Thanks for the education. I'll take a look at "What is Real."

Notice how close this is getting to the dictum of classical metaphysics - that ‘to be is to be intelligible’.

Ha, well I'm trying to figure out if this standpoint is actually justifiable while starting from no presuppositions with Big Heg. The problem is that for some reason I thought the Logic was notoriously dense but at least shorter than the Phenomenology. Then the book arrives and it's like 1,000 damn pages.

I've made it about a third of the way through Houlgate's 500 page commentary on the first 20% of the Logic and we haven't made it to the introduction yet... and I don't think I've fully grasped everything... so I might have to get back to you on that.

That said, I can see the outlines and it seems like it might work.

The problem is that for some reason I thought the Logic was notoriously dense but at least shorter than the Phenomenology. Then the book arrives and it's like 1,000 damn pages. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:D

The Science of Logic is something I need to revisit eventually if I ever hope to be able to offer a formalization of sublation, but it's so hard to get through.

Copenhagen has a metaphysical perspective, it's one that is heavily influenced by logical positivism and Carnap — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think that's popular myth.

Some time ago there was a meeting of philosophers, most of them positivists, here in Copenhagen, during which members of the Vienna Circle played a prominent part. I (Bohr) was asked to address them on the interpretation of quantum theory. After my lecture, no one raised any objections or asked any embarrassing questions, but I must say this very fact proved a terrible disappointment to me. For those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it. Probably I spoke so badly that no one knew what I was talking about....

I can readily agree with the positivists about the things they want, but not about the things they reject. …Positivist insistence on conceptual clarity is, of course, something I fully endorse, but their prohibition of any discussion of the wider issues, simply because we lack clear-cut enough concepts in this realm, does not seem very useful to me—this same ban would prevent our understanding of quantum theory. — Werner Heisenberg, Positivism, Metaphysics, and Religion (in Physics and Beyond)

The quote 'for those who are not shocked...' is quite famous in its own right.

Did you know that Bohr adopted the ying-yang symbol for the Coat of Arms that was commissioned after the honours he received from the Danish Government? It symbolised the complementarity wave-particle duality



Michel Bitbol (French philosopher of science) argues that Bohr is nearer to Kantianism than positivism. See Bohr's Complementarity and Kant's Epistemology (recorded lecture). '"(According to Bohr) you cannot speak of attributes of objects independently of the possibility we have to explore them" (38:52)

Not that I am at all an advocate for "consciousness causes collapse," but sometimes exploring theories you don't like tells you important things about the ones you do like. In any event, in comparison to infinite parallel universes and infinite copies of ourselves, it doesn't
seem that wild. If the Fine Tuning Problem is bad enough to make people embrace multiple worlds, maybe consciousness causes collapse is due for a resurgence? — Count Timothy von Icarus

More on topic, though --

I'm pretty skeptical of the fine tuning problem. I'd probably count as a deflationist on the question because I'm not so sure that the "physical constants being just this way" is really that surprising. They're constants. That's what they do, and we throw them into equations all the time just to make it work. (ever notice how Hooke's Law isn't so much a law as an approximation with wiggle room that works for springs? There turns out to be a point where it's no longer applicable)

Basically I'm not sure the notion that physical constants are worth taking seriously as ontological assertions. Sure if by the notion that the physical constants are ontological entities than there's a question to explore. But if they're just constants, like Hooke's law or coefficients of friction, which we use for certain circumstances, then there's no mystery there. It's just us making the balance sheet work out right and throwing a constant in to keep our math working while we describe this physical phenomena with it.

That being said, I'm not sure that consciousness can be explained through wave-function collapse, as if our actions are always measuring wave-functions and collapsing them and so these constants come out of that interaction. The two subjects seem so incredibly disparate to me that I usually think it's foolish to combine the two. The problem of consciousness requires picking apart the supervenience relationship, and quantum wave collapse requires the Hamiltonian operator which generally operates on partial differential equations.

They're both so heady and conceptual that I usually feel like solutions that propose both are a bit hand wavey in saying "Look, there's two complex things going on and maybe we can get two birds with one stone", but to me it just looks even more confusing.

Again, there is no literal 'wave function collapse'. It's a metaphorical expression for the reduction of possibilities to a certainty. The mystery is the implication that prior to measurement, the target object cannot be said to definitely exist. And if the purported 'building blocks of reality' can't be said to exist, then you have to ask 'what is real?' which is the name of one of the books mentioned about this subject.

Eh. I definitely disagree with that. Just because uncertainty is a physical truth doesn't mean that the electron doesn't exist. It just means that there's a relationship between position and momentum, or time and energy, such that an increase in a measurement of position results in a decrease in a measurement of precision for momentum, and further that this is a result of the physical system rather than the various objections Einstein made to it.

The Copenhagen interpretation's fault is not metaphor, but literality. The form of the math expresses the physical reality, rather than represents it. The electron, whatever it might mean, is literally a point and a wave.

In ways this mimics Hegel's dialectic, because these concepts are not Boolean contradictions of the form "A ^ ~A", but rather were two concepts thought to be contradictory. My thought on the Copenhagen interpretation, with respect to dialectics, is that the assertion of point/wave started a dialectic, and the sublation was in the mathematical equivalence between wave and matrix mechanics.

Just because uncertainty is a physical truth doesn't mean that the electron doesn't exist. — Moliere

What do you think the Bohr-Einstein debates revolved around? It was just this kind of question. This is why Einstein famously exclaimed one day 'Does the moon cease to exist just because nobody's looking at it?' The clear implication is 'of course it does, stop being ridiculous'. But he was compelled to ask it the question. He posed the so-called EPR paradox to once and for all disprove the anti-realist implication of quantum mechanics, but as is well known, this was torpedoed by the Bell inequalities experiments conducted by Alain Aspect and others (subject of a recent Physics Nobel, I believe.)

The view of the first-generation quantum physics was deep, subtle, and philosophically informed. Schrodinger was a lifelong student of philosophy, particularly influenced by Schopenhauer, and expressed an admiration for Advaita Vedanta. Heisenberg was essentially a Christian Platonist, who studied the Timeaus deeply in his university years. (By the way, it was Heisenberg who coined the term 'Copenhagen interpretation', in 1955, in his book On Physics and Philosophy. His writings are the canonical source for much of what goes under that name.)

This brief article is worth a read: Quantum Mysticism: Gone but not Forgotten. The author notes that it was with the migration of physics research to the US after the war, and the heavy involvement of the military industrial complex, that the 'shut up and calculate' mentality became predominant. The Americans lacked the philosophical culture of the European pioneers. (Having just watched Oppenheimer, I have no trouble believing that.)

The electron, whatever it might mean, is literally a point and a wave. — Moliere

How can 'something' be 'literally' two completely different kinds? As is well known, Bohr said that the answer to 'is it a wave of a particle?' depends on which question you asked, but it could not to be said to be anything beyond that. Heisenberg: 'What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.'

How can 'something' be 'literally' two completely different kinds? — Wayfarer

By being both a particle and a wave. "particle" refers to matrix mechanics, and "wave" refers to wave mechanics, and it turns out they were mathematically equivalent. It was an old science fight between Schrodinger and Heisenberg which turned out to not matter because they both predicted the same outcomes. So I interpret that as "particle" and "wave" as being inadequate to the task at hand, where the math is adequate even though we still puzzle over what it means.

When we start measuring small stuff it behaves differently than when we measure big stuff. And you can even apply QM to macroscopic objects, like the moon, and you'll see that how small the difference is basically gets erased at the level of the moon. Neither the moon nor the electron cease to exist if the experimenter is not experimenting. It's being measured by all the other electrons, etc, around it.

Or -- the Copenhagen interpretation encouraged shut up and calculate, because that's where the literal truth was thought to be.

The form of the math expresses the physical reality, rather than represents it. — Moliere

I've been pondering this. It is possible, I suppose, that the mathematics in quantum theory has been reified to some extent. The Mathematical Universe is this idea writ large.

even though we still puzzle over what it means. — Moliere

Right! My point.

Neither the moon nor the electron cease to exist — Moliere

And this is where the 'mind-created world' of idealism enters the picture, but I won't drag Tim's thread any further in that direction.

the Copenhagen interpretation encouraged shut up and calculate — Moliere

I believe that saying was coined by David Mermin. Heisenberg himself did not shut up - he continued to lecture and write throughout his life, albeit that his international reputation suffered because of his association with the Nazi bomb project.

Cool. Glad to have you along thinking with.

That's basically what I think. I love the German scientists because they were educated in philosophy and so were willing to explore interesting questions that were just their curious thoughts, and I think it was obvious that these curious thoughts lead to some advances in the sciences.

But I'm skeptical of the implications. The first thing I think of is, why not biology as a first science rather than physics? Maybe the results in physics, at certain times at least, aren't fundamental but specific to the system they're studying, and the aggregates of the physical world don't follow the same rules. Not in a superfluous way, where we're just approximating the quantum level, but rather that The Origen of the Species The Origin Of the Species* sets out a wholly different way to interpret the physical world that can be semi-bridged through the genome, but even as we dig into the mechanics of life there are differences that are only half-way related to QM (like proton pumps) or not related at all (like "uh, the cells just changed based on the measurement, but I'm not sure why").

*The Origen of the species would be the end of the species, since he castrated himself. I done did the mispelling thing and so am correcting myself here.

why not biology as a first science rather than physics? — Moliere

It's too messy. And chemistry and physics underlie it. A biophysicist could go into more detail. There is one lurking here.

I'd be happy to hear from them if they're willing to speak.

I'm not a biophysicist, but I sometimes annoy my coworkers in my insistence on attempting to reduce our experiments to the physical sciences :D. But, that also provides some motivation to reject the reduction -- the working molecular biologists I'm around, who know way more than me about their subject, are perfectly able and I'm still learning concepts from them. Not all the relationships are mathematical. They're linguistic, even in a fairly plain-language sense while occasionally introducing some technical terms, and yet seem to be true.

Then I think about the plots of climate science and how I believe in global warming. There's a lot of supporting ideas, but if I were to look at the math alone then the uncertainty would dissuade me if I didn't know about the reality of the system being studied.

I guess that leaves room open, in my judgment at least, that biology's messiness is actually a virtue with respect to truth.

why not biology as a first science rather than physics? Maybe the results in physics, at certain times at least, aren't fundamental but specific to the system they're studying, and the aggregates of the physical world don't follow the same rules. — Moliere

It's about scale. Particle physics deals with the world at the smallest possible scale. To understand biology you need to understand chemistry and physics, but not the other way around.

Darwin didn't write his book in those terms, at least. Later on it was confirmed that biology and chemistry get along, but that's not where he started. And I'd say there's still some questions with respect to natural selection and physical science that aren't answered because we're still mapping the proteome (of humans, of various eucary, archaea, and bacteria) , we're still figuring out how the physical and the biological interact -- even in the most practical applications like medicine, but also with respect to basic research.

To understand biology you need to study biology. To understand chemistry you need study chemistry, and all the same for the other subjects. The intersection between these fields isn't so clean as you present.

To understand biology you need to study biology. To understand chemistry you need study chemistry, and all the same for the other subjects. The intersection between these fields isn't so clean as you present. — Moliere

It's about scale. You need to understand chemistry to understand biology at it's most basic level. Biological systems have to behave consistent with the rules of chemistry. The reverse is not true.

The reverse is not true. — T Clark

I'm skeptical.

Especially now that these two disciplines are interwoven and so have reciprocal support for one another. I don't think there's a "most basic level" as much as there's a wild web of knowledge loosely interwoven, and which concepts get priority at what times has more to do with the experimental apparatus and question we're exploring than general emergent properties of the respective knowledges, such as a hierarchy conditions.

Further -- the big conflict here, with respect to interpreting the sciences in a philosophical manner, is on different notions of causation. The SEP has a lovely page on Teleological Notions in Biology, which you won't find in chemistry except as metaphor. The intersection between physics and biology is interesting specifically because it's where we might be able to understand the relationship between our traditional notion of causation in science (not quite billiard-ball, anymore, but still), and the frequent use of teleology in understanding living systems. That is -- putting biology first isn't so crazy as it sounds because we're not modeling the world off of natural selection, but instead questioning what sort of causation is truly fundamental.

Or, if we are dedicated Humeans, we'll note that neither is fundamental at all, that there is no most basic kind of causation that everything can be reduced to, that it's a mere habit of the mind.

That is -- putting biology first isn't so crazy as it sounds because we're not modeling the world off of natural selection, but instead questioning what sort of causation is truly fundamental.

Or, if we are dedicated Humeans, we'll note that neither is fundamental at all, that there is no most basic kind of causation that everything can be reduced to, that it's a mere habit of the mind. — Moliere

This reminds me of the problems of emergentism and notions of "downward causation". How does a higher level influence a lower level, if the higher level doesn't exist yet? Are we going to invoke some sort of quantum level of indeterminacy of time? That seems a stretch. I am not saying it's necessarily wrong, but that approach seems a stretch.

But this brings up a more fundamental question. How do properties (without a knower already in the equation) "emerge" from nothing to something, other than by assertion that "things exist from more basic things it appears". That is just restating what is the case, instead of the question of how that works.

This reminds me of the problems of emergentism and notions of "downward causation". How does a higher level influence a lower level, if the higher level doesn't exist yet? Are we going to invoke some sort of quantum level of indeterminacy of time? That seems a stretch. I am not saying it's necessarily wrong, but that approach seems a stretch. — schopenhauer1

Heh. Well, therein is the rub to all interpretations of QM -- they all kind of stretch our notions of credulity. It's hard to pick one interpretation or another because it's difficult to determine an experimental set up in the interpretations which allow us to distinguish them. Furthermore I think a lot of the QM interpretations are asking too much of the science, like it's a foundation of reality or something. But there's no reason to pick QM over classical mechanics if we're positing foundations. In a way you could treat them like a step-wise function -- when you get to such-and-such a scale, whether we are zooming in or out, then you use these equations. Which equations you use has more to do with your question and what we know from past experience. So far we've noticed small stuff is better predicted with some difficult equations, and big stuff is better predicted with what are still difficult, but different equations.

I've been pondering this. It is possible, I suppose, that the mathematics in quantum theory has been reified to some extent. The Mathematical Universe is this idea writ large. — jgill

That's pretty much my charge leveled against interpretations of QM. Insofar that we don't require all physical theories to cohere into one logical system there's nothing really in conflict between classical and quantum mechanics. They're just measuring different systems, sort of like life is a different system than a beaker of salt water, though there are connections to be drawn out. And you can choose to use either set of equations as you see fit.

There isn't any one mainstream theory for this. Rather, there is a constellation of widely variant theories that focus on anything from "all complex enough computation results in experience," to "certain energy patterns = experience," to panpsychism, to brainwaves, to a quantum level explanations. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Seems to me the kind of situation we would expect in light of less than adequate empirical data, and all the more reason to recognize the low spatial and temporal resolution of the empirical data available at present.

What is surprising is that, even if we could resolve individual synapses, we aren't sure this would give us an answer. That is, most theories are such that, even if we magically had that sort of resolution, they couldn't tell us "look for X and X will show you if a thing is conscious or not." — Count Timothy von Icarus

To me it seems unsurprising that speculation in the absence of sufficient empirical data fails to yield definitive criteria for identifying the physical nature of consciousness.

Would you elaborate on why you find the situation surprising?

Further -- the big conflict here, with respect to interpreting the sciences in a philosophical manner, is on different notions of causation. The SEP has a lovely page on Teleological Notions in Biology, which you won't find in chemistry except as metaphor. The intersection between physics and biology is interesting specifically because it's where we might be able to understand the relationship between our traditional notion of causation in science (not quite billiard-ball, anymore, but still), and the frequent use of teleology in understanding living systems. That is -- putting biology first isn't so crazy as it sounds because we're not modeling the world off of natural selection, but instead questioning what sort of causation is truly fundamental. — Moliere

A couple of thoughts.

I read a book a while ago "What is life? : how chemistry becomes biology" by Addy Pross. It's about abiogenesis and Pross writes, somewhat convincingly, that it would make sense to think of everything, including non-living matter, as subject to natural selection. That could be seen as evidence for your position, although I don't think it is. Cross-fertilization between disciplines is useful, necessary. That's different from understanding science, all human understanding, as a system of hierarchical levels. Perhaps you don't see that as a useful way of seeing things, but I do.

As for causation, it is mainstream philosophy, not to say everyone agrees, that causation is not a useful way of looking at the way the world works. As you suggest:

Or, if we are dedicated Humeans, we'll note that neither is fundamental at all, that there is no most basic kind of causation that everything can be reduced to, that it's a mere habit of the mind. — Moliere

That's nothing new. Bertrand Russell wrote a paper on it in 1912. That makes sense to me. This is not the place for us to get deeply into it.

This is not the place for us to get deeply into it. — T Clark

Fair point. Tangentially related, but that'd be going off the deep end.

I read a book a while ago "What is life? : how chemistry becomes biology" by Addy Pross. It's about abiogenesis and Pross writes, somewhat convincingly, that it would make sense to think of everything, including non-living matter, as subject to natural selection. That could be seen as evidence for your position, although I don't think it is. Cross-fertilization between disciplines is useful, necessary. That's different from understanding science, all human understanding, as a system of hierarchical levels. Perhaps you don't see that as a useful way of seeing things, but I do. — T Clark

Yeah, that's a big conceptual difference between us there.

So I suppose that's also part of my skepticism with respect to the problem of consciousness' relation to QM -- not only are they two different problems that are heady and complicated, but even in related fields, like chemistry and biology, it seems that there are limits to coherence when we dig deeply enough.

problem of consciousness' relation to QM — Moliere

I don't think quantum mechanics has any special understanding to add to the study of consciousness beyond it's role as the substrate for all physical phenomena.

I don't think quantum mechanics has any special understanding to add to the study of consciousness beyond it's role as the substrate for all physical phenomena. — T Clark

:up:

You might be interested in Adam Becker's book "What is Real?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

As I noted on another thread, I did read Becker's book and enjoyed it. It was a bit too People Magazine for me - about biography, personality, and relationships rather than science. Becker was also too rah rah for non-Copenhagen interpretations for my taste - a bit smug and condescending. But the explanations of the different interpretations were clear and well thought through. I found that really helpful. I found one of the interpretations Becker described - spontaneous collapse - plausible and intriguing, although I still don't see how it can be distinguished from the others experimentally.

All in all, my understanding of the overall problem hasn't changed.

That was sort of my feel too. It felt like he had an axe to grind at some points, although it does seem like some people intentionality went out of their way to destroy other's careers to keep their theory from being challenged, which also isn't a good thing. Evolutionary biology has a very similar thing going on right now re how central the "gene pool," really is to adaptation.

Plus, he totally skips retrocausality and information based approaches. The former is interesting, and the latter is one of the most popular versions.

The spontaneous collapse versions do make slightly different predictions and have been tested in some forms. I posted a link to those above.

Information based versions that claim the universe is computable are falsifiable, we have ideas for experiments that might confirm them (and arguably strong emergence) but lack the technology to pull them off.

But verifiable experiments have been born from this sort of work. For example, tests of Bell's Inequalities came out of work in foundations and are important. The delayed choice quantum eraser experiment came out of Wheeler and Feynman's work in foundations.

I am less familiar with work on quantum gravity and attempts to unify physics, but my understanding is that theories about "what is really going on behind the measurement outcomes," have at least some implications for thinking up ways to unify physics and ways to test said theories.

So even if the interpretations can't be falsified currently, work on them does indeed produce testable hypotheses. The idea of decoherence, given short shift in Becker's book, is probably the biggest of these. It has had a huge impact and it wouldn't exist without considerations of what "collapse" is.

Again, there is no literal 'wave function collapse'. It's a metaphorical expression for the reduction of possibilities to a certainty. The mystery is the implication that prior to measurement, the target object cannot be said to definitely exist. And if the purported 'building blocks of reality' can't be said to exist, then you have to ask 'what is real?' which is the name of one of the books mentioned about this subject. — Wayfarer

Yes. I think Bohr's magical/statistical metaphor was taken literally by those who wanted a more mechanical/physical explanation for the non-classical "Quantum Weirdness" that perturbed the pioneers of sub-atomic physics. Apparently the literalists intended to make Bohr's implicit mind-over-matter notion seem absurd. For them, unreal Mind & real Matter are like oil & water.

A century later, the role of the observer is simply ignored by those for whom the mind doesn't matter. Yet, those less opposed to Mental-Physics, now use statistical Quantum Bayesian calculations to measure experimental results in terms of "degrees of belief". It accepts that mental Belief may not have a physical effect on matter (ontological Being), but it certainly has a metaphysical effect on interpretation (epistemological Knowing). :smile:


The Observer Effect :
Abstract: The observer effect is the fact that observing a situation or phenomenon necessarily changes it. Observer effects are especially prominent in physics where observation and uncertainty are fundamental aspects of modern quantum mechanics.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8423983

Wheeler's Observer Effect :
The surprising implications of the original delayed-choice experiment led Wheeler to the conclusion that "no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%27s_delayed-choice_experiment
Note -- prior to the experimental observation, the Phenomenon is statistically unknowable, and even after the test, it's still statistically uncertain, perhaps because the object is Virtual, not Actual.
"the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has nothing to do with the observer or equipment used during observation". https://chem.libretexts.org/Uncertainty_Principle