Good point. ↪apokrisis , to what extent is the "collapse" simply the experiment being resolved by identifying one of the many solutions of the Schrödinger equation, all of which "exist" together? — jgill

How do you mean? The act of measurement that picks out a solution is the tricky issue.

As an experimenter how is just one fate picked? And does nature pick a solution in the same fashion, or do all solutions exist as "worlds"?

So following to what you wrote above.Can we actually escape from the mechanical way we see the nature??Can we Indeed build-invent a device that can actually give us a different from "yes or no" answer?? — dimosthenis9

I would say that misses the point. From the point of view of semiosis as a theory of meaning, our great advantage – what makes us intelligent organisms – is that we can actually impose a logical framework of counterfactuality on our environments. It is by finding ways to reduce our environments to numbers on dials that we can actually then model it in ways that are of maximal interest to us.

Peircean semiotics in particular – or what we called the modelling relation in theoretical biology – is about constructing a model of the world with us in it. An Umwelt. So it is the "us" that is constructed along with the "that" which is outside us. Our model is thus a meaningful relationship because both self and world are what are being represented, and indeed created. We experience a world as a place ripe with all its potential to serve our interests. We are as central to the model making as the world.

From that point of view, we don't want to transcend the limits of our experience for any good reason. We have the opposite desire of wanting to make the world ever more like our rationalising model of it.

So semiosis - as the modelling relation that gave rise to life and mind as evolutionary structures – is founded on four main levels of code. Genes and neurons take care of biology. Words and numbers take care of human sociology – our existence as cultural creatures.

Evolution shaped our neurobiology and gave us our sense organs. They were exactly whatever were needed to decode our environments at the time – set up a rational self~world relation where we just have to look or listen and it all makes pragmatic sense. Our senses break everything into a world of threats and promises, with us at its centre as a choice maker with some list of priorities, some collection of skilled habits.

Then humans invented a more abstract form of semiotic world modelling based on language. Then later on, mathematics.

And once we had maths, we could go full logical. We could reduce the self in the model to some universal notion of an observer. We could reduce the world in the model to some set of crisp measurement values. We arrive at the scientific method with its formal theories and instruments designed to reduce the material world to a data set.

The eyes only need to be able to read the numbers on the dials. Our senses needed to be limited, not expanded. At least to see reality at this mathematical level of the self~world relation.

But still as you mentioned for reality and measurement, also here reality doesn't require maths as to exist.Maths could easily be just a human invention and nothing more. — dimosthenis9

My argument is different. Maths is the natural culmination of an evolutionary process. It is semiosis taken to its most abstracted level. And a new kind of self has to emerge to be able to live in such a world. For this world to make sense, we need to remake ourselves as that kind of intelligence.

This is a thought that horrifies many. But it is why education pushes at least the basics of logic, maths, critical thinking and a scientific attitude so hard.

As a biosemiotician, I both accept and criticise this outcome. I say this is both nature at work, doing its thing – an evolutionary trajectory. But also, the four levels of semiosis might not be all that well integrated with each other given the rocketing trajectory of Homo sapiens and its semiotic development.

As individuals, we all have to integrate our various levels of semiosis – from genes, to neurons, to words, to numbers. But that is quite a project when our linguistic and numeric selves are still transforming our worlds at an accelerating pace.

So why do we all need to be finding our answers to the biggest possible metaphysical and scientific questions? What point is there in that, and what kind of selves would that then create? That's an interesting discussion in itself.

But what I'm saying is that you have shifted the discussion from ontology to epistemology now. Which is fine as the OP is also about epistemic good practice. It is about why science demands full mathematical rigour and how much room that then leaves for unstructured "metaphysics" – that being then another way of saying you want to reduce knowledge of the world back down to biological sense data. You want to be able to picture something solid and real like billiard balls cannoning around a table.

But my definition of metaphysics would be stricter – more mathematical. Metaphysics is about seeking the logical structure that could produce a reality in some self-creating or self-necessitating way.

What would you say about the idea that there is happening no collapse at all.But we just think that we "spot"one ,cause we are condemned from our own consciousness to see it like that?Cause our consciousness can't conceive something being everywhere at the same time? — dimosthenis9

So that is my argument. Semiotics is all about imposing a rational frame on the world. That is how we then deal with the quantum world. We impose a machinery of counterfactual measurements that achieve an effective collapse. To collapse just means the world is so thermally constrained that its indeterminacy is minimised in some way that is counterfactually useful to our thoughts.

We don't actually have to collapse to claim to make an observation. We just give nature no other choice – when it comes to the state of a switch – that it registers the digital fact of being either on or off. It returns either a 0 or a 1.

So yes, we evolved to see ourselves as objects in a world of objects. That is our neurobiological default. We see things that bump and collide in a way best interpreted as local and deterministic in their causality.

It would take a lot of training to think more contextually, structurally, or holistically about causality.

Our consciousness "needs" a specific result for the observation cause that's how it works as to interpretate things and well it "sees" a specific result at the end because nothing else would make "sense" for it. — dimosthenis9

This is what I've tried to explain. Out consciousness is the sum of all four levels of semiosis or self~world making. And each level imposes its own mechanistic kind of measurements on the world.

Each level of mind has to be able to read its kind of signs. Sense data is looking for shape and movement – the object oriented point of view that sees a world in terms of rocks, tigers, wasps, rivers, hats and coats. Science seeks to reduce reality to numbers that slot into differential equations.

So it is about a reduction to the signs that make sense to the kind of self for which those signs would make sense. The measurements must be of the kind that plug most directly into the models. And in a more general sense, we become the kind of minds that see their worlds in that particular kind of light.

It is not a problem. It is how it works.

But the problem we experience as selves is the degree to which all the levels of world-making feel unintegrated.

If you don't get the maths in a personal fashion, then all you might hear is the words of those seeking to impose their more abstracted selves, and their more abstracted worlds, upon you.

Naturally there can be resentment. But also you live in a world where the maths works. All the technology that is your modern environment is constructed by that abstracted level of semiotics.

So you have to live in that world, but you can't speak its language. Frustrating.

But hey. All the confusion over quantum interpretations is evidence that even the mathematically informed are largely unsure how to integrate all the levels of semiosis themselves. There is no one community tale to tell as yet.

That is a work in progress.

Slightly different, I agree, — Isaac

No it’s not. But perhaps you are confusing yourself because you want to critique the US as an imperialist superpower rather than engage with the specific point - which is that the incompetence of the Russian force projection is not because Putin never thought he would need an effective army, but because a rotten system could never have delivered an effective army.

Try comparing the Russian situation to democratic states in general. Let’s remove your emotions about the US from the debate so you can see things more clearly.

You seem to be arguing that Putin didn’t feel he needed a modernised army when he said he did, nor that he felt Nato wasn’t actually a threat, despite always acting like it was.

At best you've given a mechanism whereby an imperialist Putin might, despite his intentions, have only achieved a substandard army, but you're far from a compelling argument. Plausible, sure, but hardly a coup de grâce. — Isaac

So I’ve won the argument but now you want to bicker about the margin of my victory? :grin:

Ultimately, I've just got no reason at all to start from the assumption that Putin is a fierce imperialist, so I don't need to find ways to explain events through that narrative. If I start from the assumption that Putin is a greedy opportunist, nothing about the current events doesn't fit. — Isaac

I’ll just remind you again that my original argument was geopolitical. So it was about the conditions that shaped both Putin’s worldview and Russia’s general historical position on these matters.

The puzzle at the centre of this is then that Putin seems a fierce imperialist and a greedy opportunist in equal measure. Both seem true. And yet the two conflict.

That is my fascination. That is what makes things so unpredictable.

Has he changed? Did he start out wanting to make Russia great again but then get corrupted by the very system of power he was forced to construct? What are the actual war aims of his special military operation? How could they rationally fit either monotonic reading of Putin’s mind.

I agree I started out with the Peter Zeihan type analysis of the need for defendable borders and the pressure of imminent demographic decline. Then Vlad Vexler makes it clearer that Russia always hurtles without clarity and so Putin being trapped into his own escalation game becomes the psychology at work.

It’s like if you are Jeff Bezos, why keep piling up more money? If you are Rupert Murdoch, why keep building up more political sway? If you are Trump, why keep stirring up even more shit?

Escalation becomes its own structural logic. We see it everywhere in the world. Folk are trapped in cages of their own making. They start out being successful in the terms the world has given them, but then get locked into that mode of success long past any apparent true purpose.

Bezos, Murdoch and Trump all spring to mind as stark failures of the values of democratic societies. They are growth stories turned cancerous. And yet one can’t believe they are happy in their achievements. Being trapped in an escalation machine seems a human tragedy. The fairground ride that never stops.

So when it comes to analysing the Ukraine crisis, I don’t claim anything is clear. But it feels like Putin must have built his escalation machine out of the mix of inchoate historical imperialist angst and the more modern turn of the Russian state into a self-perpetuating kleptocracy dependent on its skills in information autocracy.

He had to invade Ukraine just to show forward purpose. He had to throw an incompetent, ill prepared, and underpowered force into this endeavour. Plan B is doubling down and hoping the general chaos means that at least everyone loses.

It is all very irrational even if it begins as something rational. Just as in the same way that cancer is biology escaping the constraints of its own immune system.

This makes it sound like the metaphysics comes later, to be tacked onto the science as an ad hoc specific account of the theory from a slightly higher level of abstraction. — Joshs

As you say, it is a semiotic process of sense making. So it is all intwined and develops in hierarchical fashion with new levels of abstraction coming to incorporate the earlier stages of development.

You can’t treat this as both the feature and the bug as suits your rhetorical purpose.

The Scientific Revolution is painted as a correcting of the very wrong theories of Aristotelean metaphysics. The new metaphysics had to be seen to be replacing the old one in a big way. That is the usual social dynamic. But historians of science then look back and see less of a leap than supposed.

Your favorite philosopher , Peirce, who has closely been influenced by both writers, wouldn’t seem to have any trouble in synthesizing classical and quantum models within his metaphysics. — Joshs

Well of course. I mean that is exactly what I’ve said so I have to agree. :razz:

Trouble is, he's talking about the US military... — Isaac

That’s right. This kind of open criticism of the political settings - the choice of wars fought, the size of the established force, etc - is what Russia would need as well.

But we were talking about the competence - the military structure, equipment, logistics, training, morale - of the Russian forces. The operational effectiveness of a system where criticism is suppressed.

Sure. Everyone can point to all the unnecessary wars the US has fought because it ain’t sufficiently politically honest with itself. It is set in imperialist mode in terms of ideology. No argument there.

These are the two narratives I can't seem to square. — Isaac

It’s simple enough. If you set up a top down system with the goal of diverting blame from the leader then that prevents the bottom up feedback that tunes the system to be effective. The system lacks the independent thought and truth telling it needs to function well.

All this against the alternative narrative that the Russian army is crap because Putin simply wasn't interested in using it to expanded his empire. — Isaac

Do you have informed sources that argue this? They would be fascinating to read.

I'm not saying it's implausible that Putin has this private imperialist agenda which he's somehow unable to adequately prepare for because he's been too hubristic to listen to advice. That makes some sense. But it doesn't make so much sense that all other interpretations are apologist fantasy... that's the point I'm making here. — Isaac

This seems a welcome change of tune. :up:

Plus the technology machine that is used for that measurement , which is also part of the system. — dimosthenis9

That is in fact exactly what I would focus on with my own biosemiotic approach to the measurement problem.

The significant thing is that human intelligence can impose a system of mechanical switches on a thermally decohering reality. That is what a measurement is. Turning a material event into a number on a dial.

So now we are only saying that if we constrain quantum indeterminism to the point it has to answer a yes/no question, then - not particularly magically or weirdly - we get a yes or a no from our device. We have forced the world to act in a mechanical fashion. It has given us a classical reply – even if this reply failed to constrain all the other things we might have chosen to measure in the same mechanical fashion.

So in this way, we can see that we use the idea of the machine - the binary switch – to impose our chosen simple metaphysics on a more complex reality. But this doesn't have to mean the world actually collapsed into classicality at that point. It only had to be forced towards that classicality as the decoherent limit.

The mysteries of the quantum are preserved by saying it is not human consciousness or anything like that which cause a physical collapse to classicality. It is only human intelligence that allows it to construct a mechanism of measurement which will limit a quantum potential to such a degree that a device reacts in some black and white way. An event is recorded.

And humans with their instruments can only exist in a very cold and empty vacuum where there are stars and planets and other such crud to turn into mechanisms. Measurement operates in a far from typical condition. And reality certainly doesn't demand to be measured to exist.

So the whole collapse thing is an artefact in this view. It is tied to human acts of measurement which involves the physics of flipping switches – a physics that itself exists only at this atypical moment in cosmic history, and only due to the fact that humans have invented this whole system for turning reality into numbers on dials.

Did that "n*gger" word come from Physics or Psychology or Popular Science? Historically, Racists have justified their prejudice with scientific evidence. They too, "engaged" in propagating personal repugnance disguised as scientific facts. — Gnomon

What? You seem particularly unhinged today. This was the term you introduced into the discussion.

You may find it offensive. But it ain't racist.

Where does woo-woo come from? Woo-woo is first recorded in the 1980s, used to mock beliefs associated with the likes of New Age culture. The term may have originated as an imitation of the sound of the theremin in horror and sci-fi films and TV, or of the spooky noises associated with ghosts and the supernatural.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/woo-woo#:~:text=Where%20does%20woo%2Dwoo%20come,with%20ghosts%20and%20the%20supernatural.

What evidence led Guth to extend the Big Bang moment backward in space-time?

The biggest result in cosmology in a decade fades into dust — Gnomon

Inflation is still an open question. Observation has indeed ruled out a large class of models now. Guth's own version died almost immediately as it would have left very visible domain walls. Slow roll inflation followed by reheating is the current story.

I myself was very keen to see inflation turn out wrong as it seemed too much of an extra complication. But I've had to change my mind – in terms of what I expect, rather than what I believe – as, for many reasons, the logic is pretty strong that a scalar field had to have stretched the spacetime metric very flat.

The fact that Universe is incredibly flat, and yet it doesn't have a balanced critical mass budget until you let dark energy take care of that problem at the back end (after inflation has taken care of it at the front end), has become an evidence-backed finding.

So that is the constraint that cosmological interpretations have to operate under. Inflation changes from being a complication it would be nice to just cut out of the old story of GUT symmetry breaking (where mass and gravity could start out in perfect critical balance after a Planck scale symmetry breaking) to being the simplest way to get around a critical mass story that now has its three disparate components of matter, dark matter and dark energy.

At least inflation and dark energy could be both the same thing now.

But anyhow, the way you throw the 2014 revision of the Bicep data into the conversation as some kind of "gotcha" is indicative of how little you are aware of the constraints on the conversation to be had. It shows you don't really know what you are talking about.

The question the kindly professional might then ask, well, is this guy interested in learning? Or does he just have a bee in his bonnet?

I'm not asking how the world we see emerges from the quantum foam. I'm questioning the objective existence of the quantum foam or any other structure or system, temporal or not. — noAxioms

OK. So how would you objectively measure the quantum foam? In what sense does it exist as a measurable stuff?

If you properly follow that question, you can perhaps start to see how a substance ontology – one that says "show me the fundamental substance, and then tell me why it exists" – is just an inadequate way of framing the ontological issues.

You keep looking for the "stuff" that breathes fire into the equations. Hawking was too. Pretty much everyone frames its as the hunt for the fundamental substance, that then brings with it it's own "well, why that?" question.

So my position is based on trying to get around that whole frame of thought. I follow the line taken by Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce in particular. And this then leads to the kind of structuralism which explains the success of the mathematical equations, coupled to the "material potential" of Peirce's logic of vagueness, Aristotle's prime matter, and Anaximander's apeiron.

Or, as here, Wheeler's quantum foam.

But the substantial being (your term, not mine, so maybe I'm using it wrong) of the ball and dome is what the topic is about, so you were very much meant to pay attention to that. — noAxioms

I was doing so in arguing for Aristotle's hylomorphic view of substantial being. I was pointing out that you are taking substance for granted in a way that Ancient Greek metaphysics already shows is unwarranted.

Have you studied hylomorphism? That seems to be the sticking point.

It's kind of an anti-platonic view. Plato says abstract things exist (that the existence property is meaningful, and that such abstract things have it). — noAxioms

And have you studied the Timaeus closely enough to see that Plato also needed to breathe fire into his equations by positing a chora or receptacle to take the imprint of his forms?

Both Plato and Aristotle were wrestling with the same metaphysics when it came to an explanation of substantial being. Neither had the perfect answer. But they point the conversation in its right direction.

Can you explain to me what you think the topic is about? — noAxioms

I agree that Hawking is scratching at the right itch. But say he - like you, and indeed most – still make the mistake of thing of material cause in terms of actually formed stuff. Substantial being. Something that can be measured in some basic way, even if it is a bland stuff like some kind of clay.

Remember that what breathed fire into Newtonian mechanics was the idea of objects with mass. These bounced about in an empty space and time void.

But then mass became confined energy under relativity. Energy in turn became an entropy gradient, and even information. Physics has kept moving its understanding of the animating fire into a more and more structural definition.

And this ain't wrong. It is correct. But it then leaves us asking what we mean by the stuff that breathes fire into all the maths? What is it that is being informed by all the form?

This is where we have to stop and be ready to give up on thinking of material cause as something fundamental rather than as something itself emergent. Material cause is something that structural necessity itself makes manifest.

That's a whole new metaphysical ballgame. Or in fact, one as old as Anaximander, the first real metaphysician.

Before setting forth upon the special operation, Putin was a popular figure in European ultranationalist circles. At the same time, he courted the EU to set up massive infrastructure deals. It seems safe to say that bit of dual theater is gone. — Paine

This interview with Ralph Schoelhammer sets up how things might go as Euro nationalism erupts in the coming sticky winter, especially if the US did blow up Nordstream to ensure Europe can't backslide on Ukraine.

(We still have to discover who actually did blow the pipes, of course. Or what it is that the majority will believe.)

The video is right wing propaganda. Yet there is truth in how the political situation could turn quickly if a new European narrative is adopted. The existential fear is legitimate.

My comment was that Putin would at least be calculating the possibility of Europe being at this very tippable point as a result of his chaos.

Climate change is the real existential threat, not this rerun of Tsarist or Soviet imperialism. And the world having failed to become collectively organised must logically dissolve into it collection of self-interested parts.



Peter Zeihan has then been spelling out northern Europe's problem with green tech for many years. In sum – for Germany in particular – not enough sun for solar, not enough wind for turbines. Plus German industry is all about turning fossil fuels into export goods.

So Germany – as the anchor of stability – is facing crisis. It has to jump in some direction.

Are you a credentialed expert on "woo mongering"? — Gnomon

As a science writer I was indeed professionally engaged in delving into varieties of woo mongering in the 1990s, from psi, to quantum consciousness, to artificial intelligence, to all sorts.

So this was woo at the academic level - professors with labs. :grin:

Isnt the relevant question, who in particular wants to, as you say, assimilate QM to a more familiar everyday metaphysics? What if it turned out that a majority of the key players in the development of current QM thinking were in this category? Would we have any justification in claiming that they are failing to grasp the correct metaphysics? There is a cottage industry of philosophers wanting to assimilate QM to their favored philosophical foundation , but could there be any arbiter better suited to determine what sort of metaphysical foundation is implicated by QM than one of its inventors? What is the metaphysical underpinning of Newtonian mechanics? Isn’t Newton’s own metaphysics writing an excellent source? — Joshs

You are treating this like some kind of cultural power struggle. But that is a bad lens for understanding the sociology at play in the scientific community.

Newton did set this ball rolling. He put together the metaphysics of atomism and the mathematics of differential equations. The result was the natural philosophy of mechanics.

And even QM fits that mould mathematically. Particle mechanics was switched out for wave mechanics. Real numbers were switched out for complex numbers.

So as a community project, it was a natural extension of the metaphysics of mechanics ... having to then make concessions on the key tenets of that metaphysics as it progressed.

For example, determinism became wrapped up in the wavefunction, and so what was determined was now some set of probabilities.

The wavefunction also looked to exist outside the space and time it modelled. Hence it spoke about the local from a nonlocal view.

But even this is not so unacceptable given that Newtonianism already had its own similar deep interpretive issues. To believe in his version of gravity, you had to have some kind of spooky action at a distance. You had to believe also in a spooky action at a temporal distance as all material trajectories were regulated by the least action principle. Not to mention you had to believe in space and time as backdrop that was empty of action or dynamics.

Good old fashion mechanics is also deeply weird if you delve into its metaphysics. Atomism seemed pretty crackpot back in Ancient Greece for a reason.

So this is the context. If you are in the business of science like the quantum pioneers, you know that mechanics works. And you know it already builds in a weirdness of the kind any lay person would object to if they had ever understood it properly.

And if your job is to continue with what works, then developing the same general mathematical approach – suitably vamped up with wave mechanics, complex number magic and probabilistic determinism, etc – is what you do. Yes, this leads to troubling metaphysical weirdness. But it is also mostly just picking the other option in terms of what defines weird.

Is the Cosmos a void or a plenum? Newtonianism says a fixed and eternal void. QFT says a plastic and evolving plenum.

Is it a problem that QM is nonlocal? Well not so much if Newtonianism already demands acceptance of the spooky principle of least action and QFT built that right in as its path integral metaphysics.

So from the outside, you can paint it as being a bunch of simple-minded realists suddenly running into the quicksand of their own mathematical formalisms.

But from the inside, it is about making community judgements about what you take as your general truths and thus what defines your counterfactual evidence.

You can't doubt everything at once. And it has worked to suspend doubt about certain core principles. After a few hundred years of spectacular success, you might even risk talking in public as if the core principles are ontological facts rather than epistemic assumptions.

However those working on the foundations of physics ought to be as familiar with the weirdness buried in Newtonianism as the weirdness appearing in quantum mechanics. And to the degree this is simply a swapping of one kind of weirdness for its dialectical other, then it is business as usual. You just adopt the opposite axiom.

Or more ambitiously, the collective inquiry can turn to the goal of tidying up the metaphysics of both Newtonianism and QM. Not to mention relativity and quantum gravity.

Mechanics itself needs a proper metaphysical foundation. Atomism was always just the convenient story that fitted with a particular mathematics.

So from my own point of view, my own interests, QM interpretations are a part of that much bigger adventure. Which also drags it back towards metaphysics as the conversation to be had. What ontology can have both the classical and the quantum as its dichotomous faces?

But the problem is that in QM the "evidence" lead to a deadend so far.The actual theory itself is schocking and mind blowing to what we already knew about nature.And that's the reason generating so many different interpretations.And such no surprise that many of these "crackpots" are actually well known scientists.So I don't think is easy to distinguish them.Except from "extreme cases of crackpotters". — dimosthenis9

I wasn't talking about QM interpretations. These are all ways of trying to make ontological sense of mathematical algorithms. All the players are tightly constrained to stay within the maths, but allowed to be free as they like with their ontologies.

It's not crackpot because it is a useful community exercise. It has progressed. If your ontology demanded hidden variables, then Bell's inequality should have eliminated it. If your ontology applies only to QM and not QFT, again you have fallen off the back of the pack.

This doesn't look like a deadend. It looks more like a serious conversation about the most difficult of things.

By the way, i remember how surprised (not to say schocked) I felt when i first read that the dominate interpretation in QM is Coppenchangen's.
That consciousness affects the results.Mind interferes matter.That's actually pure metaphysics! — dimosthenis9

That is now the least supported version of Copenhagenism. It's not a general belief but rather it highlights the fact that what is missing from the formalism of QM is how actual measurements can get made when the observer is also part of the system.

Decoherence gives a pragmatic mathematical answer now. But again that is maths lacking a clear ontology. You still don't know where to place the epistemic cut – the division between the observer and the observed – in a generally agreed sense. This fact is dramatised by taking the options to either ontic extreme. Either the physical wavefunction collapse is somehow caused by the human mind, or there is no physical collapse, which results in the equally ludicrous outcome of there being "Many Worlds".

You don't have to believe either of these interpretations. But it is useful to know that these are logically the two most extreme choices available. They define the spectrum of possibility when it comes to locating the epistemic cut.

And now decoherence is here to say we really ought to start focusing on the actual thermal scale where the world looks to transition between its quantum weirdness and classical determinism.

Given that step forward in the debate, Copenhagenism and Many Worlds – in their matchingly extreme forms – should both be fading out fast. We should now know just where to look to find the intersection between classical observers and their quantum realities.

My understanding of this war is that Putin, an opportunistic kleptocrat, saw an opportunity, in the machinations of US imperialism, to consolidate his power (and more importantly his wealth) by taking control over key strategic areas of Ukraine. — Isaac

Vexler says 30% of the motivation would be Putin creating domestic crisis so as to take tighter control of a shaky power structure. But that leaves a lot of room for also have a rather personal and inchoate sense of imperial mission.

Sick and at the end of his life, wealthy beyond imagination but a failure in his ambitions, he might have just found himself trapped in a cycle of escalating aggression as a gambler's last chance.

He knows – through a successful cult of personality and a clever policy of information autocracy – that he has the people with him. He has made the fascist connection between leader and the led.

But the consequence of that is the state machinery has become too corrupt and inefficient to execute any war plan. He has a crappy army because he had to squeeze all independent thought out of Russia's power structure.

So as a dictator, you win some, you lose some. And the only way forward becomes escalating to the next step in terms of external aggression and internal suppression. Putin becomes caught in the dynamics of his own machine.

So it is not opportunism vs strategic plans. Things just spin faster as they gurgle down the plughole.

What I would love to know is how Putin rationalises all this to himself. What secret hope does he harbour?

Maybe he acts in the belief that if he can just stir up enough chaos, then the worst that could happen is Europe also becomes brought down by it too. You don't need to roll your tanks into Latvia and Poland. You just need to wreck energy and food supply chains for one winter. Quite likely you will have economic collapse, hard right power grabs, a meltdown that cripples the EU.

If you know you can't win a conventional war or nuclear war, then is infecting your foe with social chaos a rational strategy given that everything must be escalated right now in your own eyes?

That said, it seems Putin did expect to be able to seize territory and topple the regime in Ukraine in weeks if not days. Mobilisation was never intended. Concrete gains were hoped for.

But behind that may be the mindset that if Russia can't succeed, then at least it can pull everyone else down to the same level. If this is the game plan, then it is all about tipping Europe into its own hard right chaos now. That is what Russian imperialism looks like these days. The crappiest version of itself.

Maybe, it's good that I have no professional credentials to be sullied when I express personal opinions on an internet forum. — Gnomon

The problem here I believe is that the goal of a forum ought to be to express some collective wisdom rather than provide a platform for personal opinion.

Of course, a crowd is made up of its voices. But that is why philosophy, science, or any other intellectual activity aims to be a community of inquirers. There has to be a conversation that seems to be going somewhere collectively useful. A discourse has its history. And its importance is measured by the degree it comes to constrain unbridled "personal opinion".

So freedom of speech is essential to an intellectual community. But then so is the collective view that comes to shape discourse within that community.

It is a two way street. And I would say that is how folk judge participation. This is the sociology in play as people seek to norm behaviour.

I have no orthodoxy to be held accountable to. — Gnomon

That sounds like an exciting position in life. Until you try to put it into practice. Have you ever been to speaker's corner in Hyde Park? Crackpots ranting from soapboxes as public entertainment? A sad sight.

The wonderful thing about orthodoxy is that it gives you something solid to react against. You learn everything you know by engaging with it on its own terms.

Orthodoxy exists to hold you to account. And that is how you could even participate in the growth of knowledge and collective reasonableness.

Crackpots want all the glory for doing none of the work. That's a very different mindset.

Seems then that the various interpretations have been useful, even if only as annoying gnats or mosquitos that have to be swatted away. — T Clark

Yeah. Folk had to have a go at assimilating the quantum weirdness to conventional classical metaphysics as the first step. Nothing wrong about that.

Then they had to refine their thinking about what essentially had to change.

So it is just science doing its thing of following the evidence. Which is what makes it easy to distinguish from crackpots doing their thing.

Generally, the Copenhagen interpretation is considered equivalent to the shut-up-and-calculate one, although I guess there is some lack of clarity on that. — T Clark

It runs the gamut from "shut up and read the dials" instrumentalism to "consciousness causes the collapse – as that is the only place we can find a collapse". So it is a rather comfy fit for all views.

If an interpretation adds value, if it is useful, then it is metaphysics. If it doesn't, if it isn't, it's meaningless. — T Clark

I agree that multiple interpretations seems a sign that nothing has leapt out of the pack in way that has advanced the actual physics. But then again, there has been a story in the way attempts to assimilate QM to classical notions – as with EPR and Bell's inequality – have led to ever more subtle experimental evidence in support of nonlocality and indeterminacy.

So the interpretations have been eating away at their own believability and demanding that greater metaphysical paradigm shift in my view.

New voices like Emily Adlam are making that case.

I can't figure out what you mean by "compossibility. — T Clark

Hah. That’s Leibniz. I mean the possibility of being composed. So atomism. The idea that all existence can be constructed ground up from elemental being. Another core ontic commitment of classical metaphysics.

Is it firmly established that there is no empirical difference between the interpretations? — T Clark

I’d say it is more that none of them - familiar at a popular science level of discussion - are well enough defined to be put to a sharp test. They are mostly a means to explain away rather than explain.

But as I say, the focus seems to be tightening. Bohmian mechanics has fallen right off the charts as a relativistic version couldn’t be produced. And folk are saying it is all very well accepting spatial nonlocality, but your interpretation needs to accept temporal nonlocality too.

It's interesting that the survey showed zero percent in favor of a transactional approach. — jgill

Yep. But as framed by Cramer, it was still rather clunky feeling. It needs a whole new definition of time as something thermally emergent. So not the classical notion of time as an unbroken symmetry but the evolving block universe kind of view where you would have true temporal nonlocality, but the saving grace is that the nonlocal aspect is left with so little to do.

The retrocausality would be minimal - like tiny “wrong way” eddies in a powerful forward temporal flow. The future could constrain the past as a running adjustment on a wavefunction. But the tilting of the odds becomes less and less as the state of the universe grows more and more thermally decohered.

When things are hot, anything could happen. As things cool right down, what could happen becomes highly constrained - if also still entangled at the wavefunction level.

What defines knowledge is that you can act on it. It is pragmatic. It is a model of reality that results in the ability to affect reality in predictable fashion.

So what does it mean that there are a whole bunch of QM interpretations that try to demystify its mathematical success in one way or another?

Well, the thing they all have in common is that they want to assimilate QM to a more familiar everyday metaphysics – the classical view which is founded on determinism, composition and locality.

This simply shows the prevailing metaphysics in scientific circles is out of step with the prevailing physics. Or at least it was in the 1930s or whenever the popular choices were being framed.

The maths worked, the metaphysics couldn't keep up. It was stuck trying to assimilate a new world to its old maps. That left folk trying to rescue determinism and locality by whatever it took – whether that was Copenhagenism, Many Worlds, or whatever.

So the interpretations industry just made the metaphysical plight worse in trying to drag things backwards to a simpler view of the world.

But these days it is catching up as folk come to accept that cherished elements of reality such as determinism, compossibility and locality are emergent features of a quantum reality rather than foundational features of a classical reality.

When I label my own philosophical "interpretations" of the quantum foundations of reality as "Meta-Physics", I often receive finger-pointing accusations of promoting "woo", or if especially offensive to the poster's belief system, as "woo-woo". — Gnomon

But that is understandable. While most official quantum interpretations just want to assimilate its mathematical structures to a classical metaphysics perspective, the woo-merchants are trying to assimilate them to their romantic notions about mind and spirit. The metaphysical grounding ain't even classical, but animistic or theistic.

It isn't answering the question at all. Do you at all understand what I'm getting at? Any cause (material, formal, whatever) is still only related to a created thing, and the universe cannot be such a thing. That's the category error I was talking about. You're treating a causal structure like a caused structure. This is intuitive, yes, but only because language treats it so. It's still wrong. — noAxioms

I thought I was clearly arguing against a "first cause" position. Emergence and development are different from "acts of creation".

So I would say you don't follow what I've actually said. You don't yet get the subtlety of the structuralist or systems perspective.

But the question asked by the topic is, does there need to be an existing ball on a dome for this to occur, or will just a ball on a dome suffice? — noAxioms

You were meant to pay attention to the mathematical structure of that example, not the substantial being that is some literal ball on some literal dome.

Again, my argument is that we start by following Aristotle in dissecting substantial being into its formal and material causes. And what we find is that we wind up where we do in mathematical physics. We have a tale of Platonic-strength structural necessity – the inevitability of the invariances due to symmetries – coupled to the most nebulous sense of "materiality" possible. QFT winds up talking about excitations in fields due to inherent uncertainty or instability.

So the fields must fluctuate due to a fundamental indeterminacy. And that is all that is required by way of material cause to breath fire into the equations of the Standard Model.

But if you can't shake a more concrete conception of Nature from your imagination – the one based on a metaphysics of "medium sized dry goods" – then yes, this won't compute.

The causes of substantial being have to be dissected. Once that is done, formal cause gives the reason for why structure has to be what it is – under the further finality supplied by a least action principle.

And then material cause is reduced until it is virtually equivalent to a nothing – a quantum foam of possibility or Apeiron of random fluctuation.

Structure supplies the determination. Fluctuation supplies the indeterminacy. Chance encounters constraint and an evolutionary cosmic process is unleashed.

Simple. :grin:

The reason I related its use to the logic of MAD is that once one introduces nukes into the battlespace, it doesn't make sense to send just a few. — Paine

The battle space is Ukraine. If you are in Idaho or wherever, you don’t say let’s go MAD. You say sorry for your loss, guys.

The issue is how to frame Putin’s thinking. A persuasive view is that he sees himself in an existential battle with NATO and the West. Ukraine is just the current focus of a general strategy of constant escalation.

So his game is to ratchet up the pressure however he can. He doesn’t know exactly how much he will actually gain, but shaking the tree hard enough is bound to knock off some of the fruit.

Reading the nuclear talk in that light, his goal would be to put the world in such a state of funk that he gains an advantage. He must gamble with Russia’s only real card - a nuclear arsenal - and promote a climate of genuine fear.

So going nuclear in a delimited tactical fashion wouldn’t be to win in Ukraine and then declare hostilities over. It would be part of the bigger project of destabilising the West by crossing one of its bright lines and raising the question “now what?”.

The danger is that escalating chaos is his goal, not some negotiated face-saving solution to the Ukraine invasion. It is a game of chicken and the West would have to figure out how to play in this updated version of MAD in which a whole new bunch of bright lines would have to be established by the international community.

In short, Putin isn’t trying to find solutions. He is trying to create problems.

Of course some folk believe Putin just wants a fair deal on a Crimean corridor, a chastened NATO, and we can all get back to what we were doing before February. Putin is not a nostalgic imperialist. His demands are kind of reasonable from a certain light. Etc, etc.

If that little material something needs fire breathed into it, then it matters not that it’s minimal. The problem is still there. I eliminate the problem at the start by not suggesting the need for it. But it acts against a strong bias and nobody else seems to be able to accept that. — noAxioms

Minimising our notion of material cause by maximising our understanding of formal cause is still progress. It is answering the question of cosmic existence in causal terms.

So we can breathe fire into the equations by understanding them to be describing formal causal necessity. We can see why the symmetries of nature are not just some random choice but a mathematical necessity. Existence couldn't be otherwise.

And at the same time, the material cause – which is what folk conventionally think of as the bit needing to be supplied as the animating fire – is revealed to be the most accidental or incidental kind of cause. It has to be there as a cause in some minimal sense, but ends up being hardly anything at all.

This is the message of spontaneous symmetry breaking. The ball on the top of the dome has to roll off. The situation is so poised that absolutely any and every nudge will tip it. Therefore the actual nudge that tips the situation is as unspecial and "immaterial" as it gets. You couldn't really say it caused anything as such. One fluctuation would has been as good as any other. All you need is the impossibility of ruling out fluctuations.

And structuralism lets you argue that fluctuations can't be ruled out until in fact structure starts emerging to produce its suppressive constraints. A fluctuation ain't even a fluctuation except retrospectively to the context it then revealed.

How do the BM people respond to this criticism? — noAxioms

As I said, folk like Goldstein agree it is an issue and hope to solve it. But what is the point of just catching up to QFT with an inherently clunky QM interpretation when the goal is already to find a way forward to a full QG theory?

The idea that NATO could pick up all the tactical nukes is simply ludicrous. In fact, just how elusive the HIMARS launchers have been tells how difficult this really is.

I think this goes a bit to the propaganda side.... — ssu

Sure, he may overstate. But surveillance and drones have also come a long way since Cuba and Iraq. And Russian logistical incompetence is a thing.

Vlad Vexler gives an interesting account of the psychology driving the invasion. In a nutshell, the ideological/existential clash between Russia and the West is the curious one of the West being driven by its techno-utopianism view of humanity and Russia simply being undecided about what its glorious imperial destiny is all about.

In Googol's words, Russia can't give a "why". It just hurtles ... and everyone else ought to get out of the way.

And then Putin hates the West because it has twice now infected Russia with its dangerous ideology. First there was Lenin importing communism. Then it was the US pushing neoliberalism after the Soviet collapse.

So the West has its own familiar worldview. It got swept up in its Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution to become a fossil fuel driven dream of endless growth and social progress. Economics and politics have become fused into machine designed to deliver this destiny. The natural expectation is to become one planet united under free trade liberalism.

But Russia was left off to one side as its own vast Tsarist empire with fuzzy borders, unsure if it was really Western or Eastern, just sure that it was a sacred enterprise, a true fount of culture and humanity. And increasingly aware of the difficulties of maintaining a stable sphere of influence given the fast pace development of Western Europe, with Asia starting to industrialise as well.

So the key, says Velxler, is the West is tied to a destiny predicated on teleological growth, and Russia is tied to a destiny which is just about existing as some kind of impressive imperial spectacle. It doesn't want to be made over in crass imitation of what the West thinks of as the human ideal.

This gives a neat view of why both sides think they are right at a metaphysical level. And hence why both finds the other "unreasonable".

Putin comes in after the West's neoliberal shock treatment proved so disastrous in the 1990s - an experiment in the Western dream of unstoppable growth imposed on Russian soil. And he views the USSR era as likewise the importation of flawed Western metaphysics.

Communism, like neoliberalism, was another theory based on economic determinism – change the economic structure and you change the people.

So the thesis is that Russia's sense of empire and destiny has always been vague by Western standards – as the West has very concrete notions of economic determinism and progressive ambitions.

That is why what Russia really wants in this world seems hazy. It doesn't have an empire plan as such. Even communism as a world revolution, a definite project, was a foreign import. But Vexler says under Putin this inchoate sense of self has turned hard and fascist. Putin has worked on making the state and the people one. And the mission is to push back at the West and its ever-pressuring economic utopianism.

"What good is the world for us, if it is a world without Russia?" Putin says rather nihilistically.

So is the war with Ukraine rational or irrational, competent or incompetent? Vexler paints Putin's Russia as a superpower without any particular teleological plan – something the West could negotiate with – but a huge sense of having been imposed upon for far too long and is now fused into a fascist body politic ready to be reckless about shoving everyone as far away as possible.

More useful comments on tactical nukes from former British army officer and former commander of the UK & NATO Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Forces, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon…..

It is likely that these launchers would need to travel hundreds of miles to get into a position where they could attack Ukraine, as they only have a range of up to 500 kilometers (310 miles). But from a mechanical perspective it’s unlikely, in my opinion, that they would get that far.

I believe Putin’s tactical nuclear weapons are unusable. Even if their vehicles do work, the minute they turn their engines on to move they will be picked up by US and NATO intelligence.

I hope the private discussions the Biden and Putin administrations have apparently been having are along the lines of, ‘you move your tactical nukes and NATO will take them out with long range precision guided missiles’.

The most likely nuclear scenario is, I believe, an attack by Russia on a nuclear power station in Ukraine. This could have a similar effect to a tactical nuclear explosion but would be easier to deny for the Russians, who accuse Ukraine of deliberately bombing their own power stations.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/28/opinions/how-close-putin-nuclear-war-de-bretton-gordon/index.html

What if that response wiped out strategic use of nuclear weapons by Russia? — Paine

I’m not following. How could lobbing a few tactical nukes in the current war - now framed as a legitimate defence of mother Russian territory - make any difference to the strategic arsenal of subs, missiles and cruise missiles?

Commentators say Russia could use a tactical nuke and the West would live with it. So step one is not MAD but calculating what Western caution allows.

It’s not as if the chemical and biological lines haven’t been crossed often enough now.

So an EMP strike to take out communications and surveillance in conjunction with a renewed push by a conscript reinforced frontline, perhaps next spring, rises to the top as one rational choice - depending on whether EMP works as advertised and if the frontline can be held through the winter.

Or else the big Hiroshima demonstration of resolve much sooner to see if that cracks Ukrainian and Western will. A more desperate gamble. And who would be the likely target? Odessa as the critical sea port and historical city?

Could US provide the Ukrainians with the antimissile defence or even shift to enforcing a no fly zone if Russian preparations are underway? Is that the countermove?

If they were used for a tactical advantage, then some units would have to advance through the corridor provided. There is no evidence that the existing forces are equipped to do that. The prevailing winds tend to go from west to east. Not good for Russia. — Paine

Yes. The analysis I’ve read so far rules out practical use on the battlefront - apart from EMP.

If it was a strategic strike, then wiping out Kyiv would certainly change the calculus. — Paine

But who do you negotiate with? And Belarus might be unhappy about a strike so close.

Odessa docks might be a limited enough starting point. Both a useful military target and one with international name recognition.

And if the Russians know that would happen then the strike would have to get in front of all the instruments of Mutually Assured Destruction by a preemptive strike from the mother of preemptive strikes. — Paine

Yep, the sky’s the limit after the first move. So if the Russian generals are capable of rational choice, does that tilt things to an EMP attack and spring offensive? A more “excusable” crossing of the line?

The problem is that Putin needs to pull a rabbit out of the hat in the next month or so given the way his frontline is crumbling. What do we know of his generals and their ability to prevent that?

Situation update: mobilisation makes it far more sure Putin will resort to tactical nuclear weapons now. He has proven he will keep doubling down no matter what the costs. The only off-ramp seems to be if his generals refuse to push the button, and so Putin is replaced.

Questions: What would be the first target? Would he aim to shock and awe Ukraine into submission with a demonstration population strike like Hiroshima, or hit vital infrastructure, or hit some military concentration?

Then what is the world like after that? The West couldn’t respond in kind. But does it just escalate its current tactics - step up arms supply, sanctions and isolation - or does it have to stop and come up with an entirely new plan? Can it give into Putin’s demands in the short term while having some long term containment strategy? What’s plan B?

Your last replies didn’t really engage with any particular argument I was making.

To recap, you started out with the question of why anything would actually exist in a fashion that mathematics could now describe it. And also you seemed to want to clarify something about the role of time in all this.

My reply was that Hawking’s question could be flipped by ontic structural realism. The cosmos exists as it does not because nothingness was impossible but because quantum "everythingness" was self-limiting. Nothing could prevent symmetry breaking and the expression of the least action principle as an act of cosmic Darwinism. Gauge invariance had to emerge locally, Lorentz invariance globally.

So that is the structuralist view. But structuralism still suffers from needing a model of the raw action - the initial everythingness - that can breath fire into the equations. There is still a "first cause" issue in some form. But the big step forward is that it is as little of a "material something" as could be imagined. It is just a quantum foam of possibility as yet to be structured by an emergent topological order.

So ontic structural realism, or the condensed matter view of a cosmos shaped by the principles of topological order, is the part of reality that is the most "mathematical" and thus what the maths of fundamental physics seems to be "all about". The maths is the natural way to capture the organising limits of nature – its emergent gauge symmetry in particular.

But also we need a theory of the stuff – the material cause that complements the formal cause – that "breathes fire into the equations" in the sense of giving the symmetries something to limit. And this is where we need some kind of model of the quantum foam, or vague Apeiron, too.

I wasn’t aware of this. Can you expand or provide a link about this issue? — noAxioms

On the problems with Bohmian mechanics, that Adlam reference is useful as a general overview – given you seem to want to incorporate retrocausality or temporal nonlocality into whatever QM interpretation you wind up with.

Moreoever, most mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics, including the Everett interpretation, spontaneous collapse models and the de Broglie Bohm approach, are prima facie temporally local.

But SR of course already tells us that the idea of a present moment and tidy temporal order is problematic. And this then is a reason why Bohmian mechanics and its pilot wave fails to be relativised.

https://doi.org/10.3390/e20010041

But in general, BM doesn't relativise because where QFT path integral demands that particles take all possible paths, including the non-classical, BM's pilot waves just take classical trajectories.

Goldstein has tried to use backwards causality to fix this – https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0105040.pdf

Sounds legit. :up:

Why would you be asking me for such an account, what makes you think I have one? — Isaac

You’re hilarious.

:up:

For, indeed, that only makes sense if you manage to collapse the Russian state; i.e. defeat Russia. — boethius

I was talking about the implosion of Putin’s regime following a failure in Ukraine. Different thing.

It's a direct quote, you asked for a moral judgment on Putin. — Isaac

No. I asked for a geopolitical account by which he might be understood as a rational actor. Just as my first post stressed that Russian imperialism as a national identity is grounded in geography and history.

So keep on strawmanning.

As to your specific questions, I haven't any idea why anyone would want to discuss who the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys' are in geopolitical events. — Isaac

So you continue to strawman me. Post after post and still nothing of substance from you. Find someone else to pester.

It's not as if anyone's open to actual discussion about the crisis itself is it? — Isaac

You and Bennie just shoot first and ask questions afterwards.

But go ahead. What is your balanced view of Putin and his little adventure? What paints him in some better light? What makes it anything less than an awful miscalculation and another Russian implosion?

If his rump of the old empire finally crumbles into its parts, why would it be so bad to be a clutter of small ethnic states on the edge of NATO and the EU? Some might be corrupt stans, others might thrive like the Baltic states. But in what way would the West be the bad guys in such a world?

Discuss away.

Obviously the referendums are not legitimate. — Jamal

I saw comment that military law says conscripts have to serve four months before they could get sent to fight in Ukraine. But annexing Donbas, etc, would let them be sent straight to defend the “homeland”.

If this is the reason for the referendums - to dot the i’s of domestic legalities rather than anything to do with international opinion - it is an interesting sidelight in how even autocracies must function as states with legal systems.

So the show is for home consumption - a fiction to stave off law suits from a nation of angry mothers.

The point is that your comment... — Isaac

As I said, it was hyperbolic in response to benkies hyperbolic accusation of imperialism being a fiction.

The fact you acknowledged this yet still continue to make a song and dance says you have no interest in a discussion. You are simply caught up in the emotional drama of it all and need someone - anyone - as a foil for your righteous opinions.

I'm referring to his 2016 Essay in Foreign Affairs on why Putin took Crimea, but that's not relevant — Isaac

So Treisman says the seizing of Crimea was either to prevent loss of Black Sea fleet, or part of a more general imperialist agenda, or just an impulsive improvisation of an autocrat turned erratic.

It seems to me that all three are still in play, although with the current miscalculated invasion, there was no immediate prospect of Ukraine joining NATO or Russia being forced out of Crimea. And where once might be seen as impulsive, twice looks more like a pattern.

Again, remember my comment was not that Russians are driven by some kind of nostalgia of lost empire - although that is a sentiment. It is the practicalities of constructing a defensible Russia that drives the imperialism in the first place. Given the actual economic and demographic state of Putin’s Russia, this then explains why Putin’s efforts to Make Russia Great Again look impulsive and opportunistic because, well, he isn’t in a position to be more systematic.