From: Dan Fabulich (dfabulich@warpmail.net)
Date: Wed Sep 11 2002 - 02:46:51 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
> 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?
Like I said, everyone is a realist about something and a non-realist about
something else. Heisenberg knew this, and said as much.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/heisenb3.htm
"The probability function combines objective and subjective elements. It
contains statements about possibilities or better tendencies ('potentia'
in Aristotelian philosophy), and these statements are completely
objective, they do not depend on any observer; and it contains statements
about our knowledge of the system, which of course are subjective in so
far as they may be different for different observers. In ideal cases the
subjective element in the probability function may be practically
negligible as compared with the objective one. The physicists then speak
of a 'pure case'."
With that said, Bohr's complementarity principle was explicitly
subjectivist, though it did reify uncertainty: uncertainty under
complementarity is a thing in the world (because the world is nothing more
than our perceptions/measurements/observations).
I seem to think that Dirac was actually a positivist and rejected the
whole notion of subjectivity/objectivity as a meaningless one. I have no
idea about Schrodinger.
> > 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.
Well, the follow-up punch to MWI would be that it doesn't do anything the
Copenhagen interpretation doesn't do, (it's just an interpretation, after
all!) and so is on weaker ground because it posits unobservable entities
to do its work. [Like I say, I think that Occam's Razor is a wash here; I
think MWI has its strengths and Copenhagen has its strengths, and you can
use either as you like.]
But still, you could imagine a "magical fairy" theory of physics: every
time an atomic event occurs, a tiny invisible fairy in a green dress and
pointed shoes waves her magic wand over the observation in question,
collapsing the wave function in agreement with fay caprice.
You can see how very unconvincing it would be to say in defense of this
theory: "Of course the magical fairies aren't directly observable, but
their effects certainly are!" It would be unconvincing because we'll
accept arguments of this kind only when all the alternatives are much
worse.
> 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.
Very well... so do the supernatural numbers really exist, or not? I can
assume, as an axiom, that they do, or I can assume that they don't; either
way, I can get a consistent arithmetic.
If mathematical objects are "real", then the supernatural numbers must
really exist, or really not exist. So is one of these axiom systems
"right" and the other "wrong?" What are we to make of the "reality" of
the wrong one, if there is a wrong one?
> > > 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.)
You can actually prove the consistency of some simple arithmetic axiom
groups as well, but those axiom groups need to be really woefully
incomplete about the facts about the natural numbers.
> 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.
I think a realist has to reject some parts of mathematics as being about
non-real entities, since various mathematics are being done on disagreeing
axiom sets. Under Euclidean geometry, all the sum of all three angles of
the triangle always comes to 180 degrees; under non-Euclidean geometry,
they don't. The Euclidean and the non-Euclideans can't BOTH be realist
platonists.
Now, you might ask: why not? Why couldn't we just say that the Euclideans
are talking about real Euclidean space, but the non-Euclideans are talking
about non-Euclidean space, which is also real? Because *that is the
philosophy of social constructivism*: if I can be said to "discover" a new
space when I make up a new axiom, then there can't be any difference
between discovering non-Euclidean space and creating non-Euclidean space.
Indeed, radical constructivists in science have made similar arguments:
medieval astronomers would talk about the firmament [the outer wall of the
universe to which the stars were attached], which existed in medieval
astronomy, but doesn't exist in modern astronomy; both are as "real" as
each other, according this highly modified definition of the word "real".
This is exactly the sort of argument the realist must reject. To be a
realist in any meaningful sense, "real" can't apply equally to Euclidean
and non-Euclidean geometry, any more than it can apply to medieval and
modern astronomy. They contradict each other.
> > 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.
Of course, I was claiming more than that. Do you think the problem of
whether the future \exists is a real problem? Do you think it exists in
English?
> > 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.
Well, I think that's all I was getting at: this language that only allows
statements containing degrees of certainty would be useful, even though it
wouldn't have a way to say "X is just plain true".
Though, after that, the question must become: why so restricted?
> > 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.
I don't understand. Do you think he's changed his mind? As Damien
pointed out, he was *arguing* for his claim, not merely stating it absent
mindedly.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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