----- Original Message -----
From: Marvin Long, Jr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 11:57 PM
Subject: Re: Kant QM, So L3 that Scotty...
>
> ...is crying out, "Captin'! Tha mail server, she kinna take much mora
> this!"
>
> On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Dan Minette wrote:
>
> > Well, I don't think so. The strongest argument for this position, off
the
> > top of my head, is the enormous trouble inherent in any self-referential
> > statement. Think of Godel's proofs.
>
> For the true mathematicians and physicists (i.e. not me)....is it by any
> means clear that Godel's proofs preclude a complete human (scientific)
> understanding of the universe, including humans, just because we're in the
> universe?
I'm not saying that. As I stated elsewhere, it was used as illustration of
the difficulties with self-reference. The other ones I used were quite
physical. It is a byword in the detection business to calibrate one's
instruments against a know standard or, failing that, calibrate them against
other instruments.
> Do we, really? I'm thinking of the monk in meditation, observing his
> thoughts bubble into his consciousness whether he wills them to or not.
> How is internal observation any less phenomenal in character than external
> observation?
There is a difference between awareness of phenomenon and the reflective
self-awareness of the "I" aware of the phenomenon. There are, indeed,
internal phenomena, such as the sense of pain, which we cannot share. But,
there is also a reflective self awareness every time we are aware of
phenomenon.
>
> > Wittgenstein addressed this fairly well with his "beetle in a
> > box" metaphor in Philosophical Investigations. It is said that he
destroyed
> > logical positivism with this last work, as he had founded it with
Tractatus
> > Logico-Philosophicus.
>
> I have to admit I've not read Wittgenstein. How does this metaphor work?
>
I have a box; you have a box. I cannot look inside your box; you cannot
look inside mine. Yet, we agree that both boxes contain beetles.
We do not see beetles outside of the box. We do not see the qualities of
the beetles outside of the box. Yet, we agree they are the same.
But, we cannot know. Language, since it is based on the shared experience
outside of the box, cannot bridge this difference.
> > It depends on what you want to do. If you are a realist, you can
explain
> > most of the world in a self-consistent realistic fashion. I do think
you
> > would have to throw away most of the understanding we obtain from-self
> > reflection as worthless, since it is not reducible to external
observations.
> > In particular, things like free will and the meaning of "ought" go away.
I
> > think that ethics are reduced to something far less than they were
thought
> > to be for 2000 years.
>
> I don't think these conclusions follow at all--or if they do, they
> certainly don't *clearly* follow. Ethics may be changed, but that doesn't
> mean they are diminished.
To me, the meaning of ethics is strongly tied up to our free will. An
earthquakes is not immoral. If we have no more control of our actions than
a hurricane, than how can we be moral or immoral? While there have been some
believers in predestination, most ethical systems I know of presuppose that
we actually have some volition. Can you point to a system in Western
philosophy that presupposes that all of our actions are forced, and yet
develops a system of ethics?
>And exactly what kind of knowledge do we get
> from self-reflection (aside from Idealism) that would have to be thrown
Well, given that viewpoint, anything experienced internally will either be
reduced to something that is experienced externally or thrown out as
illusion. Indeed, even the idea of ideas would have to be "rethought."
What we think is what we are forced to think, so the concepts underlying
rationality will have to be reformulated.
>How much does humanity benefit, for instance, from
> learning that depression (for one example) isn't necessarily a
> consequence of weakness of the will but has a biological origin?
>
Well, we have benefited from that. Indeed, the Catholic church has changed
its outlook on suicide and states that most suicides are not acts of the
will, and are thus not sins. But, turn it around. If we have absolutely no
control over our actions, what dignity is there in being humans. We are
just along for the ride. What will be will be is the only reasonable
philosophy. There's no sense worrying about anything, because there's
nothing that we can do except do what we are forced to do.
> Not sure how you were going to finish that sentence, but I'll toss out a
> thought: why doesn't any idealism--in which the existence of the observed
> universe depends upon human cognition--falsify evolution? One the one
> hand, we can say that our phenomena-based explanation (science) only has
> to be consistent with itself, since we can't very well prove whether or
> not it's consistent with the noumenal reality.
>
Well, it would only say that evolution is our best model of what happened
based on observations. How our minds really formed is probably more complex
than evolution, but since we only have our senses to make models from, we
should do the best that we can with what we have, acknowledging our
limitations.
> Contrariwise: if the rules of time and space and cause-n-effect are just
> grounds for human perception, why don't we (I'm assuming we don't) get
> glimpses of things at the macro level that violate our perceptual powers?
Because our minds were formed while interacting with the nomenon in a manner
that produced the macroworld of phenomenon.
> One could imagine that there are things out there whose relationship to
> the noumenal world is utterly unlike our own--so unlike our own that we
> and they could coexist and never know it; but it seems to me that we
> should expect to run into things that can *sort of* fit into our
> perceptual scheme but not really.
We needed to look where we hadn't been looking before.
> The example that leaps to mind is T.H.
> White's Merlin, whose relationship with time is remarkably different
> from our own, but not wholly divorced from ours either.
>
Well, realists are proposing backwards in time signals. Anyways, a reality
where space and time are connected dimensions and one rotates in spacetime
as one changes velocity isn't close enough to that for you? What about
living in a world that 23 degrees off the fundamental axis (the Weinberg
angle in electroweak).
> > I am not really clear what you mean here. Are you trying to go back to
> > macro-realism and micro non-realism?
>
> I really just trying to say that just because an electron doesn't behave
> like a billiards ball doesn't mean that billiards balls don't really
> behave like billiards balls or that they fundamentally aren't billiards
> balls.
>
So, fundamentally, they are not made up of protons and electrons. What
about the fact that quantum chaos is apparent in billiard balls within 1
sec?
> While this certainly implies there's something about space/time/
> matter/energy we don't understand, I'm not sure it implies the existence
> of a thing-in-itself, and I'm not sure it implies that we'll *never*
> understand.
>
Well, since this is philosophy, there are no proofs. But, I'm surprised
that no one else thinks "fudge factor" when they think of renormalization.
> Why not just say that our models are based on limited observations of the
> reality in which we are nevertheless immersed? (And that, as a result,
> our language for describing models is biased toward the macroscopic, but
> that's an accident of evolution that can be overcome with specialized
> terminology.)
>
> > > In other words, language is inaccurate, but instead of blaming
language
> > > transcendentalism "blames" the universe.
> > >
> >
> > Well, there are significant difficulties with this statement, as far as
I
> > can see it. First, how do we see photons, quarks, leptons, gluons apart
> > from theories? We do not actually "see" any of these; we observe bubble
> > chamber tracks, numbers on computer screens, etc. and match these
results
> > with models that include these fundamental particles.
>
> But we still use words like "particle" which suggest miniature billiards
> balls, the very concept we're trying to get rid of. I'm sure that
> physicists and philosophers of science have asked this question before,
> but why not, instead of referring to particles that defy macrorealistic
> expectations, talk instead about probabilities with mass and energy?
Well, there are called fields, if that helps. I think that non-physicists
get hung up with terminology more than physicists because we tend to look at
the equations to intuit things more than the metaphors available in the word
that are used.
> Instead of being confounded by things that refuse to behave like things,
> refer to probabilistic mathematical structures that have some but not all
> of the aspects of things, which aren't really things themselves, but in
> the aggregate will behave like things.
So, billiard balls are real, but electrons aren't? We are poking underneath
the structure of reality?
>> Almost by definition, if our language (including math) is inadequate,
>>then they are inadequate.
>
> I don't mean that it's inadequate once and for all time, just that
> macroscopic language is unfit to describe QM.
But, we do have a language that describes QM: the QM theories themselves.
Everything else is a summary.
> Which brings me to a question I've been wanting to ask, which you can
> probably answer more quickly than I can read the Critique of Pure Reason:
> what function does the noumenon play in Kant's philosophy generally, aside
> from being the thing-in-itself? Fifty words or less. :-))
>
> Just kidding about the 50 word bit.
>
> > Sure you can. You always could, and there is no way to either prove or
> > falsify what exists apart from our understanding. But, it should be
clear,
> > then, that the existence of God is a matter of faith, and not knowledge.
>
> Well, yeah. No God worth his salt would make it *that* easy, would he?
> <g>
>
> So...if we haven't hit the wall, we're pretty damn close?
>
Yea. Just think about how many really new theories of physics there were
between 1875 and 1925. Now think about how many there were since 1925. I
can think of about 4 between '75 and 25 and about 0 between 25 and 01.
>
> Still, if we don't know what is real, we also don't know that what we see
> isn't real.
>
No, we don't know that. What I do know is that realistic philosophers have
clung to interpretations of QM that assume a hidden reality.
>
> And I've got another question: it seems to me that Kant talks about
> "things-in-themselves" as though chairs and cats have "real" identities in
> a noumenal world which, though it might be perpendicular to our own and
> thus unknowable to us, nevertheless tracks closely in some way with the
> world we observe.
Its actually closer to the concept that you cannot read a book without bias
because your past experiences give you a context in which to understand that
book.
> So here's a conjecture: there are no things in themselves, but there are
> multiple (2 or more) perspectives on reality. Perhaps from another
> perspective the problems of QM don't exist, nor do space and time or
> anything remotely resembling them. Whatever beings might live in one of
> these realities would be experiencing exactly the same meta-universe as
> we but would live in an utterly different cosmology. But they might still
> be able to have the same realism vs. idealism debate as we, not realizing
> that their noumenon is our phenomenon, and vice versa.
>
That's part way to what I think. What I think is closer to the idea that
they have a different set of phenomenon, with different distortions and
limitations. We all have the same nomenon. If you want to fit God in this,
God is the only being without a limited mind, and is thus able to both
understand reality as it is and understand what our phenomenon (and all
other beings phenomena) looks like.
Dan M.
