I was surprised to see an article by Tim Maudlin, a philosopher of Physics- in the wholly paranoid Boston Review. It turns out Maudlin has beef with Bohr & Kuhn who viciously suppressed the sorts of great truths the Left believes would liberate us from Poverty, Injustice and the fact that some peeps have dicks even though dicks cause RAPE!
People are gullible.
It sometimes pays to appear to be so just as it sometimes pays to appear to appear to be tricking someone else who isn't gullible at all. These are 'strategic games'. But what has that to do with physics?
Humans can be duped by liars and conned by frauds; manipulated by rhetoric and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled, seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled, inveigled, and ensnared. In this respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom.
Not really. You can trick animals or, in my case, get tricked, manipulated, beguiled, browbeaten and subjected to derisive comment of a thinly veiled Hindu-phobic nature by the neighbour's cat.
Aristotle emphasizes another characteristic. Humans alone, he tells us, have logos: reason. Man, according to the Stoics, is zoön logikon, the reasoning animal. But on reflection, the first set of characteristics arises from the second. It is only because we reason and think and use language that we can be hoodwinked.
Animals trick each other. If one dog has a toy the other wants it pretends there is someone at the door and starts barking. The other rushes to get in on the action thus leaving the toy for the smarter dog.
Deceptive signalling is a feature of co-evolution. The snake which looks as poisonous as fuck has no venom. Statistically speaking, at the level of the species, it doesn't need it. Its predators tend to leave it alone often enough for the cheap deception to be worth it. One may say that the aposematic snake or other small animal faces a trade off between cost in terms of acquiring a signal and the benefit it provides. Is there an 'optimal' solution? Depending on the assumptions we make about other relevant factors, there may be a number of different solutions which are optimal in different ways- i.e. the minimize or maximize different things. Come to think of it a 'least action principle' is an optimization problem of a particular sort. But surely, in physics, nothing strategic is involved? The answer is that though elementary particles or Galactic systems don't want to play games with us, still the thing being optimized is 'intensional' or epistemic- i.e. it changes as our knowledge base changes. Moreover, different 'dogmas' (Sanskrit 'matam') re. intensions may be looking for different types of knowledge. Thus even if their 'Vigyan' (Scientific 'observational equivalence) is the same, still they are different.
Einstein was looking for something different from what Bohr was looking for.
Einstein was not centrally bothered by the indeterminism of quantum mechanics. What vexed him—as he said repeatedly—was the nonlocality, or, in his pungent phrase, the spooky action at a distance (spukhafte Fernwirkung) in quantum mechanics. Einstein put his finger on this right away and never took it off.
In other words, Einstein's 'dogma' was mechanistic. There must be something in between two events which ensures that the causal link we have found holds up. We know X killed Y with this gun and this bullet. We may still want to show that the bullet could have passed through everything between X and Y. In a Chesterton detective story, a man can kill another man who is alone in a shut and locked garden shed. This is because the walls of the shed are constructed in a manner which leaves decorative chinks. X uses his sword stick to push through one such chink to kill Y and then throws the sword stick into the sea. A dog barks at X who thinks the dog is accusing him of the crime and, in a fit or remorse, throws himself off a cliff after confessing. Chesterton gives a 'naturalistic' or 'mechanistic' explanation of the 'oracle of the dog'. That canine was expressing puzzlement and disappointment that he could not retrieve the stick as part of a game, because the stick was too heavy to float. For other people, the confession was good enough. X killed Y. How he did so didn't matter. He had put himself beyond the reach of justice.
Consider the collapse of the wavefunction in Schrödinger’s wave mechanics. If an electron-wave is channeled through a very narrow hole, when it emerges it will spread out in all directions like a circular undulation in water. But a hemispheric screen constructed to catch the electron does not reveal anything spread out: there is a single bright flash, as of a particle hitting the screen. The transition from extended wave to localized particle requires the collapse of the wavefunction. What bothered Einstein was that the sudden appearance of the flash at one spot implied that there could not be a flash at any other spot, no matter how far away. Somehow, all the distant spread-out parts of the wavefunction instantaneously disappear. Faster than light. Spooky action at a distance.
This is like the 'oracle of the dog'. How did the dog know whom to bark at? Chesterton's answer is that the dog liked to return sticks to the person who threw them. It saw the guy throw a stick but it sank and thus the dog has turned up to express disappointment. It doesn't know about the murder. Essentially, the dog is a 'witness' to something- 'who threw the sword-stick'- but is taken to be an oracle regarding something else entirely- 'who killed Y'. Similarly, in this case, 'the flash' is a witness to something other than a connected 'least action' path for the particle. This does not mean such a path does not exist. It is just that the two things are not necessarily related.
Einstein saw that the phenomena themselves—as distinct from Schrödinger’s theory with its wavefunctions—did not require anything spooky. All you had to believe is that the electron was always in some precise location, of which we are ignorant, and takes a humdrum path from the source to the screen, causing a flash. But because quantum mechanics does not specify the location, accepting this picture demands rejecting the completeness of quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen interpretation cannot be the final story.
This is like saying the dog is not a true oracle. It doesn't really know that X is the murderer. Indeed, it does not have a concept of murder. But it is a witness as to who threw a stick which was so perverse that it didn't float and thus could not be retrieved. The dog complains furiously to the thrower at this malpractice.
The dog's story is complete. The Copenhagen interpretation is complete. But they don't answer the question Einstein is concerned with which is like the question Father Brown is concerned with. In Chesterton's case, the police can check that the garden shed has chinks in the wall and then they can search the beach a low tide for a sword-stick. If they find both then the investigation is complete. These are 'hidden variables' which fit a particular interpretation.
Bohr never came to grips with this argument. Indeed, it is unclear whether he ever understood it.
In Chesterton's story, there is no police investigation. If the sword-stick came to light and it had blood on it and fingerprints and so forth, then, sure, a case could be made. But in its absence, this was just a hypothesis- a story.
But while Einstein won—and would continue to win—all the logical battles,
Logic can't win battles. As Epicurus noted, where there are 'multiple explanations', the best we can do is gain the 'tetrapharmakon' or four fold remedy of not losing sleep over things we think ought to exist but which are incompatible with what we are or what we know. It is pointless to fear a God, or, indeed, death itself, when neither can be the object of experience even if our logic suggests otherwise.
Bohr was decisively winning the propaganda war.
Nope. There was a little bloke named Hitler around back then. It was he who prevailed.
The Copenhagen doctrine of the completeness of quantum theory and the inescapability of fundamental chance spread, enforced by Bohr and Heisenberg and the rest of the Copenhagen school.
As it did in every other empirical discipline. Mendelian Genetics enabled Neo-Darwinism to triumph over Lamarck. There had to be a pragmatic acceptance of 'Tychism' as C.S Pierce termed stochastic 'chance'. In Logic, the alternative was 'modal collapse' i.e. what is, necessarily is and could never be otherwise. This is fatalism or 'occassionalism' or something more mystical yet. It isn't Science.
Behind the scenes, the Copenhagenists did not agree with each other, but to the world they presented a unified front. Meanwhile, Einstein and Schrödinger both rejected Bohr, but they also bickered with each other.
Schrodinger improved on Bohr but, like Einstein, yearned for a higher dimensional geometry undergirding all things. This 'Theory of Everything' would be a Dogma which could dispense with Science. It would allow Solomonoff type 'inductive inference' from almost any data set such that there would be an algorithmic probability system which would be complete. Sadly this entails uncomputability. Equally, Solomonoff shows that 'any computable system is incomplete. There will always be descriptions outside that system's search space, which will never be acknowledged or considered, even in an infinite amount of time. Computable prediction models hide this fact by ignoring such algorithms.' I suppose one might say this is because some 'witnesses' are like the 'oracle of the dog' and appear non-deterministic in a way no deterministic system can prevision. Sadly, it seems, one can either have computability or completeness- not both.
Here is Einstein’s own description of Copenhagen: “The theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac.”
But a Bayesian would soon be able to refute that paranoia quickly enough.
Philosopher Imre Lakatos gave this later assessment:
'In the new, post-1925 quantum theory the ‘anarchist’ position became dominant and modern quantum physics, in its ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, became one of the main standard bearers of philosophical obscurantism. In the new theory Bohr’s notorious ‘complementarity principle’ enthroned [weak] inconsistency as a basic ultimate feature of nature, and merged subjectivist positivism and antilogical dialectic and even ordinary language philosophy into one unholy alliance. After 1925 Bohr and his associates introduced a new and unprecedented lowering of critical standards for scientific theories. This led to a defeat of reason within modern physics and to an anarchist cult of incomprehensible chaos.'
Then everybody woke up to the fact that philosophers like Lakatos and the later Putnam had added nothing to physics. They were a waste of space.
Strong words. It is Becker’s burden, and Becker’s triumph, to show that every word is true.
Yet this 'anarchist cult' seems able to continually come up with cool new tech.
The story has twists and turns: John von Neumann’s purported mathematical proof (1932) that quantum mechanics is complete and one could not add anything more to it and retain its successful predictions;
Von Neumann argued against hidden variables, on thermodynamic grounds. He suggested that the collapse of the wave function could happen at any point along the causal path to the observer.
the philosopher Grete Hermann’s detection in 1935 of the fatal flaw in von Neumann’s proof
it was wrongly thought to show hidden variables were impossible. But then anything is possible. Hermann (and Bell later on) showed that the Von Neumann proof made a physical assumption that is not valid for quantum mechanics—namely, that the probability-weighted average of the sum of observable quantities equals the sum of the average values of each of the separate observable quantities. However, more recently. Jeffrey Bub has shown Von Neumann was aware of the limits of his proof.
—and the complete disregard of her work; the elaboration of Einstein’s reasoning into the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) argument; Bohr’s incomprehensible response to EPR; Schrödinger’s reaction, including his eponymous cat. Surely, one thinks, this mess must have been cleaned up eventually! But it never was. It persists to this day. And we are only through the first third of the book.
Philosophy may have considered the situation messy but technology was advancing which meant that better experiments- including Bell tests- could be performed. So far, the news hasn't been good for the Einstein camp. It's not that the thing is impossible. It's just that given the data it is extremely unlikely.
The middle third of Becker’s book adopts a somber tone in the stories of three renegades who bucked the system in the 1950s and ’60s, after the Copenhagen mysticism had congealed into an icy command: shut up and calculate! Work on the foundations of quantum theory was effectively forbidden, with one’s career and future at peril. The first renegade was David Bohm, a bright and dutiful Copenhagenist until he met the aging Einstein and recanted. Bohm rediscovered the pilot wave theory that Louis de Broglie had presented at Solvay in 1927. The theory slices through the enigma—wave or particle?—like Alexander’s sword through the Gordian knot: the answer is wave and particle. The wavefunction becomes a pilot wave that guides the particles along their paths. The theory is completely deterministic—no playing dice—and recovers all the predictions of standard quantum mechanics. One would think Einstein would love the theory, but he did not. The dreaded nonlocality had not been exorcized. Indeed, it was even more striking.
If particles need 'guides' and 'pilots' why should they be denied psychoanalysis and motivational counselling? Many elementary particles feel listless and disinclined to obey whatever laws Physicists come up with.
Bohm’s theory put the lie to von Neumann’s impossibility proof by direct counterexample. Contra Bohr, the particles are visualizable even at microscopic scale.
What's more, we can visualize them telling their Therapist about how other elementary particles are being mean to them and saying sarky things about them behind their backs.
In short, the theory demonstrates beyond all doubt that the Copenhagen interpretation is nonsense.
As is the notion that quarks don't need gender reassignment surgery no matter what bigots like JK Rowling may say.
But Bohm’s work was ignored and effectively suppressed.
By Neo-Liberalism. Wake up sheeple! The IMF is watching you poop!
A political leftist, Bohm had refused to testify at the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was dismissed from his job at Princeton and went into exile in Brazil. His U.S. passport was revoked. He eventually found his way to Birkbeck College in London, but never received the recognition that was his due. In a notorious episode, Robert Oppenheimer is reported to have said, “If we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him.”
Bohm became a friend of Jiddu Krishnamurti- an Iyengar by birth. The orthodox position is that there is a trinity of image, pre-image and mirror (bimba, pratibimba and darpan). Dhyana, or meditation, is 'dhayati' or reflection. This is a way of reconciling Ramanuja and Sankara. Their dogmas may be different but the 'Science' (vigyan) is the same. So far, QM has been better for 'Science'. This may change.
The second renegade was a graduate student at Princeton not long after Bohm left in 1952. Also rejecting Copenhagen, Hugh Everett took Schrödinger’s evolving wavefunction and removed the collapse. He argued that rather than an incomprehensible smear resulting, as Schrödinger’s neither-alive-nor-dead cat suggested, a multiplication of worlds results. Schrödinger’s cat ends up both dead and alive, as two cats in two equally real physical worlds. Today this approach is called the many-worlds interpretation.
It was given a boost by work on quantum decoherence or loss of information (actually this is encoded in the environment by quantum correlation) at the point where quantum and classical meet. Also, it allowed Captain Kirk to meet the female version of himself in an alternative reality. That was cool.
Everett’s thesis advisor, John Wheeler, had great enthusiasm for Everett’s innovation. But he insisted that Everett get the nod of approval from Bohr. Bohr refused, and Wheeler required Everett to bowdlerize his thesis. Everett left academia and did not look back. His work lay in obscurity.
He was always eclectic and was probably doing highly classified work for the Pentagon. Sadly, he died relatively young just when his work was being hailed as revolutionary. David Deutsch, also a student of Wheeler, might be considered his successor.
The last and greatest renegade was John Stewart Bell. Spurred by Bohm’s papers, Bell queried whether Einstein’s dreaded spooky action at a distance could be avoided. Copenhagen and the pilot wave theory had both failed this test. Bell proved that the nonlocality is unavoidable. No local theory—the type Einstein had sought—could recover the predictions of quantum mechanics. The predictions of all possible local theories must satisfy the condition called Bell’s inequality. Quantum theory predicts that Bell’s inequality can be violated. All that was left was to ask nature herself. In a series of sophisticated experiments, the answer has been established: Bell’s inequality is violated. The world is not local. No future innovation in physics can make it local again. The spookiness that Einstein spent decades deriding is here to stay.
There may be loopholes like 'fair sampling' but true believers are scarce on the ground.
How did the physics community react to this epochal discovery? With a shrug of incomprehension. For decades, discussion of the foundations of quantum theory had been suppressed.
But cool stuff like quarks had been discovered
Physicists were unaware of the problems and unaware of the solutions. To this day, they commonly claim that Bell’s result proves Bohm’s theory to be impossible and indeterminism to be inevitable, while Bell himself was the staunchest advocate of Bohm’s deterministic theory. Even now, the average physicist has no understanding of what Einstein argued in the EPR paper and what Bell proved.
That may well be but does it matter? Love of Wisdom may cause us to say 'Wisdom must be nice-nice. Also it mustn't have a dick because dicks cause RAPE!' but loving wisdom isn't itself wisdom. Doing Physics may not involve understanding Physics any more than talking bollocks involves understanding the bollocks you talk.
The last third of What Is Real? could hopefully be titled “Slow Convalescence.” Gradually the worst excesses of Bohr’s influence are mitigated as Bell’s work inspires a new generation to look into foundational issues. We meet a new cast of characters, and the overall atmosphere is mildly optimistic. But there is a long way to go, and this very book could prove to be a watershed moment for the physics community if it faces up to its own past and its present. Or, following the fate of Einstein, Bohm, and Everett, Becker could just be ignored. But if you have any interest in the implications of quantum theory, or in the suppression of scientific curiosity, What is Real? is required reading. There is no more reliable, careful, and readable account of the whole history of quantum theory in all its scandalous detail.
Physics isn't nice-nice. Did you know that some Physicists have dicks? Dicks cause RAPE! All is the fault of Bohr who said nasty things to Everett causing the fellow to cry and cry.
The subtitle of Errol Morris’s new book is, “Or the Man Who Denied Reality.” That might suggest a biography of Bohr, but the face on the cover is that of Thomas Kuhn. A renowned documentarian known for his dogged pursuit of truth that got one man off death row, Morris had a short-lived stint as Kuhn’s graduate student at Princeton. The cut-glass ashtray of the title was hurled at Morris’s head by Kuhn in a fit of pique. Morris has never forgiven Kuhn. And the ashtray is the least of it. Morris loathed Kuhn’s relativism and abandonment of reason and evidence, and Kuhn loathed Morris back.
Kuhn's 'no neutral algorithm' is a lot like other 'impossibility' results which say you can't have your cake and eat it too. You need as many instruments as you have objectives. Worse yet, you can't 'lexically preference' objectives or reduce them, save arbitrarily, to a common metric.
Morris’s book is a settling of scores, both personal and philosophical. It is also delightful, digressive, unpredictable, engrossing, amusing, infuriating, and visually stunning.
because Maudlin approves of Morris's politics.
The tale of The Ashtray is one of serendipity. Kuhn trained at Harvard as a physicist. There he started teaching classes in the history of science, and as a Harvard Junior Fellow decided to switch from physics to the history of science. His first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), is a splendid work. Rejecting the usual physicist’s tendency to see past scientific work through the lens of present scientific theory, Kuhn brings the reader back into the debates of the time. There are no high theoretical pronouncements, just the patient historical work needed to make the assumptions and commitments of an earlier generation of scientists comprehensible to a modern audience. Had all of his work been of this character, Kuhn would be remembered as a talented historian of science, largely unknown by the general public.
Neo-liberalism got hold of the fellow and he became evil. Also he had a dick. Dicks cause RAPE! Bant them immediately.
Through a series of random events, Kuhn was asked to write a monograph on the history of scientific revolutions for the Encyclopedia of Unified Science. That book became The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn said that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was just a sketch for a longer book which never got written. Instead it went on, as it was, to become the most widely read and influential work of philosophy in the last half of the twentieth century.
I have heard this claim made about many works of philosophy. But they were all ignorant nonsense.
The first three quarters of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions give an insightful account of the everyday life of a scientist doing what Kuhn dubbed normal science. As a doctor of physics, Kuhn was on familiar ground and his account rang true. Normal science, according to Kuhn, is designed to solve puzzles. Both the nature of these puzzles and the acceptable means of resolving them are fixed by a set of rules, practices, and examples that Kuhn called a paradigm. Only by reference to the paradigm could a scientist defend the importance of the puzzle she is working on and the legitimacy of her solution. In particular, says Kuhn, it is not in the nature of normal science to question or challenge the paradigm: the paradigm provides the rules by which the game of a particular science is played.
Say protocols and you are on the right track. Still if you discover something previously unknown and others can repeat your experiment and find the same thing, then paradigms don't matter. It's like what happens when someone invents a new idiom- like King Charles saying 'Niggah puh-leeze!'- and suddenly that is the paradigm everybody uses to get Prince Harry to shut the fuck up.
But of course, we are not playing the same scientific games as we did two hundred years ago. To get from there to here, various paradigms had to be overthrown and replaced. In Kuhn’s argot, there had to be paradigm shifts. And all of the excitement and controversy surrounding Kuhn turns on the nature and the outcome of these paradigm shifts. Exchanging one paradigm for another constitutes a scientific revolution.
Revolutions were cool back then. America had one- right?
We can ask three critical questions about scientific revolutions: how are they fought, why are they won (or lost), and what is the cumulative outcome of them. Kuhn’s answers to all of these questions could be read in an unsettling way.
Better yet, one could just say 'paradigm shift' and hope people would think you were smart.
Kuhn explicitly analogized scientific revolutions to political revolutions. The outcome of an attempted political revolution cannot be settled through political means since there is no institutional structure that both sides will submit to. “The parties to a political conflict,” writes Kuhn, “must finally resort to the techniques of mass persuasion, often including force.” Often elusive, Kuhn does not explicitly say that scientists engaged in a conflict over paradigms do the exact same thing, but he does not quite deny it either. (The fate of David Bohm cannot but spring to mind in this context.) The choice of a paradigm, he says, “can never be unequivocally settled by logic and experiment alone.” This repudiation of the rationality of scientific practice struck a chord in the zeitgeist. In the 1960s, it was chic to depict science as no more legitimate or authoritative than any other cultural practice. Instead, it is all a matter of propaganda and power moves.
But Science which couldn't pay for itself by improving technology tended to lose funding or else migrated to Philosophy land before finally turning into Grievance Studies.
But surely, one objects, these scientific revolutions lead to progress. Scientific theories, unlike fashion trends, do not merely change; they get closer to the truth.
Fashion trends either make money or they aren't fashion at all. Science has to make more money than it costs otherwise it becomes Sociology of Science or something lame of that sort.
Here, too, Kuhn is adamant: he remarks near the end that the word truth has never once appeared in his text except in a quote by Francis Bacon. Then comes the coup de grace: truth is just what the winners of the conflict over paradigms say it is. And of course, according to the winners, their own paradigm is true.
Marxism was supposed to be a Scientific theory at one time. It still is, if you live under the benevolent reign of Chairman Xi.
Whereas Becker’s villain is Bohr and his heroes are Einstein and Bell, Morris has Kuhn get his comeuppance from philosophers Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam.
Both started off bright and mathsy. But they lost the plot soon enough. Philosophy is bad for brain cells.
The central philosophical issue that Morris discusses is the reference of terms: how does a noun such as mass or planet or Albert Einstein pick out or denote something in the world?
David Lewis was on the right track when he said 'conventions' and words for things solve coordination and discoordination problems.
Without an account of reference, we cannot construct a theory of truth.
But even with it, what we have is arbitrary.
A true claim correctly describes the object or objects it denotes, so determining truth or falsity requires determining the object under discussion.
Arbitrarily. This may be useful enough even if it done by tossing a coin.
Analysis of the reference of terms goes back to the very beginning of the strangest and most intellectually shocking philosophical view in the Western tradition. The pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides defended the thesis that all change and motion is an illusion. Parmenides came to this conclusion by reflecting on claims about nonexistence or, in Greek, tō mē on, that which is not.
If a thing can be thought or said- it is.
We all accept as true the claim that Santa Claus does not exist, or, equivalently, Santa Claus is nonexistent. But what, exactly, is this supposedly true claim about? It cannot be about Santa Claus because if it is true, then there is no such thing. Parmenides asserted, “The same things exist for thinking as for being.” In other words, you can only think about existent items because there are no nonexistent items to be the objects of thought. It follows that a nonexistence claim such as “Santa Claus does not exist” cannot be true: if it were true, then Santa Claus would not refer to anything, so the sentence would be meaningless. Parmenides took this result to establish the incoherence of all nonexistence claims. And since to say that things have changed is to say that the nonexistent has come to be, and the nonexistent is meaningless, there can be no change.
Existence is a peculiar predicate but we can always put in a type theory or have 'restricted comprehension'. Santa Claus is a genuine imaginary being. Shanta Claus- his Hindu wife- isn't because I never got around to giving her a back story.
Philosophers rose to Parmenides’s challenge by theorizing how a term such as “unicorn” can be meaningful even if it does not refer to anything. Unicorn is just shorthand for a description such as “horse-like animal with a horn growing from its forehead.” And “unicorns do not exist” is true just in case no animal fits that description. Bertrand Russell suggested a similar analysis of everyday proper names: “Santa Claus does not exist” just means there is no jolly, bearded, red-suited, toymaking individual who lives at the North Pole. John Mill accepted the descriptive account of unicorn but objected to the parallel theory of proper names: a name such as Heisenberg has no associated description or connotation. It is a mere tag that has only a denotation, the man Heisenberg himself. There is no description in virtue of which Werner Heisenberg denotes that very man. So Parmenides’s puzzle still remains for names of nonexistent items such as Santa Claus.
South Park presented a solution to this Meinongian puzzle in 'Imagination-land'. Shanta Claus is currently sitting on Santa's face. That is why he has chosen non-existence as the better of two evils.
One advantage of the descriptive view is that it works not only for talk of the actual world, but also for talk about mere possibilities. The descriptive view explains not just why it is true to say there are no unicorns, but how under certain conditions there would have been.
So, the descriptive view only works for an omniscient viewer.
All you need are conditions that would have produced horse-like animals with horns. So there are two quite different contexts in which the meaning and reference of terms has to be explicated: how they get (or fail to get) referents in the actual world, and how they work when considering merely possible (counterfactual) situations.
We don't have omniscience but we do have 'verification'- e.g. seeing and touching an actual unicorn- which is how we determine truth value. We don't need to know anything about what caused the unicorn to be to verify that the beast is currently laying its head in my lap- coz I iz a virgin.
The difference between indicative propositions about the actual world and counterfactual propositions about mere possibilities is illustrated by these two conditionals: if Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot John F. Kennedy, then someone else did (indicative and true);
This is only true because there was verification that the dude had a bullet hole in him.
and if Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then someone else would have (counterfactual and probably false).
This may be verifiable if we find documentary evidence of a second shooter ready to take the shot if Oswald missed or got cold feet.
Kuhn implicitly accepts the descriptive view.
Only in the sense that everybody implicitly accepts that I have a ginormous dick except my ex-wife.
The meanings of theoretical terms such as “mass” are determined by the theories in which they are deployed.
And the meanings of those theories are determined by my ginormous cock- implicitly.
Mass as used by Newton means something different from mass as employed by Einstein because the theories they are embedded in are different. Therefore Newtonians cannot really communicate with Einsteinians, Ptolemaic astronomers cannot really communicate with Copernican astronomers, and so on. This is why, for Kuhn, scientific revolutions cannot be settled by rational means: the disputants necessarily speak different languages.
People who speak different languages can have their disputes settled by polyglot Judges.
The descriptive view was demolished by Kripke and Putnam in a series of lectures and papers in the 1970s. Whereas Russell took the descriptive theory and applied it to both general terms like unicorn and proper names like Heisenberg, Kripke took Mill’s view that names have no connotation and applied it to general terms like unicorn and water. This left both Kripke and Putnam with the task of explaining both how scientific terms like mass manage to refer to anything in the actual world, and how they function when used to talk about merely possible situations. These two tasks were addressed in different ways: the first by the causal theory of names, and the second by the theory of rigid designation.
Which is fine if there are rigid protocols governing such things or if 'naturality' exists. Otherwise, the thing is arbitrary.
Articulating these fine distinctions would be out of synch with the spirit of Morris’s boisterous book, but as a result, conceptually different issues get somewhat muddled together.
Those issues were silly. Language is about coordination and discoordination games. Pragmatics is essentially economic.
One page contains a picture of a pet rock, another a painting called Truth Coming from the Well Armed with Her Whip to Chastise Mankind. Here is a Glyptodon, there a map of bomb damage in London, and last of all a photograph of a school class that contains a young Adolf Hitler and, perhaps, a young Ludwig Wittgenstein. For Morris, Wittgenstein so effectively undermined the philosophical ideals of truth and reason that he seriously pauses to consider which of the two did more damage to mankind.
Witless couldn't damage shit. He was too stupid. Game theory is needed for language games. Brouwer was a deep thinker. Witless wanked.
The question may seem extreme but it springs from the noble place of a firm commitment to the possibility of rationality and evidence.
not to mention a firm commitment to babbling useless bollocks.
Our beliefs should not be whatever feels comforting but what is most likely to be true.
Our beliefs should be strategic, same as what we say.
As angry as Morris is about how Kuhn treated him personally, he is much more outraged at the widespread influence of Kuhn’s ideas. He must delve into philosophy to elucidate the refutation of Kuhn’s sophistry. For if, as Kuhn suggests, we all live in worlds of our own manufacture, worlds bent to conform to our beliefs rather than our beliefs being adjusted to conform to the world, then what becomes of truth? All of us living in this post-truth political culture must face that question.
Otherwise our heads will fall off.
Accounts of human gullibility are generally retrospective. We laugh at tulip mania, and shake our heads at the Salem witch trials. But both Becker and Morris are after more dangerous game, delusions that are still in effect. One exposes the intellectual rot in the foundations of physics and the other decries the anti-rationalism sprouting from Kuhn. For Kuhn’s legacy lives on, not in philosophy (where he is widely derided for his excesses) but in other parts of academia and in popular culture.
But we also laugh at Kripke and Putnam and Lewis and Maudlin.
Becker exposes how Bohr and company succeeded, in some cases by smash-mouth academic politics, including the shameful treatment of Bohm and the denigration of Einstein. But Kuhn wielded no such power. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions succeeded through its own allure. What is the attraction of Kuhn’s account of science? It has its roots far back in time, with the biggest self-deluder of all, Immanuel Kant.
Kant thought Newton was right and explained how our minds must work in order to be able to know Newton was right. But Newton wasn't right. There are no synthetic a priori judgments. Logic can't get us to truth. Verification of a provisional or rough and ready sort is the best we can hope for.
The hand of Kant lies behind both Bohr and Kuhn. In his epic and epically incomprehensible masterpiece The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant pulled off the grandest intellectual hocus-pocus in scholarly history. Kant called it his Copernican revolution in philosophy. According to Copernicus, phenomena that had been attributed to the motion of the stars and other heavenly bodies—the daily cycle of the sun and stars, the erratic motions of the planets—were really the product of the motion of Earth itself. These apparent motions had their source not in the observed but in the observer. Similarly, Kant argued that what have been taken to be features of a mind-independent reality—the structure of space and time, the existence of cause and effect, the law of conservation of energy—are actually imposed upon our experience by the mind itself.
If this is the case, Philosophy wouldn't be a waste of time. But it isn't the case and so Philosophy is stupid shit.
We have no justification for thinking that reality is intrinsically spatiotemporal or causally structured.
But we are welcome to believe what we like.
But we are nonetheless eternally destined to experience the world in those terms because those are the intellectual and perceptive structures we must bring to our experience.
Only if Philosophy isn't a waste of time. But it is.
Kant’s argumentation for this Parmenidean thesis is famously obscure, and his writing forbiddingly impenetrable. But the moral he wanted to draw, which goes by the name of transcendental idealism, is easily summarized. I just did. And for whatever reason, this conclusion of Kant’s has been attracting people like a siren’s call ever since. Remarkably, many people just want Kant’s conclusion to be true.
If you teach philosophy why not want the subject not to be a waste of time?
Bohr grew up in an atmosphere of neo-Kantianism. And his most prized achievement, the doctrine of complementarity, is an insidious tweak on Kant. Kant had argued that in order to be comprehensible to us—in order to be anschaulich—the world of experience must be given in space and time and governed by deterministic laws of causation. Fundamental quantities must be conserved. Bohr adopted these as the essential properties of the classical world. The world of everyday experience, of lab experiments and their outcomes, must of necessity be classical, said Bohr.
It could stop being classical but then humanity would most likely perish.
The microphysical world, according to Bohr, is not visualizable, not classical. It does not, and could not, satisfy all of Kant’s requirements. But Bohr hit on his great revelation: although the microscopic world cannot be both pictured in space and time and regarded as governed by deterministic causal laws, it can be either pictured in space and time or treated by means of deterministic causal laws.
This is true of anything at all and nothing at all.
Furthermore, which of these two possibilities is realized is up to the observer. By setting up one sort of laboratory situation, the concepts of space and time can be applied to the microsystem, and by setting up an incompatible laboratory situation the concepts of causation and determinism, of energy and momentum, can be applied.
You don't need a laboratory to visualize quarks getting gay with each other or else obeying some mathematical formula.
The conversion of a classical both/and into a quantum either/or became Bohr’s great mania. He started to see this complementarity everywhere. In biology, being alive is complementary to having a detailed account of the structure of cells: “Thus the existence of life itself would have to be regarded in biology, both as regards the possibilities of observation and of definition, as no more subject to analysis than the existence of the quantum of action in atomic physics,” Bohr wrote. There was complementarity between the practical and mystical understanding of human life. Complementarity would solve the mind-body problem.
Dialethia can solve any problem. It is true I have a tiny todger. It is also true that I have a ginormous cock.
Bohr showed as much obsessive attachment to his brainchild as Kant had to his. When granted the Danish Order of the Elephant in 1947, he chose as the motto on his coat of arms Contraria Sunt Complementa (opposites are complementary). He even appealed to complementarity to account for the obscurity of his own writings. According to Rudolf Peierls, Bohr would often say, “truth and clarity are complementary.” This sentiment is the death of Enlightenment rationality. Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hume all strove for both clarity of expression and for truth.
Not Hume. Justice is utility not truth.
But according to Bohr, necessarily the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. Bohr triumphed through anti-rational aphorisms such as this. As the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann said, after conversations with Putnam, “Bohr brainwashed a generation of physicists.”
Sadly, Putnam's brain turned to shit. He thought QM disproved itself.
A vivid illustration of Kuhn’s kinship to Bohr in this respect can be drawn from Morris: “What I hated most about Kuhn’s lectures was the combination of obscurantism and dogmatism. On one hand, he was extremely dogmatic. On the other, it was never really clear about what.” It is no stretch to apply this precise description to Bohr, and not much of one to apply it to The Critique of Pure Reason as well.
To be fair, Kant and Hegel were actually pretty up-front about what they were doing. It's just that what they were doing was silly.
When the Copenhagen interpretation got imported to the pragmatic soil of the United States, Bohr’s incomprehensible nonsense was replaced by the more concise “shut up and calculate.” That is the philosophy that dominates physics to this day.
It is the philosophy that dominates Accountancy to this day. Physicists are welcome to come up with new Structural Causal models- like 'constructor theory'.
What of Kuhn? He was quite explicit about his relationship to Kant. Late in his life, Kuhn declared, “I am a Kantian with movable categories.”
But movable categories are arbitrary. There is no 'naturality'.
That is, he embraced Kant’s thesis that the mind imposes structure on the experienced world rather than discovering structure in it, but, contrary to Kant, the imposed structure can change. Such a change is a paradigm shift, the ultimately irrational replacement of one experienced reality with another incompatible one.
An arbitrary act is not necessarily irrational. But it isn't the only action which everybody would agree must necessarily have been chosen.
Caught in our own little thought-worlds, deprived of access to objective truth (because there is no objective truth), we can do no better than miscommunicate, misunderstand, and ultimately resort to raw institutional power to resolve our disputes.
Either that of do stuff which leads to the invention of cool new tech.
As appropriated and mangled by Bohr and Kuhn, Kant—despite his own embrace of science and reason—becomes the agent of the anti-Enlightenment, the post-truth Age of Spin and Branding we live in.
As opposed to the pre-truth age of Parmenides- right?
Both Becker and Morris, each in his own way, is fighting an uphill battle against these trends. Each wants to reestablish the authority of reason and evidence. But it is the most difficult of all tasks. How do you convince a whole culture that it is deluded? How do you shine light into conceptual blind spots? Each of these books, as different as they are in style, is an attempt to provoke an epiphany and a revolution.
Meanwhile, actual scientists are helping invent cool new tech. Still it is nice to think of elderly Philosophy professors receiving visions of the Divine Beatitude and storming Capitol Hill next time Sleepy Joe steals an election.
If works like these cannot succeed, then we ought to acknowledge the situation. We should shorten the dignified designation Homo sapiens to the pithier and more accurate Homo sap.
You calling me a homo? My ex-wife used to call me that because I sleep with my G.I Joe action figure. If that makes me a fag in your book, then, let me tell you, your book isn't the Good Book. In the Bible, Samson always clutched his GI Joe action figure very tightly when he took a nap. How many readers of the Boston Review are aware of this fact? If this blog post of mine can't succeed, then we ought to acknowledge the situation. We should shorten the dignified designation 'Boston Review' to the pithier and more accurate 'BoRe'.
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