...and here beginneth part 2 of my response.
On Sat, 24 Feb 2001, Dan Minette wrote:
> Well, there's the quote of Wheeler
>
> "You may say that I am just a small spec in the universe, and that is true.
> But, the universe itself would not exist for a primitive act of
> registration."
>
> Let me phrase it this way. Lets go from something medium sized to smallest:
>
> Tree
> Cell within tree
> Nucleus within cell
> DNA within nucleus
> A water molecule
> Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms
> Protons and neutrons
> Electrons, quarks, and glueons
>
>
> At what point do things cease to have independent existence? What is the
> minimum size that something can have and still exist independent of human
> observations.
Clearly there's no demarcation. Either it's all real and independent of
human observation, and reality is a layered web of probabilities
interacting; or it's all contingent upon human observation because a web
of probabilities is meaningless unless somebody checks the score.
Or one can turn the question around and ask: if humans ceased to exist,
would bees cease to pollinate flowers? Would fire ants no longer build
colonies in what used to be my lawn? Would elephants no long roam in
Africa?
In other words, what is the minimum degree of perception required to
guarantee the existence of the universe? Would it take another fully
intelligent and conscious species, or would animals the level of my
neighbor's cat suffice? Granting that a cat wouldn't see exactly what I
see when I look at a tree, would the tree still exist?
Is an amoeba's "simple act of registration" sufficient to sustain the
universe?
> Actually, I think that QM suggests something stronger. The universe is our
> organization of what we observe. It is highly probable that stuff exists
> apart from us; its just that the universe is our model of phenomenon and
> thus dependant on us for existence.
My "realistic" take on this statement, I think, would be that yes, the
universe *as humans perceive it* depends upon human perception, and thus
depends upon humans being around to commit acts of perception. We aren't
omniscenct, our viewpoint is limited, and thus the universe as we see it
is a byproduct of our limitations. When I die, my point of view, i.e. my
set of phenomena, dies with me, and my set of phenomena cannot include an
unmediated view of the whole--my viewpoint is not transcendent. But that
doesn't imply that a transcendant perspective exists....it just so happens
that the buck stops at the quantum level...and that's it.
What would a transcendant perspective "look" like, anyway? Without time,
space, or causality to condition the transcendant observer's perspective,
would he or she or it just see a nondescript ball of mass-energy (that
isn't really a ball, because there's no extension in space; and can't
really be observed, because there's no time to observe it in, etc.)?
Referring specifically to Kant's noumenon, how can there be a
thing-in-itself when all criteria for defining a thing are absent? Of
what would "in-itselfness" consist? I haven't read Kant thoroughly enough
to know what his speculations are on this point, if any.
> > IOW, everything that humans observe is perfectly "real" for the purposes
> > of scientific investigation, but everything also has a transcendant aspect
> > that is also *more* real and which can only be apprehended directly by a
> > being with a similarly transcendant point of view, which humans aren't
> > privileged to have.
> >
>
> True. We don't see nomenon, that's absolutely true. What we see is the
> difficulty in defining the objects of phenomenon in a manner consistent with
> them being things in themselves. IMHO, this suggests a nomenon that is
> comprised of things-in-themselves behind the phenomenon.
How can there be things-in-themselves (plural) if all criteria for
determining quantity and quality are stripped away?
What I'm wondering about now is how any complete physical description of
the world could avoid raising QM-like problems. It seems to me that at
some point in the definition of matter and/or energy one is bound to hit a
wall beyond which description and direct observation are impossible. QM
appears to be such a wall, otherwise metaphysical questions wouldn't be
raised.
But is it possible to imagine a physical description of the universe that
doesn't have a similar sort of problem? What if particles all behaved the
rules of local realism and classical physics? Aside from buggering all
modern science, such a physical law would still have metaphysical puzzles.
Suppose you reached a point at which you had tiny marble-like
irreducible particles with mass and volume and maybe charge, and you'd be
faced with the contradition of a solid but indivisible item. We'd wonder
what's inside one of the little beasties and be endlessly frustrated by
the demonstrated impossibility of knowledge beyond this seemingly
arbitrary point.
The natural metaphysical steps would be either to say 1) that's all she
wrote, folks, or 2) to hypothesize an idealistic explanation for the
mystery. It would be really hard to prove either position.
And why Kant's noumenon, anyway? In the case of QM, we might follow
Berkley: to be is to be perceived, and QM defines the limits of human
perception while demonstrating that the existence of the universe depends
upon observation. Yet despite the mystery of particles between
observations, the world persists, so God must watch the electrons in all
their superimposed glory. One doesn't have to posit a problematic
thing-in-itself, and we still get to keep the strangeness of a
world grounded in QM, and we get God too, the establishment of whom, IIRC,
was the ultimate point of positing a noumenal world in the first place
where Kant was concerned.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
