and zero) are clearly a group under addition, with the identity element being 0. So by the theorem above, 0 is its own inverse.
Why bring up things which are not comparable?
Quoting Andrew M
Well, I've never seen "negation" defined as " zero minus a number". Care to share where you got that one from? Zero minus a number clearly does not negate the number, as negating a number gives zero. So I think you are really stretching for straws now Andrew.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
We are not talking about maps, we are talking about reflections, mirrors. It's your analogy, keep on track and don't change the subject please.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
No, you are changing the analogy. There is no "mapping" in the analogy.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
Again, you are trying to change the subject. We were not talking about "mapping".
Quoting Real Gone Cat
Please don't be an asshole Real Gone Cat. I really don't understand why some people get so upset when the axioms of mathematics are debated. There's no reason for it, it's just a field of study. Keep your shit together
Quoting Real Gone Cat
What I am arguing is that mathematicians ought not accept such theorems, I am not trying to say that they don't accept them. So, you providing me evidence that they do accept them, just provides me with inspiration to produce a stronger argument that they ought not do what they do.
I just took a moment doing what I do to read this post, and now I feel so guilty. :cry:
You have no mercy, MU.
They're comparable because in each case the number remains the same. On that basis you reject that a negation has occurred but, apparently, still accept that an addition and a division has occurred. Which seems to be an arbitrary conclusion.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I've linked to the definition several times now. Here it is again with the relevant parts bolded.
Quoting Additive inverse - Wikipedia
Thus to negate a number is to subtract that number from zero.
For example, to negate 2 is to subtract 2 from 0 which is -2. Conversely, to negate -2 is to subtract -2 from 0 which is 2.
Similarly, to negate 0 is to subtract 0 from 0 which is 0.
So this is why quantum weirdness is not that weird: if we have three verbs in a sentence (a noun form as the subject, then a transitive verb, then another verb as the object) and the first action is necessary for the third it seems that it is proper to say that the action that is the first causes the action that is the third.
So for example:
If
If
If
If
Then it stands to reason that:
If
That's right. Show up at confession and feel the guilt for your sins. But you know you will be forgiven.
Quoting Andrew M
There is nothing about the definitions of "addition", or "subtraction" which requires that the result be other than the starting number. "Negation" is defined as producing a statement other than the one which is negated.
Quoting Andrew M
You provided a definition of "additive inverse", not of "opposite", nor of "negation". And, as I've told you already, your quote only demonstrates that mathematics uses these terms in a way which is inconsistent with other fields of study, like philosophy and logic.
In fact, I see now that there is inconsistency within the quoted paragraph itself. It says: "For a real number, it reverses its sign". And it also says: "Zero is the additive inverse of itself." Since zero is a real number then it is an exception to the stated rule for real numbers, therefore the inconsistency inheres within your definition. It is self-contradicting, stating a rule then a contradicting rule.
Quoting Andrew M
This clearly demonstrates the contradiction. Negating a real number is to reverse its sign, by your definition. Zero is a real number. Yet you propose that zero is negated without reversing its sign.
You seem to be forgetting what negation is:
[quote=Wikipedia] In logic, negation, also called the logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition {\displaystyle P}P to another proposition "not {\displaystyle P}P", written {\displaystyle \neg P}\neg P, {\displaystyle {\mathord {\sim }}P}{\displaystyle {\mathord {\sim }}P} or {\displaystyle {\overline {P}}}\overline{P}. [/quote]
Notice, negation takes the proposition to "another proposition". There is no exception, which would allow that a negated proposition could remain the same, as you propose with zero. You simply refuse to adhere to the rule, and insist on defending all those sinners who have gone before you. Please, approach the confessional box, now! You will be forgiven.
And there are so many, many of those. My math genealogy alone goes back to Karl Weierstrass (1850s), one of almost 40,000 descendants of that gentleman. And everyday 150 or more papers arrive at arXiv.org . So many sinners, so brief a time . . .
You truly know nothing about math. Do yourself a favor and look up a term before spouting off nonsense about it.
Mapping is a commonly used math term. A reflection is a type of mapping.
From Britannica (online) - although you can find similar definitions in many places :
You revel in your willful ignorance of math. You puff out your chest and promote yourself as the folk-wisdom hero who must bring down all mathematical evil-doers. How's that going for you? Have you ever taken my advice and sent your math musings off to prestigious journals for publication?
That's correct. There is also nothing about the definition of "negation" which requires that the result be other than the starting number.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You're equivocating. The subject is numbers, not statements.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Negation, as a mathematical operation, is the additive inverse.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, it does not. Different fields have their own specialized terms. Recognize the context and equivocation can be avoided.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is not part of the definition, that is commentary. To negate a number is to subtract it from zero. It's very simple.
That follows from the group-theoretic definition which @Real Gone Cat kindly provided earlier. The real numbers (and, separately, the integers) are a group under addition, where 0 is the identity element and 0 is its own inverse.
Which is to say, the negation of zero is zero. If you disagree, then you shouldn't trust a calculator since it treats -0 as a valid operation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As noted above, a number is not a proposition.
Again, we were not talking about mapping. Your analogy was stated explicitly as "To be across from something means to be reflected in a line, point, or plane."
"To be across from something" as in opposite to it, does not imply mapping. If you would have been up front in the first place, and said that you were describing opposite as mapping, instead of as a reflection, I would have rejected that right off the bat. Instead, you tried to use the ambiguity of "opposite" to lead you to "across from", then on to "reflection", and finally "mapping". That's nonsense to describe "opposite" as "mapping".
Quoting Real Gone Cat
It's going very well, thank you for asking. I find it quite amusing, a lot of fun, and a good source of entertainment. I sincerely hope it is as much fun for you as it is for me. Then we're both winners here.
Quoting Andrew M
The subject is "inverse", and "opposite", and whether mathematics uses a perverse meaning for the words, which allows that a term such as "zero" might be opposite to itself.
In our inquiry as to whether this is the case or not, we can either adhere to the logical definition of "negation", or move to some perverted definition of "negation" which you propose, ("To negate a number is to subtract it from zero"), devised by you to be consistent with a perverted meaning of "opposite", and "inverse".
Of course, we ought to adhere to the logical definition of "negation" and not succumb to the perverted definition, because then we would not grasp the perversion which is present, and not see that mathematics has perverted the meaning of "opposite" and "inverse", to allow zero to be opposite to itself.