I call it you continuing to frame the situation atomistically and thinking you've said something worthwhile.

Social construction is about the informational constraints that shape the individual psychology. So it is not about society making you decide anything, it is about society being the meaningful framework within which any personal autonomy is exercised.

My model accounts for the reasons or motivations that are so lacking in your model.

You are complaining the reasons don't exist in us, and they don't exist in the cosmos, so they don't exist anywhere. You've searched high and low, and you can find no point to any particular choice.

But I am saying this is a failure of naturalism on your part. The reality is that "we" are socially constructed. So meaning was never going to be intrinsic to "us" - beyond the kind of biological motivations that are natural to just being alive. A larger purpose in life is the social purposes to be found all around us. Society is the organismic level of organisation here. It is the locus of the kind of meanings that are necessary to social creatures living a social lifestyle.

Now you can of course have all sorts of thoughts and disputes about that. No one is going to pretend that society as it stands, or ever was, is a completely perfect or rational animal.

But as a departure point for moral philosophy, that is the reality from which to start a discussion. It is not unnatural to be behaving like socially constrained creatures if it is social constraint that is constructing us as the particular creatures we are in the first place.

We are already plunged into that historical flow of existence - the human story. You may wind up appalled or delighted. But it is philosophically unreasonable of you to distort the basic facts. And that is my objection.

So when we make decisions, we are making it on a species level? I don't compute. — schopenhauer1

Social communities are smaller than the biological species. And "we" are the product of multiple levels of community. So let's not be simplistic. You have a family heritage, a peer group, a neighbourhood, a national, religious or ethnic identity.

But the point remains. Language gains its meanings at a social level of development. And these meanings are what shape "us" in terms of some psychological set of habits of action. You can't analyse the individual abstracted from the social context as the social level is where the meanings are arising on the whole.

However, who actually MAKES the choice? It is not the species, but the individual... — schopenhauer1

Do individuals actually make all their own choices? You are presuming a level of independent mindedness that is much talked about - in a particular cultural tradition at least - yet rarely enough exhibited even within that culture.

Of course, people could call their physiological drives their own. Biology has its needs. And those are meaningful at that organismic level.

But mostly folk are not making real choices - not about reasons, anyway. They are seeking to apply existing social meanings to the lives they happen to be living. So they might have to plan or make choices about how to achieve some purpose. But the purposes are readily to hand as part of their cultural environment.

But how are the individuals not responsible for choices of motivation? — schopenhauer1

Nope. Why would you argue the unscientific and unnatural view that motivations should be a matter of individual choice. You are starting with a bogus model of psychology and so all your consequent philosophising is for naught.

it is still the individual who takes upon whatever role or goal to work towards. — schopenhauer1

We can always recognise the fact that we are only responding intelligently and creatively to the embedded demands of our cultural millieu. And that - theoretically at least - raises the possibility of dissent.

But you are ignoring the corollary. If we also recognise the fact that "we" are a social construction, then we can't claim there is some other "us" that exists free and independent of that cultural millieu.

Now we can imagine cutting ourselves off from our fellow humanity so entirely that we become your atomistic individual, alone in its cosmic sea of burden and futility. Indeed, there is whole genre of culture where you can learn to take precisely that attitude. You can find "yourself" among the like-minded by sharing the right texts and manuals.

But at the end of the day, you can't escape the reality that being socially constructed comes first. If you want to construct some absolute kind of psychological individualism, that is going to come after the fact. And considered sanely, what could be the point?

If there is a choice, it would be so binary as to be improper to conflate with human goals which are linguistically based and with a much higher degree of freedom of choice. — schopenhauer1

Maybe your mistake is to misunderstand the level at which language-based thinking, choosing and willing finds its natural meaning. You presume it is at the psychological level of the individual, and yet it actually happens at the organismic level of a culture and society.

So sure, a worker ant granted some kind of self-awareness might suddenly question what it is all for. But an ant colony has a clearly evolved reason for whatever the worker ant generally does, or is.

So your philosophical misstep is to fail to recognise the nature of meaning. The reasons for actions aren't ever to be found in the "self" when we are talking biology. That psychological self is always a biological or social construction. It arises embedded in a living context that determines its nature.

As has been said before, your angst about the meaninglessness of life arises only because you vault that embeddedness in a social context to consider the human condition in the context of a random and purposeless Cosmos. You jump scales of being.

But the irony is that that image of the human condition is itself a social construction - a product of a particular time in the development of the theories of physics, coupled to the romantic reaction that image of nature engendered.

So your pessimistic lament is anachronistic - out of date with our understandings of nature and humans as socially-constructed creatures. Time to change the tune?

For example if it is neurons creating mind what material properties predict this and causally necessitate it. — Andrew4Handel

The causality works the other way round. Life and mind rely on the functional trick of getting an informational grip on the material flows of the world. So the key material properties are those that permit information to have this power. The material world does nothing directly to necessitate the existence of neurons. What matters is that the material world could in fact itself be constrained by the free and independent informational activities of a system of switches.

Or if you like, the key material property is that material physics could be controlled that way. Genes and neurons and other kinds of biological information could bend its entropic flows to their own ends. Neurons evolved as that negentropic step was energetically favoured.

...and what prevents any matter and any arrangement of matter from causing a mind or experience to occur. — Andrew4Handel

Life and mind depend on that possibility of switching and controlling that emerges in very precise physical conditions. It has to cost next to no effort to choose the direction of the material flow being regulated. The actual material effort being expended must be as close to zero as possible.

So that means bodies and brains can only evolve when conditions are right. Recent biophysics shows that we are talking about the quasi-classical nanoscale of molecular action in liquid water. That happens to represent a convergence zone where all the key structure-creating forces of nature become matched in size.

At a scale of 10^-9 metres (the average distance of energetic interactions between molecules) and 10^-20 joules (the average background energy due to the “warmth” of water), all the many different kinds of energy become effectively the same. Elastic energy, electrostatic energy, chemical bond energy, thermal energy – every kind of action is suddenly equivalent in strength. And thus easily interconvertible or switchable.

There is no real cost to turning one form of action into another. And so also – from a semiotic or informational viewpoint – no real problem getting in there and regulating the action. It is like a railway system where you can switch trains on to other tracks at virtually zero cost. The mystery of how “immaterial” information can control material processes disappears because the conversion of one kind of action into a different kind of action has been made cost-free in energetic terms.

See http://thebigone.stanford.edu/papers/Phillips2006.pdf and http://lifesratchet.com/

So life and mind colonise a seam of physical freedom that arises right at the point where quantum physics is itself "switching" with classical physics. It sort of become frictionless for information. It can get in there and regulate material flows for virtually no material cost. That then opens up the possibility of vast and unhindered evolutionary complexity. Nature has this new direction represented by living and mindful structure.

This kind of question makes me turn dualist because it seems like materialism about the mind leads to too much mind emerging indiscriminately and without clear location. — Andrew4Handel

Well science says there is a kind of dualism here in that you can make a distinction between dumb physics and smart life. But there is nothing indiscriminate about where or what happens. You need the very lucky thing of there being this nanoscale convergent zone where a variety of energy forms intersect closely enough to become switchable at "no real cost". And then from there, it becomes inevitable that a switching machinery is going to evolve to exploit that particular seam of material freedom to its own ends.

It is an inertial frame. And I’m not claiming that there is no accelerating force. I argue that the necessary force ought to be considered generic rather than particular. The environment did it. Accidents happen because they can’t be suppressed.

So, modally speaking, we have the number two and God being used interchangeably as abstractions of the mind. — Posty McPostface

The modal distinctions I made were narratively different. Two would be general rather than particular. God would be fictional rather than factual.

Are you saying that pragmatically, they serve no further utility to use than using a different language game? Again, if they are modally independent of synthetic a priori judgments, then they exist universally. — Posty McPostface

I wouldn't focus on these two particular examples - two and God. My argument is that "abstractions of the mind" are only "conceptions of a world". So before we get into anything else, the first step is to avoid getting sucked into a Platonistic framing of the options. I would begin in the pragmatism of "language games" - though "form of life" would be the better term, if we must invoke Wittgenstein.

Pragmatism isn't just a game, but life itself. We are constrained by nature to make it work in the long run. And "we" are ultimately the product of the game more than its author. So again, it is about shifting away from the opposing extremes and telling the story from the balanced middle.

With two-ness and the divine, we can see them as important to our conceptions of ourselves, as we exist in a world. If we express it that way, we can see that both sides of the equation matter.

If we are talking about dogs and cats, or turnips and potatoes, there is no big deal. It seems we are talking about physical stuff that is just "out there" right now in relation to us and what we might think about those things "in here". The separation - and the regulative interaction that epistemic separation enables - feels direct and immediate. No mystery.

But talk about numbers and creators touch upon the kind of generalities that must now somehow incorporate "us" - our own being or existence as both physical and mental entities. So that alone is shifting the modal register. Two speaks to the greater generality that is entification itself - separability or countability. While God speaks to the desire for a causal explanation - a general reason for the particular individuations we might observe.

So on the one hand, there is a definite shift to a metaphysical register of reference. Pragmatism is about a conception of the world with us in it. It seems to be about the everyday human scale view of turnips and dogs. And then we find ourselves talking about "things" - like two and God - that must be classed as transcending that human scale view. That appears to break the spell of ordinary language. We feel we must be talking about either abstractions that actually also exist, or abstractions that are merely pure imaginative inventions.

But that is why - pragmatically - we have science (and maths). The appropriate thing to do, we have found through our adventures in philosophy, is to step up another level in semiotic scale and start describing reality from an "objective" rather than a "subjective" point of view.

So we resolve the Platonic dilemma not by deciding in favour of universals, generalities or abstracta being either "creations of the mind" or "facts of the world", but by establishing a systematically larger point of view that can achieve the level of pragmatic understanding we seek. The "world with us in it" becomes the world as a well-informed scientist or natural philosopher sees it - if that happens to be what you agree is the proper step up in viewpoint.

As I say, learning to see the world that way involves habits that then produce that form of selfhood. It is a form of life. And many would immediately leap forward to say the naturalistic image of nature is something they must hate and resist ... as it threatens their own habitual identity. :)

However setting that aside, the resolution of the paradox - abstracta: mental or real? - lies in seeing that everyday language is a pragmatic form of life. And then having formed a habit of conception that successfully presents the world with us in it, we are going to encounter the world as it currently seems much larger than just us. That then presents the next challenge we might want to answer. And the only actual tool to hand is the sign relation or semiosis.

Well, we could always compare/contrast our respective conceptions of "sensation"... — creativesoul

I think you are just being asked to justify your sweeping statements on the issue.

You said sensations weren't meaningful. That would startle most psychologists. Why would the nervous system go to all the bother of conceiving of the world as a system of signs otherwise?

Then how else would you phrase the issue instead of resorting to terms like "abstractions of the mind"? — Posty McPostface

Conceptions. Habits of sign. "God" and "two" exist as words in a language. And as such, they mediate some pragmatic conceptual relation we might have with the real world.

Now of course you can go on from that to talk about whether they in fact relate us conceptually to the "real world" or just "metaphysically possible worlds", or whatever other kind of world you want to then name.

But that boils down to modality. Two-ness is being conceived of as completely generic - true of all possible worlds (where counting would work). And God is conceived of as completely fictional - not actually true of the actual world ... for the atheist at least.

So semiosis provides the larger encompassing framework already. It subsumes "material realities of the world" and "abstractions of the mind" into an over-arching semiotic relation. It cannot be a simple case of either/or - either God and two physically exists, or else mentally exists. It is already being said that for the words to exist, and be used within a language system, requires that both the mind and the world are "places" where they "exist". The existence is in fact the process which is a relation that works. Something about the world, and something about the mind, must be in fruitful co-ordination.

So God must be a useful fiction when the purpose was the regulation of traditional human societies. Two must be a useful generality once humans started to conceive of the world in terms of mathematical-strength signs.

Of course, there is aways something "out there" - that God-shaped hole to fill in a society seeking to be ruled by less earth-bound rules, that two-shaped identity to be discovered everywhere that counting appears to work.

But also there is always something "in here" - the participant in a language community capable of finding such a habit of interpretance a functional way to operate.

So your OP was setting things up for a false dilemma - something exists either in the world or in the mind. Pragmatism presumes that the existence of that something - the sign: some word that gets regularly used - must speak to a relationship that works. And for that to be the case, it exists as a unity bridging mind and world.

Of course - the next familiar Kantian difficulty - it is the "world" as it is for "us".

So it is the world as the phenomenal or an Umwelt, not the world as the noumenal. And it is us as an emergent modeller, not us as some Cartesian and unphysical res cogitans.

...are they real or just metaphysical? — Posty McPostface

...or demonstrably useful?

(Again, is there a good reason to debate realism vs idealism for the billionth time when you have pragmatism as the better choice?)

Sensation is not meaningful. — creativesoul

Whoops. Off the rails already.

Sure, language takes semiosis to another level. But sensation is also fundamentally semiotic.

What was your purpose then?

(Pretty clearly, it was to suggest there might be a "dilemma" worth discussing. So given the familiarity of this debate, were you planning to offer anything new?)

So the context has to be changed in order for the ball not to fall? eliminating each classical cause is the sisyphean task? — JupiterJess

I would instead say that to arrive at the classical situation, you would have to keep adding classical constraints. My argument is that indeterminism can never actually be eliminated. It can only be contextually regulated.

So we arrive at classicality as a terminus - the result of adding enough complex restrictions to produce an apparent causal simplicity. We have to remove the jitter, the friction, the heat - all that messy thermodynamic stuff - to arrive at one round object perched motionlessly on top of another round object with now no other object in sight to disturb that ridiculously unstable situation.

Maximum instability is presented as absolute stability. And then somehow this is the causal model of the world that most people want to defend.

The symmetry of the initial conditions is already broken in the sense that there is both a probabilistic process and the barrier preventing it breaking through until a threshold is accidentally breached. — apokrisis

I didn't quite complete this thought. As I am trying to make plain, my own interest here would be in the question of cosmic creation - the causality of the Big Bang as an example of spontaneous symmetry breaking. So the difficulty becomes getting beyond a story - like tunnelling - which already presumes a causally broken situation. We have to get the bit just beyond where there are either the trapped propensity, or the barrier that is trapping it.

Tunnelling is good for explaining why there might be delays in events happening - like particle decays. And the decays - being statistically random - seem good evidence that we are glimpsing a quantumly indeterministic realm beyond. With quantum tunnelling, we can see flashes of the fundamental uncertainty breaking through.

However, the primal story would seem to have to go beyond a trapped propensity and the threshold holding it back for "a time".

Can you find a use for them? Is there a meaning beyond that use?

The answer is the usual pragmatic one. Show that there is any actual mystery here. If we form a concept, it had some application. It was a constraint on possibility which served a purpose.

(Even if that purpose might seem really generic, or really minor.)

As apokrisis has said, the ball effectively vibrates, as its internal molecules move about (Unless the experiment takes place at absolute zero), so it 'pushes' itself, if nothing else does so first. No need even for QM, just Brownian motion is enough to explain it. — Pattern-chaser

Reflecting on things further, we do seem to wind up with the issue that there always needs to be some kind of probabilistic tunnelling process for there to be an actual causal issue. The symmetry of the initial conditions is already broken in the sense that there is both a probabilistic process - some kind of quantum or even classical jitter - and the barrier preventing it breaking through until a threshold is accidentally breached.

So the ball bearing perched on the dome is going to be able to survive any nudge until there is one strong enough to overcome the frictional forces that would oppose the ball moving. Instead of the accelerative nudge tipping the ball bearing, that energy would instead start to heat up the environment via friction.

So again, if we really zero in on the full physics of the thought experiment, we find ourselves being pointed down the path to a fuller thermodynamical conception of this little causal universe. Not by accident, we look to be headed towards Feynman's Brownian ratchet and how that imposes an ultimate physical cut-off on determinism.

The general principle that follows is that we need to view first causes - the spontaneous breakings of symmetries - not as something hot happening to something cold (as in the bump that pushes the ball bearing), but instead as something cold happening to something hot - the fall, as in a generic fall in temperature that suddenly allows a ratchet and pawl to quit hopping about and start turning mechanically in a single deterministic direction.

That explains particle decay. In a hot environment, the particle isn't even stable. It is already melted. But if the environment is cooled, a particle can form. It will lock up a degree of internal instability that has some lingering propensity of overcoming the thermal decay barrier represented by a now cold world. By quantum uncertainty, that barrier will be spontaneously crossed because the particle fluctuated into a higher energy state that wasn't forbidden to it.

So if we want laws of nature that are generic enough to capture the causality of a Big Bang cosmos, this is the direction our causal thinking has to head in.

Classical causality is about something hot happening to something cold. But we need to flip that model on its head. The deeper causal story is about something cold happening to something hot. It is the context that tells the story, not the event. As the temperature drops generically, then localised heat can start to become the new big thing. But only after the temperature has dropped generically.

The OP presupposes an utterly impossible entity. It would have ended rather abruptly had it's author noticed this fatal flaw. — creativesoul

Yeah, it was my mistake to link to that paper for sure. I should have just left it at the gif I was taking.

But still, Norton's dome is also its own interesting debate. I'm just saying don't keep mixing the two things up.

Another way to avoid bifurcations, both future and past, might be to replace the 1st law by a new law saying that the relationship of any force to time must be analytic. — andrewk

There is no need to worry about trying to fix Newton's laws if you just accept them as effective descriptions. They are how reality would work in the limit. But reality can only approach such a limit.

It is defending Newtonianism as a literal truth that creates the problem.

And the metaphysical insight for philosophy of maths is that a third category beyond the discrete and the continuous needs to be recognised - that of the vague.

Limits in metaphysics can only be defined logically in dichotomous or complementary terms. The discrete and the continuous are ideals - opposing limitations on possibility defined by their formal reciprocality. That then leaves raw possibility - ie: vagueness or indeterminacy - sitting in the middle as the stuff that can approach one or other limit with arbitrary precision.

(Or, equivalently, in a time-reversed scenario, it would take an infinite amount of time for a ball sent sliding up to come to rest at the apex). — Pierre-Normand

The metaphysical reality of time reversal scenario's would also be in question here. If classical reality is actually the product of maximally constrained fluctuations - spontaneity is only ever suppressed - then time reversal can only be a locally effective story, not the generic metaphysical story.

Yes, I can drop your Ming vase on the floor and you will be able to gather up all its shards to glue it back together. Initial conditions can be recovered if no information is either created or lost in the time evolution of the event.

But thermodynamics would appear to say that is not the generic case, certainly at the Cosmic scale on which we are trying to write the laws of nature. So especially if we grant that the development of physical complexity erases past information - because hierarchical organisation acts downward to simplify the parts of which it is composed - then time irreversibility becomes the generic condition.

David Layzer makes this cosmological case - http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/layzer/

The larger point I am course working towards is that when it comes to the big question - why does anything exist? - we mostly start from completely the wrong metaphysical place. The ball perched for all time on top of a dome is just an example to how far our most familiar models of causality are from the physical reality.

Layzer's approach shows how classicality exists as literally borrowed time. The Big Bang cosmos had to go through its phase change - gravitating mass had to condense out of the relativistic thermal fireball - to create "Newtonian" degrees of freedom. You suddenly had particles that could have a location because they could move at less than light speed and so inhabit a realm where there was emergently a space-like causal separation between events.

So when speculating about the beginnings of everything, we have built up a stock of false Newtonian intuitions. Newtonianism only describes a Cosmos that has got cold and large enough to have undergone a complete phase transition - one that takes it from a quantum description to a classical one. And if we try to time reverse that, how to do we cross the divide given it involves a massive loss/creation of information at the transition point? (A loss and a creation, depending on whether you are tracking the negentropic order created, or the entropic disorder lost.)

The quantum fireball was of course its own further crossing of a transition with its own symmetry-breaking creation story. But we can't say more about that until the lingering Newtonian determinism is completely dispensed with.

It may be that the solution lies in what's being neglected by the problem itself — creativesoul

Two different questions are being confused here.

The OP was not intended to be about Norton's dome and its claims of Newtonian indeterminism due to a latent jounce concealed in the initial conditions. The OP was about how we would think about an initiating cause when it comes to spontaneous symmetry breaking. The usual natural inclination is to finger one individual perturbation - the straw that broke the camel's back. But the alternative view is to point to the general impossibility of reaching the Platonic perfection modelled by a Newtonian set-up.

In that other view, Newtonianism is only arrived at via the suppression of environmental perturbations. And so, even if perturbations can be more or less completely suppressed - thus allowing Newtonian determinism to be a useful general description of an actual material system - they can also never be absolutely suppressed. Hence - generically - the environment still fluctuates, meaning there will always be a straw to break the camel's back.

"Molecular decay" would be just one more example of this generic inability to suppress all background fluctuations. Just the same as thermal jitter in the ball and dome. And if we get down to the quantum level, there just is always a probability of the ball quantum tunnelling across the threshold, moving sufficiently off-centre due to uncertainty.

In the real world, there would also be some residual frictional forces holding the ball bearing in place. The surfaces in contact would have some microscopic degree of roughness. So in reality, the whole frictionless dome set-up is unphysical.

Did you have any thoughts about a clearer account of Norton’s set up?

Comments suggest to me that the cause of the sudden spontaneous motion is a concealed fourth derivative jounce. So it is like the ball is set down on the apex in the middle of just being about to snap. The maths allow this because the maths is blind to the concealed action. The maths only concerns itself with the first and second derivatives being zero to say the ball is at rest. It can’t pick up a singularity, as when the ball would be briefly motionless apex of its trajectory when tossed in the air.

That would seem a rather trivial get out though. And I don’t yet see why this particular curvature is so special. Any explanation for why this curve is somehow poised in a way that allows for the claimed indeterminism?

This is another good little commentary I was looking at - https://theconfused.me/blog/is-newtons-first-law-merely-a-special-case-of-the-second/

(There may be a emergent law specifying the half-life of a ball's staying poised before starting to fall). — Pierre-Normand

Yeah. I think this is the next interesting case to dig into.

Another slant on the OP would be the more standard example of a phase transition where a system is in a state of correlations of infinite length. It is right on the cusp of a global symmetry breaking and any perturbation at all will push it across the threshold. At that point you can throw away the need to identify the triggering disturbance. It was always going to happen somewhere.

All this is about how to view spontaneous symmetry breakings. The formalism usually reduce the description of the physical system to its perfectly poised symmetry, leaving the issue of a triggering cause - the source of the spontaneous change - outside the model. This leads to some rather arbitrary metaphysical conclusions by those only prepared to consider what the formalism is prepared to cover.

So that is the issue. How can we talk about the lighting of the blue touchpaper, the first cause, in a way that it is part of the model and not some ad hoc extra? If fluctuations are treated as generic, then that would answer the question. The causal problem is flipped as what would now become surprising is if some critical instability could be prevented from breaking.

In short, why does existence exist? It no longer requires a particular triggering cause that broke a prior quiescent nothingness. Now the generic issue is how could wild fluctuations ever get suppressed? The causal story becomes about the physical mechanism that could limit the possibility of fluctuations to the point where stable order finally starts to reign.

This would be missing the point of the thought experiment. We can take it for granted the ball bearing is actually at rest on the apex in perfectly balanced fashion and then just focus on the event that would be needed to topple it.

I agree that in practice this precision would be impossible, but that isn’t the point being made. The point is about how we like to assign causality to particular triggering events, but if a triggering event is almost sure to happen, then the particular loses its hallowed explanatory status. The cause can be treated as completely generic.

Making the generic cause to be about the impossibility of placing a ball with arbitrary accuracy on an apex is both another way of saying the same thing, but not quite as strong a version as focusing on the impossibility of eliminating triggering fluctuations.

I would say you are missing the point. I am discussing how we might view the metaphysics of accidents - spontaneous or random events.

On one view there are no accidents as every event will turn out to have some particular cause. Look close enough and you will find the nudge that actually did the trick of toppling the perfectly balanced ball bearing or pencil. So the accident becomes in fact micro determined. It only looks an accident while we are ignorant of the fine detail.

I want to contrast that usual view with its opposite. The story can be turned around by laying the stress on the other facts. In the end, it was the impossibility of eliminating all sources of environmental disturbance that was the cause of the toppling. Yes, there was some individual nudge that did it. But a nudge of some kind was also absolutely inevitable. We thus have no good reason to point a finger at some particular nudge as if it were significant in its own right. It was nothing special. If it had failed to act, the ball bearing would have still fallen just as surely because an unlimited number of other nudges were there to step in and do the same job.

So the odds of the accident happening would be 100% from that point of view. We could say that the ball bearing simply has the propensity to fall. It doesn’t need a particular push. It is generically set up to respond to a perturbation. Identifying some individual nudge as the actual culprit adds no real information to an account of the causality.

Clearly this line of reasoning then takes you into the interesting metaphysical questions about how the Big Bang could happen out of “quantum nothingness”, or what causes an unstable particle to decay.

The experiment can contrast the statistics of coherent and decoherent systems.

My question was about a poised situation and how we think about its symmetry breaking. It seems a problem that we need a first cause to actually pop up out of nowhere and set the ball in motion. But that problem can be removed by imagining a world where nothing is ever absolutely at rest. The second metaphysical picture is less conventional, but better fits the facts, I would suggest.

I see now what you mean. It was a mistake to link to that paper as Norton’s dome is a special case. Do you buy his story? I don’t get where his sudden spontaneous motion could come from. And why it is a solution permitted by his particular curve. Need to read more yet. This helped - https://blog.gruffdavies.com/tag/the-dome/

But anyway, I just meant to talk about the standard example as an illustration of spontaneous symmetry breaking.

I told you that I cannot think of a good reason to accept that it is impossible to eliminate all disturbances. Do you have one? — DingoJones

Quantum mechanics.

I cant think of a reason that it would be impossible. — DingoJones

But that is the easy presumption that is under attack here. Most people probably do find no reason to even question the possibility of being able to eliminate every possible source of perturbation in some physical system.

The habit is to think of a world that is essentially clean and simple. A blank slate. A void. And then you start populating this world with its little pushes and pulls, its atomistic play of events.

But I say why isn't the inverse of that a closer match to observer reality? Why don't we start with a world already chock full of pushes and pulls, then see if we can imagine subtracting them all completely away.

Quantum mechanics tells us we can't in fact achieve a void. There are always going to be infinitesimal or virtual fluctuations.

So in fact we have a well-motivated reason for taking the opposite view - the one that presumes the impossibility of suppressing all physical disturbances. And so - as a metaphysics - that would flip the usual comfortable view on its head.

Where before there was no reason to think an absence of fluctuation was impossible, now there is no reason to think it might be possible. Hence the idea of a triggering cause loses its previously fundamental-seeming metaphysical status. The interesting condition is the one where such causes have become so suppressed that all their particularity has been lost and there is only now the generic concept of "the inevitability of spontaneous outcomes". Perturbation itself becomes a primal feature of "the void".

Not so, as I've already explained to Bitter. The shape of the dome is such that, as the ball is getting infinitesimally close to the apex, the second derivatives of its horizontal motion tends towards zero; and hence, also, the horizontal component of the force. — Pierre-Normand

But that relies on the ball starting on a slope, not on the flat. It is only infinitesimally close to the apex and so also infinitesimally inclined towards rolling down in some direction. The forces acting upon it are already sufficiently off-kilter.

So again, my essential point remains. The ball can't be placed with exact precision at the apex. Our modelling incorporates that infinitesimal "swerve" as something that can't be eliminated.

As a way of thinking about what causes the ball to start to roll, the answer becomes we couldn't prevent that because any placement on the apex had to involve infinitesimal error.

Another way to view it is to imagine the time reversal of the process where the ball is being sent rolling up the dome with just enough speed so that it will end up at rest at the apex, after a finite time. Thereafter -- and this is unmysterious -- it may remain at rest for an arbitrary period of time. If this is a valid solution to Newton's equations, then, so is the time reversal of this process where it remains at rest for some time and then "spontaneously" starts rolling (with an initial instantaneous null acceleration). — Pierre-Normand

But now if you time reverse the story, you still only can arrive infinitesimally close to the apex, not actually perched exactly on it. So if the ball seems at rest, that is a mistake. It is only ever decelerating and then beginning to accelerate again. Inertia and friction might slow that transition in the real world. It might get stuck a while. But in the model, which presumes frictionless action and an actual perfect balance of forces, with no infinitesimal errors regarding its location at the apex to break the symmetry in advance, traditional thinking would seek a triggering push. And it is that framing of the situation which is the OPs target.

I cast my vote for "it fell" rather than "it was pushed". For one thing, all the environmental forces operating on the rock are cumulative, and have been operating for a long time. — Bitter Crank

Yes, but this would be a case of innumerable accidents as you say. The "push" advocates would still reply that there would be one last event that finally did the trick. So it could have been the unlucky tourist that leant on it, or that lightning bolt which was the straw that broke the back of the camel.

I want to focus on the most extreme example where absolutely anything would be enough to be that straw. And so we can't really blame some particular straw anymore.

What's interesting about the dome is that the ball's starting from rest, and, after a finite time, rolling in an arbitrary direction, is a valid solution to Newton's laws of motion. — Pierre-Normand

How so? If the ball has mass, it has inertia. A push is required to set it moving.

Of course, it the ball is already "in motion", then that acceleration already exists. But that then becomes my alternative story of the physical impossibility of eliminating such accelerations. A physical mass has to have some kind of internal thermal jitter and so - even when placed perfectly at rest - it is going to just throw itself over the edge and roll.

So we can't rely on the formalisms if the formalisms simply leave out the crucial physical facts.

Its not necessarily either. ... There are reason(s) why the ball bearing was displaced, and with enough sophistication in the instruments of measure (whatever they may be) these reasons can be revealed and your question answered. — DingoJones

But here you seem to both say the right answer doesn't really matter, and yet also the right answer is that there will be some particular triggering cause that accounts for the "why". In the end, it will be a push that did it. And that is what counts most for your general view of the world.

In practical terms, you might be right. It seems we could always measure nature more closely and put our finger on some individual environmental disturbance as the guilty party.

But the essence of my question was metaphysical - what do we really want to believe about the truth of nature? So something is at stake. We ought to come down on one side or the other.

Could you imagine ceasing to care about the individual pushes and instead accepting that the generic impossibility of eliminating all disturbances is this deep truth?

I am guessing you would resist that alternative view strongly. The question becomes why? With what good justification?

This would be a devastating reply, if it wasn't based upon something other than what I've been arguing. Then, it would even be true. But alas, it is and it's not. — creativesoul

Anyone here understand what @creativesoul's position is? Someone care to hazard a guess.

Not a free creation of the mind — Janus

I was just citing Einstein there. I think he knew what he was talking about.

It is basic to pragmatism that you could say absolutely anything about the world as a hypothesis. And that modelling freedom is what Einstein was stressing. It is science because you don't have to start with "the truth", just some reasonable conjecture.

Of course the corollary is that models must be testable. The world does have to be able to constrain the conjecture in some measurable fashion.

I like defining things so, logic: A method by which humans go from premise to premise that seems to reflect reality if the premises do. What was the "origin" of logic. — khaled

Logic arises quite naturally out of getting into the habit of imagining nature organised like a machine. So as soon as humans were building huts with doors, or fields with fences and gates, already a mechanical conception of things was taking shape.

A switch is the canonical logical device. It is either off or on, open or shut. And doors and gates are kinds of switches. The world is divided into inside or outside. In the hut or paddock, or outside it. They are machines for the organisation of living. So the origins of logic as a useful way of conceiving of nature go right back to human technological inventions. If we could impose a rigid circuit-like pattern on the unconstrained flows of nature, then we would be laughing.

Logic thus arose as a way to regulate natural flows rather than as a close description of nature. It was a way to impose our artificial mechanical schemes on the world.

Why is it that we are simply born with a "rule for deriving rules" and why does it work so well? — khaled

But we are not born with a brain designed to think mechanically. We are only taught from the earliest age to learn to think that way because we depend so much on artificial ways to regulate an otherwise fairly unruly nature.

It works well in that a logical turn of mind grants humans a good dose of control over material events. But also, machines are brittle things. They break very easily or can give very wrong outcomes. So strict logic - of the kind you are describing - can be just as useless as it is advantageous. Garbage in, garbage out.

Good job we do have properly evolved brains to fall back on when the literalism of logic lets us down.

QM is our invention. Causality is not. — creativesoul

And so you dumbly repeat something that I never said? I said classical physics might give us one model of causality. QM might give us another.

And I wouldn't call a model an "invention" exactly. It might be a free creation of the mind, but it also has to show itself to work in the real world. It is not yet clear whether you would dispute or agree with this obvious qualification.

Likewise, I would point out that "causality" is a linguistic term. As such - by your own account even - it is a concept, a model, an interpretation of "the world". But you struggle so much with writing clear posts that who knows what you really want to commit to on this score.

QM did not exist - in it's entirety - prior to our discovery. Causality does. — creativesoul

Again you are guilty of conflating epistemology and ontology. Or simply of being utterly confused in your thoughts.

QM didn't exist as a model until we invented it (although for some reason you now say we "discovered" it). But clearly, we have no reason to think that the world wasn't always "QM".

And likewise causality didn't exist before we invented/discovered/modelled it - at least not as an articulated conception. And again clearly, however we understand causality with any clarity, there would be no reason to thing the world wasn't always "that way".

So you have to stick to some consistent epistemic story. Either you are talking about QM as a model of reality, and so causality is also a modelling construct, or you are shifting registers to talk about QM as the putative ontology of reality, just as you seem to be employing the term "causality" as being a noumenal fact of the world.

To try and maintain that QM is just an invention, causality is just a fact, is conflating an epistemic linguistic register with an ontic linguistic register.

It makes no sense. And that incoherence would indeed explain why your posts just seem a confused babble - the sound of naive realism wrestling with its own demons to no useful end.

Incoherency...

Next?

You want to claim that you're not... then draw and maintain the distinction between causality and a report thereof. Then, do the same with QM... — creativesoul

In what way am I failing to distinguish between model and world by drawing close attention to the mediating role played by "the report"?

The sign (or measurement, observation, witness statement, report, fact) is the basis of the semiotic mechanism by which the model and the world are kept apart, and thus why they can then stand in some relation.

So - dealing with your conflations - we have the three elements of the world as it may reveal itself to our inquiries, our conceptions that form the generic basis to our inquiries, then the reports that seem the right kind of particular evidence in favour of some habit of belief we might be forming.

If you keep just talking about the two things of the report and the world, you are collapsing the account of the epistemology to the point it can make no sense. You are going to remain stuck in the usual dualistic confusion of the realists vs the idealists.

I'm pointing out the inherent conflation in your position, namely that you're not drawing the distinction between your report and what's being reported upon(causality, in this case). — creativesoul

Maybe you still just fail to understand pragmatism then?

How could I be conflating the model with the reality when I am talking about our models of reality? But then the "report" in your terminology must be the mediating thing of a measurement, or observation, or sign. And the "report" does underwrite the conception. It is the particular that inductively confirms the generality of some theory.

That is how it is meant to work. You haven't shown any problem with it.

If you get hit by a rock falling out of the sky, you could assign that physical fact to various theories. It could be a malicious god taking careful aim at you. Or it could be a random accident - a bit of falling space junk.

In the one example, you would report being struck by a divine missile. In the other, you would report being struck by a fluke accident.

So "what is being reported" is some particular ... that relates interpretatively to some generality. You have two possible causal interpretations. You wind up reporting the version you have some habit of believing.

Pragmatism draws out this full triadic relation of theory, measurement and world. It does the opposite of conflating in doing so.

To hold that QM is the basis of causality is asinine. — creativesoul

But that is just your weird phrasing of what is being said.

I said QM challenges the kind of classically linear, cause-and-effect, model of causality which you would appear to hope to assimiliate all your experiences to.

So you have some habit of mind. You think you know what causality actually is in its true natural form. But as I've argued at length, even classical physics conceals basic challenges to that. The least action principle doesn't fit that story.

And then QM really rocks any remaining faith in it. We know that causality can't be locally real. Or at best, that it is only a macroscale emergent phenomenon. Like the liquidity of water, it is a collective state of order that arises when the Universe has got so large and cold that any lingering QM uncertainty or weirdness has been shrunk mostly out of sight.

So what is asinine is pretending that simple linear causal logic ever really applied to the observable physical world. Even Newtonian physics knew there was more to the story. QM proves there has to be much more.

If QM can undermine causality, — Harry Hindu

QM undermines classical causality. QM puts forward its own causal story. Experiment determines which story we are inclined to believe. It's really simple.

A model of our invention is not something that causality can be.

I would warn here against conflating a report(conception if you prefer) of something with that something. — creativesoul

Yep, so you are making some confused epistemic point about our models of reality.

Now of course we can presume that reality exists as whatever it is, independent of our thoughts, wishes or conceptions about what it might be. But that kind of realism is still a presumption, even it it seems pretty reasonable. And then one problem that QM poses is that the observer no longer seems independent of the observables. As in the twin slit experiment, the choices an observer makes becomes part of the reality in terms of the statistical outcomes.

So even if you personally choose not to believe this fact of QM, it remains something that has now been witnessed time and again. The fact is not disputed, just how it might best be interpreted in the light of what we might want to believe in terms of defending more classical notions of causality, such as one that still models events in terms of the principle of locality.

So whatever causality is "in the noumenal raw", we are going to understand that in terms of a model. And that is fine if our modelling is based on a desire to model the world as accurately as we can. Which pragmatically, cashes out as a measurable minimisation of our uncertainty or surprisal when it comes to the physics of the world. We never "know" causality, but we sure as heck can work towards the models that make the best possible predictions and so leave us with the least possible surprises.

On that score, we know that classical models of causality work fine when the scale of the Cosmos is cold and large, but not when the Cosmos is small and hot. That is when the quantum model of causality would have to take over - and the Big Bang tells us it is the more fundamental story, being the condition that ruled at the beginning.

So there is no danger of conflating our models of reality with that reality if we are pragmatists. But what is clear is that science has found that different models sum up the story of causality at different scales of being. And yet you are insisting you can go beyond the models to see how things really are. You can believe in a classical causality as the true story rather than as merely one of a couple of models we can usefully employ to measurably good effect.

From a scientists point of view, this is a little crazy. Even classical Newtonian determinism is known to be full of causal paradox. The principle of least action is as basic a physical axiom as the principle of locality, and yet that involves "spooky action at a distance". Every event would have to know its future outcome so as to follow the path with the least action. Even Newtonianism has this "effect dictates the cause" back-arsewardness to it.

And even if we now have quantum theory as our most accurate predictive model, we know it doesn't completely capture the causal story. QM has been relativised. The need to account for observer collapse has been worked around by tacking on statistical mechanics - the contextual thermodynamic decoherence story - as a kluge. But including gravity and thus spacetime fluctuations in the formalism is work in progress.

So the point is that classical physics never actually supported a simple cause and effect ontology. It relied on some weird least action principle to actually determine every trajectory. And then QM brought least action to the fore as one of the causal things it was going to fix. The path integral formalism showed how reality must in some sense take every possible path and then sum over the possibilities. But QM can't yet deal with the contributions of gravitational fluctuations - at least right down to the Planck scale limit where they start to completely overwhelm any conventional causal structure.

Science thus tells us that we don't actually understand causality, but we have gone a long way towards telling a more complete feeling story. We are acknowledging the modelling gaps and seeking to plug them with mathematical machinery.

Yet you, in contrast, seem to be saying you can see cause and effect with your own eyes. Every question you could have about the way the world is has already been answered.