[FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Tue Apr 30 23:25:20 EDT 2019

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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