Forgive me.

The first sign of being addicted to philosophy is doing it while you're in a k-hole. The second sign is doing philosophy when you're not in a k-hole.

@Andrew M@boundless@noAxioms, note of appreciation for such a good sustained discussion. :clap:

You've quoted two passages, one from Bohr, one from Wheeler, both of which call into question the objectivity of scientific observation, as if they support the objectivity of scientific observation. So - who is not reading what? :-) — Wayfarer

They only 'show' this when you misinterpret the observer. Like this:

What I am arguing is that, you take 'the world out there' as independently real, always existing, regardless of any observation by us. — Wayfarer

See? Claiming observer=human again. Bohr and Wheeler have gone to pains to say that this isn't so. This is the only thing stopping you from seeing 'observers' - which recall for Wheeler are 'irreversible events of amplification' - as part of nature. Going back to the start; like a sodium atom and chlorine atom acting as observers for the electron in the outer shell of the sodium atom by constraining its distribution of trajectories in forming an ionic bond.

Bad news for the 'arche-fossil'! — Wayfarer

... Really? You didn't even tag me man! And you seem to have forgotten a few things from the paper, selectively choosing what to emphasise.

Initiate close reading mode:

After your first quote, Wheeler clarifies his notion of 'recording' or 'observation':

A phenomenon is not yet a phenomenon until it has been brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplification; such as the blackening of a grain of silver bromide emulsion or the triggering of a photodetector

(my italics)

Firstly, observation is characterised as 'an irreversible act of amplification'. Secondly, he clearly ascribes the role of 'irreversible acts of amplification' to the lab equipment, rather than human consciousness. (without mentioning the previous quote @StreetlightX gave)

He also draws a large distinction between 'elementary quantum phenomenon', like the observation of a single photon dispelling its superposed histories, and macroscopic phenomena:

Anything macroscopic which happened in the past makes, we know, a rich fallout of consequences in the present. But whether we deal with the fall of the tree or the evidence for the dab of paint on the canvas or the motion of the moon through the sky, the number of quanta that come into play is so enormous that the unseen quantum individuality of the act of observation can hardly be said to influence the event observed

he goes on to clarify that rather than defining the past with respect to the present, the quantum observation determines the trajectory it took. Prior to the observation it makes no sense to speak of the route the photon took. He clarifies:

This is the sense in which, in a loose way of speaking, we decide what the photon shall have done after it has already done it. In actuality it is wrong to talk of the "route" of the photon. For a proper way of speaking we recall once more that it makes no sense to talk of a phenomenon until it has been brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplification; 'No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed) phenomenon'

This is much distinct from giving any sort of being, even theoretical, to the past; it is saying that for quantum states/trajectories it makes no sense to talk of their past trajectory without their observation. Moreover just after introducing his idea of a 'participatory universe', he immediately gives the clarifying note; a caution; that this should not be interpreted in terms of consciousness.

We cannot speak in these terms without a caution and a question. The caution: "consciousness" has nothing whatsoever to do with the quantum process.

He then reiterates his previous clarification between an anthropomorphic sense of 'observation' and his preferred description of it:

We are dealing with an event that makes itself known by an irreversible act of amplification, an indelible record, an act of registration. Does that record subsequently enter into the consciousness of some person, some animal or some computer?

To super-duper-mega-ultra emphasise that it is not the cognition of humans which 'creates' the 'past' of quantum phenomena, he even says of cognition/interpretation:

Is that the first step in translating the measurement into meaning?

IE, the 'measurement' is a nonconceptual thing, it is not a property of a human relating to a quantum state, it's a physical interaction which is analogised with conception or perception using perspectival vocabulary to explain it.

Of whether the requirement of observation for a quantum phenomenon to take on a determinate character renders reality some composition of ideas and perceptions. He firstly (and before the quotes we've discussed) makes an analogy with Berkeley:

Hoe does quantum mechanics today differ from what Bishop Goerge Berkeley told us two centuries ago, 'esse est percipi', to be is to be perceived'? Does the tree not exist in the forest unless someone is there to see it? Do Bohr's conclusions about the role of the observer differ from those of Berkeley? Yes, and in an important way, Bohr deals with the individual quantum process. Berkeley, like all of us under everyday circumstances, deals with multiple quantum processes

.

he concludes this analogy in a later section:

An old legend describes a dialog between Abraham and Jehovah. Jehovah chides Abraham: 'You would not even exist if it were not for me!', "Yes Lord, that I know", Abraham replies, "but also You would not be known if it were not for me"

In our time the participants in the dialog have changed. They are the universe and man. The universe, in the words of some who would aspire to speak for it, says 'I am a giant machine. I supply the space and time for your existence. There was no before before I came into being, and there will be no after after I cease to exist. You are an unimportant bit of matter located in an unimportant galaxy."

How shall we reply? Shall we say "Yes, oh universe, without you I would not have been able to come into being. Yes you, great system, are made of phenomena, and every phenomenon rests on an act of observation. You could never even exist without elementary acts of registration such as mine"?

Are elementary quantum phenomena (note not consciousness dependent - me), those untouchable, indivisible acts of creation, indeed the building material of all that is? Beyond particles, beyond fields of force, beyond geometry, beyond space and time themselves, is the ultimate constituent, the still more ethereal act of observer-participancy? For Dr. Samuel Johnson, the stone was real enough when he kicked it. The subsequent discovery that the matter in that rock is made of positive and negative electric charges and more than 99.99 per cent of empty space does not diminish the pain that it inflicts on one's toe. If that stone is someday revealed to be altogether emptiness, "reality" will be none the worse for the finding.

Are billions upon billions of acts of observer-participancy the foundation of everything? We are about as far as we can be today from knowing enough about the deeper machinery of the universe to answer that question

These theme of multiple quantum processes is exactly mirrored in his distinction between 'elementary quantum phenomena' and 'macroscopic' phenomena which he has previously discussed. Not only does Wheeler reject the dependence of observation upon consciousness, he explicitly rejects transferring the account of subjective idealism which hold in analogy for elementary quantum phenomena - which he is using to explain observer dependence to those who do not understand it - to systems of multiple quantum processes; esp. the macroscopic. How you can cite the article for support of your position when it goes to pains to refute it baffles me.

But we do certainly know that most observers are not humans, or human consciousness and so on. How can we make sense of the idea that everything is observer dependent plus the idea that observers are not human consciousnesses? (rather, recall, interpretation for Wheeler occurs after observation!) Wheeler characterises such a question as requiring more 'knowledge of the universe', IE he thinks it's something that might be true or false about nature that 'everything' is created through some system of observation. But we can say that our reality would not be transformed by such an understanding, in a similar way to Dr. Johnson's foot-pain not being alleviated from the discovery that mostly things are made of empty space.

end close reading mode.

That observer dependence isn't consciousness for Wheeler, and that he compares the discovery of the observer dependence of quantum phenomena to the discovery of that matter is largely empty space, suggest that he takes a realist stance towards observer dependence. That is, observer dependence is not an epistemic or conceptual relation toward a phenomenon; just a map; it is a mode of nature interacting with itself; observer dependence is 'in the territory' too.

Also adjoin that he thinks macroscopic phenomena are largely 'untouched' by quantum effects; ancestral statements can easily be produced. They can even be produced about the photon whose past was determined by observation; how long did it take to get here? Longer than the lifetime of human history.

All you've demonstrated is that you didn't read Wheeler's paper closely, and that you didn't actually understand the arche-fossil argument (which is my fault). Perhaps I should make a thread on it.

Plus we shouldn't write two paragraphs just to explain that the map isn't the territory. Just say the map isn't the territory and go about your business. You weren't going to address any challenges anyway. — frank

Unfortunately people still need to be convinced that the territory isn't another kind of map.

Going once... Going twice...

Does anyone want to hang any staff about this decision or can I close this thread? We're just having the argument in feedback rather than the Lounge thread.

Our bar's pretty low, actually. If you've ever been in a place without any content standards, you'll see the wisdom of having some. The moderator decision here wasn't even to delete the thread, it was to move it to the Lounge. Everyone who wants to talk about it still can, just we won't have anything about this ridiculous crap on the front page.

No one denies that survivable fertile offspring from inter-order hybridization is, if possible at all, very, very improbable and rare. — Michael Ossipoff

Which is funny because people have babies a lot.

Let it go, you read too much into a plausible- sounding-at-first-glance-paper and now you're annoyed with moderators for declaring that a literal discussion about 'pig fucks a chimp and it makes a human' is pseudoscience. You can still talk about it with anyone who cares in the Lounge.

Myers' "demolishing" consisted of name-calling, angry-noises, and unsupported personal-opinion. — Michael Ossipoff

And refuting the morphological argument in the paper, and an analysis on chromosomal compatibility which strongly suggests that the pairing couldn't bring offspring at all, never mind fertile offspring.

The reason Myers got to be so insulting is because he thoroughly refuted the claims, the substance of the argument isn't insults. Insults are the irresistible spice on top for dealing with something so stupid.

To be fair, the link to the biology blog I gave demonstrates extremely thoroughly why the argument in the paper is flawed and the conclusions would be implausible-bordering-on-impossible even with a valid argument.

Wrong way round dude, and rather indicates the care given to this decision. — unenlightened

I'm sure the only reason that it was removed from the science category into the lounge was because no pigs were artificially inseminated with chimp semen. It was clear from the presence of snuggling on the list of unique characteristics of humans that pigs and chimps were fucking a whole lot way back in evolutionary time.

Or alternatively you can look at PZ Myers completely destroying every part of the claim.

You may as well have linked a flat earth 'research paper', it's in the same league of ridiculousness. But by all means, get a Kickstarter going to artificially inseminate pigs with chimp semen to test it, the author certainly didn't bother.

‘Thought and object’. It is just that instinctive division which is called. Into question by ‘the observer probllem’. Anyway - thanks for your considered criticism, I appreciate the time you have taken. — Wayfarer

If you are willing to collapse the distinction between the two, rather than merely and only 'inhabiting' the relation as correlationists describe, then the arche-fossil is successful; it at the very least forces a correlationist to choose between idealism and absurdity.

That there is no material reality prior to the existence of humans is certainly one way to find the argument instructive.

Anyway, was fun, even though I doubt I convinced you, I understand the arche-fossil argument in a lot more detail through rehearsing it with a willing antagonist. Thanks. :)

2§4

4. Before we make the application to space, some considerations about flat manifoldness in general are necessary; i.e., about those in which the square of the line-element is expressible as a sum of squares of complete differentials.

In a flat n-fold extent the total curvature is zero at all points in every direction; it is sufficient, however (according to the preceding investigation), for the determination of measure-relations, to know that at each point the curvature is zero in ½ n (n - 1) independent surface directions.

This follows from the previous discussion; it's enough to know the curvature is zero in a subset of independent surface directions to know it's zero in all of them. Riemann then generalises the discussion from surfaces of 0 curvature to surfaces of constant curvature (0 is a constant).

Manifoldnesses whose curvature is constantly zero may be treated as a special case of those whose curvature is constant. The common character of those continua whose curvature is constant may be also expressed thus, that figures may be viewed in them without stretching.

If we have a rubber sheet and roll it into a cylinder, interpoint distances don't change; this follows from thehe thought experiment with the measuring tape pinned to the surface). If you stretch the rubber sheet, then the measuring tape would have to stretch too to mark the new interpoint distance. This follows through contraposition (P=>Q <=> ~Q => ~P), where 'Q' is 'curvature is constant' and 'P' is 'figures may be viewed in them by stretching'. It's easier to imagine ~Q, where the curvature changes - which means the measuring tape would have to stretch to fit snugly to the object -, which would therefore mean the figures inscribed on the surface would have their interpoint distances changed too; and thus are distorted.

For clearly figures could not be arbitrarily shifted and turned round in them if the curvature at each point were not the same in all directions.

Is the contrapositive argument. Inspired by the relationship between curvature and interpoint distances in the previous discussion, and through this contrapositive argument, Riemann seeks to strengthen the implication to P<=>Q, which says 'figures inscribed on the surface are undistorted' if and only if 'the curvature is constant'. The argument here is somewhat informal, as it is demonstrated by 'the measure relations on the manifoldness are entirely determined by the curvature', IE 'curvature behaviour' characterises 'interpoint distance behaviour'. Though this is of course supported by the prior derivations linking interpoint distances to curvatures.

On the other hand, however, the measure-relations of the manifoldness are entirely determined by the curvature; they are therefore exactly the same in all directions at one point as at another, and consequently the same constructions can be made from it: whence it follows that in aggregates with constant curvature figures may have any arbitrary position given them. The measure-relations of these manifoldnesses depend only on the value of the curvature, and in relation to the analytic expression it may be remarked that if this value is denoted by $\alpha$, the expression for the line-element may be written:

$\begin{align}\frac{1}{1+\frac{1}{4}\alpha\sum x^2} \sqrt{\sum dx^2}\end{align}$

which is just the formula for the relationship between the metric and the curvature (don't know exactly how he gets to it).

:up:

More observations give more evidence, as a general rule. Say we have n of them. However, if you repeat the same observation n times - like copy pasting a row of a spreadsheet - you have no more information than a single observation. The number of independent observations is between 1 and the number of reports n. In anecdotal examples the true number of independent reports usually is somewhere close to 1 or somewhere close to the number of reports.

The scenarios when it's somewhere close to the number of reports are when you have something like a controlled randomised double-blind experiment. The scenarios where it's close to 1 are when each subject has either been conjured into existence or is likely to have exactly the same reaction to the treatment/question due to unobserved factors; correlating their responses/beliefs strongly.

I leave it up to you whether the anecdotal evidence in the bible resembles more strongly people passing along and writing down stories with a selection mechanism that makes only strong believers write stories or a controlled and randomised double blind experiment.

I would like to reiterate a few previous points before continuing the discussion, Wayfarer.

• The observer or measurement effect in quantum mechanics doesn't just occur in the lab.
• If all systems are quantum systems, this means that systems which have never interacted in any way with humans are also quantum and display their effects.
• The conceptualisation of X and the quantum observation of X are only related analogically. Scientific theories are not lab equipment, a sodium atom doesn't bond with a chlorine atom by thinking about ionic bonding.

With that in mind, giving all these interpretations of the observer effect in quantum mechanics to support the claim 'Conceptualisation of X is necessary for X's existence' is stretching an analogy well beyond its bounds. Exactly the same can be said for motion in special relativity (though to be fair motion has been relative motion since Galileo), every instance of motion (or rest) defines a frame that things move with respect to, and our human cognition is no more required for this than for two raindrops to fall side by side.

This is the nub of the issue.

I think you’re arguing from the general perspective of representative realism: that concepts represent (or fail to represent) some principle or phenomena. So in this picture of representative realism, there is the thinking subject and then there's the domain of objects, energies and forces which we confront, analyse, and attempt to understand. — Wayfarer

No, I don't think this is quite right. How are scientific, or indeed philosophical, hypotheses made? How do you generate relevant ideas which provide a good account of something? This goes for the design of experiments which test hypotheses as well as the formulation of hypothesis and theories. You need to take your cues from the thing in order to analyse it well.

As much as I dislike the subject/object distinction, I will use it here to make the point, It is not as if a subject stands inertly by throwing theories at the object until something sticks, the subject tries to create concepts that express the nature of a thing within a desired context of analysis. Rovelli's example in the talk @boundless linked is relevant here; when you model a pendulum as a simple harmonic oscillator you don't really care about how reflective it is, what it's made of, the 'love stories' of bacteria within it and so on, you care about its pendulum motion. And how do you form an account of the pendulum motion? By trying to see what drives it.

The properties of the object suffuse any account which accurately expresses them; within a behavioural regime.

The problem that brought us to this point in the discussion, however, can't be conceptualised this way, or rather, it eludes being captured within this kind of framework. It has forced scientists to say things like:

We need to get rid of the notion of:
- absolute (observer-independent) state of a system
- absolute (observer-independent) value of a physical quantity
- absolute (observer-independent) fact

It is the 'absolute fact' that I'm taking issue with. Whereas, I *think* your positing a 'transcendent real' that we're always working on getting a more and more adequate conceptualisation of, as a kind of domain of (at least potentially) absolute fact. — Wayfarer

You seem to be under the impression that 'absolute facts' are like 'absolute simultaneity' or 'absolute space' or 'a quantum superposition randomly being mapped to one of its eigenstates due to some interaction'; we both agree that absolute simultaneity, absolute space and some absolute 'quantum state' are flawed notions (though the first two are fine approximations when dealing with low velocities). This is just science. The relationship between any of these things and the claim 'X's existence is dependent upon its conceptualisation' is only analogical, but for some reason you continue to cite scientific studies that allegedly 'show' the existence of X is dependent upon its conceptualisation. This allegedly is important, because you seem to have forgotten the relationship between frame dependence of motion and observer dependence of quantum state relate to the correlationist epistemological framework is an analogy. An analogy furnished through our common vocabulary of relation and constraint taking its cues from words related to perspective/perception/viewpoint and so on, but an analogy nevertheless.

I have seen you claim, elsewhere, about the problems of reductionism in science; people trying to 'define away' experience and so on. The strategy of your argument here is an excellent example of inappropriate reductionism; you seek to explain frame dependence of motion and observer dependence of quantum state/properties as being mere instances of conceptual relations between thought and object. Far from respecting in precisely what ways frame dependence and observer dependence are perspectival in their own terms, you jump to the conclusion that frame dependence and observer dependence are perspectival in precisely the same sense that a conceptual framework apprehends its topic.

In terms of the metaphysics here, you are also being a reductionist. The relationship between thought and being is just one relationship with its own properties; the relative motion of raindrops is another; the dependence of an ecosystem on soil qualities is another. No doubt you would cite all these dependences as instances of the relationship between thought and being; whereas the appropriate conclusion to draw is that nature has relations in the territory which are not exhausted by the fact that we may mirror them (in a behavioural regime) through the relation of concepts.

In terms of personal taste, I really don't get how you could look at something like the OP paper and the frame dependence of special relativity and think 'look! more instances of the same thing I already suspect is true! more evidence that everything depends upon its conceptualisation.' The relationship between thought and being does not have a monopoly on the character of relationships; clouds do not think rain.

Edit: I would like to point out that while there probably are analogous properties regarding the relationship of thought and being to other interactions; perhaps a spider's behavioural instincts which classify vibrations in their web; a neat one to one mapping which preserves all properties between reference frames/quantum observers and our garden variety conceptualisation of things is unlikely to hold.

I was asking for the signs you take as proof that there is an independent formlessness. — frank

Personally I think it's just all made of eggs. All the way down. No one can doubt the formlessness of eggs in their ineluctable succulence intruding into my anxious mouth.

Half hearted questions get half hearted answers.

"What is conceptualized" is the markings of a duck/rabbit. Even markings are a fusion of form and formless matter. — frank

Lines - still drawn.

One of the most interesting things about our reasoning is our ability to create concepts with it. We make concepts to understand reality, based upon our interaction with it. We bring a historical context to every act of reason, and a uniquely human element that comes along with the functional necessities of our embodiment which involuntarily and necessarily condition our interactions with the world.

The analysis of a theme or entity, then, is a creative synthesis between this background we bring to that analysis and the constraints the theme or entity places upon any adequate conceptualisation of it. This requires an ontological distinction between concepts and what they explicate; of ideas and objects (broadly construed to include processes, interactions etc). The distinction between an object and the concepts we use in our interaction or theorisation of it is the very ground for error; and while this error can be conceptualised to improve our theorisations, the possibility of this error marks that the distinction between concepts and what is conceptualised is not merely conceptual, it is real. The mismatches between the goals of our inquiry and the products of our inquiry are rooted in this ontological excess the objects have with respect to our ideas of them. That is to say, in targeting our inquiry towards an entity or theme simpliciter, the distinctions between it and our conception of it operate to tailor our conceptions of it toward greater accuracy. Yes, we operate from a perspective, but this perspective is a vantage point upon domains which do not depend upon our perspective to exist.

You have a commitment to the reality of the domain of sense-experience, but you don’t see the way in which the mind itself imbues that domain with reality. — Wayfarer

We may emphasise the constraints that we bring to any perspective; the whole structure of the sensibility of the transcendental ego can be thus construed; but to hypostatise those constraints as imbuing nature with reality is to forget the distinction between the concept and what it conceptualises.

If anything, this is paying a great disrespect to the power of human reasoning; we can grasp problems from the very beginning of being until its end, we can conceptualise that which unfolds irrelevant of our conceptualisation through providing an adequate account of what is conceptualised. The creative and analytic power of our minds is done a great injustice by believing that nature is parasitic upon our conceptions of it; rather nature is expressed through any adequate conception of it. The distinction between the concept and what is conceptualised saturates any inquiry worthy of its name; the accuracy of our conceptions demands no less.

The true problem of epistemology is not the fact of our conditioning sensibility, it is how the conditioning sensibility can arrive at or contribute to an adequate conceptualisation. Any conceptualisation which is not a pure fiction is driven by the operative distinctions between it and its goal. Nature only becomes understood through our attunement to it, by relearning how to see when it shouts 'no!'.

I am not confusing anything. Why do you think Neils. Bohr found it necessary to say that ‘if you haven’t been shocked by quantum physics, then you don’t understand it?’ It’s precisely because it calls into question our innate realism. You have a commitment to the reality of the domain of sense-experience, but you don’t see the way in which the mind itself imbues that domain with reality. — Wayfarer

Does this mean you disagree with the claim 'The existence of X is different from our ability to conceptualise X'?

decoherence — andrewk

Thanks, I am a noob in this kind of discussion.

Why is the question being asked? What lead to the asking of the question? What is the issue? Isn’t it because physics itself has challenged the idea of ‘observer-independence?’ — Wayfarer

The claim that something exists mind-independently does not commit one to the claim that it is conceptually inaccessible. We conceptualise the world and thereby come to know it. You're continually confusing the ability to conceptualise X with X's existence. The reason for me continuing to pursue the question is because I hope that we agree that the ability to conceptualise X is different from X existing; and I want to bring that to a point by inviting you to consider a scenario in which one of our concepts continues to operate; ionic bonding; its reference class continues to have exemplars; the formation of sodium chloride; but we are not around to see it.

You can’t get a y/n answer to that question. Yes, there is evidence of the history of the cosmos prior to the evolution of h.sapiens . But all of that evidence exists in an interpretive framework which presumes a perspective. Thatt perspective is generally implicit, bracketed out. But physics has made that ‘bracketing out’ explicit - hence the interpretive issue. — Wayfarer

The interpretive issue is not whether the term 'ionic bonding' in 'ionic bonding occurred prior to humans existing' is a result of human conceptualisation; we do have a theory of ionic bonding; the interpretive issue is that a condition for the possibility of the meaning of the statement 'ionic bonding occurred prior to humans existing' requires there to exist a reality prior to the existence of humans. Of course our theories about ionic bonding are a theoretical construct, but ionic bonding itself is not.

The substitution of 'the conception of X' for 'X' is completely illegitimate in all cases for any empirical realist; you already know that X's existence is not dependent upon the conception of X.

This is why I have been harping on about nature shouting 'no', and perhaps in a language we don't understand. We inhabit a reality which is not intrinsically concept ladened; it is independent of our conceptions of it; just like an uninhabited landscape exists and we do not populate it simply by thinking about it.

It frustrates me somewhat that in order to defend the mind dependence of quantum observers you defend a Kantian position of transcendental idealism which grants the real an autonomy in excess of the phenomena constitutive of our interaction with it. If you are operating under the presumption of empirical realism, the literal interpretation of 'ionic bonding occurred prior to the advent of humans' is something which must make sense for you even if you think the claim is false.

In any case, what is common in Kantian-like philosophies is a sort of paradoxical situation of 'external objects'. Since they are regarded the cause of our sensorial experience, they must exist independently by us as the 'empirical things in themselves' (hence 'empirical realism'). At the same time, however, they are still 'inside' the representation. Check also how Kelley L. Ross deals with this issue of 'empirical realism': http://www.friesian.com/kant.htm#idealism. — boundless

Yes, the relationship between empirical exteriority and transcendental interiority is exactly what this kind of argument challenges.

What is remarkable about this description of the modern philosophical conception of consciousness and language is the way in which it exhibits the paradoxical nature of correlational exteriority: on “the one hand, correlationism readily insists upon the fact that consciousness, like language, enjoys an originary connection to a radical exteriority (exemplified by phenomenological consciousness transcending or as Sartre puts it ‘exploding’ towards the world); yet on the other hand this insistence seems to dissimulate a strange feeling of imprisonment or enclosure within this very exteriority (the ‘transparent cage’). For we are well and truly imprisoned within this outside proper to language and consciousness given that we are always-already in it (the ‘always already’ accompanying the ‘co-’ of correlationism as its other essential locution), and given that we have no access to any vantage point from whence we could observe these ‘object-worlds’, which are the unsurpassable providers of all exteriority, from the outside. But if this outside seems to us to be a cloistered outside, an outside in which one may legitimately feel incarcerated, this is because in actuality such an outside is entirely relative, since it is – and this is precisely the point – relative to us.

I honestly don't understand your position and the relationship it has to my questions. I appreciate that you are probably trying to argue that the answer to the questions is immaterial because what is at stake is you educating me out of my unsophisticated pre-critical realism. In contrast, what I am trying to do is to show that the conditions for the possibility of sense of ancestral statements is a problem for correlationism. IE, the direct truth or falsity of these statements is not relevant, only the ability for it to make sense to suppose the truth or falsity of any statement.

Ideally I want to know whether you think 'Ionic bonds happened before there were humans' makes sense when interpreted literally, even if that interpretation is misguided or shows an insufficient deference to the role the transcendental subject plays in apperception.

In principle, it doesn't matter whether it's an 'ionic bond' or any other chemical or physical relationship. The ionic bond is just an illustrative example. — Wayfarer

In response, it is perfectly possible to have a realist view of the empirical domain - the age of the earth, the universe, the solar system and so on. I take a realist view of all such facts. But it doesn't obviate the point, which is that the human mind - your mind and mine - is an essential pole in any such statement, even statements of empirical fact - which is the basic claim of transcendental idealism. So empirical knowledge, even knowledge of the early cosmos, is still the analysis of phenomena, of what appears. — Wayfarer

Does taking a realist view mean you believe "Ionic bonds happened before the advent of humans"? I have a realist view and find this largely unproblematic to believe, even with the caveats related to 'ionic bonds' as a concept being the product of our understanding. They also just happened to happen long before they were theorised.

Ionic bonds happened before the advent of humans, yes or no? Ionic bonding would have occurred even if humans never existed, yes or no?

What troubles me about this is that, on my understanding of QM, wave function collapse is non-measurable. It is a matter of interpretation, of ontology, not something that can be measured - so strictly speaking it isn't even part of QM. So either this experiment implies less than the MIT pop summary says it does, or I am going to have to radically revise my understanding of QM. — andrewk

Collapse mathematically is a mapping from an operator's spectrum to a one of its eigenstates right (a projection map)? Whether this collapse has a physical interpretation, and what that physical interpretation is, are where all the knots are AFAIK.

I was wondering if you would answer a few questions for me before I respond in more detail:

(1) Do you believe that ionic bonds happen without human intervention?
(2) Do you believe they happened before the advent of humans?
(3) Do you believe that human ratiocination can find order in nature because the human mind and the regularity in nature jointly participate in some eternal cosmic logos? If so, how do you think that works?
(4) Do you believe in anything like the distinction between primary and secondary qualities? Primary qualities being like mass, tensile strength, temperature and so on. Secondary qualities being heaviness, sturdiness, warmth and so on.

IMO, a weaker form of 'correlationism' is, in fact, right. Let me explain this briefly. First, let's define 'direct knowledge' as a form of knowledge that is not based on inference but it is immediate. I believe that for this form of knowledge the 'correlationist' is right. We cannot 'neglect' its 'perspectival nature'. On the other hand, there is another type of knowledge, based on inference that is necessary for science. For instance, if we accept the reasonable assumption that we can know by inference, it seems hard to deny. We can say that we cannot be 'absolutely certain' about it, but it is difficult to think that all our inferences about something independent from our own perspective cannot give us knowledge. — boundless

The relevant question about our networks of inferential knowledge is whether they are vindicated solely by virtue of being intersubjectively validated or whether a knowledge claim's intersubjective validation tracks how nature behaves. Scientists don't produce theory or experiment, usually, for the purpose[ of intersubjective validation, they validate claims about the world using shared methodologies. Even repeating an experiment is done to assess whether a claim is true, consistent with the available evidence, or neither of these things.

If the above is true then we simply cannot have a 'perspective'-independent knowledge. Rather all knowledge is 'perspectival' by necessity. Does this mean that there are only 'perspective' and nothing else? That is: can we still speak about 'absolute' properties of things? For instance, can we speak of an intrinsic property of an object O? Or all properties of O are relational, i.e. defined only in relation to other objects? — boundless

It's worthwhile to remember here that our discussion about intersubjective validation relates to the phenomena of quantum mechanics only analogically. Is a scientific theory a quantum observer? Is a research practice a quantum observer? No to both of these things, scientists don't fire scientific theories at particles to determine their state. Can a chlorine atom serve as an observer for a sodium atom when forming an ionic bond? I think, absolutely, and the latter is the run of the mill kind of quantum interaction that's been going on since things have been going on.

Even when all properties are relational, we can still be in the state where Alice agrees that Bob sees X, Bob agrees that Alice sees not-X, or that one was in a superposition or whatever. The general logic here is about as banal as @Banno portrayed it outside of the QM context and @Andrew M portrayed it within the context of the paper in the OP. Collapse is observer dependent, great, we have established something about nature.

What is fascinating however is that it seems that all this reasoning is suggesting that we should take into account a perspectival thinking. That is, it seems to suggest that all 'true statements' we make are context-dependent, so to speak even if we do not accept the 'correlationist' position. We are always 'forced' to specify the context in which a statement is true. (And also we should not neglect too easily our own perspective!) — boundless

I would remind any reader that a view from somewhere is a view of something. The context dependence of the production of a theory; through whatever intersubjective validation mechanisms you like; does nothing to diminish the truth of well established claims using methods consistent with the theory (or theoretical context).

Given the above, how can we make sense of the sentence: 'the universe is 13.8 billions years old'? If we accept Rovelli's interpretation, IMO we cannot even speak of 'the universe as a whole'. Why? Because, there is nothing outside that can be used to define a relation (this is very reminiscent of Kant's antinomies about the universe). So, fine! But as you say cosmology is very effective so it is hard to think that even such statement is perspectival. On the other hand, we should not forget that even that statement is made according to a 'perspective', the reference frame where the Cosmic Wave Background is isotropic, that is the 'co-moving reference frame' (check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_time ). So, strictly speaking it is still 'perspectival'. — boundless

Yes, the calculation of the age of the universe is done with respect to a reference frame in which its expansion is isotropic. But:

You can still make ancestral statements within the frame; its history goes back well before the advent of humans; before the advent of the distinction between unconditioned datum ('raw experience' or 'direct knowledge') and conditioned factum ('processed experience' or influence from a category of the understanding). The more relevant point here is that we can make sense of statements which describe events anterior to the the genesis of the a-priori; of conditioning sensibility.

Meillassoux discusses this point in terms a distinction between 'the lacunary nature of the given' (say that we only see one side of an object when looking at it) and 'occurrences which are not contemporaneous with any given':

The objection against idealism based on the distal occurrence is in fact identical with the one based on the ancient occurrence, and both are equivalent versions (temporal or spatial) of what could be called ‘the objection from the un-witnessed’, or from the ‘un-perceived’. And the correlationist is certainly right about one thing – that the argument from the un-perceived is in fact trivial and poses no threat to correlationism. But the argument from the arche-fossil is in no way equivalent to such an objection, because the ancestral does not designate an ancient event – it designates an event anterior to terrestrial life and hence anterior to givenness itself. Though ancestrality is a temporal notion, its definition does not invoke distance in time, but rather anteriority in time. This is why the arche-fossil does not merely refer to an un-witnessed occurrence, but to a non-given occurrence – ancestral reality does not refer to occurrences which a lacunary givenness cannot apprehend, but to occurrences which are not contemporaneous with any givenness, whether lacunary or not. Therein lies its singularity and its critical potency with regard to correlationism.

The strategy here is to locate the conditioning sensibility within a time concept or becoming concept; whereby the conditioning sensibility passes from a state of nonbeing to a state of being. (I'm quoting out of order from the book because I think it fits the flow of our discussion better) It is tempting to say that the existence of such an ancestral state of affairs is a merely empirical matter, which does nothing to change the relationship between the forms of sensibility and their conditioned facts - as I believe @Wayfarer likes to emphasise. However, the interpretation of the ancestral statement; and the required condition for it to make sense; is that we imagine a time before there was a conditioning transcendental subject, a time in which the sensibility's conditioning becomes an event. We need to be able to say that a transcendental subject occurs for the occurrence of the conditioning relationship the sensibility has upon our interpretations. As he puts it: (quoting out of order since it fits our discussion better)

We are told that the transcendental does not exist because it does not exist in the way in which objects exist. Granted, but even if we concede that the transcendental subject does not exist in the way in which objects exist, one still has to say that there is a transcendental subject, rather than no subject. Moreover, nothing prevents us from reflecting in turn on the conditions under which there is a transcendental subject. And among these conditions we find that there can only be a transcendental subject on condition that such a subject takes place... In other words, at issue here is not the time of consciousness but the time of science – the time which, in order to be apprehended, must be understood as harbouring the capacity to engender not only physical things, but also correlations between given things and the giving of those things. Is this not precisely what science thinks? A time that is not only anterior to givenness, but essentially indifferent to the latter because givenness could just as well never have emerged if life had not arisen? Science reveals a time that not only does not need conscious time but that allows the latter to arise at a determinate point in its own flux.

What this argument reveals is that the conditions of possibility for the sense of ancestral statements require us to be able to think of a world indifferent to any given; any conditioning sensibility or emergent system of intersubjective validation. The meaningfulness of ancestral statements requires us to adjust our sophisticated intuitions about the a-priori nature of the correlation between thought and being to include the ability to interpret, since we inhabit, a world radically indifferent to any conceptual distinction. Nature becomes a curmudgeonly gainsayer who can refuse to yield to any determination of theory or sensibility; it will shout "NO!" whenever it bloody well likes and may not speak our language.

But you go further when you speak of systems as if they're observers. — Wayfarer

Rovelli makes the same point in the paper boundless linked, as does Bohr in the quote I gave earlier. It's convenient to talk of these things in terms of human perspectives and related terms, because that's how the common relevant vocabulary works, but they go to pains to distinguish observer from human. Whether a system is a being or not is probably outside the scope of the thread, I would tentatively say that it generally is, but it's more adequately described as an interacting connection of flows; what matters more is its image in the category of becoming rather than of being.

Maybe the same could be said of a wave function; the only observables are the states (and derived quantities) and their frequency of occurrence through experiment, but I'd be quite happy to think of a wave function as a being or a property of a being.

Don't think it's relevant really, things induce quantum effects in other things; hence ionic bonding and the arche-fossil reference for when this relationship is anthropomorphised too much.

It's not so much 'correlationism' as the incorrigible realism that each of us is born with. What you're not seeing is the role the mind/brain plays in the statement about the age of the Universe (or anything else, for that matter.) But what this assumes is just what Kant means by 'transcendental realism': — Wayfarer

I do agree that the claim 'the universe is 13.8 billion years old' is something produced by our theories and understandings. But I also believe that it is literally true. In terms of your quote:

For because he allows this matter and even its inner possibility to be valid only for appearance– which, separated from our sensibility, is nothing – matter for him is only a species of representations (intuition), which are called 'external', not as if they related to objects that are external in themselves but because they relate perceptions to space, where all things are external to one another, but that space itself is in us. (A370)

I believe it's important to emphasise that nature also informs our sensibility and strikes accord with it. The impulse Husserl expressed that phenomenology (a discipline heavily indebted to Kant) is 'relearning how to see' is basically correct; with the addendum that reality can teach us how to see better when we give ourselves the goal of understanding it.

You seem to want to paint me as a pre-critical realist; I'm not, I know that experience is 'theory ladened' and informed by what we know, what we've experienced, our habits and the structure of our bodies; but I will insist that it is also informed by the objects we experience.

The problem is, empiricism has bet the house on the fact that what it conceives of as nature, the real world, and so on, is what is finally and fundamentally real. But QM continues to throw this into doubt. Hence the controversy! — Wayfarer

The same thing happened with special relativity; and people make the same mistake that the relativity of simultaneity is property of a human perspective; more properly it's a property of motion that can't adequately be accounted for while assuming the speed of light is infinite, the relativity of simultaneity is still something natural, it just takes really fast relative motions to have meaningful effects.

With that in mind, that different observers of quantum states can disagree on precisely what state the system is in is also not a property of a uniquely human perspective; other systems can serve as observers, and systems can serve as observers to coupled systems of observers and other systems. These are facts of nature that need no appeal to human cognition to explain; only an appeal to the randomness of the quantum state. Of course we need to cognise it to understand it, it's a theory; but it still describes some natural phenomenon.

As I said, however, Bitbol does not claim that we 'create' reality. Rather the situation here is much like in Kant. We cannot know how reality is independently from our perspective. We just cannot 'neglect' it completely. Why? Because, conscious experience is the starting point of all inquiry. — boundless

(will also serve as a reply to our Heideggerian friend @Joshs)

This more general theme is precisely what I was reacting to in the thread. There's a weak, and I think very agreeable account and a strong, and I think very important to undermine account.

The weak claim goes something like this; all knowledge derives from interpretation, if we know anything about anything, it has to be an interpretation of that thing. Grant for the sake of argument that experiences are also interpretations of stuff; if you pat a dog, the topography and consistency of their hair leaves its impression through your sense of touch. Interpretations are always simplifications and approximations, with a required background to understand them and a necessary set of presuppositions on which they develop. Another way of stating this is that the way we theorise is through the creation of concepts; and we use concepts to make sense of things. Moreover, experience informs the tailoring of concepts.

The strong claim goes like this: it starts with the weak claim; all knowledge derives from interpretation - I agree with all you said, but that is not the end of the story. Consider that every relation that we have with any other thing is an interpretation; interpretations are the trace of our experience and history in our living bodies. When asked the question; what does your knowledge and experience consist of? You may say it consists of interpretations. What of the things we experience in the world? Those too are interpretations with a certain thingliness associated with them. Whenever we interact with anything, all that is generated is an interpretation, and all thought consists in a chain of such interpretations evaluated with a logic of links you might call a theory. Whenever we encounter an object, that object is an interpretation from a certain perspective; it is a contextually circumscribed concept. As Josh put it above:

What we get right or wrong, true or false , only makes sense in relation to our changing theoretical norms — Joshs

I believe in the weak claim, I believe in the emphasis portrayed in the strong claim on the dogged pursuit of where our concepts come from. What I don't believe is the characterisation of interpretation, knowledge, or interaction induced through:

When asked the question; what does your knowledge and experience consist of? You may say it consists of interpretations. What of the things we experience in the world? Those too are interpretations with a certain thingliness associated with them. Whenever we interact with anything, all that is generated is an interpretation, and all thought consists in a chain of such interpretations evaluated with a logic of links you might call a theory

Specifically, I disagree with:

(1) (I don't like that) The substitution of interpretations for the targets of interpretations; (rather I believe) knowledge must always be knowledge of its target.
(2) The claim that the target of an interpretation, or knowledge or theory, is consigned to a realm beyond our experience because all experience is interpretation.

Instead I want to emphasise that interpretation is a relationship between its target and a perspective; reasoning consists in the development of this relationship, but its standards of relevance are dictated by the demands the target places on our inquiry; as Lakatos puts it nature can always 'Shout NO!'. We understand nature through theories and interpretations, we don't just have access to theories and interpretations, theories, interpretations and experiences are how we access their targets.

The emphasis I put on quantum phenomena occurring long before our accounts of quantum phenomena were written, and long before the first vestige of quantum mechanics was developing in the canon theoretical physics, is to ape a famous argument that attempts to undermine (2). The argument is usually called the 'arche-fossil' and it was advanced by Meillassoux is the first few chapters of his 'After Finitude, an Essay on the Necessity of Contingency'. The strong account, as I termed it, Meillassoux calls 'correlationism'; stated in one line, correlationism is the belief that we can never have knowledge about thought or being, only of the relationship between them.

Kant fits in here as a correlationist, but he still has the noumenon. The nounmenon, even if we can never have determinate knowledge about it, can be the subject of imagination. Whether you believe that the role of the noumenon in Kant is negative; in that it simply marks the boundary of our possible knowledge; or positive; in that it refers to an uninterpreted reality which subsists beneath our interaction with it, there is still something other than interpretation which we are dimly aware of. Whether this noumenon can 'Shout no!' to our theories or whether it casts no shadow upon our interpretations and experiences is the substance of my disagreement with the 'strong account'. I believe that nature can 'Shout no!' (as Lakatos puts it) when we ask it well formed questions, and I believe that the capacity for it to shout no is a necessary component of a good account of knowledge, interpretation, and the ontology of our being in the world.

The strong account, or strong correlationism for Meillassoux, does away with the relevance of the noumenon; what is the point in it if we can never have experiential or interpretive access to it? Our interpretations persist in the relation of thought and being and never take inspiration from that which is outwith the relation between the two. That is to say, never from nature; even if it 'Shouts no!', we're necessarily deaf to its cry, for its cry would be another interpretation.

Meillassoux summarises this position like:

We said above that, since Kant, objectivity is no longer defined with reference to the object in itself (in terms of the statement’s adequation or resemblance to what it designates), but rather with reference to the possible universality of an objective statement. “It is the intersubjectivity of the ancestral statement – the fact that it should by right be verifiable by any member of the scientific community – that guarantees its objectivity, and hence its ‘truth’. It cannot be anything else, since its referent, taken literally, is unthinkable — Meillassoux, After Finitude Chapter 1, Ancestrality

Meillassoux considers a class of statement called an 'ancestral statement' whose meaningfulness undermines the strong correlationist account. For an example, consider 'the age of the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years'. The precise logic Meillassoux ascribes to the interpretation of this kind of statement for those who believe in the strong account/correlationism is as follows:

Consider the following ancestral statement: ‘Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.’ The correlationist philosopher will in no way intervene in the content of this statement: she will not contest the claim that it is in fact event Y that occurred, nor will she contest the dating of this event. No – she will simply add – perhaps only to himself, but add it he will – something like a simple codicil, always the same one, which he will discretely append to the end of the phrase: event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans – for humans (or even, for the human scientist). This codicil is the codicil of modernity: the codicil through which the modern philosopher refrains (or at least thinks she does) from intervening in the content of science, while preserving a regime of meaning external to and more originary than that of science. Accordingly, when confronted with an ancestral statement, correlationism postulates that there are at least two levels of meaning in such a statement: the immediate, or realist meaning; and the more originary correlationist meaning, activated by the codicil.

The literal truth of the statement, not just 'for us' for Meillassoux entails numerous unpleasant things for a correlationist to square themselves with.

We would then be obliged to maintain what can only appear to the post-critical philosopher as a tissue of absurdities; to wit (and the list is not exhaustive):

• that being is not co-extensive with manifestation, since events have occurred in the past which were not manifest to anyone;
• that what is preceded in time the manifestation of what is;
• that manifestation itself emerged in time and space, and that consequently manifestation is not the givenness of a world, but rather an intra-worldly occurrence;
• that this event can, moreover, be dated;
• that thought is in a position to think manifestation’s emergence in being, as well as a being or a time anterior to manifestation;
-that the fossil-matter (the state of affairs pictured in the statement 'the universe is 13.8 billion years old') is the givenness in the present of a being that is anterior to givenness; that is to say, that an arche-fossil manifests an entity’s anteriority vis-à-vis manifestation.

Needless to say, there are problems here. Being the incorrigible simpleton that I am, when I believe the statement 'The universe is 13.8 billion years old', I'm actually believing in its literal truth, and not the correlationist transformation of the statement; 'The universe is 13.8 billion years old for us/our current theories/whatever'. Moreover, though I have given no argument of this, I believe that the ability to accept the literal truth of that statement and moreover that it has a meaning at all are indicative that thought really can 'aim for that which is outside of it', and that our inquiries are meaningful only when they can admit the possibility of nature 'Shouting no!'.

How does this relate to the discussion in this thread? Well, firstly, it relates to the equation of a quantum observer with a human. Secondly, it relates to the equation of an observer-quantum state system as a human-quantum state system, and lastly it relates to the equation of a 'perspective' in an observer-quantum state system with anything like the usual meaning of worldview or theoretical background we would give to it. The debate about these terms and their application in the philosophy here is a lot broader than quantum mechanics; though I do very much appreciate the explicit reference to Kant, @boundless.

Clarifying note: a basis is a collection of directions which can be used to express an arbitrary displacement. EG, for 2 dimensional space, the plane, 'up' and 'along' work. Every point can be travelled to from any other by moving an amount 'up' and an amount 'along'. Riemann simply changes 'up' and 'along' to the relevant directions on a surface; which, say, for a circle would just be 'rotate clockwise', or the surface of sphere would be 'rotate up' and 'rotate sideways'.

2§3, trying to build momentum again:

Riemann abstracts from the analysis of specific surfaces and their coordinate systems to properties which remain the same after the surface has been deformed.

There are two points here: the first is that if you bend a surface, you can account for the bend through a change in coordinate system - you just need to chart where the points started, the initial shape, and where the points ended up; the function which takes you from start to end is a coordinate transformation. The second is that transforming a shape can be thought of as a way of taking the points on it onto other points, a function which maps points to points again.

Constraining the types of function which bend shapes or transform coordinate systems into each other will allow the the study of invariants to those transformations; which are thereby intrinsic properties of the manifold considered.

The methodological move here is to define what is intrinsic to a shape with reference to what does not change when you transform it. This is the idea where the (long ago now) mentioned difference between intensive and extensive types of analysis is partly inspired by.

For a physical analogy, take two balls made entirely of iron, the sizes can differ but the density is the same. Or when you pour water out of your kettle into a cup, the temperature of the water in the cup is the same as the water in the kettle, whereas there's more heat energy in the larger volume. Density and temperature are then intensive properties, volume and heat energy are extensive properties.

Riemann wants to introduce a similar distinction within the study of manifolds; intensive/intrinsic properties are those that do not depend upon any particular coordinate system or object deformation for their expression, extrinsic/extensive properties conversely depend upon a particular coordinate system or object deformation.

He sets this up in the first paragraph of §3.

§ 3. In the idea of surfaces, together with the intrinsic measure-relations in which only the length of lines on the surfaces is considered, there is always mixed up the position of points lying out of the surface. We may, however, abstract from external relations if we consider such deformations as leave unaltered the length of lines - i.e., if we regard the surface as bent in any way without stretching, and treat all surfaces so related to each other as equivalent. Thus, for example, any cylindrical or conical surface counts as equivalent to a plane, since it may be made out of one by mere bending, in which the intrinsic measure-relations remain, and all theorems about a plane - therefore the whole of planimetry - retain their validity. On the other hand they count as essentially different from the sphere, which cannot be changed into a plane without stretching.

The specific constraint he places on deformations to make this distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties is that the deformation must preserve the length of lines within the object. In this manner, if you draw two dots on a piece of paper and measure the distance between them with a tape measure, then fold the tape measure and the paper together to make a cylinder, the tape measure will still report the same distance between the two dots after the deformation. The existence of a deformation which can transform one object into another without changing the length of lines within the object; or equivalently the interpoint distances constrained to the object; means that two objects can be treated as equivalent.

Therefore, if you can take a plane and bend it into some other shape, the theorems of plane geometry will continue to apply to it. If you cannot bend a plane into another shape, it will have different intrinsic properties; it will require different geometric laws to model.

This connection between geometry and the intrinsic properties of surfaces is the point in the analysis which suggests that there are a plurality of geometries, rather than simply the geometry of a Euclidean embedding space. Geometries track intrinsic properties of manifolds, and constrain the coordinate systems which can be used to express them; by means of limiting whether an appropriate deformation exists between an object in one configuration and an object in another. Riemann gives the example of the surface of a sphere as a manifold which cannot be appropriately deformed into a plane.

According to our previous investigation the intrinsic measure-relations of a twofold extent in which the line-element may be expressed as the square root of a quadric differential, which is the case with surfaces, are characterised by the total curvature. Now this quantity in the case of surfaces is capable of a visible interpretation, viz., it is the product of the two curvatures of the surface, or multiplied by the area of a small geodesic triangle, it is equal to the spherical excess of the same. The first definition assumes the proposition that the product of the two radii of curvature is unaltered by mere bending; the second, that in the same place the area of a small triangle is proportional to its spherical excess

In one dimension, for curves, the radius of curvature at a point is the radius of a circle tangent to that curve which fits the closest to it; the curvature at that point is then the reciprocal of the radius of curvature. In higher dimensions, tangents are replaced with tangent spaces, the spheres to their higher dimensional analogues, and the point they touch the surface must have the radius normal to the surface.

The 'two curvatures' of a surface (in 3 space) are the directions in which the curvature changes least and most at a point. These depend on the deformation of an object; and so are extrinsic properties.

The idea behind this is to wrap a surface onto a circle or sphere (the Gauss map), you take the radius of curvature and the direction it lays in, then shift the line segment representing the radius to have its origin in the centre of a circle or sphere. You do this for every point on the desired surface, making a function from the surface you're studying to the circle or sphere. Intuitively, the rate of change of this function with respect to displacements on the original surface measures the angular changes in normal vectors with respect to movement on the surface; if the normal vector never changes angle, the shape is a plane. Of course, for higher dimensional manifolds, there will be various directions we can choose for the displacements on the original surface, meaning we need to represent changes in all directions in the same mathematical object. This is done by finding a basis for the directions in which a normal vector can change, then expressing the rate of change in each direction. The two curvatures (for a 3 dimensional surface), then, quantify the amount of curvature change in directions of maximal and minimal curvature change.

The spherical excess is just another way to measure this angular change. Riemann then wants to generalise this construction to an intrinsic feature of the surface; and he does this by defining the above directions of variation in terms of geodesics which stem from a point; the geodesic is uniquely determined by the initial direction it moves away from the point, and these directions are the directions of variation for a normal vector to that point. Thereby, the notion of displacement in the previous paragraph is made intrinsic to the surface by relating the directions of normal vector change to the directions geodesics can travel away from a point.

The previous discussion in 2§2 then applies when we have chosen appropriate geodesics to express variation on the surface. Riemann summarises this by saying that the above geodesic construction determines the curvature. Since the construction was based on the length of lines, it will also be invariant to transformations which preserve length of lines.

To give an intelligible meaning to the curvature of an n-fold extent at a given point and in a given surface-direction through it, we must start from the fact that a geodesic proceeding from a point is entirely determined when its initial direction is given. According to this we obtain a determinate surface if we prolong all the geodesics proceeding from the given point and lying initially in the given surface-direction; this surface has at the given point a definite curvature, which is also the curvature of the n-fold continuum at the given point in the given surface-direction.

Maybe an experiment you could do would be to survey posts on this forum and see how many times 'subjective', 'objective' are used and 'subject' and 'object' are used in a manner consistent with the subject object distinction.

I doubt that society has ever really thought or behaved in accordance with Cartesian epistemology, but I think people beginning to get an interest in philosophy or in general philosophical argument will find that these terms come to mind. They're, for better or worse, wallpaper at this point.

consciousness?’ because natural objects and properties are not intrinsically identifiable ; they are identifiable only in relation to the ‘conceptual imputations’ of intersubjective experience." — Joshs

I'm tired of debating whether nature is inside our theories of it or not. Imagining that nature is all we have to say about it is a pointless retrojection; it has been around longer than theory and impresses itself upon us even when we have no account of it. Yes, you will probably say, science produces truths, but more profoundly those truths are indexed to our theories and that those truths attain their sense solely within our theories.

The questions we ask nature are thus muted after leaving our lips; nature's behaviour becomes covered by the silent fog of our understanding, we could never ask questions of it, only of our relation to it. Our theories' mediating status between us and natural phenomena becomes bloated and complacent, it takes the target of theorisation to be the theory produced and not what domain is actually theorised.

Don't put our understanding in the way of our understanding. Questioning and inquiry are themselves ways to relate to nature.

Nonetheless, the main problem with this view is that if the wave-function is considered to be information or a 'mathematical tool' (as in my understanding Rovelli does), then it is difficult to understand how we can speak of 'information' related to a non-conscious observer. This is, in fact, Michel Bitbol's point. — boundless

Information and probability are dual notions; wherever you have a probability distribution you have an entropy. The connection between the two is particularly intimate for discrete random variables - like when there is a given probability of being in one of countably many eigenstates of an operator. Quantum entropy measures the degree of mixing in a state; how close it is to behaving in a singular eigenstate (unless I'm misinterpreting, I am both rusty and mostly uneducated here). Information measures are derivable from probability distributions, but the process of mapping a distribution to an entropy value is not invertible - so the two notions can't be taken as inter-definable. As in, if you have an entropy, you have a single number, which could be generated from lots of different quantum states and probability distributions.

I'm sure there are problems, but I think there are good reasons to believe that information is just as much a part of nature as wave functions.

↪fdrake Indeed - I think that is very much the kind of understanding that has emerged from science in the last several decades. But I think it sits oddly alongside what you said previously. — Wayfarer

Well we know that physical processes interact with others, it is not so surprising that their interaction can effect all involved or produce novel phenomena. This maxim applies more generally than in quantum physics - ecosystems can couple and interact, so can social groups. The details depend on the specifics.

I think that nature is inherently relational only sits oddly with intuitions that relations are somehow derivative or less important then their relata; like the two poles of subject and object, where everything interesting lays between.

Notice that Bohr says that ‘the objective world of nineteenth century science’ has become untenable. I think he’s correct in saying that, but isn’t it very much the substance of his disagreements with Einstein? — Wayfarer

Quantum phenomena undermine some aspects of determinism, relativity undermines absolute space and time. Sub specie aeternitas this requires us think of nature in the wake of discovery in both fields, but also when things are big enough or slow enough where the weirdness of either or both does not apply. Objectivity there, I think, means something like invariant of perspective - observer/frame independence. We know nature is not either in many circumstances. The trick is then in giving an immanent account of 'perspectival' dependence without making humans a necessary constituent of nature.

It does not help that the usual words we use to discuss these topics are perception analogies.