(Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway) — StreetlightX

I only read half of Meeting the Universe Halfway, a few years ago, not because it's not good -- it's excellent -- but because of time constraints. I'll come back to it eventually.

It's worth noting that although the smallness of Planck's constant entails that, for instances, for mesoscale sized bodies very much larger than electrons, Heisenberg's inequality relation relating the products of the uncertainties (or indeterminations) of the positions and momenta of such bodies to Planck's constant have little practical signifiance, measurements of observables that relate to individual photons or electrons *do* have immediate practical significance for the behaviors of the macroscopic measurement apparatuses that are set up for measuring them. The main reason for that is that the mutuality relations that hold between conjugate variables (complementary observables such as position and momentum) do not just affect how microphysical entities behave but limit what sorts of measurement apparatuses can be jointly implemented to probe the very same phenomena that they are measuring without destroying their very conditions of existence. So, just because microphysical phenomena can be effectively amplified by macroscopic apparatuses that interact with them, the finiteness of Planck's constant (i.e. the fact that it's larger than zero) has direct consequences for the structure of the phenomena that we can observe at the macroscopic scale, such as interference patterns. This constraint also undercuts the idea that the microscopic events that are being probed have their determinations independently from the instrumental contexts in which they are being measured, or so have Bohr and Heisenberg argued.

Serious. As I said, QM is just the way things are. I don't feel any ontological agita. Why would you expect things to behave the same at atomic scale as it does at human scale. I hate it when people, even physicists, get all excited and talk about "quantum weirdness" as if they're Neil DeGrasse Tyson, that son of a bitch. This stuff makes me rethink how the universe works. — T Clark

Until just a few years ago I tended to share this judgement about the (lack of significant) philosophical significance of quantum mechanics. There is rather more to it than just a description of the way microphysical objects happen to behave, though. Maybe Bitbol's preface to Heelan's book would lead you to change your judgement about this topic. It is very short and entirely devoid of weirdness or woo. It's been published separately from the book, in case you would have some trouble locating it. (Search for 'Heelan' on this page).

A while ago, I wrote this, on the topic of 'reductionism': — StreetlightX

Very nice OP, and thanks for the links to the texts by P. W. Anderson; by Noah Moss Brender; and by R. B. Laughlin and David Pines. I now know what I'm going to be reading tomorrow.

Regarding the issue of context, here is a relevant quote from Patrick Aidan Heelan's own preface* to his book The Observable: Heisenberg's Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, which I was reading earlier tonight:

"I had found that phenomenology and hermeneutics were helpful in making sense of the distinction between classical physics and post-classical physics of relativity and quantum mechanics because these new philosophies had the capacity to explore the latent significance and function of context in both scientific traditions; ‘context’ was arguably the central innovative component of these physical theories that had revolutionized 20th century physics.

Specifically, the notion of context can be thought of as having two parts: a part internal to human consciousness, comprising the functions of meaning-making, meaning-using, and meaning-testing; and a part external to human consciousness, comprising the physical processes associated in human life with meaning-making, meaning-using, and meaning-testing. The internal part draws on the hermeneutic resources of intentionality, which is a technical term for the making, using, and testing of meanings. These hermeneutic resources include not only the habitual practices of categorizing what is represented in the sensory flux, but also habits of relating groups of categories to one another by higher-order explanatory laws (or theories). The external part of context acknowledges the physical aspects of the embodied practices of meaning-making, using, and testing, such as the organized conditions of the space and time of the laboratory bench and engagement with the ‘world’ through acts of measurement performed by a qualified embodied observer who, in his/her community of practice, has become skilled in ‘interpreting’ the measured scientific phenomenon as a datum, present as described within the context of the relevant categories and theories." (All italics in the original)

* There also is a preface by Michel Bitbol and another one by Babette Babich who edited to book after Heelan's passing. Bitbol's preface is outstanding.

It's happened already! The long anticipated Peterson-Žižek debate occurred.

@csalisbury Fair enough. For the time being, I am happily agnostic (because ignorant) regarding the notion of grace. So, modulo that, we indeed may be on the same page.

What you need to make it actually constitute a system of its own is a value in which it believes.You need a third level. An ethical way of life is, precisely, not knowing one what will do. That is the linchpin of the whole thing. If you conflate knowing what one ought do with one knowing what one will do, you lose humanity in a blink. — csalisbury

I agree. I am very much a neo-Aristotelian about practical reason. Hence, on my view, ethical motivation is grounded in virtue of character and the "space of reason" merely signifies the forms of justification that belong to an ethically informed form of life. I don't view reason and morality to be separable at all, not even notionally. The severely impoverished forms of practical rationality being studied formally by some economists and rational decision theorists only can be called "rationality" by analogy, on my view.

Also, my characterization of knowing what it is that one will do because it is what one ought to do is mostly indebted to Elizabeth Anscombe and, though her, to Aquinas and Aristotle. I am suggesting that there is a reading of Kant (or of some strands within Kant's practical philosophy) under which he is much closer to Aristotle than he is usually made out to be.

But the ideologies of "pro-science" laypeople do not need to be criticized the same way? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Yes, they need to be criticized in the same way. Scientists are just as likely to be ideologically biased as any other kinds of intellectuals.

And all of the ideologues who use science to attack religion, attack social conservative opponents in debates over sex education, transgenderism, homosexuality, etc. do know what they are talking about and do have sufficient training in relevant fields? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

No, the exact opposite, actually. When natural scientists talk about the climate, they have a tendency to be informed about this particular topic (although there are exceptions). When they venture into social and political science, and into philosophy, they tend to speak like ignoramuses.

What are we talking about when we talk about the self as unknowable? Do we mean, simply, that we don't know what we'll do in the future? — csalisbury

I have a somewhat different take on this. I am mostly relying on Kant's discussion of causation in the Third Antinomy.

As an embodied agent, the self is both a phenomenon (more precisely, an empirical substance) and, well, an agent. This duality doesn't correspond to two different concepts that one can subsume oneself under (there is just one relevant concept in the vicinity: that of a human being, or person) but rather two different stances: empirical and agential. So, I would surmise that knowing oneself is, indeed, knowing what one will do. But this can be achieved from two different stances. From the empirical stance, the agent is subsumed under laws of physiology and (empirical) psychology. It's not so much that her behavior is predictable (which it may very well be, given sufficient information about her past and present circumstances and material constitution), but rather that it is determined by the law-governed chains of causation that she is empirically embedded into (necessarily so, according to Kant, because of the a priority of the Categories of substance, causation, etc.)

On the other hand, the agent who deliberates what to do pictures herself to be initiating new chains of causation that don't have necessitating causal antecedents reaching into her past. The reason for that is because the agent who is deciding what to do must reflect on the reasons why she would do it, and this knowledge, grounded in valid principles of practical deliberation, is free from empirical considerations about physiology and psychology. For sure, one can predict that one is likely to behave irrationally, in some circumstances, owing to some merely empirical fact about oneself (e.g. that one is lazy, or a glutton, say). But such empirical considerations can only constitute excuses or grounds for blame, not reasons for doing what one does. When one does know what one will do (as may occasionally happen) because of the reason one can cite as a good (rational) justification for doing it, then one thereby expresses knowledge of what it is that one will do and, also, at the same time, spontaneous knowledge of the intelligible ground of one's decision and action. This is a form of self-knowledge that is irreducible to empirical self-knowledge (such as knowledge on one's psychological tendencies). This intelligible object of self-knowledge (i.e. one's reason for acting) is the ground that was missing when one attempted to predict what one would do on the mere basis of antecedent empirical facts about oneself. (In that case, what was predicted wasn't intelligible behavior at all, but mere bodily motions).

Offering reasons for one's intended actions thus exemplifies what Kant calls the intelligible character of causation, which he contrasts with the empirical character of causation. The former is potentially gained from the agential stance (given an ability to deliberate rationally) while the latter is potentially gained from the empirical stance (given sufficient knowledge of physiology and psychology). Since angential self-knowledge (from spontaneity) is a form of self-knowledge that is free from empirical self-determinations, this might justify the idea that it is knowledge of the 'noumenal self', where the term 'noumenal' may be construed negatively to signal that its ground is free from empirical determinations, and can also be construed positively to point to the intelligible character of causation which is at play in rational agency. (On that view, 'noumenal ground' and 'intelligible ground' are synonymous).

Which is, in turn, one of the main factors underlying scientism as a kind of quasi-religious belief system - amply illustrated in this thread ;-) . — Wayfarer

Maybe you'll enjoy, if you haven't read them already:

Atheism Considered as a Christian Sect

and (recommended by darthbarracuda, recently):

A Short History of Atheism by Gavin Hyman

Conservatives like to blame the victims to distract away from institutions, social organizations, or actions by powerful people. What he's saying is something different. There's a difference between that kind of excuse-making and making important self-reflections that movements are going about their ways insufficiently, which btw, they are in America to my experience in activism. — Saphsin

Yes, I agree. No contest there.

I don't know where the author advocates for a messiah of the Left (he just says Peterson succeeded by filling a gap that the rest of the Left visibly does not fill for American consumers, that's not advocating one figure to fill the gap) and I don't know where the author says there is the absence of an alternative full blown ideology (whatever that means) — Saphsin

Yes, he may not be saying those things explicitly. That had struck me as being implicit, maybe, because he is clearly lamenting the lack of *something*, that the left has itself to blame for, and which enabled Peterson to find his popular niche. The lack of a well developed alternative political ideology, or of an effective alternative leadership, had seems to me what Robinson was pointing to maybe because the other pieces that I mentioned (by Zizek and by Gyrus) themselves complain about those alleged lacunas being red herrings that distract from the necessity of more radical criticisms (some of them actually agreeing with some strands in Peterson's conservative thinking!) of the current liberal and progressive movements and institutions.

I'm a defender of jargon, which can most effectively be used either sparingly or bountifully depending on the case. I think there's a clear difference between that and what the author has a problem with Peterson throwing jargon around to serve as an intellectual cache and not to illuminate actual content. — Saphsin

Yes, I also understood this to be the point of the author. There are good (needed) and bad (obfuscatory) uses of jargon. But good uses of jargon oftentimes are required in order, precisely, to convey the subtle distinctions that must be made in order to justifiably protect a theory (or paradigm, or hypothesis or philosophical idea) from merely apparent falsification. So, what is it that can serve as a criterion of demarcation between unfalsifiable pseudoscience (or pseudo-philosophy) and jargonous falsifiable albeit unfalsified science (or philosophy)? There is no shortcut that bypasses some moderate level of acquaintance with the topic at hand. That was my main point since the complaints put forward by Robinson seemingly mirror the complaints routinely leveled against philosophy (from friends of empirical hard science), and also against specific fields of mainstream science (by 'skeptics'), on the basis of naive falsificationist epistemological principles. (The idea being: if you can't state your thesis in an way that's easily understandable by a five year old such that it can be immediately falsified or corroborated by 'raw' experience, or common sense, then it is BS).

To concur again with Banno, one thing that infuriates me with Peterson is that he often happens onto some genuine insight, philosophical of psychological, because he seems to be rather well read and intelligent. Hence, he offers some analyses of stories or real life anecdotes that seem to hit at what is indeed important about the psychological dynamics and, indeed, the salient ethical feature of the situation. And yet this insight is not so soon expressed that it gets entangled in the crudest possible forms of sociobiological thinking or loosest kinds of Jungian archetype analysis.

Forgot this gem, addressed to Peterson. — fdrake

Yes, Peterson often does 'postmodernism' without being aware of it rather in the way Monsieur Jourdain was unknowingly talking prose. The pragmatist anti-'metaphysical realism' feature of so called postmodern thinking, which permeates Peterson's own conception of pragmatic truth, led to an infamous clash with Sam Harris. Their protracted exchange was an intellectual train wreck. Both Peterson and Harris are regarded by their largely shared fan bases to be experts on the topics of metaphysics and objectivity. Yet, to the dismay of their fans, they took two contradictory stances -- pragmatist and metaphysical realist -- without displaying much understanding of, or acquaintance with, either one of those philosophical traditions.

By the way, I had commented in another thread about one source of Peterson's mongrel assimilation of Marxism and postmodernism.

Furthermore, the most valuable, ever-green insights from these thinkers are often their critiques, not their recommended solutions.

Thanks. I very much like this concluding sentence. It also highlight the never-ending character of genuine philosophical inquiry as well as that of sensibly grounded political thought.

And while Peterson has explicitly distanced himself from Richard Spencer, the latter, in a tweet, stated, "I respect your work. And we share a lot of common ground and philosophical starting points." — Maw

That's true. In another video with Stefan Molyneux, who also is a libertarian alt-right guru, they lament how tragic it is that mainstream academia doesn't acknowledge the (alleged) racial biological basis of IQ variations between ethnic groups, while also insisting on the (alleged) pointlessness of educational efforts that aim at ameliorating individual cognitive competences.

Incidentally, one of the the YouTube comments that Robinson reproduced, but that you didn't yourself quote, had been posted by me! It was intended sarcastically, though. I fear that I didn't word it carefully enough for the sarcasm to be apparent. I was actually shocked by the fact that Peterson couldn't seemingly fathom that there might be good reason to refrain from hitting women other than just because some men can, if they are angry enough, badly injure or kill women that they hit.

New article on Jordan Peterson by Nathan Robinson that's thorough — Saphsin

It's good, not excellent. I broadly agree with Baden's assessment. It succeeds best in exposing Peterson's rhetorical tricks and his methods for concealing both his ideological intentions and the shallowness of his arguments. I have two main reservations, though.

The first one is that some of the criteria by means of which Robinson categorizes Peterson's intellectual system as vacuous (such as excessive use of jargon and lack of strict empirical falsifiability) are a bit naive and overly formal. Peterson's method, for sure, doesn't conform to the stereotypical canons of empirical scientific research. But the main reason why he fails, intellectually, is because of lack of rigor, lack of consistency and, more importantly, shockingly poor scholarship or fidelity to sources. By the stringent criteria offered by Robinson, not only Peterson's own system fails the test of intellectual worthiness, but so do lots of perfectly good scientific and philosophical paradigms that are equally ambiguous (in many respects) and couched in difficult vocabulary. What makes the apparently indecipherable works of Kant, Einstein, Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty nevertheless valuable is their being firmly enmeshed in antecedent research traditions, sensitive to broad ranges of problems that arose from them, and sensitive to the criticism that obvious responses to those problems are likely to meet. Peterson's output, by comparison, whenever it strays from common sense advice, is freewheeling and completely unmoored from any critical tradition. It is, in short, sophomoric.

My second reservation is that the author laments the leadership vacuum that has enabled Peterson to construct a niche that appeals to people on the left. Zizek's two pieces in The Atlantic and Gyrus' piece on Dream&Flesh appear to me much more successful in pointing out the specific lacuna in current mainstream left-wing political movements that Peterson is exploiting. They do so without resorting to lamenting the absence of an alternative full blown ideology, or calling for an alternative charismatic Messiah-like rallying figure for the left.

So far, the best review of Peterson's book (and critique of Peterson) I've read yet. — Maw

Thanks for drawing attention to it. It's pretty good, and spot on, if only, maybe, a bit too unrestrained (in respect of style, not content).

As a general critique of Peterson, and finer analysis of the multifaceted ideological fault lines that he exploits, I still find The Black Truth of Jordan Peterson more insightful, though. It's also more charitable even though it is, in the end, similarly unforgiving.

...so they won't explain anything sudden, like. — unenlightened

Indeed, the variable Milankovitch forcing explains the slow and regular Holocene cooling trend that has occurred since the Holocene Climatic Optimum, roughly 7,000 years ago. It doesn't explain why this cooling trend suddenly reversed a little more than a century ago, and why the climate has warmed as much, over the last few decades, as it had previously cooled, over seven millennia. The human caused increase of atmospheric CO2 (and also methane,CFCs, N2O, etc.) concentration explains this unnatural warming.



Source: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/paleoclimate-the-end-of-the-holocene/

I agree with your comments. However it wouldn't matter if the prediction did take into account that I would be informed about its content (assuming it didn't include a reward or threat). I would still be free to either accept or reject that prediction (i.e., to drink either tea or coffee) and there would be no inconsistency in either outcome. — Andrew M

While I agree that the occurrence of the prediction, and the presentation of its putative content to the agent, take away nothing from the agent's freedom of choice, it must be noted that this setup may make it impossible for the prediction to be successful. That's because if the agent has set up her mind to do the opposite from whatever she is told that she had been predicted to do, then, conditionally on her being presented with the prediction that she would drink tea, say, the predictor will predict that she will drink coffee, and vice versa. So, under those conditions, the prediction, as written down and shown to the agent, can't succeed.

I think this is part of what I wanted to get at.

If I don't behave normally, I'm not entitled to be considered normal. But it need not be a pejorative thing. I think the healthy thing for a nonconformist to do is to accept that they aren't normal, rather than campaign to redefine normal. My sense is that this is a big part of what's going on. — Roke

The trouble is that people don't usually go around qualifying other people's behaviors as "normal" or "abnormal" in a totally dispassionate and/or merely descriptive or statistical way. If this were the case, we could say of an American citizen who speaks both Chinese and Russian that she is highly abnormal.

Also, if someone is gay or transgender, say, and demands not be treated as an abnormal person, it would be very disingenuous to interpret her as saying, foolishly, that her specific case represents a statistical norm: that a large majority of women are gay, or that a large majority of people born with XY chromosomes are females, and hence that she is normal in that sense. Rather, what she is saying is: to hell with norms. Merely statistical of biological norms aren't normative in any kind of moral sense.

It implies that even if you have a completely deterministic description of the universe which predicts I will drink tea, I am not bound by that description. Instead the correctness (or incorrectness) of the description depends on my choice to drink tea (or not). — Andrew M

This is tricky. What you mean to say, possibly, is that the description of what it is that you are determined to do (actually, given "the past" and the deterministic laws that govern the evolution of the material universe) would not bind you if it were (counterfactually) supplied to you. That's because, of course, in the counterfactual scenario where you would be told what it is that you actually are predicted to do, the physical system that you are a part of would be (counterfactually) perturbed away from its actual evolution. Hence, in the counterfactual scenario, you may choose to deliberately do the opposite of what it is that was "predicted". That's because the "prediction" was effected under the assumption that you would not be informed about its content.

What is most deeply true about compatibilism, I think, is the intuition that what can be concluded from a passive theoretical (predictive) stance does not conflict with that it is that can be decided on the basis of a practical (deliberative) stance. And that's because no agent can adopt both stances about herself at once. Deciding what one rationally ought to do is an activity that is inconsistent with passively predicting what it is that one is determined to do conditionally on one's own antecedent psychology and character. Mainstream compatibilist theories spoil this insight when they attempt to theorize the question of agency (and its internal conceptual link with practical deliberation) from within the theoretical stance and hence reify desires, wants and dispositions as some sorts of psychological forces that determine action.

Yet, apparently their supposedly highly intelligent, highly rational opponents easily fall for the narrative that says that there is a significant anti-science movement made up of nutcases. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

It is true, as some have mentioned already, that the AGW-skeptical movement (that is, people skeptical of the anthropogenic contribution to recent and foreseen global warming) has been fueled by fossil fuel interests, and also by economic libertarian ideology. However, it seems also to be a drawback from the crude scientism that has been for a long time pushed by the scientific community. From my experience debating climate science in internet fora, most AGW-skeptics view themselves as advocates and defenders of sound science. The same is true, by the way, of anti-vaxers, in general. Just like the mainstream advocates of "official" scienfic positions, they tend to have a fetish for an idealized version of the scientific method that is broadly Popperian and falsificationist. The problem that skeptics face in grasping the rationale behind some mainstream scientific conclusions isn't methodological. It is rather, to put it crudely, that they don't have a clue what it is they are talking about. That's simply because they lack a sufficient formal training in the relavant fields.

The main thing that prevents mainstream scientists who advocates the crude "scientific method" to go off the rails and fall into pseudoscience, as the skeptics often do, is their actual expertise and active participation in a well developed scientific research tradition. It isn't reliance on any kind of mythical universal method that accounts for the success of science. Hence, when the skeptics charge the mainstream scientists with failures to actually be practicing science in the only way their own endorsed method advocates that they should do, they are correct. In order to correctly assuage the worries of the skeptics, the mainstream scientists would need to highlight the substantial flaws in their arguments, and also criticize the ideologies that bias the skeptics' evaluations of the practical aims and other social aspects of the research, rather than advocate for them to accept mythical methodological principles that nobody actually obeys.

These days, most seem pretty confused about it. I'm confused about it. There seems to be some demand to change how it works, but I honestly don't understand what's being demanded. — Roke

Yes, I think there is some degree of confusion, left and right. Left because people who are socially progressive aren't always philosophically literate and right because people who are socially conservative sometimes don't want to be.

I think the insistence to distinguish sex and gender doesn't amount to something being demanded as much as an insistence that fewer demands be made on the basis of sex. If you are a biological determinist, or biological essentialist, about sex and gender, for instance, you are likely to judge that someone who doesn't comply with a demand regarding how people of a given sex ought to behave isn't entitled to be considered normal. This socially prevalent demand for normal behavior, construed with reference to the alleged link between biological sex and gender-appropriate behavior, seems grounded into a form of the naturalistic fallacy (or, sometimes, divine command).

fdrake commented to me (privately):

I've been reading this 'generalised probability' paper. The 'Heisenberg' uncertainty principle doesn't necessarily need a new form of probability axioms to demonstrate it. The result was actually known before Heisenberg and is a result of the theory of Fourier transforms. The position and momentum operators have an uncertainty principle because one is a Fourier transform of the other. This gives an example in terms of Gaussian distributions.

The intuition behind this result is something like: say you have a function that is highly localised in space (it looks like an upside down U), then its Fourier transform has to have lots and lots of different types of frequencies to 'cancel out the tails' in frequency space to produce U. This means the Fourier transform is very dispersed in frequency space but (and thusly) less dispersed in the original space.

A concrete and extreme example is given by a pure tone. Say someone plays a pure note A with frequency 28Hz. This pure tone, mathematically, wiggles all the way out from −∞ to ∞ - it is infinitely not-localised in position space. What about in frequency space? Well, it consists of a single frequency, 28Hz, so the function in frequency space consists of an infinite spike at 28Hz and is 0 everywhere else - infinitely localised. — fdrake

Agreed, however this characterizes mathematically the duality of conjugate variables in quantum mechanics without supplying an interpretation (either realist or otherwise) of the wave function or of the measurement process. Hence, Heisenberg initially developed the mathematical apparatus of his "matrix mechanics" while being guided by the idea that the measurement process introduces an unavoidable perturbation of the measured system, and proceeded to quantify the resulting uncertainties. It was Bohr who convinced him to endorse a more radically instrumentalist interpretation of quantum states, which justified the characterization of Heisenberg's principle as a principle of (ontological) indetermimination rather than a principle (merely epistemic) uncertainty.

Bitbol's own interpretation has been characterized by him, recently, as a radicalization of Rovelli's relational interpretation. That's because, like Rovelli, Bitbol views the nature of the relation between a quantum system and the agent who actively sets it up, and actively interacts with it, to be constitutive of (rather than merely informative about) what it is that is being measured. However, unlike Rovelli, Bitbol argues against the idea that the wave function (or vector state) that describes the composite system comprised of the observer, the apparatus and the observed system, constitutes a tool that allows for describing all the possible ways to factor this composite systems into an observed system an observer that this system is allegedly "relative" to. Bitbol rather interprets the wave function of the combined systems as merely a mathematical tool by means of which observers coordinate their mutual interactions and their intersubjective judgments about the physical systems that they interact with (and that are constituted by those interactions).

Hi Wayfarer,

I think that it is more a "perspectivism" of sorts. I mean it says that there is an objective reality but there are multiple descriptions possible. Whereas "relativism" denies that there are universal truths.

In some sense it is similar to "realistic pluralism" by Putnam.

But as I said to noAxioms I might recollect badly. — boundless

If I am to believe the Wikipedia entry on Model-dependent realism, it rather looks like a half-baked mixture of pragmatism and Popperian falsificationism. Putnam's mature pragmatic pluralism also is a form of realism, which he distinguishes from metaphysical realism. It is a realism that is essentially relational. It dispenses entirely with the idea of the world as it is in itself, which our models would only convey incomplete understandings or representations of. It is thus neo-Kantian and, likewise, not any more relativistic than Kantian epistemology is. While the elements of the open ended plurality of objective empirical domains, in Putnam's view, each are essentially related to definite sets of pragmatic considerations (or to ways of being-in-the-world), they don't constitute relative points of view on some fundamental reality that grounds them all.

Have to look it up. — noAxioms

Rovelli's paper on relational quantum mechanics is available here.
He also discusses his idea of relationality in non technical terms in his popular book Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity.
He also has co-written with Federico Laudisa the entry on Relational Quantum Mechanics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

As I mentioned above, Bitbol's paper Relations physiques ou relations fonctionnelles ? Une lecture non-métaphysique de l’interprétation relationnelle de la mécanique quantique de Rovelli is excellent. It's a pity that it's only available in French. Bitbol has written a bunch of papers in English about his favored interpretation of quantum mechanics, though. Most are available on his web-page. I recommend especially:

Quantum Mechanics as Generalised Theory of Probabilities and
Reflective Metaphysics: Understanding Quantum Mechanics for a Kantian Standpoint.

I've been following this thread with interest over the last few days, and read most of the messages. I've only been lurking because I've been quite busy with my readings. Some of my readings, though, may interest some of you.

Michel Bitbol, Relations physiques ou relations fonctionnelles
(In this paper, Bitbol compares his own pragmatist interpretation to Rovelli's relational interpretation, and he compares the latter to both Bohr's and Everett's. It's the fourth paper by Bitbol that I read on the topic of the intepretation of quantum mechanics.)

Michel Bitbol, De l'intérieur du monde : Pour une philosophie et une science des relations
(This is a fascinating 720 pages book. I've only read a few dozen pages. It appears to have much affinities with my own neo-Kantian pragmatist proclivities in metaphysics and epistemology.)

Manuel Bächtold, Interpreting Quantum Mechanics according to a Pragmatist Approcach
(This is a summary of Bächtold pragmatist interpretation, which he developed more fully in his thesis, written under the supervision of Michel Bitbol)

Manuel Bächtold, Le Possible, l'actuel et l'événement en mécanique quantique : Une approche pragmatiste
(This is Bächtold's thesis. I am currently reading section 3.8 Les interprétations everettiennes, and section 3.9 L’interprétation en termes de corrélations)

I certainly approve but... Benkei didn't even get to finish his popcorn!

And he actually ADMITS this ??!! — Dachshund

Thorongil is a post-structuralist Trostskyite. This often puts him at odds with Agustino who is more of a Derridean structural-Marxist.

I hear you. For each item that I read, ten more join my reading list. (I've learned in my probability theory class, though, that there is a way to add 10 new beads in a jar, and only draw one out at random, at each step, and end up with with an empty jar after countably infinitely many steps.)

Been reading through Jared Diamond's anthropological work, following it up with Debt by David Graeber. I think this is completing my late teenage Marxist deprogramming - better follow it up by finishing 'Society of the Spectacle' and making a thread about it. — fdrake

Thanks for drawing my attention to Graeber. If you've enjoyed Diamond's anthropological work (I've only read Guns, Germs and Steel, and maybe a couple chapters from The Third Chimpanzee), maybe you'll also find interesting Sterelny's The Evolved Apprentice, which I mentioned above. (I'm currently midway into the third chapter). It reaches deeper into the past than does Diamond's Guns but it articulates a conceptually overlapping framework for understanding the origins of culture.

Evidence and Inquiry by Susan Haack
History and Utopia by Cioran (rereading) — Maw

I much enjoyed Haack's paper Just Say 'No' to Logical Negativism. I share her profound dissatisfaction with Popper's falsificationism. She seems to have already expressed some of her critical arguments against falsificationism in Evidence and Inquiry (I merely browsed it). A minor criticism that I may have is that she doesn't have a clear view of the possibility of a disjuctivist epistemology as a fallibilist alternative to falsificationism. She seems not to distinguish fallible epistemic grounds (or defeasible criteria, as they're also called), from fallible epistemic abilities. To be fair, almost everyone working in epistemology makes this unfortunate conflation.

Vote for Richard Potato!!!! — charleton

Richard Potato-Head?

1. Racist people make racist comments and write racist books.
2. Charles Murray wrote a racist book.
3. Therefore, Charles Murray is a racist.

That's an entirely valid argument. — Benkei

While that clearly isn't ad hominem, and it may also have some inductive validity, it is deductively invalid. Benkei may have meant the first premise to read something like "Only racist people make racist comments and write racist books." In that case, it would be deductively valid.

To the extent though the rule does mean that there should be no legal protections or limitations upon those who lack the ability to comprehend what they're engaging in, I am encouraged by the overwhelming rejection of the rule by the various European countries. — Hanover

The main rationale for denying to mentally incapacitated individuals the right to represent themselves legally, or administratively, seems to be to protect them from themselves. They need help, and hence, some custodian such as a family member of some public agency is tasked with representing their interests. This doesn't appear to me to apply to the right to vote since a vote cast for the 'wrong' candidate is unlikely to harm the individual as much as denying them this fundamental civic right can potentially harm them morally should they express the wish to exercise this right. (Also, since it's a right that they are unlikely to demand to exercise anyway, there is no downside to granting them universally).

(4) the identification of performing hypothesis tests with enacting an empirical paradigm of research.
(5) the identification of scientific relevance with a rejected null hypothesis

is a driving force of poor quality science.

Hypothesis tests themselves reward noisy data collection. Gelman and his coauthors have worked extensively on this recently. — fdrake

I concur very strongly, as Trump would say. I've recently argued with some of my friends about what seems to be the damaging effect of the hegemony of the research paradigm of p-value hypothesis testing in many areas of social science. It seemed to me to reflect some unwarranted empiricist assumptions about the categorical separation of 'raw' data from 'subjective' theory, and to foster an unwarranted skepticism directed at our theoretical and practical (technically effective) understanding of the world. For one thing, those empiricist assumptions obscure the fact that the null hypothesis can't generally be meaningfully falsified since its initial credence (prior probability) must be evaluated in light of the plausibility and fruitfulness of the "theory" that supports it. One example that we discussed was the idea of rejecting the null hypothesis (with p=0.01, say) in light of a statistically significant "result" of telepathic communication, which is absurd. At best, the Bayesian analysis of the result of the experiment that we just performed ought to lead us to update our credence in the reality of telepathy from a microscopic 'prior credence' to a slightly higher but trill microscopic 'posterior credence'.

And in 2014 a biomedical science journal outlawed the use of p-value hypothesis testing in submitted papers. Hopefully the times they are a'changing.

That's remarkable! I'll show this to my friends.

— fdrake

Thanks for all those informative links!

On the other hand is the assertion that humans experience of duration is unique in experiencing not physical processes like clocks or anything else physical, but of the advancement of this "ontologically real" present. This would elevate it to an empirical claim, and despite being untested, would seem to be complete nonsense. — noAxioms

Totally agreed.

Here is perhaps the disconnect between what fdrake has been addressing and what I've been denying, which is the ontological status of duration, or of time. So I think some clarification is needed, because I think the wording you put here is the more standard one.
When people ask me if they think time is real, I don't know how to answer since I don't associate ontologly with my understanding. But apparently it is in contrast to 'prespectival', and no, I don't think it is real in that sense. — noAxioms

Proper time isn't perspectival, though, is it? This is the idea of the absolute duration of a localized process, as measured by a standard clock that travels alongside the process.

The times when events occur (or coordinate times), as referred to a specific inertial reference frame, for instance, are perspectival in the sense that they are relative to the choice one makes among many possible inertial reference frames. But there is another sense in which time is perspectival, and this is the sense in which the separation between the three classes of events that are past, present and future is relative to the locally and spatially singular perspective on an agent. And this ties up with the idea of one's power of intervention. This sense of temporal perspectivality is quite independent from whatever the special theory of relativity has to say about time, empirically, except for the manner in which it defines the three regions of the agent-centered light-cone at each instant: limiting possible intervention, or unintended causal influence, to the events located within the "future" region of the light-cone. The two other regions of the agent-centered light-cone can be assimilated to this agent's perspectival past, for all practical purpose, since they comprise all the events that this agent has no causal power influence anymore.

Still, the physical duration of processes seem to me not to be perspectival in any one of the two senses distinguished above (i.e. "frame-perspectical" or "agent-perspectival"). So, that would be one rather trivial sense in which time can be said to be "ontologically real". But this consideration is blind to the metaphysical significance of the distinction between past, present and future, which is better addressed with Kantian considerations on the relation between concept and intuition, or inquiries about the phenomenology of situated agency.