I have a degree in computer science, and have always loved learning about computing. Whenever there is some new kind of computer on the market, I try to get ahold of it to learn to start programming for it entirely on my own free time as a hobby. When I got into quantum computing, I got rather frustrated at most explanations on the subject regarding how it worked. I mean, the mathematics isn't even that bad, just a lot of linear algebra. It was the language around the mathematics that bothered me, nobody could give me a consistent description of what was really going on, that is to say, there was no consistent account of the relationship between the mathematics and the ontology of the theory. Really, the theory has no ontology, as the Copenhagen interpretation largely stresses that quantum mechanics represents the limits of human knowledge, so we cannot actually say anything about how nature really is. At that point, I kind of become obsessed over the topic of the relationship between the mathematics and ontology, reading tons and tons of books on the subject, going all the way back to Heisenberg, Einstein, Schrodinger, Bohr, to reading many contemporary authors. It's really natural philosophy that interests me, I have never put much thought into things like moral philosophy or other kinds.
Philosophy
All about Philosophy.
wait - off topic: am i correct in guessing that you read my comment in another thread (about true randomness), commented there and then came to check my profile to comment here? i feel honored (to be considered that interesting).
No, this website doesn't get that many posts so I often keyword search to find things to reply to, and I am assuming your posts just both commented on a topic I keyword searched.
Very interesting point! I feel that there is a lot to say about the ontology in quantum physics; (and I'm interested in that myself).
I've adopted a few views that helped me cope with the practically non-existent explanation of what is really going on:
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Our brains are meat computers. Theories talk about the following: What does a computer measure after they have performed an experiment? In other words, theory isn't supposed to be emotionally fulfilling. It is merely making predictions for the computer.
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Truth is a lot like the stars. There's one big one, and a lot of small ones. Maybe we just have to accept that quantum physics is all about the many small ones.
I’ve adopted a few views that helped me cope with the practically non-existent explanation of what is really going on:
The thing is, I've been obsessed with this topic for so long that I do not really agree. The purpose of me being interested in the topic is to research and find reasonable explanations, and there is only so many years you can do that before you actually start coming to some conclusions.
These days I am a strong supporter of the contextual realist approach, which the philosopher-physicist Francois Igor Pris has some good books on the subject, but sadly he does not write in English if you only speak English, but mostly in Russian. It is based on the writings of the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist, which you can read his book Towards a Contextual Realism which has a good English translation, it is more philosophy than physics, although it does touch a little bit on quantum mechanics towards the end. Pris's books are more specifically about the application of Benoist's philosophical framework to quantum theory.
Our brains are meat computers. Theories talk about the following: What does a computer measure after they have performed an experiment? In other words, theory isn’t supposed to be emotionally fulfilling. It is merely making predictions for the computer.
I see the purpose of theories as ultimately to be able to predict how things change. If I drop a ball, it falls to the ground, if I drop it again, it falls again, and so I can assume through inductive reasoning that if I drop a third time, it will probably fall again. I could then create a mathematical model which describes this behavior, and so anyone can plug into the model the ball when lifted up, and then run a computation and see what it spits out is a prediction of the ball having fallen to the ground.
I am by no means a utilitarian when it comes to scientific theories, as if I think they are just "useful tools for making predictions and tell us nothing about reality." Rather, my view is that these "useful tools for making predictions" are useful precisely because they tell us something about reality: they capture how reality changes over time. If they did not, they could not be used to make predictions about it.
I think a lot of the difficulty in interpreting quantum theory is that a lot of people see ontology somewhat differently. They think that the ontology is not merely how reality that we can experimentally observe changes over time, but that it must also tell us about some alternative realm beyond all possibilities to ever observe. People for some reason have a desire to introduce additional and unnecessary metaphysics to the ontology of the system, to add things to it we cannot actually ever verify is actually there, and it's my view that if you abandon this temptation then you avoid much of the conceptual difficulties of the theory.
Truth is a lot like the stars. There’s one big one, and a lot of small ones. Maybe we just have to accept that quantum physics is all about the many small ones.
To be honest, I'm not sure what you mean by this.
Truth is a lot like the stars. There’s one big one, and a lot of small ones. Maybe we just have to accept that quantum physics is all about the many small ones.
To be honest, I’m not sure what you mean by this.
I will try to explain, but it might be a bit difficult for me to put it into proper formulation.
I will try to explain it with a picture, if I can. You start with a base condition called x(0). It represents some physical quantity in time. As the system evolves, the quantity becomes x(t). Now, you can draw this graphically with "trajectories", which are lines that draw out the curve that x(t) is making over time.
What happens, due to randomness, is that this trajectory splits up into many smaller ones. This is what I meant with "small truths". Then they unify again, when the randomness becomes irrelevant again, and that is what i meant with a "big truth". Maybe I just put it badly at words before, English is not my native language either.
Schrodinger makes a good argument in the book "Nature and the Greek and Science and Humanism" that we should actually just abandon the idea that there even is a trajectory.
Our sciences are derived from inductive reasoning. You drop a ball, it falls to the ground, you repeat it, it falls again, and eventually, you come up with a mathematical law to describe this. You assume from that point if you drop it an infinite number of times, it will always fall to the ground, but this is just an assumption that cannot be proven.
When the members of the Frontiers of Science discussed physics, they often used the abbreviation “SF.” They didn’t mean “science fiction,” but the two words “shooter” and “farmer.” This was a reference to two hypotheses, both involving the fundamental nature of the laws of the universe. In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.
Cixin Liu
We also do this to derive our concept of trajectories. We can measure something a x(0) and x(t), then repeat the experiment and measure it at x(0.5t), then repeat it again and measure it at x(0.25t) and x(0.75t), so on and so forth, measuring many many in-between points. From that, we assume that if we continue to cut the intervals in half and measuring in between, our predictions will continue to hold, making us conclude that there is a completely continuous transition between x(0) and x(t) exactly as described by our mathematics, which we can fit to unambiguous mathematical equations.
Yet, this is just an assumption. We cannot actually know that this continuous transition exists, and what Schrodinger argued is that there is in fact good reason to think it doesn't. This is because, in various particle experiments, you cannot actually try to reconstruct this path in a way that is unambiguous and would be consistent with every experiment. It is much simpler just to treat it as if the particle was over there at x(0), and now it is over here at x(t), with a time delay of t. Rovelli describes it as nature evolving through succession of events, rather than nature being made up of "stones bouncing around," nature flows according to these succession of events whereby things manifest their properties to one another during an interaction, but there is no trajectory the particle actually took in between interactions.
These trajectories are entirely metaphysical and could never actually be experimentally verified, since verification requires observation, and observation is an interaction, so to posit that there is any path in between interactions is to posit that there exists something in between observations, and by definition you could not observe that. It would always have to be something assumed a priori. This is what I meant when I said most people approach quantum mechanical interpretation seem to have a desire to assume quantum theory can tell us about things beyond what is even possible to observe, and much of the confusion around the theory is trying to philosophically understand this unobservable realm of what is going on in between observations.
I tend to agree with physicists like Schrodinger, Rovelli, and Francois Igor Pris that what makes the most sense is to just abandon this because it is entirely metaphysical and ultimately faith-based and cannot actually be experimentally verified. We should just stick to what we can actually confirm through observational evidence, and observations are discrete, so any continuity we assume about nature is ultimately metaphysical and could not be derived from observation. That is why it makes more sense to consider reality not as autonomous stones bouncing around, but as a succession of discrete events, and the physical sciences allows us to predict what properties of systems will be realized during those events.
My journey into it started as I was getting out of religion. Listening to debates about religion had several general philosophy references, so I read about those topics. I had some conversations with a buddy claiming "that's Marxist, that's Socialist" whatevers, and I wanted to learn what those things actually meant and why they scared so many people etc. Basically me not meshing with the ideological beliefs of my peers sent me down some deep rabbit holes lol.
I never outgrew the incessantly asking questions childhood phase; I only eventually mostly internalized it.
Depression and Marxism
Harry Dubois frfr
Marxism, reading theory brought me to Historical and Dialectical Materialism, which also brought me to researching the foundations that led up to Marxism that Marx built off of.
Would you say Hegel is worth reading. How do you think it affected your understanding of Marxism?
Haven't read Hegel proper, if your goal is to understand Marxism then Elementary Principles of Philosophy is my recommendation. It goes over Idealism, Dialectics, Materialism, and then how they came to form Dialectical and Historical Materialism.
C.S. Lewis, specifically The Screwtape Letters. I had been raised very conservative Catholic, and this book was my introduction to moral philosophy, as odd as that may sound given the overtly religious nature of it. The idea that morality has nuance, that an action can be wrong and still not damning, or 'virtuous' and still evil, was a new idea to me in my early teens.
While it would take me several more years to really start learning more definite philosophical concepts, that book was the first one that actually challenged me to ask myself why I believed the things I did, and made the case that blind, unchallenged faith was not faith at all. I started paying more attention to the things I had previously accepted at face value, and that examination would lead to me leaving the church and Christianity entirely later on. I still have faith of a sort, but it is more a faith in humanity and an undying and unifying spirit of community than a religion.
Now I have read quite a bit more in terms of philosophy, though not as much as I would like. All thanks to one book about demons trying to send a man to hell.
It was an interesting book when I first read it too!
Well, philosophy is the study of knowledge, so if you're interested in knowing stuff, you might as well go to the origin.
I got interested in Philosophy around the same time I started getting really interested in Psychology and Spirituality.
Got into those to try to understand the mindset that's lead to our hyper divided political landscape here in the States.
I can't really remember a time before; I was reading theology and religious philosophy from a young age. I do remember when I first started reading philosophy outside my religion, however: I found a book on Buddhist meditation and really enjoyed it. I tried some of the meditative practices in the book and found them really useful, and started seeking out more books on meditation, which led to me reading "Meditations" (the Marcus Aurelius one) and finding that most of the personal practices I already had were hallmarks of Stoicism.
In college I was exposed to a bunch I hadn't yet come across on my own, Plato and Kant and Augustine and Nietzsche; and started reading more fiction with a philosophical bent: Eco, Dick, Hesse... mostly to impress girls. I also got to take formal logic classes in the Philosophy Department as part of my CS degree. I continued to be involved in religious philosophy and theology, too, volunteering with the Interfaith Alliance to organize guest speakers and working as a student leader in the campus chapel. This was back when "social justice" was really gaining ground as a guiding philosophy among the more progressive Christian denominations, and we were all thinking and talking about it a lot.
Since college, I've continued to work through my personal beliefs and practices, but Stoicism, meditation, and Christian theology are still at the core. I've spent a lot more time thinking about political and civic philosophy the last decade, as well. Halfway through my life, I've got a handful of philosophical points I wholeheartedly champuon, and a vast sea of possibilities I'm happy to both critique and defend depending on my interlocutor.
Similar to my path, sounds like. Started when I noticed how much the acceptance of physics theories depended on POV. Already questioning Western religion/philosophy wholesale, Watts got me started looking at multiple Asian POVs, that brought me back to Jung, Gurdjieff, Polanyi and Bohm. There was no cure for any of that, so back to restart with slightly less naive realism. I am, whether or not I think, therefore.
"Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that precious little fragment as well. " — Philip K. Dick
If you like PKD on philosophy, he's got some stunners. But my favorite is Galactic Pot-Healer.
I'll give Chap1 a shot. PKD can be a headscratcher.
Veganism/animal rights