[FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Wed May 1 10:54:36 EDT 2019

I did find notes from Hywel but they are too long to send to Friam.
Perhaps they could be put on a server.  I will see if they say enough about
gravity to make that worthwhile.

Frank

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Wed, May 1, 2019, 6:27 AM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> We already know what it causes.  The question is, how does it accomplish
> "action-at-a-distance"?  There are explanations of other such phenomena.
> Particles sent back and forth, etc.  Ask Hywel for details.  Perhaps he
> left some notes.  Or has an equivalent Oracle on the list.
>
> Frank
>
> -----------------------------------
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
> On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 11:46 PM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net>
> wrote:
>
>> Frank,
>>
>>
>>
>> But when we do find out what gravity is, it will be from the study of the
>> things it causes; and if it caused nothing, we would find out nothing,
>> right?
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
>> Wimberly
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, April 30, 2019 9:25 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>> friam at redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick,
>>
>>
>>
>> If Hywel is correct we know a great deal about how gravity "behaves" but
>> not what causes it.  No one has ever observed a graviton, he said.
>>
>>
>>
>> Frank
>>
>>
>>
>> The quote marks are because we know how objects behave in a gravitational
>> field.
>>
>> -----------------------------------
>> Frank Wimberly
>>
>> My memoir:
>> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>>
>> My scientific publications:
>> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>>
>> Phone (505) 670-9918
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 9:15 PM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi, Eric, and interlocutors,
>>
>>
>>
>> I knew I would get my ears boxed for this:
>>
>>
>>
>> *I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were
>> wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience
>> that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.  *
>>
>>
>>
>> Others have met you at the high level of your response, so I will now
>> confess that I was making a small logical point.   In the first place,
>> “things beyond experience that we could never know” IS a tautology, right.
>> So, that expression is merely to say that there are things we may never
>> know.  Ok.  That’s fine.  But when you go on to say that nature is
>> determined by unknowable causes that’s an oxymoron.  To the extent that
>> anything is caused, by whatever means,  it reveals its causes in its
>> behavior.  To the extent that events are random, no cause is revealed and
>> no cause exists.
>>
>>
>>
>> Now the discussion which followed your post was so far above my head,
>> that I wasn’t sure the extent to which it addressed the following:  To what
>> extent do you-all think the vagaries of quantum phenomena are properly
>> generalized to the  macro level?  I hear a lot of talk among social
>> scientists to the effect that now that we have quantum theory, we can’t do
>> psychology, which talk I take to be obscurantist blather.  Do I need to be
>> pistol-whipped on that point, too?
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
>> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 2:22 PM
>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com
>> >
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>>
>>
>>
>> > I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were
>> wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience
>> that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.
>>
>>
>>
>> I think this requires care.  Never wanting to defend the positions of
>> people I don’t know in a conversation I wasn’t in, it would be helpful to
>> know what topic the conversation was about, in the terms the participants
>> applied to it.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Since physics has existed as a mathematical science (let’s say, since
>> Newton?), it has employed a notation of “state” of a system.
>>
>>
>>
>> Also since that time, it has employed a notion of the “observable
>> properties” (shortened to just “observables”) somehow associated with the
>> system’s states.
>>
>>
>>
>> In classical physics, the concept of state was identical to that of a
>> collection of values assigned to some sufficiently complete set of
>> observables, and which observables made up the set could be chosen without
>> regard to which particular state they were characterizing.
>>
>>
>>
>> aka in common language, anything inherent in the concept of a state was
>> just the value of an observable, meaning something knowable by somebody who
>> bothered to measure it.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> In quantum mechanics, physics still has notions of states and observables.
>>
>>
>>
>> Now, however, the notion of state is _not_ coextensive with a set of
>> values assigned to a complete (but not over-complete) set of observables,
>> which one could declare in advance without regard to which state is being
>> characterized.
>>
>>
>>
>> To my view, the least important consequence of this change is that the
>> state may not be knowable by us, even in principle, though that is the
>> case.  (To many others, this is its most important consequence.  But the
>> reason I shake that red cape before a herd of bulls is so that I can say…)
>>
>>
>>
>> The important consequence of this understanding is that we have
>> mathematical formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and
>> they are two different kinds of concept.  It is precisely that both can be
>> defined, that the theory needs both to function in its complete form, and
>> that the definitions are different, that expands our understanding of
>> concepts of state and observable.  A state still does the main things
>> states have always done in quantitative physical theories, and in the sense
>> that they characterize our “attainable knowledge”, observables do what they
>> have always done.  Before, the two jobs had been coextensive; now they are
>> not.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I assume Shakespeare wrote the “There are more things in heaven and
>> earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” line about the same
>> phenomenon as the thing that makes the Copernical revolution a revolution:
>> people fight to give up importance they believed they had, or control they
>> believed they had.  Once the fight is in the culture, there may not be that
>> emotional motive in all the combatants; they may believe they have a
>> logical problem with the revolution.  But how can there be a logical
>> problem with the Copernican revolution?  It is a statement about the
>> alignments of beliefs and facts.  Likewise the concepts of state and
>> observable in quantum mechanics.
>>
>>
>>
>> It feels like a Copernican revolution to me, every time physics shows
>> that new operational understandings are required, and tries to give us new
>> language habits in which to coordinate our minds (singly or jointly) around
>> them, to pose the question how this was known all along in our folk
>> language and thus can be logically analyzed with its categories.  There is
>> only very limited reason for our folk language to furnish “a description”
>> of the nature of the world.  It is a collection of symbols that are part of
>> “the system of us”, which when exchanged or imagined mediate coordination
>> of our states of mind (and yes, I know this term can be objected to from
>> some behaviorist points of view, but it seems to require much less
>> flexibility to use provisionally than the state of a quantum system, even
>> though it is also much less well-understood at present).  If a collection
>> of robot vacuum cleaners exchange little pulse sequences of infrared light
>> to coordinate, so they don’t re-vacuum the same spot, we might anticipate
>> that there is a limited implicit representation of the furniture of the
>> room and its occupants in the pulse sequences, but we would not expect them
>> to furnish a description of the robots’ engineering, or the physical world,
>> or much else.  Human language is somewhat richer than that, but it seems to
>> me the default assumption should be that its interpretation suffers the
>> same fundamental hazard.  Signals exchanged as part of a system should not
>> be expected to furnish a valid empirical description _of_ the system.
>>
>>
>>
>> Common language is fraught with that hazard in unknown degrees and
>> dimensions; technical language can also be fraught, but we try to build in
>> debuggers to be better at finding the errors or gaps and doing a
>> better-than-random job of fixing them.
>>
>>
>>
>> The fluidity and flexibility with which the mind can take on new habits
>> of language use, and the only-partial degree to which that cognitive
>> capability is coupled to emotional comfort or discomfort in different
>> habits, seems important to me in trying to understand how people argue
>> about science.
>>
>>
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ============================================================
>>
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>>
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>>
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>>
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>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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>
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