From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 02:10:03 MDT
Dan writes
> > > > Do you have example[s]? I claim that anything with
> > > > actual content is best spoken about with realistic
> > > > language.
> My point was that the scientific fruit was born with the subjectivist
> view... MWI came later as an attempt to shore up what were perceived to be
> philosophical problems with the Copenhagen interpretation.
Perhaps, but would you say more about why you suppose the
Copenhagen view to be subjective, especially in its historical
context? I submit that if you had talked to Heisenburg, Bohr,
Dirac, or Schroedinger in 1929, they would have claimed to be
speaking quite objectively---except maybe Bohr, who was always
defending his father's philosophical points. They thought that
the wave function was quite objective. Only later did certain
people such as Von Neumann and Wigner conclude that the standard
interpretation was subjective?
> Lee Smolin raises a good philosophical critique against MWI in his _Life
> of the Cosmos_, where he argues that MWI is troublesome because it creates
> new *unobservable* entities. He argues, therefore, that it's needlessly
> Platonist in the sense that it calls the ideal unobservable world the
> "real" world, and calling the world of our observations somehow less than
> the real. Only God, he points out, could have a point of view in which it
> made sense to say that the worlds split, since we have access only to our
> side of the split.
To David Deutsch and the MWI crowd, the other worlds are
as observable as atoms were (until very recently): namely,
that although not directly observable, their effects
certainly are! Interference, for example.
> > > How about the "supernatural" numbers Hofstadter suggested in GEB?
> >
> > They are trivial, and cannot be connected up to the rest
> > of the discovered numbers, and may even be inconsistent
> > with them (I don't recall exactly).
>
> Ah, NO. :) See, the supernatural numbers are like the non-Euclidean
> meeting point for parallel lines. They definitely aren't ruled out by the
> axioms of arithmetic. I don't have GEB on hand at the moment, but I'll go
> home and get it.
Sorry, you're right. I was confusing them with something else.
But to realists, remember, integers are *not* what follows from
certain axioms. Integers are those pre-existing entities that
we try to *capture* with axioms. In fact, Godel showed that
they'll always have properties that don't stem from any
finite set of axioms.
> > Finding out *the* geometry of our universe--- i.e., which one happens to
> > characterize (perhaps only to some degree) our universe is kind of an
> > empirical question.
>
> Oh, sure, sure. So, we know a few things about this and that, and one of
> them is that our universe doesn't have simple flat Euclidean geometry.
> So... uh... should we be realists about Euclidean geometry? We know it
> doesn't describe our space. Does it describe Euclidean space? Is that
> space real?
I'm not sure, and I don't understand how close the parallel is
here between numbers and geometry. The case of geometry still
seems simpler: you can prove the consistency of small groups
of axioms, e.g., those for projective geometry. (It's probably
also true for those of Euclidean geometry and Lobachevskian
geometry, but I'm not sure.) While we realists want to say
that our universe is open to exploration and is real in that
sense, it also seems true that it settles down to fit one or
the other of our pre-existing axiom schemes.
As for platonic Euclidean space, yes, a realist affirms that
it has the same kind of existence that the integers do, that
the results of any axioms have a similar, though less obvious,
existence. In other language: there is a huge set of constraints
on what will turn out to be true about circles, triangles, and
so on, and this set of real constraints is what we call our
(platonic) geometry.
> > My guess is that
> > human languages (like English) are universal in a strong sense,
> > and that *anything* can be expressed in them by one intelligence
> > so that another intelligence in principle is able to follow. (The
> > latter uses his own conjectures, but the description provided by
> > the former channels his thinking appropriately.)
>
> Well, I brought up that point for a reason. The point is that there *is*
> a difference with regards to which language in which you choose to pose a
> problem.
Yes, in terms of efficiency.
> Philosophical problems appear in one language that don't exist
> in another. This isn't to say that they're "interesting" to one culture
> but "boring and unanimously solved" by another. I mean, as in the case of
> the metaphysics of the future, that the choice of language actually opens
> and closes certain philosophical problems.
Well, it certainly can make them easier and harder.
> I brought up a language in which it would be impossible to avoid using
> certainty tenses as an example of a case in which a philosophical problem
> of epistemology would be eliminated as ungrammatical.
I will admit that in certain very restricted philosophical
areas, such a language might turn out to have its uses. As
you said, (or came very close to saying) symbolic logic in
mathematics sure has its uses.
> We're converging, I see. ;)
yes, I guess so!
> I actually didn't know that. :) Was [Fibonacci] chased
> out of town due to a mathematical dispute? ("The Riemann
> hypothesis is true!" "False!" "True, infidel!" "False,
> scum!") Or was he chased out due to the mathematician's
> embarassment? Or is it your point that it doesn't matter?
I heard that the local supporters cheering on their own
mathematician became very angry at Fibonacci, and he had
to flee for his own physical safety. Quite amusing, if
true. (And I hope that I'm not confusing him with Leonardo
of Pisa.)
> That's the attitude I advocate towards Latour. He's not making a "oops!"
> mistake. If he's making a mistake at all, it's something entirely
> different from what the school child does when he accidentally claims that
> 6x9 is 42.
Oh, I'll bet that Latour realizes that he was wrong. He
needed to cushion his statements more appropriately than
he did. His remarks are outliers. Most postmodernists
are more careful.
Lee
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