[FRIAM] This makes me think of this list...

[Santafe]

Back to Nick, 

This business of, out of the variety of frames and points of view that could be taken on anything, gradually making it clear that a certain PoV is the center of a concept, and then requiring that we “get used to” seeing the concept through that point of view, is indeed what the sciences should be doing.  Your point below is a great point of departure to try to articulate this process.  There is no respect for our having had categories since antiquity and having habits of seeing the world through them.  Sometimes one of those categories is usable as it has been; other times a new category needs to come into the world of thought and understanding.  At its best, science, like nature, doesn’t care whether we happen to be comfortable with something because we have been used to it from the past.  So it’s a nice mix of sometimes-it-is, sometimes-it-isn't.

For the case of solids, the way it is currently framed as “the central point” is in terms of symmetries, specifically directions in space:

If I have a liquid, I can put a paddle in the liquid.  If I then twist the paddle (let’s say, I twist it gradually and in no particular hurry; we can then split hairs for hours at a blackboard about how gradually and what depends on that; we have math that handles all that just fine), there will be no restoring force from the liquid, which if unopposed will return the paddle to its former position.  The new position is equally good as a rest position, as the old, and it is their equivalence that we term a symmetry under rotations in space.

In contrast, if I have a solid, I can likewise embed a paddle in that (by whatever means).  If I twist this second paddle at the local point where it is, but leave the extended bulk of the solid unchanged out at remote locations, there will be a restoring force moving the paddle back to the position it was in when I embedded it and before the twisting.  All directions are no longer equivalent, and a symmetry under rotations in space no longer characterizes a specific state of the solid, the way it did for the liquid.  There are various names for this in the jargon, which do not matter at all.  If I were to use any of them, you would latch onto its psychological implications, so I will not do that, and rather will just describe in plain language what I actually mean, which is the full and entire meaning I intend to render for the concept anyway.  

There are consequences that one might not expect from this difference between a state’s manifesting a symmetry and a state’s no longer manifesting it.  In a liquid, there will be only one kind of sound, which we call “compressional” because it involves the direction-un-regarding relation between inertia and the pressure of compressing the volume in which some matter is contained.  In a solid, there become two distinct modes of sound: the compressional one is still there, but now there is a mode of sound that comes from the interaction of inertia with the restoring forces against shear deformations, which are related (through mathematical constraints) to the restoring forces under twisting mentioned above.  This is why earthquakes have P and S waves (Pressure and Shear).


I didn’t wade into the traffic on laws a few days ago, because I had stuff I had to do and that restrained my behavior, though I did want to.  But what the hell, now….

Again, one can choose a jargony plain language that invites all sorts of missings of the point, or one can choose plain languages that is meant to discourage such missings.  I didn’t know Hewel, but he sounds like he was a joyful pusher of catnip to psychologists.

Here is some alternative language for what a physical law is, that is not meant to tempt psychologists into going astray (though of course, they are responsible for themselves, too):

A law is a description of a pattern that can be framed within a very partial description of nature.

Imagine that there were no laws in the conventional sense we have now; what would we be left asking from a “science”, if it were even possible?  The most we could hope for would be statements of the form “If A then B”, where A and B would have to be full and complete articulations of the state of the universe.  (Whether those would then have to be “at different times” to be non-tautological, or whatnot, would raise all sorts of problems.  But since they are impossible in any case, at least we don’t have to deal with those questions today.)  Such full-and-complete if-then statements would only be within reach of the mystics, and ordinary people like me would be completely unable to do anything with them, or even know what they were.

What we actually have, in laws, is also statements “If A then B”, but A and B can be very limited characterizations.  For instance: 

A might be “If an object is in a state that has a definite momentum (a decision we arrive at by various cookbook methods of measurement, experimentation, and whatnot), and if there is a symmetry among positions in space,…” 

and then 

B might be “… then the value we can compute for that momentum (by the cookbook methods of measurement, experimentation, and whatnot) is the same at all moments in its history when we might make such an assignment”.

Whether the object is a hockey puck, or an Evangelical Who Knows the Glory of God, or a heathen, or a psychologist, doesn’t need to be entered into A or B, if their scope is properly captured in the way they are said.

Some of the If A then B statements are about different times, and have different conditions of (B conditionally independent of other things given A) structure, to which we attach different categories of causation.

But others need not be about different times, but can be about articulating what makes a certain pattern its kind of pattern and not some other.  For instance:

A might be “if an object is of the kind we want to refer to as an atomic nucleus…”

and then 

B might be “… then that object is a condensed state of quarks and leptons, with various more-or-less-evanescent order in terms of nucleons (protons and neutrons), pi mesons, etc., which is characterized in such-and-such a way by some mathematical descriptions of the strong forces and the quarks and leptons.”

This statement isn’t particularly about differences in time, though it has implications for differences in time; it is equally about “any nucleon anywhere”, so it is an assertion about the nature of matter anywhere matter might be existent in the universe, and (through the way the math is built out) its relation to whatever we mean by “the vacuum” of “spacetime”.  

For this second one, we aren’t even talking about “cause” in the ordinary senses in which the term is used for dynamics.  Whether one might want, in any given conversation, to say that the laws of the strong interaction “cause” the nature of nuclei to be what it is seems like a spurious attachment that adds nothing to the descriptive account of what one means by “nucleus” within the general system of things computed from the laws of the strong interaction.  I prefer, in such cases, not to inject terms like “cause” that do no constructive work in the law, so that I can reserve the terms for other more specific uses, in the way Judea Pearl does in his book on causation, where he wants to refer to a specific structure of conditional independences as the pattern for the term.

And so on.  

My point in the above tedious articulation (with apologies) is that, while various psychologistic language could be used to try to gesture at one or another law to give metaphorical access to it, the law doesn’t need the psychologistic language, as attested by the possibility to choose other language not employing any one or another combination of psychologistic terms and frames.

I would contrast those cases above, which avoid the agentive terms that were in some of the earlier traffic, with characterizations of patterns we might want to make in psychology or at many other levels in biology, where the nature of the pattern seems to need some distinct term to refer to it, and agentive terms are very good ones to use for the way they embed into the system of our other characterizations of patterns.  The agentive terms do quite specific and irreplaceable work in the characterization of the pattern.

All best, 

Eric



> On Aug 16, 2024, at 22:46, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I feel like, to you guys, my mind is like an old coil of sticky fly paper that has gotten dusted over. It has a bunch of dead flies stuck to it, and they are gray and dry, but it is incapable of capturing any  new flies. Anyway, I fear that that is the case.
> 
> So, in the spirit of scraping up one of my dead flies, I would like to point to something in Eric’s discussion of the difference between being a fluid and being a solid. To the extent that I can entertain essentialism, I would say that the essence of being a solid is not the molecular lattice, but how solids behave. That the behavior solidity is harder to define then the description of a molecular lattice, or whatever, doesn’t make it any less the essence of the concept of solid. Since I am not an essentialist, i can concede that the essence of solid can migrate through discourse and time from the behavior of solids to the lattice — the hankering beyond the facts can get displaced. The only thing I would hang onto with old flypaper stuckitude is that the lattice cannot be at one time and in one sentence what it is to be a solid and what explains solidity.  You can either have the satisfaction of defining solids by their latticity or explaining them because they are lattices, but you cannot have both. Everything else is negotiable.  Nick.
> Sent from my Dumb Phone
> 
> On Aug 15, 2024, at 12:54 PM, Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> cannot.
> 
> I spent a bit of time in my early twenties hitchhiking throughout North America, which often led to traveling between American festival culture loci. While I feel my orientation/attitude traveling was a bit misguided and overly ascetic, I witnessed enough to recognize how the awe-filled spiritual
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