Pardon my interjection, but could you guys briefly outline the properties of wave motion? How does the velocity or oscillation of an electron in an atom vary from one traveling in a beam or current, and how does this compare to electromagnetic radiation in various contexts? — Enrique

An electron in an atom is *bound*: unless it is supplied with enough energy (ionisation energy), it cannot move away from the atom. In this sense, it has no velocity, but it still has momentum, e.g. the angular momentum that, along with energy, identifies its state. Bound states have discretised energy levels: only certain energies are allowed.

By contrast, plane waves are *unbound*: they can have any energy and momentum. However, by definition, plane waves already occupy all of space, and so don't move anywhere either. In between these two extremes, electrons starting from a confined volume (such as an ionised electron) will spread out from the region of confinement (a circular wave) or move in a more well-defined direction and spread out as it does so (a wave-packet).

Frequency is just energy with different decorative physical constants.

Yeah, except they wouldn't have the properties for us to use the word qualia. We're conscious, just not in the way it seems, I guess. That does raise the question of what it means to be conscious. — Marchesk

They wouldn't have the extraneous properties, sure. But properties of qualia ought to be no more than those we know we observe. The original definition is suitably vague so as to avoid any illusory qualities:

There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these "qualia." But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects. Confusion of these two is characteristic of many historical conceptions, as well as of current essence-theories. The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective. — Clarence Irving Lewis

e.g. red things can be collated across space and time as red things.

Qualia definitions that go well beyond this, such as being the *feeling* of experiencing the colour red, ascribe qualia with additional properties that are probably not real. I am not sure I am ever conscious of the feeling of seeing a red thing. And indeed the point of such definitions is to insist upon an ungraspable component left over when the functional aspect of the mind is understood.

So if the holes (at the screen and elsewhere downstream) don't participate in the conspiracy (indeed, such an extended conspiracy would seem problematic), and there aren't many holes available at any one time, then the emitter has to time its transactions so as to build up the right pattern over time. — SophistiCat

Well, I'm being careful to distinguish between transmission and emission. Emission can be described as the spread of a single electron wavefunction from the tip of the cathode. Transmission is emission + absorption. In standard QM, transmission has occurred when we detect an electron on the screen. Emission by itself cannot, as MU keeps saying, be observed directly and independently (well, it can, but not without destroying the interference pattern).

So the electron wavefunction may well continue to evolve but simply not collapse. In TQM, the same holds: the retarded wavefunction can evolve indefinitely; it is only when the transaction with the advanced wave occurs that transmission occurs. As per the OP, the emission occurs precisely because the transmission occurs, i.e. it is simply one of the boundary conditions of a process that is agnostic about any arrow of time.

Is it plausible? I suppose the bare-bones theory (not including a specific mechanism for the Born rule) does not rule it out, and neither does its empirical basis, which consists of just such accumulation over time of apparently probabilistic events. — SophistiCat

True, hence my interest in Type II transactions, which, if they existed, should be empirically observable and presumably would differentiate TQM-like interpretations from others empirically.

But just to stress, the aim is not really to argue for a particular interpretation of QM. I don't really have any beliefs about it precisely because it is not something evidence can shine a light on, although the OP best describes a tentative ordering narrative going on in my little headbox. Rather, the point is about rejecting premature non-deterministic conclusions from naive quantum mechanical treatments of systems we cannot solve the many-body Schrödinger equation for. QM != non-determinism.

What I'm suggesting is you'e under an illusion about the nature of the internal world. About what's involved in your having that experience.
— Keith Frankish
...
So what accounts for the illusion that conscious experience has properties of qualia? — Marchesk

Forgive my laziness, but is that what he's saying? I read that as: what you think is going on in the brain is not what's really going on. Chalmers insists there is something to having an experience that is separate from the neurological activity involved in having an experience. This seems to be the illusion to me or, rather, a prejudice. Not that qualia do not exist, but that what we infer from their existence is an illusion. This also seems consistent with what Dennett says: it's not that qualia -- which are familiar, everyday phenomena -- do not exist, but that they are not what we think about them.

Correlations drawn between color and other things are not so much caused by color so much as they are made possible by color. Color is one basic elemental constituent of all conscious experience of color... that of red/redness notwithstanding. — creativesoul

I don't see these as exclusive. If we saw in high-contrast black and white, such that any light below a certain threshold frequency appeared to us black and any light above this threshold appeared the same intensity of white, we would have a single colour of sorts (white) but no differentiation: it is either present or absent. We could not distinguish between a nice purple berry and a dangerous red one, and colour as a linguistic concept certainly wouldn't exist. I'm not sure it would make sense to say we have an experience of colour in this case: we have an experience of light above that threshold. By having a different, frequency-dependent mapping between light and perceived colour, we have multiple colours to distinguish and colour itself emerges from that distinction.

You're saying that people who are open to panpsychism are "uncomfortable" with the facts. I think this is in line with csalisbury's view that the characters on the stage include:

1. A strong, intrepid physicalist, courageously facing the wilderness of truth, simultaneously defeating both panpsychism and nihilism.

2. A weak, muddleheaded boy, plaintively pushing magic on the world, in need of pummeling. — frank

I don't know about being in need of pummeling. To borrow from comedian Kevin Bridges, when someone in a bar starts raving about tables and rocks having consciousness, the best thing to do is pat them on the arm, tell them to have a good night, and escape.

Towards what exactly? — khaled

Are you asking me what the point of neuroscience is? Part of neuroscience is a reduction of psychology in terms of more fundamental neurological action, in much the same way that part of physics (quantum electrodynamics) is a reduction of chemistry to more fundamental physical action. So, in this context, toward a neurological basis of psychology.

When an idea gains traction, proponents of competing ideas must retreat, consolidate, and reassert themselves in ways that might even compromise the original point of their ideas. When evolution was put on even stronger theoretical ground by genetics, competing ideas re-emerged as intelligent design. When modern cosmology made a compelling argument for a godless genesis, we got the fine-tuning argument. And look what came after America's first black President.

Panpsychism -- a retreat to an old idea that competes with reductionism and thus is attractive to anyone uncomfortable with reductive explanations for consciousness (which is where the evidence is now pointing) -- is an encouraging symptom of the fact that neuroscience is making good progress. We might not have predicted that panpsychism specifically would enjoy a resurgence, but we ought to have predicted that some such anti-reductionist theory of consciousness would.

If an electron is ready to fire, and there is (in the edge case) just one hole that it can fill, then it will go there almost always, because where else would it go? — SophistiCat

That's my point, it doesn't have to go anywhere. For an electron to transmit, there will typically be a chemical potential difference between the source (here a cathode) and the destination (here a screen). If the only available site lies where the electron wavefunction is zero, no electron will transmit, exactly as if there are no available sites at all, which is the case when the source and sink are at equal chemical potential (zero voltage).

(Unless holes and/or emission events conspire to construct the distribution that we expect to see.) — SophistiCat

Effectively, yes. TQM is a conspiracy of sorts.

Perhaps the emitter is picky and won't always transact with a hole just because it's available? — SophistiCat

Exactly this. Quantum systems are whimsical :D

Yes, but in order to explain experiments where we see nice diffraction patterns, we must conclude that the number of holes available at any given time is not too few, or else we would be seeing something different (or we need to modify the theory). — SophistiCat

Well, as I said, so long as, over the lifetime of the experiment, the holes on average occupy a uniform distribution, we will obtain the characteristic banded pattern.

Language less conscious experience of red/redness cannot consist of correlations drawn between the color red and language use. The color and food items for the trained crow is an adequate example. If the crow was trained to gather red items after hearing the name "red" being spoken aloud, then it would no longer be language less for the correlations would include the language use, along with the red items and the food items. Should the crow be brilliant enough to learn how to talk about it's own conscious experiences of red/redness , that would be a metacognitive crow. — creativesoul

:up: Looks good to me.

All conscious experience consists of correlations drawn between the color red and other things. In that very real sense, they are all the same. — creativesoul

In some qualitative sense, I guess. Redness seems to be a property of objects of perception (no abstract redness is observed, but we can collate red things), and a property is that which causes some particular effect in a particular circumstance (to be is to do) which is the correlation I think we're speaking of. The particular effect may vary from beast to beast, but the property can be established as the same through additional correlations between effects: the crows collate the same things we call red.

For exactness, crows do learn a simple nonuniform language. This might be too far-fetched, but I was considering four crows in adjacent cages, each with an array of buttons of variable colour. When the buttons light up in a random colour configuration, if all crows press all red buttons and only red buttons, they all get a treat. Occasionally crows are replaced by new ones.

If crows are capable, and I expect they are, they might learn a voiced instruction to alert other crows to press buttons, and which buttons to press. A noise that means 'press the red buttons' followed by a noise that means 'this is red' as the tutor presses only the red buttons might suffice. If this were the case, newer crows might be said to have a linguistic understanding of redness.

If you had a quantum theory of special relativity you'd get the Nobel in physics without having to wait for a vote of the committee. — fishfry

It already exists, it's called the Dirac equation, and he did get the Nobel prize (so you're right about that). It's general relativity that's proving a hassle.

The equations are drawn from a book by physicist Lee Smolin, he knows what he's talking about lol — Enrique

He does indeed, which is why I am sure he did not write that they are the fundamental equations of QM. The last is historically significant; you might say it is fundamental to old quantum theory (Planck, de Broglie, Einstein, Bohr, et al) before the five postulates of QM were formulated.

the former. — Julz

Then, sure, the notion that an intelligent being kicked the universe off is sufficiently vague and discreet that it can absorb pretty much any scientific evidence. You just add "as the creator intended" to the end of every statement about the universe.

So, is it possible there is a creator? I’m interested to hear and address counter arguments as I’m not hostile to alternative atheistic or agnostic perspectives. — Julz

My counter-argument is that it's an unjustifiable and arbitrary belief. It is precisely the fact that you can neither prove nor disprove it that reduces it to a personal choice.

Once upon a time, the creator hypothesis was a very sensible one since, the absence of knowledge about ecology and evolution, the suitability of the world for us seemed consistent with the idea of design. As we learned, especially through science, more about the Earth and heavens, it made sense that whoever designed the Earth would be responsible for everything else too, including the origins of the universe as a whole.

So the reason we have the unfalsifiable concept of an intelligent creator of the universe is the now discredited concept of a creator of the terrestrial biosphere. There is no reason to believe in the former now that our knowledge of the latter makes a creator redundant.

Three of the fundamental equations of quantum physics are:
E=mc2,
w=P/mv,
and E=Pf,
where E=energy, m=mass, c=the velocity of light, w=wavelength, f=frequency, v=velocity, and P=Planck’s constant. — Enrique

E=mc2 is from relativity and is not part of QM's postulates. You can derive it from the Dirac equation in the classical limit by taking expectation values of energy and momentum. The second one I've seen in no QM textbook but it looks like you've rearranged p = Pk where k is wavenumber, and substituted p=mv from Newtonian mechanics (which isn't valid in QM). The third only applies only to plane waves.

Has science become so complete that it explicitly excludes the possibility of a creator? — Julz

What do you mean by "a creator"? Someone who caused the universe to begin? Or someone who designed and made humans by divine hand?

Likewise, also I am conflicted because I will qualify for a Scottish passport should Scotland leave the Union. So part of me looks for that as a way out. — Punshhh

I wonder if I will... My mother's a Glasgae girl.

What does all conscious experience of red consist in/of such that it is by virtue of having that constituency that makes it count as conscious experience of red. — creativesoul

I don't expect all animals to have the same concept of the same colour. As you pointed out, we have a linguistic component to our understanding of red that other animals would not. But answering your question regardless, I'd say that any commonality between conceptions of redness between different animals would rest in commonality between how those animals' brains transform raw sensory input into phenomenal data (qualia).

If the hole moves around independently of the impacting wave, while emissions are a Markov process, i.e. a transaction is established whenever a hole is available (as you explain below), with no "knowledge" of what comes before or after, then the resulting distribution of impacts will be independent of the impacting wave. It will only depend on the entropic movement of the hole - most likely just a uniform distribution. — SophistiCat

I'm not sure why you think so. The electron doesn't have to be transmitted at all. In fact, wherever the hole is located, we expect no electron to be transmitted most of the time. Any time the hole is at a site where the probability of finding the electron (as given by its wavefunction) is zero, then no transmission event will occur at all, for instance (i.e. you cannot slow the rate down to 0.001 Hz and get an event every 1 ms if the only available hole is sometimes inaccessible).

This is the analogy with the wire and the source and sink reservoirs. No electron ever leaves the source that cannot fit into the sink. (A nice sanity check that the idea that electrons know where they're going before they leave isn't too exotic.)

Similarly if the probability of finding the electron at a given site is 0.2, you would expect an electron to transmit there when there is a hole there at most 20% of the time.

In reality, the screen is more complex, and electrons will usually be able to squeeze in somewhere. But there should, as per Pauli, always be places it cannot squeeze, and that is neglected in ideal treatments.

While there are a growing number who think that the Brexiters should be given their holy grail (clean break Brexit) and be made to own it. As that is the only way to lance the boil. — Punshhh

Yes, I occasionally veer this way, but obviously I feel bad for those who voted for Remain who are going to feel that pain.

So, is the dancing sun just another yet unknown natural phenomenon? Now of course we do have a prophecy so the question is does the church have records of such cycles? I believe they do.

There's also the whole timing of the thing. At that time, there was a great schism between Rome and Russia, between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodox. So, might there have been some agenda that Rome was pushing?

Miracles or politics? — 8livesleft

The answer is likely similar to mine regarding the resurrection: it's the author of the story who should be doubted, not his supposed witnesses.

First, the miracle had been predicted. Second, the person investigating the event was himself a priest. Third, the story was published on the 29th of the same month. Now... 70-100K witness statements would be a lot to collate for an international war crimes tribunal spanning more than 10 years. It is not something one man is going to achieve in 16 days.

In reality, there were a comparatively small number of contradictory statements by people who were expecting a miracle and who weren't leaving without one. The report of so many people witnessing a particular impossible event is faulty on both counts, conflating the number of people in attendance with the number of witnesses, and the sum total of witness reports with each report itself.

In The Evidence for Visions of the Virgin Mary Kevin McClure wrote that the crowd at Cova da Iria may have been expecting to see signs in the Sun, since similar phenomena had been reported in the weeks leading up to the miracle. On this basis, he believes that the crowd saw what it wanted to see. McClure also stated that he had never seen such a collection of contradictory accounts of a case in any of the research that he had done in the previous ten years. — Wikipedia

Doubtless there were some pretty weather phenomena that day, doubtless a small number of people silly enough to stare into the Sun believe they saw some weird shit, and doubtless many in a large crowd of pilgrims completely agreed that they had seen something after others told them about it (people distinctly remember seeing the first plane strike the first tower on 9/11 - as you say, witness testimony is not reliable). But ultimately the story of the miracle as collated and presented is a fiction, like the story of Jesus's resurrection most certainly is.

There is a section regarding the resurrection that states that 500 people "saw Jesus." That is indeed a good number. But again, what I would ask is, how do those people know who they were looking at? Might this be an issue of mistaken identity?
...
So how trustworthy is this source? — 8livesleft

Vanishingly slight. But note that we are not, in this example, examining 500 witnesses, but one: the author of the text. There is no reason to believe there might be 500 people who saw Jesus resurrected, or 500 people who mistakenly identified him. The text is, itself, one dubious witness account.

That said, pertaining to your specific question:

On October 13th, about 70.000 - 100.000 people had assembled to observe what Portuguese newspapers had been ridiculing for months as the absurd claim of three shepherd children that a miracle was going to occur at high-noon in the Cova da Iria on October 13, 1917. According to many witness statements, after a downfall of rain, the dark clouds broke and the sun appeared as an opaque, spinning disk in the sky. It was said to be significantly less bright than normal, and cast multicolored lights across the landscape, the shadows on the landscape, the people, and the surrounding clouds. The sun was then reported to have moved towards the earth in a zigzag pattern, frightening some of those present who thought it meant the end of the world. Astronomers across the rest of the world did not observe any unusual activity of the sun.

In answer to the question "How many people can be simultaneously mistaken about the Sun hurtling toward the Earth", the answer is apparently somewhere between 70 and 100 thousand. 500, then, is small fry. (And, just to be clear, the Sun did not hurtle toward the Earth. We're still here.)

We must recognize cause and effect for what it really is: a concept human beings use to describe the relative movement of objects in the environment, objects which are fundamentally neither caused nor effected but are rooted in the infinity of their own absolute and infinitely singular material essence, in whatever form it happens to be observed, and as a function of whatever relative context in which it happens to be observed. — Darkneos

And yet you tapped your fingers along your keyboard anyway. I guess old habits die hard.

:up:

Pretty much the whole process you describe is consistent with the approach I advocate, as I already said to Srap when he said similar things earlier. It’s the weeding out of alternatives (even if we haven’t enumerated them yet) that progresses our knowledge, and multiple models that equally well survive that process are not elevated by the process but are merely equal co-survivors of it. — Pfhorrest

Yes, we're not a million miles apart. Subtract your tentative holding true of untested beliefs, which the above does not require, and we're more or less on the same page.

So association of color equals conception of color? — creativesoul

Refering back to myself:

What you have described is an animal that can not only compare two objects of the same colour, but can compare that colour to a colour is associates with 'get foodness'. This 'get foodness' may well be identically the "crow equivalent of the concept of redness" I spoke of (seems likely). — Kenosha Kid

So that last sentence proposes that the association could be identity in that instance, allowing for the possibility that, for said crow, there's nothing to redness but 'get foodness'. I wasn't making a general observation.

I'm not saying that one need to have knowledge that color is determined - in part - by reflected/emitted light, I'm saying that one needs to be able to focus upon the fact that different things reflect/emit the same light(that things are the same color) in order to gather like colored things for the sake of doing so. — creativesoul

I understood that, and I'm saying this is NOT relevant. If red things appeared red because God willed it, we would still have phenomena with the property of redness. The how simply doesn't enter into phenomena because it is not something we are conscious of, that we perceive. All we get is constantly refreshed, temporal mish-mash of impressions. This ball is red for whatever reason. This cup is red for whatever reason. This language-less animal can learn to connect these things by the key property they share, however it does it.

You're claiming that that gathering ability requires a concept of redness. I'm saying that it only requires the ability to see and gather like colored things and hold some expectation of food upon doing so, and that seeing and gathering red things does not equate to having a conception of redness. — creativesoul

Well, I said "crow equivalent of the concept of redness" to be precise. What you have described is an animal that can not only compare two objects of the same colour, but can compare that colour to a colour is associates with 'get foodness'. This 'get foodness' may well be identically the "crow equivalent of the concept of redness" I spoke of (seems likely). That is all it needs.

This likely origin and function of the idea of morality strongly suggests it to be self-serving and relativistic. It is relativistic in the sense that morality is not tied to anything deeper that what is likely in the interest of a strong society at that moment. — Restitutor

In one of my older threads I cited several sources that suggest that moral drives and capacities have some biological basis. You are right to an extent: the historic differences between moralities between societies speaks to the social basis of morality. However, there are still commonalities, and that might speak to the apparent genetic bases for morality: empathy and an instinct for altruism.

For me the idea of absolute morality that extends beyond what is self-serving is as unlikely as there being a white bearded god out there. — Restitutor

In light of the above, it is important to distinguish what is good for the self and what is good for the genome. A society of altruists historically had a survival benefit. The individual actions taken may be selfless, while the net benefit of belonging to such a society is to the individual.

Why do those observations not equally lend support to the other theories that are just as consistent with them? — Pfhorrest

That was precisely my point. Other than the absence of a historical competitor theory, the initial evidence is no more for one theory than another which yields those particular outcomes. As one increases the number of successful predictions, one ought to eliminate possible competitors, else the two theories are empirically indistinguishable. That process is ongoing, but there's no point at which LHC data will suddenly rule out an alternative model; in fact, I always assume that, in future, observation will lay waste to most of our models. The alternative is that I live in a privileged era.

Point being that we increase our faith in the model the more it fails to be falsified, without it ever being proven true. And this is not because we have falsified particular known competitors, and certainly not because we've falsified ~Higgs, but because we have narrowed down what a competitor theory can predict that is different to the Higgs model. One doesn't actually have to formulate the competitor theory to falsify it: it is sufficient to know that, as each data point is collected that is consistent with Higgs theory, so long as no data point is collected that rules it out, whatever potential competitor theories might be formulated are either falsified or equally consistent with the data do far, i.e. are *like* the Higgs theory to an increasing extent.

This gives us some confidence that, while Higgs might yet be ruled out (and probably will be), it is encouragingly close to reality. And it is this increasing confidence that increases our belief in Higgs. We did not start out with that level of confidence, or that strength of belief.

Like I’ve been saying to Janus over and over, that’s beside the point. Sure, if you can show that not-P implies not-Q, and that Q, then you can show that P, via falsifying not-P. But that’s not what falsification was ever against. — Pfhorrest

I included this partly for completeness and partly because you seem to interpret evidence for P and against ~P as purely falsificationist, i.e. only ~~P. But this is P so it's an erroneous distinction imo. In this class, there is no distinction between falsifying ~P and verifying P.

Not to derail the discussion, but I think what you're discussing here is Sellars' distinction between "pattern governed behavior" and "rule obeying behavior"; see "Some Reflections on Language Games". Roughly, the former is a matter of conditioning, standard learning processes, etc., while the latter relies on a meta-level recognition of something having the status of a rule that authorizes inference. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's apt, although I cannot speak for cs as to what they meant. Linguistic handling of object properties are obviously very different from phenomenological manifestation of object properties, and both are different to (models of) objective properties.

Indeed, and this shows us that "redness" is neither necessary nor useful aside from creating a bottle to buzz around in... — creativesoul

That's also not shown.

I would say instead that there are many degrees between a completely falsified belief and a mostly-unfalsified one. — Pfhorrest

Both can be true.

The characteristic decay chains of the Higgs boson in the LHC data are evidence, not proof, that the Higgs exists, sufficiently so to earn Peter Higgs a Nobel prize. It is not evidence against ~Higgs, since there are potential theories that could explain the same data with more than one particle. But the more signals corresponding to expected decay chains we see (more have been discovered very recently), the better founded the belief that the Higgs mechanism is a good model of reality. It is not proven, but nor does it have the status of 'merely unfalsified' which might apply to something that has not been tested at all.

By "mostly unfalsified", I assume you mean falsified with less than 100% certainty. An example might be Trump's claim of election fraud, insofar as the few concrete claims have been mostly thrown out or pulled as they don't agree with fact. Nonetheless there is no obvious feasible means of completely killing off the broader claim.

Third, where evidence against not P is evidence for P. Is the ball under the left cup or the right? Assuming the ball is under one of the two cups, falsifying the theory it is under the left cup is identically evidence for it being under the right cup. There's no distinction between falsifying ~P and verifying P. (Of course, by sleight of hand or a tricksy table, it might be under neither, but the *belief* it is under the right cup is affirmed, though not confirmed.)

Where's the concept of "redness" in all of that? It's nowhere to be found because it's not necessary in order to do all of those things. — creativesoul

Yes it is. A crow cannot be trained to collect red things without some crow equivalent of a concept of redness. There is a phenomenological similarity that the crow must grasp in order to do this. For two phenomena to be similar, they must share properties.

The concept of "redness" emerges from careful and very deliberate consideration of previous normal everyday use of "red". — creativesoul

Your argument is that because we encode our understanding of red linguistically, redness is a fundamentally linguistic process. This is not shown. You need to show that redness disappears without language, and that's a tall order. All you can demonstrate with this is that the way we discuss redness disappears with the language. We'll still be able to learn that this colour of mushroom is good eating while that colour makes us ill.

By the way, no one in real life behaves as uber-rationally as philosophers insist. Everyone gets by fine without careful and very deliberate consideration of "red", or indeed most other things.

I agree that some language less creatures can perceive the frequencies of light that we've named "red", — creativesoul

You're relying too much on this. We have no phenomenal awareness of frequency. There isn't even a fixed one-to-one mapping between frequency and colour perception, as you can demonstrate to yourself quite easily by taking a video recorder into a white room with a standard light bulb. The walls look white to you, but appear yellow on the recording. This is because your brain adjusts the ambient light temperature toward white if it can. None of this process is present to you in your apprehension of a white wall.

Either way, the EM theory of optics is a theory -- a very good one -- to explain why certain things have certain colours. It is likely important to the operating of the brain in producing images, however it is not shown to be fundamental to our or any other animal's phenomenal *perception* of colour. Predicating a description of colour perception that relies on a theory of optics is well and truly putting the cart before the horse. In short, if a better theory of optics comes along, we won't start seeing red grass and green skies.

The irony of pots and kettles... — creativesoul

Ahh, I see. I ought to lower my expectations somewhat. As you were, then.

I do not think that you understood the argument given. Merely distinguishing between red and blue is inadequate for understanding and/or immediately apprehending redness as a property of conscious experience. — creativesoul

That was not the extent of my argument. Try not to cherry-pick. If, say, a crow can distinguish between a red ball and a blue ball, and can correlate a red ball and a red cup, that is more than sufficient to have a property 'redness' even without the word 'red' or indeed any other word.

Knowing that red things have that in common requires isolating and focusing upon the fact that the same frequencies are emitted/reflected by different things. — creativesoul

No it doesn't, as had already been pointed out. Our concept of redness precedes our knowledge of the wave nature of light and cannot depend on such knowledge.

(Nor, if you yourself feel inclined to accept it, demand proof from yourself or else reject it; if it seems true to you, go ahead and believe it). — Pfhorrest

Something 'seeming true' is a reason to believe it, not the believing of it. Some of those are rational, such as empiricism; some are not (e.g. I cannot stand the idea that... I don't want to live in a world that...). What I'm getting at is that these are not equal. I actually wouldn't advise that someone goes ahead and believes something true that is not falsified or evidenced, especially if it's opposite or negation is evidenced albeit unproven, but that aside simply down to the lack of good reason to believe.

The inability to ever have evidence for something, rather than merely against the alternatives, is the whole point of falsificationism. — Pfhorrest

Not at all, you can always have evidence for something. A witness testimony is evidence that the accused was at the scene of the crime, for instance. It just isn't proof. Evidence for something is always incomplete; evidence against it is always terminal. That is the whole point of falsification as I understand it.

We're not a million miles apart but the above distinction is the difference. Evidence is not all or nothing. There are many degrees between a completely arbitrary unfalsified belief and a well-founded unfalsified belief.

This is contrary to the idea that X ought to be tentatively accepted until falsified
— Kenosha Kid

I never said it ought to be, only that it may be. — Pfhorrest

all beliefs should be considered justified enough by default to be tentatively held (the liberal part) until reasons can be found to reject them (the critcal part) — Pfhorrest

So it is the liberal part I'm referring to: that any given belief should be considered justified enough to be tentatively accepted. This would include any absurd yet so far untested belief that I might make up: that spiders are telepathic, or that The Great Geoff lives on an asteroid orbiting the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, or that the CIA are controlled by a secretive Inuit conglomerate.

The things I believe are not quite this random I hope. I believe the things I do not just because they have not yet been falsified, but also because there is some reason to do so. Popper's criterion is not just that an idea isn't falsified, but that it is nonetheless falsifiable, i.e. we can test it, and see if the world fails to work as if the idea is false. It is not proof because another test might falsify the idea yet, but it is a stronger grounds to believe than 'hasn't been falsified'.

Pending evidence either way, both X and ~X are permissible beliefs. To say that pending evidence either way, both X and ~X are impermissible beliefs (what I mean by "cynicism") would make it impossible to ever have evidence either way (because you would need some beliefs to be the evidence, but you couldn't hold those without others that you also aren't permitted to hold yet, ad infinitum), and so impossible for any belief in anything to ever be permissible. — Pfhorrest

But this is not what I suggested. I said that I can suspend judgment on either given no facts to support either. We aren't obliged to take a firm position on everything. Do I believe Jesus lived or not? Neither. I don't know, and I don't really care. It's a matter of supreme indifference to me.

Is it okay to believe in those things you think are uncontroversial without first proving that they're correct from the ground up? — Pfhorrest

Yes, but then I don't subscribe to the view that ideas either need to be proven or distrusted any more than I subscribe to the view that ideas must be falsified or held tentatively as true. They are false dichotomies in my view.

Pragmatically, beliefs are tools for predicting the world, the best founded beliefs being those best aligned with experience, the worst founded being those conflicting with evidence (falsification). Those exactly in the middle which are neither falsified nor supported (as opposed to proven) are likely useless, probably meaningless too. The more evidence for an unfalsified idea, the stronger the basis for belief.

However strongly justified a belief, a reasonable person must reject it the moment they see it falsified. In the meantime, so long as the belief is both falsifiable and consistent with the world, the believer is perfectly justified in holding it to be as if it were true, i.e. to have assumptions about the world.

Immediately apprehending and/or understanding the property of redness requires already knowing how to use "red", and is metacognitive in it's constitution. Already knowing how to use the term "red" to talk about red things is thought and belief that is linguistic in it's constitution but not metacognitive. So, it is either the case that raw, basic, fundamental, private, ineffable immediately apprehensible conscious experience involving red cups, balls, and tulips does not include the property of redness, or raw, basic, fundamental, private, ineffable conscious experience requires metacognition. Not all conscious experience involving red cups, balls, and tulips requires language. All metacognition does. So, the property of redness is disqualified(pun intended). — creativesoul

I doubt this is true. Yes, to know that it is called red, to talk to someone else about its redness, one must have language. But to know that this red ball is different to the blue ball, and to know that there is something in common between the red ball and the red cup that is not in common between the red ball and the blue ball, does not require language, not the kind of verbal language you mean anyway. The word 'red' is not important, nor is any other word.

In fact, I'd say the exact opposite is true: in order to have a meaningful word to describe the colour property of a red thing, we must first be able to distinguish between that red thing and an otherwise identical blue thing. A great many animals can do this perfectly well without being able to describe it.

Can you really though? I mean, pragmatically speaking, in an ordinary sense, sure you can: you can look at Jon and see his hair is blonde. But in a technical sense, in the way Banno and Isaac are on about, it's always possible to instead revise a bunch of other beliefs to account for why it seems to you like Jon has blonde hair but somehow he really doesn't. — Pfhorrest

That's inevitably true of falsification as well.

Falsification is important because you cannot affirm general laws empirically. You can never show that all swans are white; you can only show that this swan is white. The falsification that all swans are white is the confirmation that this swan is not white.Most knowledge isn't about general rules (I think?).

the other, which I call "cynicism" (whereby it is necessary to reject any belief until reason is shown to accept it), is what I'm arguing against, and which you seem to be arguing for here. — Pfhorrest

Effectively yes, although you refer to it as rejection -- forging a belief 'X is not shown therefore not true' -- whereas equally if not more important is suspending judgment: 'X and ~X are not shown therefore I do not believe X or ~X'. This is contrary to the idea that X ought to be tentatively accepted until falsified, and avoids the problem of tentatively accepting both X and ~ X.

For any reason put forth in support of some opinion is itself another opinion, for which the justificationist must then, if consistent with this principle, demand yet another reason. But that in turn will be some other opinion, for which the same demand for justification must be made. And so forth ad infinitum. — Pfhorrest

I don't see a problem with this. Pragmatically, it's not ad infinitum but to some degree of consistency. One explores an idea in the context of other ideas one finds uncontroversial. Sometimes one or more of those ideas become overthrown (one has to examine the context, i.e. examine new ideas that are consequences of the idea under consideration), sometimes everything fits nicely, sometimes it just doesn't fit at all.

Sorry this is late, I apparently failed to hit send.

The cancellation depends on both waves being advanced waves, so it's not purely terminological. (Advanced waves cannot cancel retarded waves in Cramer's formulation.)
— Kenosha Kid

Why not? — SophistiCat

Difficult to say. He doesn't say more than 'We will not discuss Type II transactions further' or words to that effect in the original paper. (Recall that retarded and advanced waves cancelling are Type II transactions.)

But even if an absorber is available, the cumulative distribution of impacts will be defined only by the distribution of the available absorbers on the screen over time. — SophistiCat

Not *only*: the wavefunction of the emitted electron still natters; my point was rather that it can't be the *only* thing that matters.

In TQM itself, the probability of a transaction causing absorption at (r, t) is the amplitude of the retarded wavefunction arriving at (r, t) times the amplitude of the advanced wave travelling backward from (r, t). So it depends on the probability amplitude of *both* waves.

In your example of a screen that has only one absorption site at any one time, only this site can backwards-emit a hole wave. In the language of TQM, only this wave can handshake with the retarded wave, since the amplitude coming from all other sites is everywhere zero.

However, that single hole will move around the screen and, on average, should be smeared out such that the probability distribution we see forming is given only by the retarded wave.

And at the same time, in order for the Born rule to hold, that distribution has to match the impacting wavefunction - whatever it happens to be. If we can contrive to emit a particle that hits the screen at times (t1, t2, ...), the screen had better supply us absorbers at such locations ri that (r1, r2, ...) form the distribution that we expect to see. — SophistiCat

It's not that it's obliged to because of the experimental setup: it will do whether we fire electrons at it or not. In essence, this is what entropy is at the quantum mechanical level: the effectively random exploration of energetically equivalent microstates. If the screen, without us firing electrons at it, stayed in the exact same microstate, with the same single acceptor site, it would effectively be a highly ordered system. Another way to look at it is the fact that the hole is its own quasiparticle, with its own wavefunction obeying a wave equation. Just as we wouldn't expect an electron to stay put in the absence of a driving field, likewise we wouldn't expect the hole to stay put. It'll move around the screen just like an electron would.

does not quite hold: we cannot make emissions happen at will (can we?) — SophistiCat

In the case of no acceptor sites, this is what happens. It's an interesting property of current-carrying systems (which the double slit experiment basically is) as described in quantum transport theory (my particular field) that the notion of electrons being driven by external electric fields is redundant. In actual fact, all current-carrying systems behave probabilistically and thermodynamically: an electron leaves the cathode if and only if the anode has a hole available with the same energy. (Compare to a box partitioned and arranged such that only one half contains more particles than the other, both boxes being in their ground state, with particles filling up energy levels up to the box's characteristic energy. We open a hole in the partition, and higher energy particles from the higher energy box will move to fill holes in the lower energy box, but not vice versa due to Pauli exclusion. If those molecules were charged, you'd have a battery.)



Here's an illustration that contains the main point. Current (in natural units) here flows left to right not because the system exhibits an electric field across itself but purely because of the *chemical potential difference* between the source and sink. The electron source on the left has electrons filling energy levels higher than on the right, thus electrons move to the right, thus a current. If the source and sink levels were equalised, no current would flow (or, as is described by quantum transport theory, no *net* current will flow). If the sink level was higher than the source, electrons would move from right to left.

This is another example of electrons behaving as if they know where they're going before they leave, or rather not leaving because there's no place to go.

We do, of course, observe that the cumulative distribution of impacts on the back screen is in line with the square of the wavefunction from the emitter. If emission occurs whenever, while the distribution of available absorbers on the screen is constrained by external factors, then we won't recover the expected distribution. — SophistiCat

That this doesn't hold true is precisely my point. While an individual transmission may depend on the precise microstate of the screen, the screen explores these microstates continuously. A statistical number of transmission events will take place over a period of time, during which one will have a statistical spread across the precise microstates explored during that time, a spread which looks like the probability of finding a given electron at a given position depends principally on the wavefunction.

But other than terminology, do you see any issues with his proposal? — SophistiCat

The cancellation depends on both waves being advanced waves, so it's not purely terminological. (Advanced waves cannot cancel retarded waves in Cramer's formulation.)

Instead of that, they should interact with the ordinary dense matter, at least 380,000 years old, as shown in Figure 2 from my recent paper on the problem of the direction of the electromagnetic arrow of time: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/13505 — Darko B

I agree with the gist of your idea, that advanced waves could exist and will look to us like retarded waves (photons being their own antiparticles).

I don't see the classical spherical wavefront as a particular problem to get around though. Quantum mechanically, the photon, after collapse, is never consistent with a spherical wave. For instance, the emitting object will undergo recoil in a direction inconsistent with the symmetry of spherical wave emission.

Spherical wavefronts are useful because we do not know the full boundary conditions of the transmission and, further, because they recover the correct interference effects for every possible future absorption event (sum over histories). According to the OP, we can consider the retarded and advanced parts of absorption and emission as spherical separately, but the full transmission is only the sums over all paths between the emitter and the absorber... in *either* direction of time.

Or do you think that all Biden voters believe that Trump is the new Hitler? — ssu

No, Hitler didn't play several rounds of golf while staging a coup. Say what you like about the Fuhrer, he made an effort.