Science seems to create, not discover, reality.
(Moderators - I posted this here, then realized it probably fit better in the Philosophy of Science sub-forum, so posted it there. I think it fits both, and there is value in having it viewed in both subforums that may provide varied nuance of analysis, but if this is improper double-posting, please delete this one as I think the other forum is the most fitting - thanks.)
After much observation and reflection, the theory that makes the most sense to me is this:
Reality is a dance / battle between two opposing forces, a consciousness that, by observing waves of probability, collapses them into particular reality. This is the process of creation. This I call the Particle Consciousness. On the other side is Wave Consciousness, which seeks to turn particular reality into waves, I think by blocking/destroying/hemming in the observations of the Particle Consciousness.
Those who suggest the universe is conscious, we are fragments / fractals of the conscious universe observing itself, are correct. But our physical body and consciousness not only observes the universe, we are actually the particle consciousness in the very ACT of creating the universe. Every time we observe anything not yet observed, we thereby collapse the waves of probability in that newly observed area, and replace them with fixed reality, and what we replace them with is what we EXPECT. We literally choose what we find around each unexplored corner of the universe. We are on the forefront of creation.
This means that all the far galaxies we observe through telescopes actually did not exist until we peered through those telescopes and then collapsed the waves of probability out there into what we expected to see. Strangely, this means scientists often, if not always, create rather than discover.
This is all consistent with the notion we live in a reality that is coming into existence as a struggle between the quantum duality of particle and wave consciousnesses. We are on the front lines of this struggle.
The fact we create reality with our EXPECTATIONS of what we will find, is a heavy responsibility. It actually can make it quite scary that so many people are pessimists, that people more and more seem drawn to horror as a genre for entertainment. We are what we eat, both physically and mentally, so the more we ingest horror into our psyches, the more this will steer our expectations for reality.
Well, there is much more to this theory. The inherent quantum nature of reality is all around. Women embody the wave consciousness and men embody the particle consciousness, at least primarily. I think we all embody both to some degree. This means men are primarily creators and women are primarily looking to generate chaos. I do not say this to denigrate women. I was concerned this mean that, in fact, men were "good" and women were "bad" in some vague, cosmic way. However, upon reflection, I think neither duality is bad. The particle consciousness, and thus masculine embodiment of it, favors creation, permanence, security. The wave consciousness, and thus feminine embodiment of it, favors freedom, passion, excitement, change. These are all good values. In fact, if you think about it, what is progress? It is the COMBINATION of creation and change. We need both aspects for progress. However, it does mean if you really want security and permanence, maybe keep women away? (That is joke, ha, ha.)
If anyone has logic, reason, evidence, scientific studies, that refute this, I am happy to reconsider / revise.
I edited to remove supposition on this addressing Fermi's paradox, as it was a notion that I have decided is too far out on a limb of supposition. As for the rest, yes it gets close to proposing a new religious / spiritual belief or set of beliefs...but religion and spirituality ARE branches of philosophy, and my new "theology" if you will is entirely appropriate for discussion and analysis in a philosophy forum, right? For internal consistency, consistency with observed reality, extent to which it reconciles or explains questions better than other theologies or even atheism? And to the extent my theology includes the belief scientists who study new areas are in some ways CHOOSING not DISCOVERING the answers they find, that we are not just the eyes of god looking around at creation, we are the mind of god, fragments of it, in the MIDST of the creation of the universe, on the front lines.
Well, we WERE on the front lines, creating the area of space around us. Now it seems all created, as far as we can see / observe. Not much left to be done here. Unless we can figure a way to proceed out into the far reaches of unobserved reality, we are probably now obsolete, which may be why we are on the cusp of extinction. That may be the real answer to Fermi's paradox. Life arises in a quadrant of space as a fragment of God creating the universe in that area of space, by observing and choosing what to bring about in existence there, and once that process is complete in that area, the life is now obsolete, so it dies off and returns its energy to God, or perhaps we have eternal souls that are then reincarnated elsewhere in the universe where we can do more creation, as alien life forms on a distant world where observation is still needed to create the local reality.
Perhaps we were meant to survive long enough to both observe local reality and space to participate in its creation, and perhaps put some organic matter into space where eventually it will land on new worlds we observed that are distant enough to be on the front lines of creation, and life there will then evolve and follow a pattern like us, where one form eventually ascends to complete local observation, then dies off.
Ken
After much observation and reflection, the theory that makes the most sense to me is this:
Reality is a dance / battle between two opposing forces, a consciousness that, by observing waves of probability, collapses them into particular reality. This is the process of creation. This I call the Particle Consciousness. On the other side is Wave Consciousness, which seeks to turn particular reality into waves, I think by blocking/destroying/hemming in the observations of the Particle Consciousness.
Those who suggest the universe is conscious, we are fragments / fractals of the conscious universe observing itself, are correct. But our physical body and consciousness not only observes the universe, we are actually the particle consciousness in the very ACT of creating the universe. Every time we observe anything not yet observed, we thereby collapse the waves of probability in that newly observed area, and replace them with fixed reality, and what we replace them with is what we EXPECT. We literally choose what we find around each unexplored corner of the universe. We are on the forefront of creation.
This means that all the far galaxies we observe through telescopes actually did not exist until we peered through those telescopes and then collapsed the waves of probability out there into what we expected to see. Strangely, this means scientists often, if not always, create rather than discover.
This is all consistent with the notion we live in a reality that is coming into existence as a struggle between the quantum duality of particle and wave consciousnesses. We are on the front lines of this struggle.
The fact we create reality with our EXPECTATIONS of what we will find, is a heavy responsibility. It actually can make it quite scary that so many people are pessimists, that people more and more seem drawn to horror as a genre for entertainment. We are what we eat, both physically and mentally, so the more we ingest horror into our psyches, the more this will steer our expectations for reality.
Well, there is much more to this theory. The inherent quantum nature of reality is all around. Women embody the wave consciousness and men embody the particle consciousness, at least primarily. I think we all embody both to some degree. This means men are primarily creators and women are primarily looking to generate chaos. I do not say this to denigrate women. I was concerned this mean that, in fact, men were "good" and women were "bad" in some vague, cosmic way. However, upon reflection, I think neither duality is bad. The particle consciousness, and thus masculine embodiment of it, favors creation, permanence, security. The wave consciousness, and thus feminine embodiment of it, favors freedom, passion, excitement, change. These are all good values. In fact, if you think about it, what is progress? It is the COMBINATION of creation and change. We need both aspects for progress. However, it does mean if you really want security and permanence, maybe keep women away? (That is joke, ha, ha.)
If anyone has logic, reason, evidence, scientific studies, that refute this, I am happy to reconsider / revise.
I edited to remove supposition on this addressing Fermi's paradox, as it was a notion that I have decided is too far out on a limb of supposition. As for the rest, yes it gets close to proposing a new religious / spiritual belief or set of beliefs...but religion and spirituality ARE branches of philosophy, and my new "theology" if you will is entirely appropriate for discussion and analysis in a philosophy forum, right? For internal consistency, consistency with observed reality, extent to which it reconciles or explains questions better than other theologies or even atheism? And to the extent my theology includes the belief scientists who study new areas are in some ways CHOOSING not DISCOVERING the answers they find, that we are not just the eyes of god looking around at creation, we are the mind of god, fragments of it, in the MIDST of the creation of the universe, on the front lines.
Well, we WERE on the front lines, creating the area of space around us. Now it seems all created, as far as we can see / observe. Not much left to be done here. Unless we can figure a way to proceed out into the far reaches of unobserved reality, we are probably now obsolete, which may be why we are on the cusp of extinction. That may be the real answer to Fermi's paradox. Life arises in a quadrant of space as a fragment of God creating the universe in that area of space, by observing and choosing what to bring about in existence there, and once that process is complete in that area, the life is now obsolete, so it dies off and returns its energy to God, or perhaps we have eternal souls that are then reincarnated elsewhere in the universe where we can do more creation, as alien life forms on a distant world where observation is still needed to create the local reality.
Perhaps we were meant to survive long enough to both observe local reality and space to participate in its creation, and perhaps put some organic matter into space where eventually it will land on new worlds we observed that are distant enough to be on the front lines of creation, and life there will then evolve and follow a pattern like us, where one form eventually ascends to complete local observation, then dies off.
Ken
Comments (140)
Are you a panpsychist / a duellist / a pantheist/ a theosophist? What actual evidence do you have?
Are there any peer reviewed, published, scientific papers you can cite, to support your 'are correct,' claim in the quote above, or are you merely making 'pure conjecture,' statements based on your personal opinion? (which is ok, if your are, but you should establish that that is the case.)
So do you not exist for me, until I observe you? Does reading your post cause you to exist, for me? :rofl:
The 'for me' bit is the crucial notion, yes?
Carlo Rovelli often describes time and reality as an individualised experience. I can appreciate that pov, but I don't think such valid observations about spacetime and reference frames and individually interpreted worldview are significant enough to lead to anything like panpsychism/ dualism / pantheism or theosophism.
You're speculating and using your own speculation as evidence for your next points. Making your speculations eve more speculative the further the text goes on:
Quoting ken2esq
This is nonsense.
Quoting ken2esq
This isn't a theory, it is speculation, it isn't even a hypothesis.
Quoting ken2esq
Why don't you begin with logic, rational reasoning, actual scientific evidence for the actual claims because you have the burden of proof first. This way of presenting extremely incoherent speculations and then demand that others disprove them is a failure of philosophy and science. It's the exact opposite of the praxis required.
If you consider that each human being is part of one creature with 8 billion eyes, and when that creature looks at probability waves, even with just one of those eyes, it collapses them, and out of the probabilities it could collapse to, it becomes that which the observing eye expected, that would be closer.
This is simplified since, in fact, humans are just one run on the ladder of life and conscious observation. Cells, tissues, organs, other organisms, organizations, all are conscious observers, fractals of the creative observer consciousness.
Bottom line is, this is the only explanation that resolves Fermi's Paradox. It also is not INCONSISTENT with anything we observe, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for other metaphysical ideas.
People continue to struggle with the ramifications of the double-slit quantum experiment revealing how the act of observation collapses a probability wave into a particle. However, one thing we keep seeing is the fractal nature of reality. Thus, consider women and men, and how much they embody the quantum duality of waves and particles. Men are like a rock, women like ocean waves. You think it is coincidence this poetically parallels the quantum duality? Or would it make more sense to consider if this is not coincidence, then it means the quantum duality is reflected in the macro universe. And if you extend that, it may be the ultimate duality of the universe. Not good vs. evil. Probability wave vs. particular certainty. And what force have SCIENTISTS shown collapses waves into particles? Conscious observation...
It's almost as if observation is a creative force.... It is almost as if probability waves are waiting for conscious observation to collapse into a particular reality. Oh, wait, that is literally EXACTLY what the science says.
- ken
What the wave function represents might be claimed to be some sort of independent reality, but those conceptions are so deficient and insufficient, that true reality remains completely unknown.
Calling something nonsense is not a logical or philosophical argument.
I am writing a theory of the universe that explains Fermi's paradox. The notion that we live in a conscious universe, that we are part of that conscious universe, experiencing itself, is not new or novel. Heck, it may be the most scientific of metaphysical postulations. Surely more logical than Christianity or Hinduism or Greek mythology.
So, the notion of a conscious universe is not my wild speculation, nor that we are parts of it observing itself. I merely add the suggestion that we are not conscious fragments of a conscious universe merely playing in the finished universe; rather, we are in the midst of that very act of creation and are actually the tools of that creation, the eyes, ears, limbs of the creator.
Look, let's agree on this if we can:
For theists (those who believe in any sort of intelligent creator, whether it is the conscious universe and we are part of it, or it is a separate being, separate from us and the universe it created), there are two main schools of thought for how the Universe was created:
(1) God basically waved a magic wand and instantaneously (well, within a week), created the entire Universe in its entirety.
(2) The universe itself is a conscious singularity, all matter and life are parts of it, humans are akin to cells on its body, neurons of its brain, eyes on the ground for it, etc, and this conscious universe is responsible for the laws of physics and initial location of matter and energy which led to the Big Bang and expanding Universe, and the Universe we live in is physically complete, but still expanding and changing without any further divine intervention. Basically, to the extent we are fragments of the conscious universe, we are playing in a finished sand box.
I am suggesting what seems a quite reasonable compromise between these two views, nothing crazy or unimaginable. Simply that both are partially true. The latter school of thought is correct that the universe is conscious. The former school of thought is correct that this "god" if you will is intentionally creating the entire universe, not just leaving its creation up the laws of physics. Quantum physics shows that conscious observation CREATES physicality from observation of probability waves, which frankly is the closest science has come to finding anything that appears at all like an act of divine creation.
So why NOT consider that instead of waving his and and creating the entire universe, God or the conscious singularity could not, or chose not, to create the universe in six days or the blink of an eye, but instead is creating it over hundreds of billions of years. Why not consider that a diety might take trillions of years to create the universe and as it does, that means that there is part of the Universe that is already created, and part of the Universe yet to be created. Hmmm...what would the part of the Universe that awaits being turned into a particular physical reality look like...... Hmmm.. We don't know, but what is the BEST GUESS based on our science? Probability waves.
The theory that the Universe is being actively created by a conscious singularity through the process of expanding observation of a surrounding, seemingly infinite, ocean of probability waves is not crazy speculation. It is literally application of Occam's Razor and reason and the most current science to improve on past, less advanced theories of metaphysical truth.
No, my theory is NOT "true." Of course not. But I believe it is MORE TRUE than anything yet postulated. It explains Fermi's paradox. It is consistent with the fractal nature of reality. It actually EXPLAIN why the double slit experiment showed what it showed about observation collapsing probabiliy waves into particular reality. Who else has a spiritual or metaphysical theory or even a scientific theory that explains WHY this exists like this?
Seriously, even if this theory were entirely wrong, it still deserves kudos for finding a logical way to wrap up all these scientific loose ends into a fairly basic new age spirituality.
And, yes, the WHOLE THING is a theory, based on the fact we observe things in nature that we cannot reconcile. Well, genius, THIS RECONCILES THEM. That is the point. Find one thing science has observed in nature that this does NOT reconcile!! If a theory reconciles our observations and no other theory does, then what does that mean? You reject it because it is new? Seriously?
This is philosophy, not a hard science. It's not physics. But if you cannot find any place where my theory is inconsistent with reality, the way a person walking on water is inconsistent, and you cannot think of any BETTER explanation of why observation collapses probability waves into particular certainty, you probably should not be so casually dismissive of this.
I will agree there is one really seemingly crazy suggestion offered here: That when a conscious observer looks at a place where there had been probability waves, and thereby collapses them into a particular physical reality, I suggest that the form this reality takes is based on the expectation of that observer. So wherever there is quantum uncertainty, when we collapse it, we CHOOSE what it collapses into.
This seems crazy because it seems to give us a bit of magical power. However, FIRST, I will point out that the notion we, as fragments of a conscious creator, have a spark of divine creative power, is very popular and widely accepted, and it is actually the working theory for why daily affirmations, vision boards, and other forms of affirmative thinking seems to miraculous work. If you believe in it. I did not until coming up with this theory which now reconciles THAT effect too, if that is real. Yes, thank you, I'll take a bow. But also, as a second point, if we are conscious fragments of a divine creator, we are its eyes on the ground, why would we NOT be its eyes ON THE FRONT LINE as well as its AGENTS OF CREATION ON THE FRONT LINE. Is this crazier than thinking that, instead, we were just created for the Universe to masturbate within its fully finished Universe? Frankly, my theory fills in whole SHITLOAD of "why is like this?" "and why would this be like this?" It provides answers that, though not proven, are also PERFECTLY REASONABLE. Name any other spiritual conceptualization that does that. You cannot.
Again, I am 100% sure my theory is wrong, that it is incomplete, oversimplified, and/or partially inaccurate. But if you consider what I am reconciling with this theory, the "why" questions it actually answers rather than just talking about divine ineffability, I think you must agree it is not something to be just readily dismissed for lack of "proof" What the hell religious or spiritual conceptualization are you hiding that has any of this "proof" you seem to crave? None? That's what I thought.
Lastly, have you considered how all the greatest scientific leaps were scoffed when first presented? Do you really want to scoff at this because it is too much of a leap WITHOUT actually giving me one logical or evidentiary argument against it? Basically just rejecting it for novelty?!!! Really?!!! Novelty???
Ken
I don't think you understand the double slit experiment at all. It is not the creation of novel particles it is just normal light waves such as are all around us, and seeing how the electrons that comprise the light waves exist in a state of uncertainty as probability waves until observed / detected. There is literally NO QUESTION that light waves and their electrons exist outside the laboratory. I'm not sure what the heck you are even talking about. I'm not sure you know.
Yes, conceptualization of reality are lacking. So I'm literally GIVING YOU ONE that reconciles EVERYTHING. A unifying theory of realty that reconciles quantum physics and the double-slit experiment, the fractal nature of reality all around us, why daily affirmations and vision boards and similar affirmation / visualization techniques seem to work, WHY we live in a universe where there are probability waves that observation will collapse into particular reality -- anyone else come up with a conceptualization that answers that? Any other spiritual concept or religion answer that? No? I did not think so.
Yes, the Universe is a mystery, and we have very limited ability conceptualize it. So what? Are you suggestion we do not try? We do not try to improve upon our utterly flaws and pointless past conceptualizations that are so inconsistent with things we observe in the Universe? Your whole philosophical approach seems to be pessimistic defeatism. Is that accidental, or is that literally your point of view?
Ken
No, you are cherry picking concepts together and call it a theory when its not a theory or hypothesis, but wild speculation. Evidence must bind together as premises towards a conclusion, that's not what you're doing here.
Quoting ken2esq
This is called bias. You are biased towards your own belief without any actual evidence to support it. Why is your belief more true than the facts that can be extrapolated out of the latest scientific consensus?
Quoting ken2esq
It's not a theory, you have no actual evidence, you have wild speculations or interpretations of speculations that you use as premisses for your conclusion.
Quoting ken2esq
Philosophy still requires due diligence in logic and rational reasoning. You treat philosophy like it's something that's about just wild speculation, which it's not. You still need to follow the praxis of philosophical arguments.
And since its not physics either, you have neither the logical rational reasoning of philosophy, nor the scientific rigor of physics. Then what have you other than wild speculation and nothing more?
Quoting ken2esq
We do not choose how it collapses. I don't think you understand what the collapsing wave in quantum mechanics is about. The collapse due to observation has nothing to do with us as humans, it has more to do with the uncertainty principle and how measurement introduces forces onto the measured particles so that you inflict change that wouldn't be there when not measured.
The pseudo-religious conclusion that we as a consciousness "choose" the collapse has more to do with a misunderstanding of the physics. It's what happens when people are confused by the science and doesn't bother to actually understand it before using it as a premise in their argument.
Quoting ken2esq
They were scoffed at by religious people or by the community before evidence were presented. Those theories didn't magically become serious theories before they were proven. First, they were presented with careful rational reasoning, either with deduction or mathematical calculations, and then proven in experiments. So if you feel like the theory is scoffed at, then you need to do what all of them did, prove your theory right. But no, you are demanding that others prove you wrong.
You aren't doing philosophy or science at all. You scream for others to accept your wild speculations as some possibility. All while you clearly show you don't understand physics or general common philosophical praxis.
Once again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
No, I don't have any evidence for this belief, it is a dogma of mine.
Exactly, especially when it uses a faulty interpretation and then build an entire conclusion around that faulty interpretation as a premise.
You fail to recognize that when we observe various phenomena we cannot explain, and people come up with various individual explanations for each of them -- all of which are complete speculation, regardless how long they've been around, with no actual evidence -- and then some one suggests a single theory that explains all of them, though the single theory has no scientific proof, its greater simplicity gives it greater credence, all else being equal.
All metaphysical notions are pure speculation. We can still evaluate their internal logical and the extent to which they explain and reconcile with what we observe. Newness and novelty are NOT flaws any more than age supports a theory.
Ken
That's not how science and philosophy works, and you attempt to do claims in both here.
Quoting ken2esq
No it doesn't, this is nonsensical logic.
I think its entirely possible you have been refuted in this exact way. The logic and explanative power have been found wanting. I tend to agree.
Quoting ken2esq
All else is never equal.
You're on thin ice here. Quite apart from the immense distances between possible life-bearing planets with advanced civilisations, there might also be immense periods of time between them. Considering the age of the Universe, the period of time that h. sapiens has possessed technology sufficient to send and receive information to and from deep space is a mere blip - less than one hundred years. Now consider the odds of two such cultures existing at the same time in the immensity of time as well as space. Compare that to the striking of a match in an immense space, where the odds of two matches being alight simultaneously, and within range, might be imperceptibly small. That would easily account for the non-discovery of other technologically-advanced cultures by us.
Quoting Lionino
That's unfortunate - it suggests that discussion of the topic is reserved to the priviledged few who can understand the mathematics, when even one of the most illustrious exponents of the discipline said that nobody understand quantum physics. Furthermore physics is held to be paradigmatic as a model for scientific knowledge, generally, so it is quite appropriate to discuss the implications of physics for other aspects of existence, and there are discussions of the philosophical implications of quantum physics by various authors which are quite intelligible, notwithstanding the nonsense that is sometimes written about it.
I think that if youre not talking to physicists or academic philosophers, thats probably a good move for self-preservation and time-saving :P
:up:
I once made the observation that LaPlace's daemon is often touted as a kind of model which validates determinism, and that the Newtonian model of a mechanistic universe is still very influential in popular culture. Yet the philosophical implications of the discovery of the uncertainty principle and the observer problem are arguably more profound - yet they're dismissed on the basis that if you're not a physicist then you don't understand it. So:
Quoting ken2esq
I think there is a grain of truth in this, but I emphasis 'grain'. And here moreso than many other places, a little learning is dangerous. But this 20-year-old article on physicist John Wheeler's 'participatory universe' can be interpreted to say something like that. And these ideas have become part of the cultural milieu, for better or worse. I've read some of the better popular books on it, and I notice many of them bear sub-titles about 'the battle for reality' or 'the struggle for the soul of science'. And why is that? Precisely because they undermine the instinctive conviction that the Universe exists out there now, just as it would without any observers in it.
From John Wheeler, 'Law Without Law'.
I will agree the supposition on how I have explained Fermi's paradox with the theory that our observations including scientific study of unknowns thereby are creating the universe from our expectations, so that we are actually the oldest part of the universe and the older parts are just what we expected to find when we looked that way, is very thin ice. Probably the most thin of any of it. I'm kind of rejecting it myself.
I still think the theory we are not just eyes of a conscious self-creating universe, but are its tools of creation, is the most reasonable to reconcile what we observe, at least justifies why observation collapses wave probabilities into particles, explains our purpose in life, to expand into the unobserved universe while developing our creativity so we can, when we observe the unobserved and there by create reality, we are doing so with with style.
Note, our CREATIVITY is agreed by all to be a virtue. Why? Why do we love make believe? Fantasy? Movies? The urge to create -- to be creative, not just to build any uninspired, repetitive crap -- seems fundamental to us.
Ken
It seems to me that there is a confusion about what "measurement" means. When we measure [for our case in the process of wave function collapse] we are not Becoming aware of a phenomenon, but rather we are physically intervening in the state of quantum coherence, which causes the collapse of the wave function. Introducing consciousness as the cause of quantum decoherence or wave function collapse is a very common error in interpretations of quantum physics: Transcategorical Error. This error consists of introducing notions and concepts that in fact do not and cannot operate in scientific practice.
That is why, taking the above into consideration, instead of using the notions of consciousness and the like, which are rather confusing, we should prefer to describe the phenomenon as the moment in which an isolated or closed system opens up for the environment to intervene. . This frees us from believing that the physical world is in a state of permanent decoherence waiting to be "perceived" so that it acquires the classical properties of physics. In a certain sense it is like saying that the universe measures itself, but this measurement is nothing more than the moment in which the environment intervenes in a closed and coherent system.
To summarize: The objects of study in physics must maintain ontological continuity in such a way that they can be causally-related to each other.
That would make you imagine that laymen are far from being able to productively approach the topic. I do not see chemistry and biology showing up in discussions of philosophy, ever. Although there is a real gap between those two and physics, I speculate that its frequent occurrence in pop culture and pop philosophy has something to do with physics envy.
Besides, I do not see how quantum mechanics figures into free will at all, being a metaphysical problem. Uncertainty principle does not say anything about the world itself but about the measurements we take of it, and interpretations of quantum mechanics, deterministic or random, pilot-wave or Copenhagen, do not give us or take away free will. Even if the world is random, our choices may be determined by it, and even if the world is deterministic, the problem of consciousness and the vertiginous question remain.
Quoting JuanZu
:up:
You keep referring to "probability waves", but you give absolutely no explanation as to what a probability wave is. So you claim to have a grand theory which employs a mystical substance, "probability waves", along with the self-evident reality of "consciousness", to magically solve all the problems of physics. That's fine, but it really doesn't do anything for metaphysics unless you can show how this mystical substance, which your mind attributes magical powers to in your fantasies, has any real existence.
Quoting ken2esq
You insist that this theory of a magical mystical substance called "probability waves", along with an equally obscure conception of "consciousness", is "the only" explanation which resolves "Fermi's paradox". And this is how you justify the credibility of your theory. Perhaps you ought to explain how you understand Fermi's paradox, and what leads you to believe that your theory is the only theory which could explain it.
All I see is a very naive form of Cartesian dualism in which "matter" is replaced by "probability waves" and "mind" is replaced by "consciousness".
With reference to the title of this thread, "science" in its modern form creates, rather than discovers reality. With this context in mind, we ought to properly respect the fact that the supposed "isolated or closed system" which the physicist produces in some form of laboratory, is completely artificial. This artificial situation is not at all natural, because such closed systems do not actually exist naturally. Furthermore, the assumed closedness of the supposed "closed system" is not real, or a true closure, because there is an issue of how, or where, does the energy which is lost to entropy escape the parameters of "the closed system".
So we can see that the use of this type of assumption, "an isolated or closed system" is problematic in two distinct ways. First, the so-called "closed system" is an artificial arrangement which does not at all represent anything natural. Second, our failed attempts to create such a "closed system" demonstrate to us, through the use of the scientific method and inductive reasoning, that such a theory, that there is a thing which could be known as "an isolated or closed system" has actually been demonstrated to be false. It is impossible within the real physical world that we inhabit, to have a fully "closed system". Therefore we need to be very wary when interpreting observations which reference "an isolated or closed system", because we can be absolutely certain that this is a faulty and untrue concept, the use of which may significantly mislead us.
What? Isn't a lab part of nature? When we need to calculate the voltage a heater/boiler must take, should we not treat the heater as a closed system because supposedly it is not natural?
I understand you are saying these things under the premise on which OP is working on, that science is creating reality, but even then it is not accurate to say that isolated systems don't exist as much as "red" does not exist. The use of closed system in science is not even a matter of whether a true isolated system, without quantum flunctuations, can actually exist in real life cellestial mechanics or electrodynamics are not concerned about quantum fluctuations.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What energy is lost to entropy? Entropy and energy are different measurements.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
1 - closed systems absolutely exist everywhere. Any place where there is no flow of mass is closed. A hermetically sealed bottle is a closed system. Isolated systems for all practical purposes also exist. A hydrogen atom floating in the vacuum of space is an isolated system.
2 - closed or isolated system are not theories. There is no theory in physics where it says "there is a (true) closed system", physics does not make existential statements even though it relies on them. Open, closed, isolated system are abstract concepts used to specify the conditions of a system. You could replace those words by ?E = 0, ?m > 0, ?m = 0, if it helps you solve the exercise faster.
So? Your inability to see is not my problem. Tell me the illogic. What is wrong with proposing the Universe is created by conscious observation of probability waves?
Tell you what: Google Schroedinger's cat, read up on the concept of probability waves being intrinsic to reality. You seem to be bereft of basic science to claim probability waves are "magic."
Ken
Calling something "nonsensical illogic" is not a logical argument. Cite one of my assumptions or my extrapolations therefrom, as I admittedly then proceed out on a limb pretty far in some cases, and show me where I started with an inherently flawed assumption or set of assumptions, or where I took a wrong step on any extrapolation, where I should have taken a step in a different direction down a different limb.
Your close-minded rejection is the OPPOSITE of philosophy and logic. Just a child saying "No it isn't!"
Ken
No, because you have to present a logical argument first, burden of proof is on you since you have an extraordinary claim that features misunderstandings of physics and cherry picked non-correlated parts that does not equal any of the conclusions you make. So, yes, what you are doing is nonsense, that's why I said so.
Quoting ken2esq
Philosophy is not about just thinking whatever bs you can think of. Philosophy requires a praxis of rational reasoning, which you haven't presented yet, so it's not close-minded to ask for better philosophy, it's the exact purpose of philosophy.
If all you do is demand that people accept your "theory", then you are doing nothing right. You need some philosophy 101 and then come back with a proper argument, otherwise there's no starting point for any of this.
"No, because you have to present a logical argument first."
Lol, that is so wrong-headed! What if I did present a logical argument? The way you show I did NOT present a logical argument is by showing how it is illogical, by dismantling the actually assumptions and or extrapolations therefrom. The conclusory "that's not a logical argument" skips all the NECESSARY steps to support your conclusion.
EVERY argument which has an opponent necessarily is viewed as an ILLOGICAL ARGUMENT by the opponent, but they do not get to say just "that's illogical" as their rebuttal. Seriously, explain a debate with opposing sides where both sides AGREE the other's side is LOGICAL. You cannot do it.
Christopher Hutchins debating theists...he did not think they had a logical argument. Did he therefore say it was impossible to address their arguments?
You position is so absurd...
This is literally the HEART and MEAT of philosophical debate, dismantling -- in detail, with exactitude -- why the opposing view IS illogical. To claim you are free from that because the other side is somehow a priori illogical is just nonsense.
Please, I beg of you, defend that position. Defend the logic of your assertion that an illogical argument merits NO rebuttal, that we only rebut LOGICAL arguments. I REALLY want to hear how you will rationalize stating such an obviously false position. Will you blame drugs? exhaustion? brain fart? being under the control of a super-conscious organization that does not want you to see the logic of my arguments and so puts really really stupid words in your mouth? (I'm partial to the last, by the way, do not blame you but that which controls you.)
Ken
In my view Wheeler and especially the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics are the pinnacle of (logical) positivism. Hence we have these models that puts the human observing something in the center of everything. Because ...it's us humans making the observations.
Tim Maudlin: The Defeat of Reason
Not at all. Neils Bohr was highly critical of logical positivism. Heisenberg relates in his book Physics and Beyond that the Vienna Circle positivists visited Copenhagen in the 1950s to hear Bohr lecture, and Bohr felt that they didnt understand him at all. That is the source of that often-quoted exclamation from Bohr, if you are not shocked by quantum mechanics you havent understood it. The ensuing discussion provides a thumbnail sketch of Bohrs criticism of positivism but I dont have it on hand.
French philosopher of science, Michel Bitbol, makes a far better case for the Kantian nature of Bohrs epistemology.
Quoting JuanZu
Not according to Brian Greene.
Quoting Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos
Quoting ken2esq
No-one ever observes a probability wave, because its a mathematical function that describes the distribution of probabilities. What happens when an observation is made is that those probabilities collapse into a precise measurement.
An analogy I've used before is that a differential equation (like the Schrodinger equation) may have a multitude of solutions, one of which suits the experiment being performed. Upon measurement one of these is determined to be be correct. No "collapse". But my analogy may be incorrect.
Sorry if I misinterpret, but where would he disagree with me?
Quoting JuanZu
But Greene's quote seems to question that, doesn't it?
Quoting jgill
It's more the fact that prior to the measurement, you can't say what actually exists. It's not as if there's a pre-existing thing, whereabouts unknown, but that there is no determinate object up until the point of measurement. What has 'collapsed' is the range of possibilities which are reduced to one single actuality - 'made manifest', one could say.
If I do not misunderstand what he is referring to, it is that a quantum system has its properties of uncertainty even without the intervention of the scientist's measurement. And what I have referred to is that the loss of that property of uncertainty occurs when the scientist measures with his physical devices.
Both positions are not contradictory. In fact they complement each other. Since I have not said that the quantum properties of a coherent system are an effect of measurement. Instead, I have said that the loss of these properties is an effect of the measure.
Because it makes no sense. Probability waves are mathematical/physical descriptions which have predictive power. They might or might not exist in real life. If you are talking about a particle in particular that is described by a probability wave, the universe is not created by its observation as there needs to be a universe to begin with for that observation to even happen.
Probability waves are not intrinsic to reality, again: it is an equation whose ontology is unknown, hence the different interpretations of QM.
What even is your background in physics to be abusing these concepts?
:up:
No, a lab is not natural, it is artificial, and "natural" is defined as not artificial.
Quoting Lionino
There are energy loses, therefore the system is not truly closed. This is understood under the concept of efficiency.
Quoting Lionino
No system has 100% efficiency, therefore energy is always lost from a system.
Quoting Lionino
So, as I said there is no such thing as a truly closed system. A "closed system" is an ideal which represents nothing natural or artificial, it is a theory only. Not only that, but as I explained, it is impossible for a closed system to actually exist, either naturally or artificially, such a thing is actually impossible. So we must respect this fact, and not allow ourselves to be misled by the idea that a closed system could actually exist.
Quoting ken2esq
Let me put it this way. How would a person know oneself to be observing "probability waves"? What are the identifying features of these, so that I can find them in the universe and observe some?
I look out and I see a universe, and I observe this universe. You say, that the universe which I observe has been created by some other consciousness observing probability waves. But you seem to be incapable of telling me what a probability wave is, and how a consciousness could observe one, or a bunch of them.
Quoting ken2esq
It's your theory, so I want to see it explained by you. What type of existence do you think that a probability wave has, and how do you think that a consciousness could observe probability waves? This type of explanation is required so that I can judge the logic of your theory.
I used it as an example of a closed system, not an isolated system. You don't seem to understand the difference between a closed and an isolated system.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That does not answer the question.
Whether a closed or isolated system are physically possible is irrelevant as it is a concept, not a theory, which, like in everything in physics, makes an approximation of reality. The inside of an average-sized black hole may be treated as a closed system when no matter is entering the event horizon, as the Hawking radiation emitted every second or even year is nothing compared to the billions of billions of tons of mass the BH has.
I am ready for a descriptive explanation, if you care to give it a go.
Quoting Lionino
So we agree on this, except maybe terminology, you say "concept", I say "theory". Whatever. Now, my point was that if we get swayed by the idea (which is proposed in some metaphysics) that this "approximation of reality", is a representation of what really exists, we will be misled.
Quoting Lionino
Didn't you just say that a closed system is a concept which "makes an approximation of reality"? Why would you now say that a black hole ought to be treated in this way? Do you understand why it was so difficult for ancient astronomers to figure out the true nature of the solar system? It was because they were treating the orbits of the planets as perfect circles rather than as ellipses. This is how the ideals mislead us, and modern science has numerous examples, black bodies, white bodies, etc..
So they might exist, good enough for me.
Quoting Wayfarer
Geez, nitpicky much? That is what I meant. Saying when you look at a probability wave it collapses or when you observe a probability wave it collapses seems pretty irrelevant to my arguments. I would suggest you not get distracted by irrelevant semantics (relevant semantics are fine). But, despite that, thanks for the tip on keeping my language clean. I did think of your point and caught myself in other writings, but maybe after writing the above.
Ken
That is exactly what I have referred to: the moment in which the scientist and his measuring devices intervene and affect the coherent system. Such a thing supposes an ontological continuity between the scientist, the measuring devices and the system in a state of "coherence". It would not be legitimate to say that perception or having a "mental representation" alters the system. No, the scientist needs measuring devices (physical devices) to be able to "observe" the system. The effects produced by the measurement are caused by a physical cause and not a mental one.
This concept challenges classical notions of reality and determinism. In classical physics, objects have definite properties and states at all times. However, in quantum mechanics, entities like electrons or photons exist in a superposition of states, with probabilities for each state, until an observation "collapses" these possibilities into a single state.
Does the act of measurement create the state of the particle, or does it reveal a pre-existing but unknown state? I had the idea it was the latter.
It's more that it's very easy to misunderstand and misrepresent the facts of the matter. There is a lot of loose talk and outright nonsense talked and written about quantum physics. In fact it's an entire cultural genre. Go to Amazon and do a search for quantum consciousness. There might be some genuine books returned by that search but I'm pretty sure there's a lot of new-age nonsense returned as well.
I've already acknowledged that there is a grain of truth in the idea the role of mind in constructing reality but it's a very tricky thing to understand and rife with possibilities of misunderstanding.
Not ambiguity, but uncertainty -- the uncertainty principle. So, with that, the Schrodinger's cat experiment doesn't deny the definite properties and doesn't deny space time. It is actually more like a critique of the very notion of the uncertainty principle, which, in all fairness, is a principle about us! -- the observer. And it doesn't purport to state that all possible states exist, rather only two states -- is the cat dead because of the poison, or is the cat alive because the poison didn't detonate.
Stephen Hawking said 'whenever I hear of Schrodinger's cat, I reach for my gun.'
My take on that thought-experiment is that it was a rather sarcastic model to try and communicate the philosophical conundrums thrown up by this issue. It was kind of a joke albeit with serious implications.
Besides, the philosophical implications of the uncertainty principle are indubitably profound. One of the best books I read on it was Manjit Kumar - Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality'. It's a legit book, mainstream popular science, not new-age publishing. And note well the sub-title - there really was a grand debate between Einstein and Bohr that endured for decades, well into Einstein's Princeton years. Einstein was an adamant supporter of scientific realism, that objective reality is just so, and it's the job of science to gradually enlarge our knowledge of it. He always said that quantum theory must be incomplete or partial. That was the conviction behind the EPR paradox, which is what lead to the John Bell theorem and Alain Aspect and others proving the actuality of quantum entanglement.
Part of a series, A Brief History of Quantum Mechanics.
Yes, good passage. But what should we think of the thought behind it? That quantum mechanics removes the vantage point of the observer and presents the world as a collection of sub-atomic elements. We really have a "flat" earth without the interaction of the observer.
So, let's say that we should really think of the world in terms of atoms and particles, not the fabulous world we live in -- the trees, and the birds, and the bees. What does philosophy have to say about that? Because it would all eliminate the "illusion", the deception, or the errors in beliefs, or even the whole metaphysics itself. From now on, we have a one-dimensional reality -- it's all atoms and subparticles. No time and space to consider.
The truth is, we don't interact, or rather we don't act as if our world has no colors and dimensions. We make decisions based on the wholeness of existence, the three dimensional reality is what we see. We based our morals based on the whole people and whole animals. We have a sense of completeness or fullness or composition which the quantum world does not recognize. We think of ethics in terms of life, death, suffering, harm, pleasure -- which, again, the quantum world does not know about.
I don't understand why we are so torn apart because subparticles exist. They should be thanking us for being here in the universe. For the first time, someone had paid attention to them. People discovered them. That we aren't in a symbiotic relationship with them is something we need to keep telling ourselves. In the billions of years that organic life weren't here, nothing fucking happened. It's 80 billion years of blank pages. You can skip to the last page and it's still the same.
Quoting Wayfarer
Hahaha. :grin:
Quoting Wayfarer
But isn't that exactly what you presented in your previous post?
It does not. If you're not arguing from logic, then a rebuttal cannot be one in logic. That's the claim being made about your position. It isn't a logical position (not that it fails a test of logic).
Quoting ken2esq
No it isn't.
Quoting ken2esq
Yes he did. Most of his debates with the likes of Lane-Craig and Lennox are expressly arguments about logical propositions. The premises are whats up for debate in those instances (though, admittedly, there are some great rebuttals to the conclusions of faulty premises - such as infinite regress not being as big-a-problem as once thought).
Quoting ken2esq
Its quite happy then, that the claim as i understand it (or at least, the one im standing behind) is that you haven't made a logical argument. Not that it fails a test of logic. It doesn't pretend to be a logical argument other than in your outright claims. Even happier, the lack of logical basis has been outline to you multiple times ..
Quoting ken2esq
Just a caution that this entire passage makes it seem as though you have absolutely no interest in discussing anything and purely an interest in defeating opponents. Not even their arguments.
And happily again, it's not a false position as best anyone but you can make out. I apologise that i've not been across many other threads regarding your OP. I shall take a stab at some elements there after this post.
As other's have said, this makes no sense. What are you taking reality to be, in which this dance occurs? It's nonsensical to posit objects without a reality in which to exist.
Quoting ken2esq
Can you explain what htis actually is? Mechanistically?
Quoting ken2esq
Again, totally nonsensical. Scientists often do [i]not/i] find what they expected and these are considered more interesting results. Besides this, scientific claims are generally based on hundreds of thousands of data points crunched through multiple systems by multiple subjects. Is the claim that all scientists are predisposed to expect the same things, in the same way, at the same time, based on varying sets of data?
Quoting ken2esq
Where, specifically, with exactitude are you deriving this absolutely wild suggestion from? And when i ask this, i'm looking for a bottom-up description of how you concluded A. that creation and entropy are gendered somehow, B. That they relate to human genders, and C. How you apportioned each to the respective gender that you have apportioned them to?
Quoting ken2esq
Suffice to say your request for 'evidence' and scientific studies' is misplaced, to put it politely. You've presented precisely zero of them to support your argument.
"That which is presented with no evidence can be dismissed with no evidence"Quoting ken2esq
Logically speaking, this defeats the preceding theory handily. If God is the source of creation, decision-making and completion, we have no place in those processes and therefore are not in any way creating anything. We are discovering God's whimsy.
It appears that your entire thrust of thought is predicated on ideas you cannot support and in fact, defeat later in your piece.
Secondarily, it appears that you're not open to update or further understanding of hte concepts you are misusing. I'd be first to say im no expert in Quantum physics. But i absolutely know enough to be entirely sure your use of 'wave', 'particle' and 'consciousness' are wanting. And in lieu of you providing sources for your suppositions and speculations, i don't think you're on very good footing to talk down to those who are spending their time pulling apart you claims on empirical grounds. You are factually wrong in many places, and so the speculations are necessarily as wrong or worse. Some noted above, some noted elsewhere but much smarter and better-read posters than I.
IN responding to this comment (if you do) please begin with the questions. Answering questions is really the only way to defend these thesis.
Quoting L'éléphant
Isn't it because of the influence of materialism? That was the philosophical view which sought to understand the Universe as aggregations of physical particles. (As you probably know I'm generally critical of materialism, hence my OP The Mind-Created World.)
I did, I pointed out the fallacies and the biases. I pointed out that you make up some arbitrary speculation based on a wrong interpretation of already defined science, and then you use your made up stuff as supporting evidence for new speculations, ending up in a mess of interconnected made up ideas that you try to communicate as a solid rational conclusion.
Quoting ken2esq
Not at all, not in philosophy. I've read a lot of logical and rational reasoning on this forum that changed my views. Sometimes a lot, sometimes just as a slight tweak to my own concepts. But for this to happen, you need to have a good philosophical praxis. You do not.
Quoting ken2esq
Maybe you shouldn't just take my word for it, but also everyone else in here.... it's your position that is absurd. This "no, it's you who's stuooopid" behavior when people point out your lack of logic and proper arguments is downright childish.
Quoting ken2esq
I dismantled it, by pointing out how your logic is faulty, your interpretation of evidence is wrong and your argument is fractured. Now, either you present a new argument that's properly put together, with avoiding biases and fallacies, which use a proper premise and conclusion structure (doesn't need to be hardcore, but at least clear points of evidence that leads to something inductive or deductive).
As I said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you've done nothing in that department and instead just continue to try and force others to accept your perspective.
The only perspective you've presented when reading your argument is that you're absolutely confused about all of it. You don't understand the science you use as a foundation and you don't know how to avoid the most common biases and fallacies.
It's like someone picked up a dictionary about philosophical terms and then tried to shoehorn them into an argument to make the appearance of being smart, or thinking they are doing high level philosophy because they believe in their idea so much that any notion of it being wrong is shattering their entire ego.
You're absolute lack of humility is a dead giveaway.
Quoting ken2esq
Why don't you go back to reddit where your rhetoric belong, if you argue like that you won't last long in here. Check the forum guidelines if you don't believe me.
Because, as I said, a black hole is not a true closed system when you account for Hawking radiation, which is so small that you may consider it as such, approximately.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Those two are extremely basic concepts of physics which you could easily look up, why do I have to provide you with education? A concept and a theory are not the same thing at all, that is also extremely basic philosophy of science.
I stand by what I said previously. Almost everybody in this thread is completely unequipped to deal with physics beyond F=ma, especially OP. I will let this thread rest as it is a complete waste of time, even on the philosophy side, as OP is clearly what some corners of the internet call a "schizo".
What is determined though, what our measurement will be? Or maybe the possibility that was actualized is retroactively determined? Or maybe all possibilities occur and we only gain information about which possibility occurred in our universe?
The problem is that there are several equally supportable explanations for what is going on. Popular scientists muddy the waters by declaring that one such position is "what science says happens," or more often by declaring various perfectly defendable positions "absurd." Ironically, one of the models that best keeps our classical intuitions in tact, and keep locality, is retrocausality.
The term "create" seems to me to lead to confusion towards the thought of a creatio ex nihilo. I prefer to say "catalyze", "induce" or "provoke".
Bell's Theorem is precisely about ruling out the latter.
The devil is in the details here though. What is meant by "observer" and "observed?" Decoherence seems to even suggest it might be a gradient.
It would be a creation from a well defined space of possibilities rather than ex nihilo.
Anyhow, circling back to the main topic:
IMO, the problem is the Kantian assumption that the world is "out there," as something we need to map "in here" in the first place. Scientists create the world to the extent that they shape how we subjects (part of the world) experience things.
The way in which a thing is experienced is a real relationship that thing has with the subject, a property of the thing. This is a real relationship, our internal world is not somehow a "less real" echo of the rest of the world. If things are defined by their properties, then we can say that, in important ways, things evolve with our collective understanding of them; the relations that define them change. Because of this, it's fair to say things change as we develop new understandings of them; the thing has new relations that did not obtain before. This is not any different than saying that "new particles" emerged in the early universe as relations changed, making things that were previously indiscernible different from one another.
This idea is easier to accept for more obviously protean terms. "Communism" today simply isn't the "communism" of 1848. It's evolved. However, a solid look at what is meant by "particle" will show a similarly protean evolution. Thus, particles evolve too.
Against this, there is generally an assertion made about particles being "out there" versus things like "communism" being "in here" phenomena. Yet, since the "in here" and "out there" bleed into each other causally in a seamless fashion (e.g. communism brought about plenty of "out there" changes) this dualism seems unwarranted.
Kant's dualist legacy seems to leave us having to choose between all the evidence for anti-realism re science and all the very good reasons we should like to claim there is an objective world that gets "discovered." Drop the dualist assumption, the noumena, and you have no good reason to go on spinning your head over "maps versus territories." If you start with noumena, then I don't even see how there is any reason to be a realist in the first place
Or to sum up: rather than "discovering vs creating" we might simply acknowledge that new things are constantly coming into being. One of the new things coming into being is our refined understanding of the way the world is. This is new, created through our efforts. However, the world is a rational place, and so the same rationality that has existed the whole time also shapes what is created, thus we are discovering principles that have always been in effect. Science, systematic inquiry in general, is the process of the rationality in being becoming known to being as subject, substance as subject.
Well in regards to the former, that's potentially a matter of interpretation though I would say most interpretations would not word it like that.
:up: Yes, I agree. I also never agree with materialism as it removes the observer -- the sentient being -- from the narrative.
I've heard this said elsewhere but I don't think that's an accurate description. I take Kant to be pointing out that the mind is an active agent which dynamically constructs the experiential world through synthesis of perception, judgement and inference. It is not a blank slate, a tabula rasa, which passively receives impressions from an existing world. Kant describes the sense in which the mind creates the world (although creation might be a problematical term due to its historical association with divine creation - 'constructs' might be a better choice of terms.) The 'transcendental unity of apperception' is the process by which the mind combines or synthesizes various sensory inputs (apperceptions) into a unified whole. It ensures that the sensory data we receive is not just a chaotic influx of sensations but is organized into a meaningful experience. And neuroscience has as yet not identified the way in which the brain-mind achieves this synthesis (this is the neural binding problem in regards to the subjective unity of perception.)
There are convergences between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics and Kant's epistemology (not that much mention of Kant was made by the Copenhagen scientists, although Heisenberg wrote about it in his book Physics and Beyond.) But it is implicit in Bohr's 'a phenomena is not a phenomena until it is an observed phenomena' and Heisenberg's 'What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.' Here's an interesting lecture on some of these convergences by philosopher of science Michel Bitbol on Bohr's Complementarity and Kant's Epistemology for anyone with an hour to spare.
FYI I've located that essay I mentioned, it is from Werner Heisenberg's 1952 book Physics and Beyond. Herewith the relevant chapter, in PDF format, Positivism, Mysticism and Religion. It relates a discussion between Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Neils Bohr, which discusses positivism. I think it shows that Bohr was by no means positivist in his outlook, even though it is common to depict his attitude as positivist, incorrectly in my view.
The salient quotation:
Describes quite a bit of what goes on in analytical philosophy, in my view.
Right, interpretations of Kant have broken into differing camps. However, the more popular one seems to be the dualist camp, the camp that draws a hard dividing line distinguishing "internal, mind-created map" from "external territory." The other way to interpret this is through the frame of subjective idealism. Per this view, we can say the mind creates/constructs the world (broadly taking, Fichte would be taking this approach to Kant's dualism problem).
I think these both have problems. The first posits a sort of hard dualism that seems difficult to support. It has both empirical problems and problems related to dogmatic presuppositions undergirding the transcendental deduction. That, and its starting suppositions seem like they can lead as easily to subjective idealism as the map/territory dichotomy, and it seems hard to say why we should support one over the other.
The subjective idealist position seems to have problems too. If the mind creates the world, did the Moon exist before minds? If we say "no" we have plausibility issues and problems with determining how it is that different discrete minds live in the "same" world (i.e., wouldn't each mind "create" a different world?). If we say "yes," then we've re-imported a dualism where there are inaccessible noumena that causally interact with the mind, but which we can know nothing about.
IMO, the mistake is in thinking that the way in which the mind interacts with its environment isn't guided by the same principles that obtain throughout the world. The mind doesn't need to be a blank slate, a window, to avoid problems with dualism, it just needs to function according to the same global rationality. If this is the case, then we can say things about "mind-independent reality" just fine.
If rationality doesn't exist in the world, then the entire scientific project and empiricism is doomed from the outset.
Definitely not. But neither did it not exist.
Quoting Wayfarer
*Nor for transcendental idealism.
That is from the Mind-Created World OP, and I believe is consistent with Kant's idealism. (Incidentally @Manuel has pointed out an excellent recent book on Kant, Manifest Reality which I think advocates a similar interpretation - the correct one - although I'm still only part-way through it. )
Rationality doesn't exist in the world tout courte. It is derived from the consistency of the relationships between ideas and experiences. (Even ChatGPT agrees!)
ooof. Is this the line that you take? That perception invokes?
ChatGPT is so cool....
Incidentally, I thought you had held a view that rationality was a transcendental phenomenon of some kind.
if rationality emerges from how our mental structures organize and interpret our sensory experiences, leading to consistent and coherent knowledge, then isn't rationality contingent?
No, because it has to exist in the first place, in order for us to know anything. It's 'transcendental' in Kant's sense that it is implicit in knowledge but not revealed in experience. Accordingly, It's not emergent but pre-supposed.
I think the precursor to that argument is the Argument from Equality in the Phaedo. You will recall that Socrates says that in order to know that two things are exactly equal, we already must possess the idea of equality as the basis for such judgements. I think the principle can be extended to all manner of judgements concerning 'it is', 'it is not', etc. We don't notice that in all such judgements, abstraction is involved. We don't notice it, because judgement relies on it. That is why natural science can't account for reason - because it has already incorporated many such grounding assumptions in its fundamental axioms. That is the source of 'the blind spot of science'. Few see it, and advocating it generally provokes a furious response, which indicates that it's a hot-button issue.
I think the overwhelming tendency in philosophy generally is to vaccilate between 'the world is real' (the objective stance, scientism) and the mind is real (subjective idealism). I think the right balance is to understand that experiential insight has both subjective and objective poles - which is the phenomenological analysis in a nutshell. And even though phenomenology differs from Kant, I still see Kant - and Plato - as the starting point.
I'm going to have to ponder on this one.
Part of me feels as if you may be able to apply to reason that which you are applying to the apparent physical world - reason is a view from somewhere, based (it seems) on the inherent capacities and limitations of our cognitive apparatus. I see you are saying rationality exists independent of human perception. (A condition of experince but independent of experince. Kant) Can we say this? Could it not be the case that although reason allows us to do things, it's capacity to work is subject entirely to the human point of view. Perhaps reason is analogous to sight - a kind of sense rather than something outside ourselves.
What would @Joshs say about the status of reason.
We do have to presuppose it to function in our world, but I would like to hear what other thinkers have made of the nature of this presupposition (apart from the obvious Platonic interpretations).
I think the traditionalist answer to that is to refer to universals - hence my reference to Russell yesterday. Very briefly, it revolves around the metaphysical assertion that Ideas (whether construed as forms, principles or universals) are only graspable by a rational mind (nous) but they are not produced by the mind. They are 'in the mind, but not of it' - that is, intelligible objects.
Quoting Bertrand Russell, The World of Universals
Feser makes an identical point:
Quoting Edward Feser
[quote=Wikipedia]In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is the basic understanding or awareness that allows human beings to think rationally. For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals can do. For him then, discussion of nous is connected to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way, and whether people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same universal categories in the same logical ways.[/quote]
Broadly speaking, it was the decline of scholastic realism in later medieval thought which leads to today's empiricism, nominalism and materialism - because there is no conceptual space in which there can be real abstractions. That has been collapsed with Scotus' 'univocity of being' and Ockham's nominalism.
That's why I find myself somewhat unwillingly drawn towards neo-Thomism :yikes:
Quoting Tom Storm
I would guess he would say it's contingent, as postmodernism generally does.
Quoting Wayfarer
I guess it is this I need to unpack or develop a more robust view of. I've grappled with universals several times over the years.
Quoting Wayfarer
Certainly looks that way.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'd be interested to hear why.
In the end, if you drill down into the belief in god/s and transcend the literalism and unpack the allegories, you eventually have to end up somewhere here, right? Abstractions/universals.
Quoting Wayfarer
To the extent that I would locate something like a universal aspect of reason, it would be neither in anything external to the mind nor within the mind , but in the structure of temporal synthesis that makes mind and world inseparably co-depdendent. For instance, the pure ideality of a geometric form like a triangle is not universal because it is a form located outside of the mind, but because it originates in a special kind of synthesizing activity of thought upon an empirical substrates producing pure enumeration. In order to know what how many means, we have to begin with a multiplicity of things in the world or in our imagination, direct our attention toward noticing individual elements while abstracting away everything about those separately noticed things that distinguish them qualitatively from each other, other than our treating them as empty, generic units of a counting. In other words, number, and the pure geometric forms which depend on it, is universal because it is not tied to anything but itself. It is not a special universal sense but the absence of meaningful sense, thanks to the peculiar intentional relationship to things that creates it.
Science since Galileo decided to adopt this empty mathematical idealization as the model for empirical exactitude. A scientific theory is accurate to the extent that it approximates a geometrical ideal of perfection based on empty enumeration of same thing different time. The power of a reason that can produce both the empty universality of mathematical objects and the meaningful sense of real objects is in its anticipative construing of never before seen events in terms of likeness and difference with respect to previous experience, rather than in some ready-made internal capacity to apprehend ready-made external forms.
I can go along with most of that, except for
Quoting Joshs
If the 'empirical substrate' refers to simple cognition, other animals possess that (and as has been shown, some recognise numbers of objects up to a point), but they don't possess the general ability of abstract reason. So I'm not inclined towards a deflationary attitude towards reason.
Quoting Joshs
Very close in meaning to the synthetic a priori. And that certain forms seem to pre-exist the minds which discover them is also a relevant consideration. Sure the mind and world are co-arising, but the structures which animate both are commensurable in some sense (which is the contention of classical metaphysics, i.e. Thinking Being, Eric Perl).
Quoting Joshs
I've not heard it put like this before, it's helpful. I need to source an expanded account.
@Tom Storm
I think a more realistic way of looking at it is that human reason is substantially a function of pattern recognition occurring in our brains, and that notions like forms and universals reflect a neurologically naive attempt at making sense of the results of such pattern recognition. I think there is a reification going on, in seeing as things ("intelligible objects"), what can more accurately be understood as events subconsciously occurring in our brains (recognitions of patterns).
I suppose one mights say, as Wayf does, that "they are not produced by the mind" if "the mind" is equated with consciousness. However, from a more holistic perspective, where mind is understood as including the subconscious activity of our brains, it seems to me more accurate to think that what Wayf refers to as "intelligible objects" are in fact produced by the mind/brain. ( Which is not to say they are purely phantasms without correspondence to things in the larger world.)
I can see how this might work. What I'd like is an accessible article on the matter to flesh it out a little more.
The problem there is that we wouldnt recognise patterns, let alone have neuroscience, or any science, were it not for the ability to abstract, compare, contrast, equate, and so on. The term intelligible objects is indeed unfortunate, as it gives rise to reification (making a thing) but I see object as a convenient metaphor for a rational operation. Numbers arent actually objects in any sense other than the object of thought. The ability to count, for example, is first and foremost an intellectual act, but the fact that such an act reveals facts which are true in all possible worlds suggests the transcendental nature of reason.
Are you saying that our ability to recognize patterns is dependent on our conscious thought? If so, I think you've got things backwards.
The problem is, naturalism is further up in the epistemological stack that basic reason. So whenever you say that we can understand reason (etc) through neuroscience, youre the one who is getting it backwards. Notice that naturalism doesnt explain reason - it doesnt need to explain it. It can safely assume reason, that there is a repeatable order and things happening for a reason. But as soon as you start to ask why are things like that?, then youre into the territory of metaphysics. But then, because there is an inherent bias in naturalism against metaphysics, youre likely to get into a tangle.
(Sorry for the brevity of the above. Its Friday night in my Timezone and Im expected elsewhere.)
Doesn't this sort of beg the question by assuming that rationality can only exist as part of mind?
If mind emerges from nature, and nature has no order, how does mind develop this trait? Natural selection, thermodynamics, etc. seem to imply order that exists prior to minds. Indeed, they seem to be prerequisites for minds.
Plus, if order and law-like regularities rationality is something that only exists in mind (as opposed to "the whole world,") then it would seem to me that we can only know things about mind.
Plus, if mind creates these things, why would different, discrete minds create them in the same way? Why wouldn't we have as many worlds as minds? We could posit a sort of collective mind, or that each individual mind fixes the properties of the world in its own small measure, but this still doesn't explain why they do so in the same way. A dolphin has a very different mind from me, so it seems like we should shape the world in very different ways.
If we assume there is a common grounding for how minds work though, this isn't mysterious anymore.
As for the expertise of Chat GPT...
:grin:
Not that schema is much of an improvement, but at least theres no or less .chance of confusing it with object.
Just wondering, you know, given my philosophical proclivities .what kind of answer can one expect when asking about the status of reason?
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I agree rationality doesnt exist, per se, but without something carrying the implication of quality, such as the concept of rationality, then .
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
.might actually be the case, as far as human intelligence is concerned, Id have to say. Maybe rationality just is the degree of concordance with logical law. Problem then arises that theres no proper deduction for the origin or formality of those laws without invoking that by which any deduction is possible, which leaves as the more parsimonious that human nature itself just is logical, and the fight with empiricists/materialists/physicalists continues unabated.
From which we might expect the status of reason to be:
. It is absurd to expect to be enlightened by reason, and at the same time to prescribe to her what side of the question she must adopt. Moreover, reason is sufficiently held in check by its own power, the limits imposed on it by its own nature are sufficient; it is unnecessary for you to place over it additional guards, as if its power were dangerous to the constitution of the intellectual state .
Big if.
Im vary wary of any attempt to *explain* reason. It seems obvious to most that it evolved, as above, but I see that as reductionist, in that it reduces reason to a matter of adaptation. Thats why I frequently refer to Thomas Nagels essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, which is also a defence of the sovereignty of reason against naturalistic accounts.
More germane to the actual argument, another graphic I posted previously, from John Wheeler's Law Without Law:
Goodman goes into some of this in Starmaking.
I'm curious as to who and what you're addressing here.
It is in a rather curious essay called Law Without Law which you can find here https://m.psychonautwiki.org/w/images/3/30/Wheeler_law_without_law.pdf
Wheeler is well-known for his idea of the participatory universe, that the universe is somehow brought into being by the act of observation (although his definition of observation is rather broad as shown below). Theres a well-written magazine article on him here, from which:
I certainly dont claim to understand everything about it, but its interesting, and also very much the kind of science that the OP was about (as I point out in my earlier post.)
Sure, but so is "if mind creates nature..."
If mind (and rationality) is completely sui generis, then I'm not sure why solipsism and radical skepticism about any external world wouldn't be justified. Our entire epistemological toolkit could only be said to apply to mind. And really, it would only apply to our own particular mind, as we'd have no reason to think all minds shape reality the same way. Any "noumena" is forever beyond us, and we might as well be locked in our own separate worlds, as Locke feared.
This problem plays out with the Kant - Fichte/Hegel divide, but it interestingly seems to show up in the mind of Augustine 1,600 years earlier. Augustine famously invokes what is essentially Descartes "cognito ergo sum," for dealing with radical skeptics, but he still has Locke's concerns about everyone being "locked in" to their own world by the senses. His bridge back to a unified world is the universal Logos through which things are known, in the dialectical phenomenology of "De Trinitate." What I find interesting here is that, down to the dialectical/phenomenological style, this is in a lot of ways similar to Hegel's version of the "transcendental deduction to repair the dualism problem. Both attempts are far from clear, but I think they're right to start from the essential aspects of experience.
Yeah, apparently they had done a lot to fix Chat GPT's famous problems with primes. Interestingly though, since it is sort of a black box, they got it to do a lot better on those questions for awhile, and apparently new tweaks have led to it failing them more often again. It's not meant to be a mathbot, so I don't really hold it against it.
I've seen it first hand with code. It's remarkably good at writing code in common languages like Java. If you ask it to use proprietary languages like DAX, it is less reliable. I asked it to use the quite rare logical language of Prolog as a test and it spat out convincing looking gibberish.
But that makes sense. It's only going to be as good as its inputs.
I wonder what a cloud of uncertainty looks like. There's something essential missing from this perspective. What is the case, is that we do not in any way actually observe the "cloud" of uncertainty, or possibility, it is detected by logic, and not seen or sensed at all. What is observed is the posterior, the physical universe after those interactions which are referred to.
So, we do not observe the cloud of uncertainty, yet we do observe what is known as "interactions". And whatever it is that happens, which brings something to be from the cloud of possibilities, this, as an actual cause, cannot be an observable "interaction". But as a cause it is prior in time to the observable interactions of the physical universe, and it must itself be an "action".
This implies that there must be something actual, an actual cause, existing within that cloud of uncertainty, which is unobservable. As an actual cause though, it must also be intelligible. Recognition of this intelligible actuality, inherent within the cloud of uncertainty, as the cause of the particular event which is observable, is the essential aspect which is missing from that perspective. We must recognize that the cause of something observable, the cause of observability, is itself necessarily prior to the act of observation. This frees us from the illogical assumption that the posterior act of observation could be the cause of what is observable, also rendering the cloud of uncertainty or possibility, as inherently intelligible, in relation to the observable physical universe.
I'll go back to this point:
Quoting Wayfarer
You didn't respond to this point, but it is the crux of the matter.
You will remember that Einstein asked, ironically, 'doesn't the moon continue to exist if we're not watching it?' (which I presume you're referring to). He was doubtless pondering the sense in which the act of measurement seems to bring about (or manifest) a material outcome in quantum physics. He was adamantly of the view that what is to be measured must exist anyway, regardless of it having been measured or not. That was the crux of his dispute with Neils Bohr over his many years of debates (as described in Manjit Kumar 'Quantum'.) I take Einstein's view to represent scientific realism.
Whereas I have the understanding that the answer to the question, 'does the electron exist prior to the act of measuring it?' just is the wave equation. And that equation provides degrees of likelihood for the subject's location across a range of probabilities. It doesn't unambiguously provide a yes/no answer to the question 'does it exist?' I think this is the origin of Einstein's discomfort with quantum physics.
I think the implications are philosophically very interesting, because it introduces the concept of there being degrees of reality. The kind of existence the electron has is not definite, but it is governed by probabalistic laws. Werner Heisenberg said in Physics and Philosophy 'It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.' Heisenberg compares this to Aristotle's 'potentia', which I think can be paraphrased as 'the real realm of possibility'.
It has been experimentally demonstrated that measurements on entangled particles, such as photons, display an inexplicable correlation. You can set up an experiment so that before a measurement is made, either photon could be spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. Once one is measured, though (and found to be, say, clockwise), you know the other will have the opposite spin (counterclockwise), no matter how far away it is. But no secret signal is (or could possibly be) sent from one photon to the other after the first measurement. But drawing on Heisenberg's 'potentia' concept, its simply the case that "counterclockwise" is no longer on the list of res potentia for the second photon. An actuality (the first measurement) changes the list of potentia that still exist in the universe. Potentia encompass the list of things that may become actual; what becomes actual then changes whats on the list of potentia. (This is the 'transactional' interpretation of QM.)
Generally speaking, observations of any quantum state, containing many possibilities, turns one of those possibilities into an actual one. And the new actual event constrains the list of future possibilities, without any need for physical causation. We simply allow that actual events can instantaneously and acausally affect what is next possible which, in turn, influences what can next become actual, and so on."
Measurement, then, is a real physical process that transforms (or manifests) quantum potentia into actual, real stuff in the ordinary sense. Space and time, or spacetime, is something that emerges from a quantum substratum, as actual reality that manifests from "the realm of possibles. Spacetime, therefore, is not all there is to reality (Quantum mysteries dissolve if possibilities are realities).
There is more to be said but that's enough for one post.
Would you want this on your tombstone? :smile:
What is on my tombstone will probably only matter to someone else.
I don't get this. If all minds disappeared right now, either the moon would continue to exist or cease to exist. There's no middle ground between existing and not existing.
That's precisely the point of the long post above.
There's the problem, whether regarding the moon or a quantum particle. Were philosophical terms defined more clearly some threads would vanish. Exist physically, or exist metaphysically? One or the other or both or neither? Then there are those damned probability waves, always collapsing like snowcones on a summer day just because we stare at them.
The moon shows a tendency to persist when we look away.
There seems to be a casual assumption that 'everyone knows' what it means for something to exist. After all you can open your eyes and see it. But again philosophy is exploring that question from a critical - not necessarily outright sceptical - perspective.
Quoting Wayfarer
I did read the article. You haven't answered the question as to whether you think the claim that possibilities are realities means something beyond what I believe is commonly accepted: namely that there are real possibilities and merely logical possibilities.
If that idea has not "fallen out of favour" then what exactly is the idea that you think has fallen out of favour?
Quoting Wayfarer
Everyone knows what it means to exist in the most basic sense; it simply means 'to be actual' as opposed to being imaginary or fictional. But now you may ask what being actual, imaginary or fictional themselves mean. When we are called upon to precisely define or explain terms the problems begin as Augustine pointed out with regard to time.
This is because such concepts can only be defined and explained in terms of other concepts, which in turn can only be defined and explained in terms of yet others and so on. This leads to an endless regression.
But we have an intuitive sense of what such terms mean even if we cannot precisely define and explain that meaning. I would say that intuitive sense derives from experiencing the contexts in which such usages occur.
If we don't have an intuitive understanding of these terms, we are not going to get to an understanding via the endless regress of definition and explanation or via etymology which is fraught with its own set of interpretive pitfalls. How else do you think we could arrive at understanding such concepts?
I think it's an intriguing ontological issue - what kind of existence possibilities have. ' Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or potential realities, that have not yet become actual. These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are ontological that is, real components of existence.' (From the article.) Whereas, I noticed, for example, in another article, debating the possible reality of mathematical objects, that it is said that ' Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing outside of space and time makes empiricists nervous.'
Quoting Janus
I think it harks back to the idea of there being degrees of reality. As I said, the answer to the question 'does the particle exist' just is the probability equation. You may brush it off but I'm suggesting, this is just what caused Einstein to ask the question 'doesn't the moon continue to exist when we're not looking at it?'
I think there might be connection between that idea of there being degrees of reality in sub-atomic physics, with the general idea that reality comes in degrees.
In the context of the kind of idealism I'm advocating, it simply serves to point to the constructive role of perception in experience. That what we take to be simply existent, is also constituted in some sense by our perception of it. Not that it doesn't exist when not perceived, but that 'existence' itself is a manifold, for which perception is foundational.
Notice the convergence with Madhyamaka (Middle Way) philosophy:
[quote=The Buddha]By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one.[/quote]
The interesting {but unfortunately unanswerable) question is as to whether there are real possibilities that never become actual or whether all real possibilities are determined to become actual. Of course, it certainly seems that no possibility exists as anything more than a possibility until (and unless?) it becomes actual.
Does anything exist outside of spacetime (presuming that by "spacetime" we don't mean human phenomenological space and time).? I'd say again that we have no way of determining the truth regarding that question.
Quoting Wayfarer
It might make some empiricists nervous...beyond that I think it is an unwarranted generalization. In any case even if it were true, it would be a psychological observation, not a philosophical insight.
Quoting Wayfarer
I can't make sense of the idea of degrees of reality, except in terms of degrees of definiteness, which would seem to come down to experiential intensity, and so would be relevant only in regard to human experience. In other words, some things may seem more real (vivid or definite) than others.
Quoting Wayfarer
From the little I know of QM, this is controversial. I don't like to speculate about things of which I have no expert or at least reasonably educated knowledge. What prompted Einstein to ask that question is a matter of psychological speculation. He was probably a realist so it would likely have seemed most plausible to him that the moon does continue to exist when we're not looking.
But again, the answer may vary depending on what we mean by "the moon".; do we mean 'the moon as appearance' or 'the extra-human conditions that give rise to the human perception of what we call 'the moon'. Different ways of thinking about it is what it comes down to as far as I am concerned; there is no final and absolute answer to questions like that.
Quoting Wayfarer
I wonder why you are advocating itdo you think it really matters for human life in general (as opposed to say you or anyone else who cares about it either way) whether idealism or realism is true or at least more accurate?
For example, do you want idealism to be true because you think it would allow for an afterlife?
But the wave equation specifies a range of possibilities. The philosophical question is 'does the electron described by those possibilities exist' to which the answer is, it is kind of real, up until the time it is registered on plate. at which point it becomes definite. This is the much ballyhoed 'collapse of the wave function' that the Everett interpretation seeks to avoid having to acknowledge.
Quoting Janus
He was indeed a realist, and his debate with Bohr over quantum physics and realism occupied him for decades. That book Quantum by Manjit Kumar is basically about all of that. It's still an open question.
Quoting Janus
No, simply because there is no material ultimate, materialism is like a kind of popular myth.
I don't see why you would say this is unanswerable. If there is real possibilities then many do not ever become actual, otherwise they would not be real possibilities. Possibility means that actualization is not necessary.
IMO, reifying possibility to the status of multiple actual worlds is a mistake born out of equivocating the various uses of the term.
That is true, but the nature of the object who's existence is only possible is not. And that is the point at issue in this context, as the putative object, a component of the atom, is supposed to be amongst the building blocks of material existence.
If a weather-forecaster states that tomorrows weather is possibly heavy showers, i interpret his sentence to be an empirical report regarding his model of the weather, and not literally to be a reference to tomorrows unobserved weather. (In general, I don't consider predictions to be future-referring in a literal sense, for the very reason that it leads to conflating modalities with theory-content and facts)
Modalities only arise in conversation when a theory is used to make predictions. But the content of theories never mention or appeal to modalities, e.g neither the Bloch sphere describing the state-space of a qubit, nor the Born rule describing a weighted set of alternative experimental outcomes appeal to the existence of modalities. Rather the converse is true. E.g a set of alternative outcomes stated in a theory might be given possible world semantics, but the semantics isn't the empirical content of the theory and so does not ground the theory, in my empiricist opinion.
It doesnt seem an apt analogy to me. At issue is the nature of the object in question and what it is that transforms it from a possibility to an actuality.
Put predictions aside for a moment. How would you deal with possibilities in the sense of "it is possible for me to do X, and possible for me to do Y", when X and Y are mutually exclusive? If I act for Y, then X is made to be impossible, and if I act for X, then Y is made to be impossible. However, at the time when I am deciding, both are possible.
How can we model this type of future in relation to this type of past, when both X and Y change from being equally possible in the future, to being one necessary, and one impossible in the past? What happens at "the present" to change the ontological status of these events?
Surely it is not the human act of deciding which causes the change in ontological status, which is known as the difference between future and past. That would mean that human beings have the capacity to create real ontological possibilities when those possibilities would otherwise not be there. How could human beings create possibilities in an otherwise determined world? It makes far more sense to assume that the possibilities are already there, as a characteristic of passing time, and human beings just have the capacity to take advantage of those possibilities.
It becomes definite for us at that point; we can't say anything definite either way about its existence prior to that, but it does not follow that what we can say reflects what is the actuality of what appears to us as an electron. There must be a good reason why there is no consensus among those who might actually know what they are talking about when it comes to the question about ontological status of the collapse of the wave function.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't see how it follows that there must be real possibilities which do not become actualized. If nature is fundamentally random there would be, but if it is fundamentally deterministic there would not be, and we have no way of telling whether nature is fundamentally random or deterministic.
Quoting Wayfarer
We don't know whether there are "material ultimates" or not.
That's right! As it stands, it is still an open question, something many here seem not to notice. The three main popular books I have read on it the last 5 years or so are: Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality(best of them in my view); David Lindley, Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg and Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science; and Adam Becker, What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics. Notice all of them are about the 'debate over the nature of reality' and 'struggles for the soul of science'. It suggests that there's something important and real at stake.
Einstein represents the realist view - that what is real must be real independently of any act of measurement on our part. But it seems from those readings that in this philosophical respect, Einstein was mistaken (which probably has no bearing on his scientific discoveries).
Quoting Janus
If a material ultimate can be conceived of in the classical sense of an atom, an indivisible point-particle, I think it's pretty definitively disproved. It is now said that sub-atomic particles are 'excitations in fields' - but what 'fields' are is an open question, as is whether there may be fields other than electromagnetic (which you would never detect with electromagnetic instruments, for example morphic fields.)
I read one of Paul Davies' books years back, around 1990, called: The Matter Myth, about just this this topic.
If I speculate that the past might change, then aren't I contradicting the very definition of what i mean by "the past"?
And If i speculate that the future is already decided, then aren't I contradicting the very definition of what i mean by "the future"?
I don't conceive of a clear distinction between the tenses and the modalities. I interpret both empirically within the context of the present, even I don't consider their meanings to be empirically exhausted by present observations, memories, intentions, actions and so on.
Quoting Wayfarer
Does it even make sense to consider the modalities (or tenses) to be the subject-matter of physics? For aren't the modalities the very essence of what is meant by an 'explanation' that are inevitably invoked when explaining any explicandum in any subject?
Unless physics is willing to collapse the explanans/explanandum distinction by appealing to circular reasoning (which for many would defeat the purpose of an explanation), then i cannot see how the metaphysical concepts of modalities can be treated as first-order physical propositions that warrant physical explanation.
From an instrumentalist perspective, scientific theories are conditional propositions that do not say how things are in themselves, but rather predict or describe the empirical consequences of performing a particular action or observation in a particular context. So according to this perspective, possibilities are what is directly expressed by scientific theories, but not what is represented or referred to by such theories.
Not a perspective of philosophical interest, I'm afraid. I'm genuinely interested in the philosophical implications. As I said already, what is ostensibly represented or referred to by fundamental physics is, or at least was, considered to be the ostensible building blocks of material reality. Of course as far as studying physics and putting the results to work is concerned, none of that is particularly important. But I think it's important.
The supposedly unanswerable question was, "whether there are real possibilities that never become actual or whether all real possibilities are determined to become actual". Within that question "real possibilities" is assumed. And "real possibilities" implies that not all of those possibilities become actual, because then they would be necessities rather than possibilities. They would just have the appearance of possibility but not really be possibilities.
So I really cannot understand your way of thinking here. The assumption of "real possibilities" as a primary premise, denies the possibility of determinism, leaving the proposition "nature is fundamentally deterministic" as necessarily false, therefore not relevant in this context.
Quoting sime
I don't see that at all. It would require that "past" and "future" be defined in such a way so as to create those contradictions. But that is not the way that we normally define past and future. We normally define them in relation to time, as the time not yet come and the time already gone by, or in relation to physical events as those not yet occurred and already occurred. Notice that neither of those two stipulate whether the past might be changed, or whether the future might be already decided. To produce the contradictions you refer to, we need to add these metaphysical/ontological principles as premises.
Quoting sime
I really don't understand what you are saying here. You appear to be saying that you see no clear distinction between past and future, because you interpret everything "within the context of the present". But isn't it the case that your reference to "the present" already implies a clear distinction between past and future? What could you possible mean by "the present", other than an assumed separation between memories of past, and anticipations of the future? Therefore your reference to "the present" seems to already imply a clear distinction between past and future.
Furthermore, you refer to "present observations", but this concept is logically flawed. There can be no such thing as present observations because "to observe" is to take note of what happens, and this implies that an observation, being what has been noticed is necessarily in the past. It is this idea, of "present observations" which is actually self-contradicting.
I can't see any reason to think the answer is not undecidable. Also, I can't see how it would make any difference to human life whether the collapse of the wave function is 'real' (whatever that could actually mean) as opposed to merely an artefact of our modeling.
I put 'real' in inverted commas and "whatever that could actually mean" in brackets because the only way I can conceive that the collapse of the wave function could be ontologically (as opposed to epistemologically or phenomenologically) real would be if it were independent of us and our models, that is if it were mind-independent.
Quoting Wayfarer
Perhaps fields are material ultimates. Remember the basic idea behind the concepts of materiality and physicality is that they denote that which exists in and of itself independently of human perception and understanding. Now of course we can say that it is logically possible that no such things exist, but it is not demonstrable that they don't, or even decidable whether they do or not.
So, our beliefs either way must be guided by what seems most plausible given the whole of human experience and understanding as far as we are able to comprehend it, or else guided by wishful thinking if the answer seems to matter enough to us to preclude the application of disinterested rational consideration.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are ignoring that fact that all possibilities remain such for us (since we cannot know the future). So even if what we think of as real (i.e. physically law-abiding as opposed to merely logical) possibilities are actually necessities (if determinism is true) they still remain just possibilities, epistemologically speaking.
About the ontological we can only speculate, and we cannot even be sure those speculations are coherent or even what it would mean for them to be coherent.
Too many double negatives in that to make sense of. But according to this blog post by Sean Carroll the question is undecideable.
[quote=Sean Carroll] quantum mechanics has been around since the 1920s at least, in a fairly settled form. John von Neumann laid out the mathematical structure in 1932. Subsequently, quantum mechanics has become the most important and best-tested part of modern physics. Without it, nothing makes sense. Every student who gets a degree in physics is supposed to learn QM above all else. There are a variety of experimental probes, all of which confirm the theory to spectacular precision.
And yet we dont understand it.[/quote]
Makes me wonder if it is a form of sorcery :yikes:
As for what is or isn't mind-independent, much of the argument over interpretation revolves around just that point.
Quoting Janus
Capable of existing independently was the original meaning of substantia in the philosophical sense. And that was never understood as 'physical' until Descartes' 'res extensia'.
Sorry Janus, I just cannot follow you. It seems like we must each have a completely different idea of what "real possibilities" means.
I do not see how a real possibility could be "physically law abiding". The very nature of "possibility" implies that the selective process which decides which possibilities would be actualized, cannot be described by "physical law". If the selection was describable by physical law, then the thing selected would be necessitated by the reality which that law itself describes. So there would be no real possibility there, only a deterministic world with our lack of knowledge creating the illusion of possibility.
You need to try harder.
Quoting Wayfarer
If we don't undertsnd it, how can we draw any conclusions about it? Sounds like the very defintion of "undecidable' to me.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not an auspicious omen for a fruitful conversation.
I think what was required is that you better explain yourself. What I explained to you is that I could not make sense of your description of real possibilities as "physically law-abiding". But you wrote it, so it must make sense to you, therefore you would probably be able to explain to me what you actually meant by this.
Quoting Janus
I can assure you that people draw a lot of conclusions about things which they do not understand. That is what is known as misunderstanding and it's very common. It is not the case, that if a person does not understand, they will not draw any conclusions about that which they do not understand, because often they think that they understand when they actually do not understand.
So for example, I drew a conclusion about what you meant by possibilities which are "physically law abiding", and the conclusion was that this would be a self-contradicting proposition. But obviously you did not mean to present me with a self-contradicting proposition, so we can make a further conclusion, that I misunderstood you, and I made a conclusion about something which I did not understand.
Yes, roughly speaking.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I understand the tenses to be closely related to modal distinctions made in relation to the present, but I don't deny the modal distinctions, nor the practical psychological distinction between past and future, or what McTaggart crudely referred to as the A series (is psychological time really a series?). But like McTaggart, I don't think the information content of the "A series" has any obvious relationship to the B series which is all that the public theory of physics refers to, or to the broader physical conception of time that Wittgenstein occasionally referred to as "information time" which i think of as a "use-meaning" generalisation of McTaggarts B series that also includes the practice of time keeping ( see Hintikka for more discussion on Wittgenstein's evolving views on the subject).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The word "present" is only used to stress the distinction between the A and B series and the fact that observations are always in the present tense, even when they are used to evaluate past-contigent propositions (which are understood to be past-contigent in the sense of the B series, but not necessarily in the sense of the A series)
So yes, observations are not of the present but they are always in relation to the present tense. Furthermore, if the B series isn't reducible to facts that are obtainable in the present-tense then the existence and usefulness of the B series can be doubted or denied, and at the very least cannot be reconciled with the the present-tensed practice of physics.
A logical possibility is anything which is not self-contradictory, while a real possibility is something that could actually come to be. For example, it may or may not be a real possibility (epistemically speaking of course) that there are unicorns on some distant planet, whereas as there is no possibility that there may be perfectly round perfectly square rocks on some planet somewhere.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I haven't denied that unjustified conclusions are often drawn.
This is what I don't understand. How can you accept the modal distinctions based in the present, and the psychological distinction between past and future, of the A series, yet then say that this has no relation to "the broader physical conception of time". Obviously, "present", and the distinction between past and future are temporal concepts, so they must have some relation to the broader concept of time. Or would you be assuming that either one or the other, A or B, provides a complete represent of time, and the other is simply misguided or wrong, so that there is no relation between the two?
Quoting sime
Nor do I understand what you say here. Observations are most often stated in the past tense, X happened, Y happened, or x was observed. Of course the past tense is "in relation to the present tense", but this does not mean that we can characterize them as being in the present tense.
We often will make an inductive generalization from a number of observations, and state the general principle in the present tense. But a generalization is not itself an observation, it is a conclusion drawn from a number of observations.
This draws into question what you say about the B series. The B series representation is obtained exclusively from the past. It is completely derived from past observations, and any statements about "the present" suffer the problems discussed by Hume. Observations of the past can only be related to the present through some form of inductive generalization. Therefore the potential problems which you indicate for the B series are very real.
It is not logical to say that if the B series did not relate to the present tense this would produce problems for the practice of physics, and conclude therefore that the B series must relate to the present tense. In reality, all we need to do is take a good look at the problems of modern physics, and we can see the possibility that many of the problems which it has encountered are likely created because the B series which it employs does not adequately relate to the present.
Quoting Janus
I don't see any difference here. If it is something which could actually come to be, then it is "not self-contradictory". And if it is not self-contradictory then it s something which could actually come to be. Your examples support this. You have just said the same thing in two different ways, "not self-contradictory", and "could actually come to be", are just different descriptions of the same type of possibilities. So all you've done is defined "real possibilities" as being the same as logical possibilities, rather than describing a distinction between these two.
You're not getting the distinction between what is logically impossible and what may be, due to the nature of things, physically impossible, even though not logically self-contradictory.
An example that should be simple enough for you to understand: It is not logically impossible that tomorrow you may be able to fly like a bird. Is it physically impossible? We cannot be 100% sure that the law of gravity will not change between now and tomorrow thus allowing you to fly, even though it seems most improbable, so we don't know for sure what is physically impossible and what is not, without adding the stipulation that the law of gravity must not change. With that condition added, we do know that it is physically impossible for you to be able to fly tomorrow.
When you say, "what may be ... physically impossible", all you are doing is signifying a possibility. So the use of "impossible" carries no weight, has no force, because you are simply saying that it is possible that such is impossible. Therefore "what may be physically impossible" is sort of meaningless except to signify a possibility. In fact it would be better off understood as self-contradictory. To say "it is possible that X is impossible" is just another way of saying "X is possible". And this means "X is not impossible". Your example ought to demonstrate this to you.
What you wrote there reads to me like nonsensical philosobabble.
Presumably what is physically impossible is physically impossible, but it is also epistemologically (if not ontologically or metaphysically) possible that nothing is impossible; we just don't know. When I say "what may be" I am speaking from the epistemological standpoint which is that we may not know, or even, taking the radical position, do not and cannot know.
Taking the radical Humean position, we don't know with certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow, because the habits (laws) of nature might change, or the Sun might in the interim go into supernova, on account of some factor that we were unaware of in our understanding of solar physics. It follows that we don't know whether it is physically possible that the sun will not rise tomorrow.
Try using actual examples; I think it will help you to clarify your thinking.
This would explain why you haven't addressed the point I made. Your example serves to demonstrate that your presumption of "what is physically impossible" is not justifiable. Therefore, as I explained in my last post, you use "physically impossible" in a self contradicting way, to refer to things which are actually possible, not really impossible. That is to say that "physically impossible" is just a possibility, and therefore not really impossible.
You say "Presumably what is physically impossible is physically impossible". What could this mean other than that the physically impossible is physically impossible? Therefore we must conclude that there could be no such thing as what is physically impossible, because that itself would be physically impossible. But you have in no way even defined what you mean by "physically impossible" and why you would presume that it is physically impossible for anything to be physically impossible, so to use your word, it's all just "philosobabble" anyway.
I don't presume that all at all. It seems you misunderstood this
Quoting Janus
which was very badly expressed. I didn't mean to claim that it was physically impossible that anything should be physically impossible which would be a contradiction, The redundancy of expression there was just for emphasis; what I meant was that presumably some things are physically impossible.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Physical impossibility is admittedly just a possibility for us; we are epistemologically limited, so we don't know with certainty whether anything is physically impossible or not. But it seems reasonable to think that some things are physically impossible given the way nature works. Fort example it may be physically impossible to transmute lead into gold, or for me to grow to be a thousand light years tall, or for that matter to travel faster than light.
Then you gave the example, of the sun not rising tomorrow as something which appeared to be physically impossible, but isn't really physically impossible. So you just disproved your own presumption, that some things are physically impossible.
Quoting Janus
Now you're back to the contradiction I explained early, where "impossibility" is reduced to a type of possibility.
The problem you are demonstrating is due to a failure in your representation of "real possibility", which you incorrectly try to oppose with "physically impossible".
We are limited by what we do not know that which we do not know. What is beyond our realm of perception is to some extent beyond our realm of conception. As my late algebra student, my Corgi, Jake, would attest.