[FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

Thu Jul 9 15:13:02 EDT 2020

Hi Nick,

You are the first person I ever heard use the expression "physics envy".
Putting together three things:

a) My claim that "laypersons" feel qualified to offer opinions about
psychological claims but not about physics.

b) When people invoke "quantum" woo they often mention the slit experiment
where a photon can go through each of two slits simultaneously.  This
counterintuitive idea puzzles non-physicists, and apparently physicists too.

c) Your account of radical behaviorism also involves non-intuitive concepts
such as the claim that people infer their feelings from their own behavior
rather than experiencing them qua feelings

Do you think that your (and others') atttraction to behaviorism arises from
an envy of physicists' ability to surprise people with non-intuitive claims?

Sorry for any mis-characterization of your position.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020, 1:43 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> What a minute.  I am lost.  Who is devaluing evolution?  And when they are
> devaluing it, are the devaluing evolution as a phenomenon (adapted
> phylogenic descent, or some other systematic form of change), or are they
> devaluing natural selection as a process by which that change is thought to
> come about?
>
> If too much water has flowed over the damn, feel free to ignore this.
>
> Nick
>
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of ? u?l?
> Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2020 11:44 AM
> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice
> needed)
>
> EricS said it well enough, I think, quoted below for easy cf. I'll try to
> restate including a comment Firestein makes on Darwinism. The point is a
> kind of hindsight fallacy, where prior to the shift, we were confused and
> argumentative and after the shift we are (mostly) in consensus. That shift,
> if relatively modern so that documents exist, brings 2 things: 1)
> foundation that we can simply/thinly accept as true without arguing our
> lips off and 2) transparency - *if* we need to reconstruct the foundation
> from "first principles", we have people/documents we can use to do so [α].
> Obviously, an at-will-reconstructable foundation is more founded than an
> assumed to be solid foundation.
>
> Re Darwin, Firestein says: "As a quick sidelight this explains modern
> biology's debt to Darwin. You often hear that contemporary biology could
> not exist without the explanatory power of Darwin's theory of evolution by
> natural selection. But it is rarely made clear why this must be the case.
> Do physicians, for example, really have to believe in evolution to treat
> sick people? They do, at least implicitly, because the use of model systems
> to study more complicated ones relies on the relatedness of all biological
> organisms, us included. It is the process of evolution, the mechanisms of
> genetic inheritance and occasional mutation, that have conserved the genes
> responsible for making the proteins that confer electrical activity on
> neurons, as well as those that make kidneys and livers, and hearts and
> lungs work they way they do. If that were not the case, then we couldn't
> study these things in worms, flies, rats, mice, or monkeys and believe that
> it would have relevance to humans. There would be no drugs, no surgical
> procedures, no treatments, and no diagnostic tests. All of these have been
> developed using model systems ranging from cell sin culture dishes to
> rodents to primates. No evolution, no model systems, no progress."
>
> Obviously, he takes some liberties there. It is a book [ptouie] after all,
> not a paper. I hope people won't go ranting off into the void because of
> them. But the gist is good. Now, to move toward your position, *IF* you
> allow for both Darwinism *and* your phenomenal path integral (regardless of
> mechanism), then you could argue that the addition of that purely physical
> principle to evolution facilitates EVEN MORE of what Firestein describes
> above. [α] I.e. adding this extra component to the description of living
> systems may (HELP) get us from small problems (vortices) to large problems
> (cultural evolution). Of course, if you insist on denigrating and devaluing
> evolution, as you seem to want to do, then I'll abandon you to stew in your
> own juices. >8^D
>
> How was that? Will you buy me a pint? Or jeer at me from a distance?
>
>
> [α][δ] I'm reminded of the recent experiments contradicting (but not fully
> falsifying) pilot wave theory.
>
> [β] Sideline to this supercool result that popped off my queue the other
> day:
> A continuous reaction network that produces RNA precursors
> https://www.pnas.org/content/117/24/13267
>
> [δ] Jon has convinced me to expand my list of footnote symbols!
>
> On 7/7/20 9:39 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> > When people I run across talk about how they wish their work were more
> like the work they think goes on in physics, they often invoke work that
> has been settled for so long that we take it as very reliable, but that was
> still unknown recently enough that we can remember the difference.  That is
> the subset selected by survival.  But I never hear them saying they wish
> their work were more like string theory.  I imagine that, if they knew what
> the endless churning around string theory were like for the people involved
> (the string theorists, and against them people like Peter Woit (sp?),
> Smolin (though less seriously), Sabine Hossenfelder, or other critics who
> try to address substance), they would say that their work is already much
> too much the same as all that, and they wish it were less so.
>
>
> On 7/8/20 9:34 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
> > Of the 5, I think I align with reason #3. Can you unpack a little more
> > what you mean by it?
> >
> > * Extra points if you explain with a steelman of my paradigm shift :-)
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 7:51 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:
> gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     *3) hearkening to paradigm shifts and longing for solid
> > foundations*
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
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