[FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

[David Eric Smith]

I feel sad, Glen, at the way that page was written, because it seemed something you should have found after your own heart, had it been done in a way it fully could have been:

> On Dec 2, 2021, at 12:10 PM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>  Even the hedging compromise of the parallel worlds interpretation of QM gives too much credibility to monism by metaphysically asserting universal laws across the multiverse, and using "dippy" trickery [Ω] to skirt infinities. En garde! >8^D
> 
> [Ω] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization#Attitudes_and_interpretation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization#Attitudes_and_interpretation>

By journalistic standards, of course, they are doing their Wikipedia job.  At noon yesterday, Republicans said it was the middle of the night; Democrats expressed disagreement.


But of course some points of view are better than others.  A lot also, in ways that are hard to defend one’s response to, goes into the choice of the way something is said, and the connotations and context that a given choice of wording brings in with it.  

Salam's comment on people who cling to subtracting infinities has about exactly the right flavor, I think.  To my mind, nobody who fully internalizes the lessons and viewpoints that typify modernity is still doing that.  (Which is not to say I can’t think of some people who still do it; even some who are smart and should be young enough to know better.  But their approach has a certain pre-Copernican flavor to me.)


Since I have no journalistic obligations, I will express a POV (noting, though, that it comes from some embedding in the topic and the community).

0.  Subtracting infinities is a 1930s and 1940s thing to do.  I still find it extraordinary that they could come up with a way to get correct answers from such an awful methodology (or less awful, ’t Hooft’s method of projecting them away by varying the dimensionality), but if I understood the method well enough to teach it, I would probably be able to explain how the real phenomenon is so robust that even with awful methods, there are ways to get the right construction.

1. The hard shell of the nut really was cracked by (who else?) Murray in 1954 (I assume from much circumstantial information that Francis Low had more of a helper role, but I don’t know whether the insight might have first been his even)
https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.95.1300 <https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.95.1300>
From here, it was essentially a forgone conclusion that sense would be possible.

2. It took 20 years for a fully didactic presentation to be provided, but Murray’s student Ken Wilson took care of that:
http://max2.physics.sunysb.edu/~rastelli/2019/WilsonKogut.pdf <http://max2.physics.sunysb.edu/~rastelli/2019/WilsonKogut.pdf>
The article represents it as if he “only” did this for condensed matter, but it is clear that Wilson understood that this also addressed the vacuum hierarchy of matter.

3. Weinberg’s “All Lagrangians are phenomenological Lagrangians” was really the 95 Theses that exorcised nonsense for all who wanted that:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0378437179902231 <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0378437179902231>
This is the point of view that I thought you, Glen, would particularly approve of.  A comment below on innuendo in wording in how the Wiki page refers to this topic.

4. From here, further exegesis wasn’t necessarily needed, but Joe Polchinski cleanly illustrated Weinberg’s illustration of Wilson’s illustration of Murray for the high-energy particle theorists:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0550321384902876 <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0550321384902876>
With this I think it is pretty much closed.  We have a method that expresses within itself the scope of its commitments and what those cannot even be assumed to include, and that’s about as good as one can ask for in a method.


So what’s left to be irritating enough to deserve comment, on this question, in the Wiki page’s “balance”.  They comment that some people feel that the infinities were “merely an artifact of human ignorance” as opposed to something “real”, or however they put it.

This, to me, invokes the language people have been bandying about for entropy for decades: is entropy a “real aspect of natural phenomena”, or “merely an artifact of human ignorance”?  (That language is uncalled-for there, too, but that is for other threads, in which my participation is now mercifully dead and buried.)

That way of saying it isn’t strictly wrong, of course, but let me offer an alternative rendering of the same strict meaning that carries a connotation that I think is more relevant:

"The interpretation that `all Lagrangians are phenomenological Lagrangians', within which infinities never arise in the course of doing calculations, entails the conclusion that humans have not yet worked out a complete and final theory accounting for all aspects of the nature and hierarchy of matter."

Gosh, stop the presses….


Of course, I know that wasn’t what the main thread was about, and was merely a drive-by shooting in your post.  Don’t know where this leaves your assertion about physicists as monists.  I think I don’t understand why anyone who claims to be a monist bothers to say anything, since the act of choosing one word rather than another, or writing any sentence, would be obviated if all things are one thing.  I assume the physicists can just ignore all that and keep trying to do work.

Eric


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20211203/58630ab4/attachment.html>