I have long believed Wittgenstein was stupid & useless. Sadly, being even stupider and more useless myself, I know there must be some reason- known to smart, useful, people- why I am wrong.
Timothy Andersen isn't stupid or useless. He is the principal research scientist at Georgia Tech. He writes in Aeon of 'Quantum Wittgenstein'- and claims that 'Metaphysical debates in quantum physics don’t get at ‘truth’ – they’re nothing but a form of ritual, activity and culture'. Since 'metaphysics' is what is beyond physics, it is reasonable to say that it isn't aiming at the sort of truths that physicists seek for. I suppose, they engage in 'metaphysics' when they speculate about why things are as they are- or appear to be- more particularly at the Quantum level.Over the last year the most important experiments in quantum information theory include first observation of top-quark entanglement at the LHC (predicted in 2021), the creation of 6,100-qubit neutral-atom arrays, and, in July 2025, an MIT-led, refined double-slit experiment confirming that measuring a photon's path destroys its wave-like interference pattern. These breakthroughs, which also include topological structures in photons, directly validate fundamental quantum principles & predictions of quantum information theory. They aren't 'in the eye of the beholder' because different beholders see the same outcome of the experiment however often, or wherever, it is performed.Recent experiments in quantum information theory have shown that our most basic assumptions about reality, such as when something can be considered to have been observed and to have definite physical properties, are in the eye of the beholder.
Attempts to address these paradoxes date back to the dawn of quantum mechanics, when Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr debated how to interpret the baffling phenomena they’d uncovered.
The interpretation which could lead to a 'crucial experiment' confirming or rejecting the theory that supported it would decide between different theories. What is impressive about this period is that theories which would only be experimentally verifiable many decades later gained wide acceptance. Rather than bafflement, this was a period of intense curiosity & far-sighted theoretical work.
Yet it was only when I dived into the parallel milieu of Cambridge Philosophy, at the time of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Russell’s ascendancy,
sadly Frank Ramsey died young and thus that shite ossified into an utterly useless 'Analytical' philosophy. Meanwhile mathematical logic, in the hands of Godel, Tarski, Church, Turing, Gentzen etc. made significant progress.
that I began to feel like my qualms about mathematics and physics might be addressed.
Stupidity can address anything. Just look at my blog.
Contemporaries of Einstein and Bohr, Wittgenstein and Russell didn’t engage with the quantum revolution directly.
Russell wrote a good introduction to Relativity. After that he became preoccupied with political and educational projects.
Yet it’s in the work of these philosophers that I began to see answers to some of our most fundamental questions about reality – answers that stem from recognising that we are not only asking the wrong questions; we are asking nonsensical ones.
It doesn't matter if you ask a nonsensical question- e.g. 'why do dogs say miaow'- what matters is what you do after asking that question. Suppose, you find a dog which says woof woof & start to study it to find out why it exhibits this unusual behaviour. You end up discovering a way to repair damaged vocal cords. You get the Nobel prize for Medicine. Mummy is very proud of you. She confesses that she had tricked you by giving you a kitten instead of the puppy dog you had asked for. You beat the shit out of her and are arrested and go to jail. Anyway, that's why I didn't get the Nobel Prize for medicine. I don't want to harm my Mummy or get raped in jail. It isn't the case that I am too stupid and useless to achieve anything in a STEM subject.
The great debates about quantum physics kicked off in the 1920s. Bohr and his protégé, Werner Heisenberg, were trying to figure out how to talk about the weird behaviour of quantum particles: how they appeared to ‘know’ when they were being observed, for example, and to act as a particle when observed and a wave when not observed.
Their motivation was to explain observed behaviour- specifically the intensities of spectral lines and the complex spectra of elements beyond hydrogen. They sought a new, mathematically consistent framework that abandoned the visualization of electron orbits in favor of, in Heisenberg's case, only relying on observable quantities. Einstein's had previously introduced the concept of probabilistic transition rates between energy levels. But this left a problem of inconsistencies. Essentially, by moving away from a mechanistic to a statistical model, members of the relevant population became indiscernibly identical. But can this be true of reality (as opposed to our model of it)? The scandal here is that of the Einstein-Rosen bridge where an observation in one place has an effect outside its own light-cone. By Von Neumann 'no hidden variables' this is 'entanglement' which seems magical. As a matter of fact there was a flaw in Von Neumann's theorem. In 1949, the Wu-Shakanov experiment showed quantum entanglement was possible. We don't know Einstein's reaction but it is likely he thought there probably was some hidden variable lurking in the background.
How to describe this phenomenon flummoxed theorists.
Their job was to give a mathematical model which was internally consistent, fitted the evidence, & made predictions. Description can be left to poets or journalists.
Heisenberg (and later, Erwin Schrödinger) came up with equations that described particles in terms of a wavefunction, where simple numbers became entities of infinite dimensions that lived in exotic mathematical spaces. The act of observation now had a complicated description that took into account what the experimenter was doing.
That's how statistics work. We believe no dog can say miaow. We find one dog which says miaow. We now know that all dogs have that potentiality. Then Mummy says she tricked us, our puppy is actually a kitten. We try to beat the shit out of her but she slaps the black off us. Sad.
But all this mathematics didn’t get at what actually happened when the properties of a particle were being measured. At that moment, all the complex infinite-dimensional mathematics suddenly compressed into individual numbers, as if the particles had been there all along.
Only in the sense that if an individual dog says miaow and it actually is a dog, then we know something about all dogs which we were previously unaware of.
Observation after observation of photons scattering on screens revealed that no simple explanation was possible.
That's true of any extensive program of observation. I once met an American astrophysicist who had two colleagues both named Vivek Iyer. He was under the impression that people with this name were smart. Five minutes into our first conversation, he realised he was wrong. There are plenty of very stupid Vivek Iyers. Indeed, his colleagues would have been as stupid as me if they hadn't studied Math & Physics rather than Drinking & Stephen Segal videos.
This description was deeply unsatisfying to Einstein, because the wavefunction appeared to prevent particles from having definite attributes before they were observed.
Attributes are things attributed by some x to some y. They don't inhere in y. However, if every observation of every y leads to the same attribution we may speak of it as inhering in the object. But this is merely a manner of speaking.
Einstein wanted the wavefunction gone, replaced with some more sensible interpretation
hidden variables
where things retained definite properties and locations.
Karma is a 'hidden variable'. That's why you can only attain Samadhi & be liberated from the cycle of rebirth if you know your own hidden karma. That's why there are so many stories of the various past lives of the Buddha.
Despite decades of haggling over the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, however, the wavefunction couldn’t be dispensed with.
because is useful. You can make a bit of money gassing on about karma but not from a 'karmic computer'. By contrast, quantum computers can make their inventors a shit-load of money.
The view that emerged from this haggling came to be known as ‘the Copenhagen interpretation’ – coined by Heisenberg in 1955, and predicated on the presence of a fundamental split between the observer and the system being observed.
The alternative is 'pre-established harmony'. Our karma is the hidden variable which makes us think there is a physical universe. This is 'Maya' or illusion. There is only God or Nirvana or something of that sort.
One is welcome to have faith in a particular Soteriology while continuing to work as an Actuary or an Astro-physicist or Atomic Scientist.
Meanwhile, the polymath John von Neumann came up with an idealised mathematical description of what happened when you measured a particle’s wavefunction: it collapsed upon interacting with the observer.
That was in 1932. Nowadays physicists speak of 'decoherence'.
Where the rest of the wave went, or whether it was ever real in the first place, was anyone’s guess.
The idea behind 'decoherence' is simple enough. Pee in the ocean & the ocean doesn't turn to urine. Take a leak in the punchbowl & you never hear the end of it.
By the late 20th century, dozens of other interpretations had appeared under exotic names: the many-worlds theory, superdeterminism, consistent histories, the modal interpretation, superselection, Bohmian mechanics, Lindblad equations. I even invented my own: dynamic histories. While a few, like mine, proposed new theories that could come into conflict with quantum mechanics, most of them don’t. They are metaphysical, not physical.
Which is why dynamic histories- unlike Gell Mann & Hartle's consistent histories- is falsifiable. Maybe some smart guy working on a crucial experiment to do this will stumble on something else which is very useful.
The big question lurking behind all this is: what does the wavefunction mean?
That which ends when decoherence occurs? It's like peeing in the ocean. The pee quickly stops being detectable as pee. Turds are another story. They bob up about you & fellow swimmers give you a wide berth.
Does it represent something real or not? Most interpretations are ‘realist’ in the sense that they assume the wavefunction is a real entity and then go on to explain what it represents – but a few say it doesn’t exist at all, such as Quantum Bayesianism or QBism, as it is known. QBism owes its existence to the work of Wittgenstein’s friend and contemporary Frank Ramsey, who developed an anti-realist interpretation of probability.
Ramsey & de Finetti made contributions to Econ & Finance where arbitrage 'makes' markets. Chichilnisky has a result showing how much can be achieved with just limited arbitrage. Sadly, her intervention in QMT is silly. The advantage of QBism is it is a 'local' theory. Some say it lacks explanatory power but it seems to be able to duplicate results found by other methods. However, this has nothing to do with Witless. Keynes, maybe. Had Ramsey lived Keynesianism needn't have been silly. I personally think he'd have taken a pragmatist turn thus killing off Anal-tickle philosophy in the womb. I'm kidding. Philosophy is only done by aborted foetuses.
QBism holds that the wavefunction is purely an encoding of human uncertainty, representing a spectrum of probabilities that is updated when we make an observation. So the quantum wavefunction is not about objective reality at all, but about our future observations.
Fair point. 'Knightian Uncertainty' certainly arises in the human world- many future states of the world, maybe all of them- can't be envisioned. What is the Universe too evolves in a manner blind to its own trajectory?
QBism therefore refutes the Platonic idealism of the wavefunction and declares it to be a mere mathematical quantification of our beliefs.
Sadly, nothing can refute Idealism. Super-smart Platonist or Theists or Buddhists we will always have with us.
Plenty of physicists have grown tired of this debate and its seemingly endless and unsatisfying arguments between realists and anti-realists. They want us to ‘Shut up and calculate!’ in the words of the physicist David Mermin: to stop trying to interpret quantum mechanics at all and get back to doing it.
Really smart people should be allowed to have hobbies or let off steam. Philosophy, for them, is a useful type of 'displacement activity'. What would be a shame is if a super-smart guy gives up Physics to become a fucking Philosopher of Physics. The reason I am the most celebrated Socioproctologist in the world is because I devote myself to farting, not the philosophy of flatulence.
Philosophers, on the other hand, tend to dismiss this latter group as being philosophically ignorant.
Socrates said he was the bestest philosopher because he alone knew he was ignorant. Strangely, I am the best farter because I know it wasn't me who farted. It was an invisible cat.
There’s a suspicion that, deep down, such physicists simply possess a metaphysics that they don’t want to admit, because they don’t want to come down on the side of an interpretation that has no scientific backing.
Why isn't there a Nobel prize for farting? Is it because the Swedes are racist bastards? No. It is because, deep down, they possess an anti-fart metaphysics but are afraid of saying so because of Political Correctness.
Yet those who follow Mermin’s injunction have a friend in one of the great philosophical minds of the 20th century –
there were none though at one time the subject attracted some bright people. But their brains turned to shit teaching nonsense to imbeciles.
one who provides not only support for their position, but philosophical reasoning for why it is the only correct one.
That's 'categoricity' which the Stone-von Neumann Theorem asserts is true in QM. However, it seems unlikely in Quantum Field theory.
My point is philosophical reasoning which shows why there is only one correct theory for why dogs say miaow is shit because dogs don't say miaow.
Wittgenstein was a reluctant philosopher.
A reluctant academic- maybe. But he beat the shit out of a kid he was teaching and so had to go to Cambridge where his students tended to be bigger & stronger than him.
Born in 1889 to a wealthy and powerful family in Vienna, Austria, philosophy seemed to be more of a compulsion for him than a love – a tendency to get stuck on certain questions, unable to move on without resolving them.
He resolved shit. Von Neumann's game theory is useful. Witless's language games are useless.
Perhaps that’s why Wittgenstein felt the need to ‘solve’ philosophy once and for all,
by telling stupid, obvious, lies.
attacking its roots and, by doing so, tearing down all philosophical debates, including the broader quarrel between realists and anti-realists in all domains.
He & Sraffa rotted away in Cambridge. Russell & Keynes had done them no favours. Both should have fucked off to America & opened a fast food franchise.
Wittgenstein was at once fantastically arrogant before his fellows and deeply humble before the questions he confronted.
He molested them. Sadly, in those days, there was no 'Me Too' movement for metaphysical questions.
His task was no less than to discover what lay at the roots of logic.
Mathematics. Norbert Weiner, in 1914, when he was 20 years old, provided the first definition of an ordered pair in terms of set theory, demonstrating that relations can be reduced to set-theoretic concepts. Russell didn't like this. He remained attached to 'descriptive functions'. But Weiner's approach was more useful. Along with the work of Church & Turing, it laid the basis for digital computers.
Starting out in the nascent field of aeronautical engineering
which was useful
in 1908, he quickly gravitated towards the philosophy of mathematics.
which was useless. However, if a smart mathematician- like Brouwer or Weyl or Godel- has a 'philosophical' motivation, the result can be very useful.
His German mentor Gottlob Frege
Frege thought the man was a fool and 'wiped the floor with him'. Russell had already taken a shine to him. But Russell was moving away from mathematical logic towards irenic, left wing, politics. Witless, to his credit, returned to Austria to fight in the War. Russell was jailed for trying to convince the Americans not to come to the aid of the Brits & French.
sent him to the University of Cambridge to work with Russell.
No. Witless was already Russell's pupil when he met Frege.
Of Wittgenstein, Russell wrote that: ‘An unknown German appeared … obstinate and perverse, but I think not stupid.’ Within a year, Wittgenstein had proved himself to Russell, who said: ‘I shall certainly encourage him. Perhaps he will do great things … I love him and feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve.’
There was a Messianic element to Witless which echoed some kink in Russell's own personality.
Russell’s motivations, however, were at odds with Wittgenstein’s. The grandson of an earl, Russell was raised in a noble household by his strict and devout grandmother. Finding no comfort in her religion, Russell sought it in mathematics, only to learn that the roots of the ancient discipline were rotten.
It had no roots. It wasn't a fucking shrub. Still, it must be said, Cambridge had fallen behind the Continent. It produced good calculators- Wranglers- not deep thinkers like Cantor, Poincare, Hilbert etc.
He was horrified to discover that the geometer Euclid’s axioms, such as ‘two parallel lines do not intersect’, were just assumptions. Likewise, the number system is based on self-evident truths. If any were wrong, the whole thing might come tumbling down. Russell therefore dedicated his life to resolving all uncertainty in mathematics.
He was rediscovering Liebniz previously neglected, or regarded as an enemy, at Cambridge. Logicism is like 'Mathesis Universalis'. But should it be set-theoretic? If so, you can't have 'unrestricted comprehension'- i.e. intensions have to have well defined extensions. Otherwise you just get cascading intensional fallacies- or Witless type ipse dixit Messianism. Russel's ramified type theory was useless, but dependent type theories are very useful.
Russell appropriated Wittgenstein’s philosophy to shore up basic logic,
This was 'logical atomism'. Sadly, there are no atomic propositions. Also, when it comes to anything epistemic, Liebniz's law of identity is violated. X is not identical to x. That's why it is meaningful to say 'I am Borges because I know I am not Borges. He has all the same predicates as I do, but there is something stagey or histrionic about the way he possesses them'
but Wittgenstein had other ideas. He wanted to understand what made facts true or false – not because he desired comfort from certainty, but because, well, it bothered him.
If a fact can be broken up into sub-facts each of which is 'atomic' & known, once & for all, to be true or false, then there is a mechanical decision procedure for determining its truth or falsity. Sadly, 'impredicativity' may arise such that the conjunction of two or more subfacts changes their truth value.
Unlike Russell, Wittgenstein was devoted to the truth, no matter how ugly.
No. He told lies all the time. You had to if you were a homosexual in England at that time.
Wittgenstein’s life was no less unusual than his thoughts. He worked with Russell intensely from 1911-13, retreating to an isolated hut in rural Norway for months at a time in order to work out his ideas.
They were shit.
In 1913, he returned to Austria, only to be swept up in the chaos of the First World War.
He volunteered. He was a patriot. Sadly, he didn't get shot. Dulce et decorum est.
It was a time of massive upheaval at all levels of European society. Empires were in decline, and the old monarchical order was ebbing away.
Multi-ethnic Empires disappeared from Europe.
Women’s suffrage was in full swing, with the vote in Britain and the United States arriving after the war.
Witless opposed this. He truly was shit.
Science and mathematics likewise were throwing off the shackles of 19th-century classicism.
i.e. deterministic 'absolute' truth. The Brits were a bit backward in this respect. Einstein says he was more influenced by Doestoevsky than Gauss & Lobachewski. 'Karamazov' was published in 1880. Ivan says maybe the moral universe is 'non-Euclidean' but our minds are. This creates a scandal for theodicy.
Einstein’s theory of relativity, both special and general, banished Isaac Newton’s concept of universal time and space,
Mach's criticism of Newton was published in 1883.
while Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle destroyed the certainty of measurement some years later.
Einstein got there first. Measurements are relative to the frame of reference. It is less surprising that measurement disturbs stuff which is very small. The twin paradox is more puzzling than Schrodinger's cat.
Russell, meanwhile – a product of the Victorian age – continued to look for certainty where there was none.
Stuff he believed was certainly wrong.
It fell to young Wittgenstein, picking up the zeitgeist, to seek to resolve the realism debate once and for all, even if that meant destroying it.
He couldn't do shit. He was too stupid. Threatening Popper with a poker was all he was capable of.
The war years were not easy on Wittgenstein. Poor health exempted him from conscription, but he volunteered for service and eventually to go to the Front. His reasons were complex, but from his letters it seems he was seeking something that he felt he could not find in intellectual pursuits. Writing from the Eastern Front, he expressed the hope that ‘the nearness of death’ would bring about a spiritual transformation in him. Wracked by loneliness and spiritual longing, he contemplated suicide, only to be saved by faith. While before the war he’d rivalled Russell in his distaste for religion, a chance discovery of Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief (1902) in a bookshop caused him to become a devout Christian.
He wasn't a practicing Christian. One may say he was attracted by Spiritualism & Mysticism.
His faith would influence his later work, and vice versa. Captured by the Italians in 1918, he spent months in a prisoner-of-war camp.
So did a lot of people who went on to do something useful with their lives.
It was during the war that he formed much of his ideas for his first great work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) – a book that applied modern logic to metaphysics via language to relate facts about reality to reality itself. He called it the theory of meaning.
It featured the following obviously false propositions
1) Logical Atomism: Wittgenstein posited that reality consists of a totality of facts,The Picture Theory : A proposition is a "logical picture" of a state of affairs.
Truth-Functionality (Molecular Propositions): Complex or "molecular" propositions are truth-functions of elementary (atomic) propositions.
Truth-Tables and Operations: Wittgenstein introduced what are now known as truth-tables to represent how truth-functional operators (like negation, conjunction, disjunction) work. He viewed these operations as formal procedures for constructing new propositions from existing ones.
Logical vs. Senseless Propositions: Tautologies and contradictions (the propositions of logic) do not represent states of affairs and are deemed "senseless" (sinnlos)—they do not have sense because they don't picture specific facts, but they are not non-sensical (unsinnig).
Operations vs. Functions: Wittgenstein distinguished his "operations" from Russell’s and Whitehead’s "propositional functions," arguing that an operation, unlike a function, can take its own result as a base.
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein developed a philosophy that was deeply embedded in the world
in the world, only one thing matters- verification, that too if there is some utility to securing it.
– not in idealised realms of thought like the rational idealist Russell, but in how we talk about the world.
We talk about the world in a bigoted & stupid way, unless we gain some benefit by verifying what it is like.
Rather than coming up with a theory about how words and facts represent reality,
They don't. They may convey information about it. They may not. Witless conveyed shit.
which is crucial to both realists and anti-realists,
No. What is crucial is whether there is an external world independent of the mind.
he determined that representation is irrelevant.
Which is not the Darwinian view. Representation has survival value. It is likely that something like a law of increasing functional information operates at all levels of reality.
No one needs to say what facts and objects represent.
Yes they do. Suppose the police enter my home to question me as to why there is a big bag of stolen money on my kitchen table and I pick up my cat and say 'This is a cat. It is a fact that cats say miaow. Mummy said they say woof woof but she was lying', then what I am seeking to convey is that I am too mentally retarded to commit a crime. However, it is my lawyer who will make this point as my representative.
They are simply there, embedded in our picture of reality. To say what they represent is actually nonsense, absurd.
A car salesman says 'this car represents value for money'. A watch salesman says 'this Rolex represents success'. Witless was representing himself as saying something important. He wasn't. He had shit for brains.
As in the visual realm, a second picture is not necessary to explain what a first picture means; if it were otherwise, we’d fall prey to infinite recursion.
Regress. If a recursion is known to only yield itself as output, there is not 'third man' type problem.
What Wittgenstein understood is that you can’t use words to explain representation,
sure you can. Teachers of Econ or Physics use words to explain models with a mathematical representation.
because words are representations themselves.
Miaow represents the sound cats make- but only for English speakers. In Japan the word is nyan. If this is true even for onomatopoeic words, it follows that words aren't representations. Take the word 'pulchritude'. It means beauty but sounds ugly.
It would be like trying to travel outside the Universe
if there is an after-life, we can't avoid doing so sooner rather than later
to show somebody what the Universe is – a feat that’s both impossible and unnecessary.
Yet it is what many believe Jesus & Mohammad & the Buddha actually did.
A sentence shows what it means by its own sense.
What does the sentence above mean? I think it means that a sentence creates a 'picture' in our mind. But different people will picture different things.
Thus, if I say ‘Jenny has an apple,’ I do not have to explain how the words ‘Jenny’ and ‘apple’ represent physical objects in the world; nor do I have to explain what ‘has’ means.
You may have to do so if a guy with a gun tell you to.
We mutually understand that, if Jenny is right there and she has an orange in her hand, the proposition is false.
We don't understand that at all. Jenny has an orange in her hand. She may also have an apple phone in her pocket.
It shows its sense. There is nothing more to say about it,
there may be. Why does Jenny have an apple? Don't you know she is allergic to apples? Who gave her the apple? Was it you? I'll kick your fucking head in.
as long as we both understand the rules of the language.
There are no rules. We understand Yoda when he says 'Apple Jenny has.'
Thus, Wittgenstein, even in his early work, suggests that the realist versus anti-realist debate is meaningless
It isn't. What if the Universe is a hologram?
because both sides are trying to say things that are only showable.
I tell the pharmacist I need an ointment for my haemorrhoids. I don't have to show him my anus.
From this early Wittgensteinian perspective, a mathematical equation – in fact, any equation, including the ones governing quantum mechanics – is like a photograph of reality.
We now have a photograph of quantum entanglement. It looks like this-
They are not alike at all.
Like photographs, we do not need anyone to interpret its meaning as realist or anti-realist.
During the War, the Army had specialists to interpret photographs gained from aerial recon.
We do not need a Copenhagen or a many-worlds to indicate the sense of the equation to us, because it is already as apparent as it is ever going to be.
This dude is hella bright. We aren't. We do absolutely need teechur to interpret this stuff for us.
To ask what the wavefunction represents is like asking what Michelangelo’s statue of David or Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night represents: any explanation beyond the mere facts is insufficient and subjective.
But can be very valuable if it is done by a smart guy who knows his stuff.
You might find this explanation unsatisfactory. Yet Wittgenstein was serious in that he believed we could not talk about things that are not in the world.
Because fairies and vampires and zombies actually exist- right?
While we might talk about quantum mechanics in terms of particles, measurements and calculations, any philosophical attributes that ascribe significance to what we can observe (such as ‘real’ or ‘unreal’) are nonsense.
Einstein, in questioning the wave function by setting up various 'gedanken' (e.g. Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen), was actually doing something quite useful. It motivated design for a 'crucial experiment'.
We must be silent on ascribing additional meaning to the wavefunction.
Coz Wiltless sez so? He should shut the fuck up and fuck the fuck off.
Wittgenstein’s exploration about what we can and cannot talk about in philosophy, however, would evolve over the next several decades, and lead to a rejection of even those philosophical concepts such as the picture theory upon which he built the Tractatus.
Did he become less crazy? No. He just became even more stupid & useless. He tried to put the boot into Godel but failed miserably. Turing was more tolerant of him. Consider the 'falling bridges' debate. Wittgenstein argued that contradictions (inconsistencies) in a mathematical system or calculus are not necessarily fatal. He claimed that if a contradiction arises, one can simply stop using that part of the system, or that the contradiction doesn't inherently render the entire system useless.
One could say that the 'consistent' part is retained as a special case in a new, more general theory. But he old theory is gone. It has been wholly replaced.
Turing, holding a realist view of mathematics, argued that a contradiction in a system used for engineering would lead to practical disasters, such as a bridge falling down.
Turing was being silly. He should simply have said, an inconsistent theory is wholly replaced- e.g. naive set theory by ZFC.
Witless said if the bridge falls down it is because of a miscalculation not a fault in the mathematics. Sadly, my own 'Iyer Mathematics' which forbids 6 being placed next to 9 because it could provoke dirty thoughts, would cause any engineer who relied on it to build truly shitty bridges.
Having written the Tractatus, Wittgenstein believed that he had ‘solved’ philosophy.
He had shat on it.
In his strange, haughty humility, he left the discipline in the 1920s, and worked various jobs as a gardener, teacher and architect.
but not a rent boy. Sad.
This interregnum came to an end, however, when Wittgenstein was exposed to
Brouwer's introduction of the "pendulum number" during his 1928 Vienna lecture? Choice sequences turned out to be very useful. Turing used them in his definition of Computable Real Numbers which permit a unique representation for real numbers.
logical empiricism. This was a movement arising from a group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle.
Who liked the Tractatus. Witless was moving in the opposite direction. There is a story that he read out Tagore (whom Brouwer had rated) to the Vienna Circle- much to their discomfiture.
They emphasised empirical knowledge and the theory of ‘logical positivism’, meaning that we can only ascribe meaning to what can be measured or observed. A strict logical positivist is unconcerned with explanations or interpretations; rather, they believe that understanding the world is built upon measurement and its prediction.
Pragmatism or Instrumentalism was better. Ultimately, we don't care if a guy discovers something useful while after having taken LSD and while seeking to communicate with a sexy unicorn on the 34th dimension. By the Seventies, only stupid people went in for 'Scientific Method'.
The Tractatus was a foundational pillar of the Vienna Circle, and this galvanised Wittgenstein to continue his work. He decided to return to Cambridge in 1929, but moved away from the philosophy of mathematics and logic,
because he was too stupid to keep up with the leaders in the field. Ramsey died in 1930. Cambridge turned to shit.
and towards ordinary language and psychology.
i.e. asking why, though everybody agrees that cats are dogs, nevertheless, pussy says 'Moo' not bow wow.
Wittgenstein eventually collected his ideas in a book called Philosophical Investigations– probably one of the strangest books of philosophy ever published (and, perhaps for this reason, only released after Wittgenstein’s death from cancer in 1951). Rather than being organised as a sequence of topics or propositions, the Investigations is a stream-of-consciousness series of points, arguments and statements. That was in fact in keeping with its own philosophy, which is that philosophy itself can discover nothing. It is simply a form of therapy that can quickly become a disease of the intellect. Its only job is to remind us of that which we already know.
In other words, Witless- like Freud- was a Viennese quack who claimed to cure a disease he himself had invented to keep himself in business.
From this later Wittgensteinian position, all the varying quantum interpretations would be the result of diseased minds, and ultimately self-destructive. That’s because all philosophy is actually a debate over mere grammar. If we take seriously these metaphysical debates, he argues, we are not only wrong, but ill.
That is the author's view. Is it far fetched? Probably not. Still, the fact remains, different interpretations of QM have led to very useful research.
In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein rejects the theory of meaning entirely while making one of his most powerful contributions to it. All language, he says, gains its definitions from how it is used in specific cases.
I suppose, natural languages are meant. But 'intensions, captured by a definition, may not correspond to 'extensions' as they are used in real life. Thus, ironically, most things people say are ironic aren't ironic at all. Paradoxically, this is also true of a lot of paradoxes.
All language is a game like chess or poker – we learn the rules by playing,
We can learn the rules of both without playing. We were asked, as an exercise, in our first Game Theory lecture to prove noughts & crosses is determinate. I've played noughts & crosses all my life. I didn't know it was determinate. I thought it was just bad luck that I always lost. The Iranian student sitting next to me didn't know what noughts & crosses were. I showed it to him. He proved it was determinate very quickly because he was smart. I didn't because I was and am as stupid as shit.
not theorising or defining. So the very notion of a universal definition is an artifice, a bit of subterfuge. One cannot talk about what words really mean; one can only use them. This applies as much to mathematics as it does to ordinary words.
No. For any specific purpose you can always have 'buck stopped' definitions & 'bright line' judgements. It's just that they may lack 'naturality'.
Wittgenstein wants to show us that we need to stop trying to interpret language.
He wasn't married. You have to be very careful in interpreting wifey's language. If she says 'how very thoughtful!' if you buy her the new Spiderman comic for her birthday she means 'fuck my life!'
Take the example of a road sign pointing to a village. We see the road sign and instantly understand its meaning.
If we can read the language in which the village is named- sure.
While there is an element of symbolic decoding involved, there is no deeper interpretive step, he says.
Unless we want there to be. 'Watson! What does that sign show us?' 'It shows us there is a village named x which is y miles from here, Holmes.' 'That isn't all it shows us, Watson. Look at the sign more closely. It is brand new. All the other signs we have passed are at least a decade old. What can we deduce from this?' 'That the village is newly built, Holmes?' 'Nice try, Watson, but no cigar. The village is named in the Domesday book. But the road sign is very recent. What does that tell you?' 'That you are a homosexual?' 'Correct, but irrelevant. What this new sign shows is that Moriarty is working for the Kaiser.' 'I don't understand Holmes. What possible connection could there be between a new road sign to an ancient English village & the Kaiser's plan to invade this green and pleasant land?' 'Elementary, my dear Watson. Every Englishman knows the nursery rhyme which features the name of this village and places it 2y miles from Banbury Cross. But a squad of German infiltrators would not know this. That is why Moriarty murdered the previous head of the Highway board and put in his minion to add all these new signs which will be useful to the Kaiser.' 'But, Holmes, why do you insist it is the Kaiser Moriarty is working for? Might it not be for the French?' 'The answer my dear Watson is that my elder brother Mycroft told me in confidence that we now have an alliance with the French & the Russians. Thus it could only be the Kaiser that Moriarty is working for. This also means that our beloved King's life is in danger. Willie always hated Uncle Teddy. To foil this dastardly plot, we must immediately have butt sex'. 'That's what you said when we passed the last road sign.' 'That time I was merely horny. Now it is a matter of saving the life of the King Emperor. Assume the position Watson.'
In other words, we do not need to figure out how the sign represents reality, either in the ideal world of Plato or some subjective concept of reality in our heads. The sign could contain almost any kind of symbols, colour coding or numbers, as long as the action that people take upon seeing it is the correct one. The sign ‘shows’ us where the village is, because that is how signs of that kind are used. That is its true meaning.
That is 'pragmatics', not 'semantics'.
The late Wittgenstein entirely rejects his own picture theory of reality. Pictures are nice and satisfying, but usage is what actually matters.
Usage can always be improved.
The wavefunction, on this reading, isn’t like a picture of reality at all. All that matters is that physicists now have the ability to do calculations, which lead to predictions that can be verified by measurements. The point is not the measurements themselves, however – as a logical positivist might claim – but how the physicists behave. Do they calculate in a way that leads to more and better physics?
Yes, if the economic 'return' to physics is rising. More money becomes available for it. Smarter people are attracted to it. There is a virtuous circle.
Language and mathematics are a means of controlling and modifying collective human action so that work gets done.
Money does that. STEM subjects took off in some places but not others because the 'returns' to them increased.
This is language as culture rather than language as picture.
Language & culture don't matter. Money matters. Military success matters.
And culture includes ritual. Like all ritualistic communities, physics contains its rules, interpretations, specialised vocabulary, a community of adherents who are admitted to the arcane arts, levels of indoctrination, and gatekeepers.
All cultures include people who fart. Thus Physics is a type of farting.
While some societies relate ritual to the appeasement of gods and spirits,
while others use them to raise a laugh.
in science they serve to therapeutically appease our philosophical needs.
farting enables physicists to appease their need to release gas. The same is true about their desire to write stupid shite for Aeon.
Competition between interpretations is not unlike competition between clan gods, trying to achieve cultural dominance.
Einstein & Bohr engaged in a competition to see who could fart longer & louder. Please by book on this topic 'Idiot's guide to Physics as Farting'.
Evolutionary cultural anthropology backs up this view, having demonstrated that language is deeply connected to ritual and religion.
& to farting. We distinguish between noisy farts & 'silent but deadly' ones. There is a well known Sanskrit saying which elaborates on this- "Utthamum dadhdadaath paadam, Madhyam paadam thuchuk chuk, Ghanisthah thud thudi paadam, Surr surri praan gatakam'
Likewise, the vocabulary, grammar and procedures of science are themselves ritualistic,
Nonsense! Rituals can only be changed by the Pope or other such authority.
with each subdiscipline having its own mores and norms. These are necessary because it is impossible for scientists to evaluate new research purely based on factual merits;it often takes years to validate a new theory or experimental result.
whereas, if the Bishop says the performance of the ritual is kosher, it is kosher.
The role of ritual also makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective.
If you get paid to do it, you go through the motions. Alternatively, one can compare it to obsessive compulsive disorder.
Humans have spent hundreds of thousands of years navigating a hostile planet by encoding information crucial for survival into ritual, which can then be transmitted across generations.
That was the 'functionalist' explanation of ritual. It was wrong.
When we invented the scientific method only a few hundred years ago,
the West did that because there were increasing returns to STEM thanks to oceanic commerce & colonization. The East didn't because productivity was stagnant.
we had to graft it onto that part of our nature in order to pass it down the generations,
No. You had to ensure the thing 'paid for itself'. One could call a lot of the science done in shithole countries 'ritualistic'- i.e. it is merely a case of pretending to do research while collecting your salary and sleeping peacefully at your desk.
hijacking an ancient and effective cultural mechanism for a new purpose.
The Freemasons have rituals. Science does not though there may be ceremonial occasions.
Hence, quantum interpretation is not really an investigation into reality, and it tells us nothing new about the world.
Because it is actually a ritualistic fart- right?
Rather, it is a grammatical investigation or, in anthropological terms, a cultural one.
Or a series of ritualistic farts.
It is a competition between differing philosophical therapies, satisfying different emotional-cultural needs.
Like the need to pass gas.
Crucially, it is in the activity of science, whether via experiment or calculation, that all its useful information it generates exists.
It is in the activity of releasing gas, whether via farts or burps, that the gas it generates exists.
Wittgenstein explains, for example, how the act of determining the length of an object
like the act of farting
is not a case for learning theories and definitions, but an activity:What ‘determining the length’ means is not learned by learning what length and determining are; the meaning of the word ‘length’ is learnt by learning, among other things, what it is to determine length.
We may need how to use a tape measure or a Laser distance meter. We don't learn what it is to determine length though we may take a course on different theories regarding what it means to learn something.
This description indicates that to learn what quantum physics means is to learn to calculate it – and vice versa.
This raises the question, does an AI which calculates thing in Quantum Physics know what Quantum Physics means? I suppose there were 'calculators' working on the Manhattan project during the Cold War who had no idea what they were working on.
Wittgenstein suggests that even mathematics is potentially a shared language and activity.
Unlike flatulence which has condemned me to a life of solitude. Sad.
He asks:what would this mean: ‘Even though everybody believed that twice two was five it would still be four’?
It would mean that there was a society where people were shit at Math. Suppose you went into a bar owned by a guy from that society and said 'I want to take advantage of your buy one get the second drink free' policy. Give me two beers. No. Scratch that. Double my order.' The guy gives you five beers but you just pay for two. You may not realize that you are, in some sense, cheating the bar-owner. Yet that is what is happening. Over time, for purely hedonic reasons, more and more people would adopt this tactic.
—For what would it be like for everybody to believe that?—Well, I could imagine, for instance, that people had a different calculus, or a technique which we should not call ‘calculating’. But would it be wrong?
Yes. There would be 'error accumulation'. The Society would become more and more allocatively inefficient. It would fall behind competing societies. It might end up being conquered or
He suggests that ‘odd’ would be a better word for it, but we would have no common frame of reference to call it wrong.
Utility. For Pragmaticism, Truth is Utility.
He goes on to suggest that mathematics is very much an activity, like a game, and we all know the same rules that form a system.
Maybe, like Russell he thought there could be no 'non-standard' analysis- i.e. one featuring infinitesmals.
Hence, we all come to the same conclusions and never argue about what is proved. Yet, some alien species could come up with different rules for their mathematical game that are no less valid because they are following their rules.
We don't have to bring in alien species. Western math displaced Indian & Chinese & Japanese math because it was better.
If Wittgenstein were alive today, he might have couched his arguments in the vocabulary of cultural anthropology.
He was merely stupid, rather than a drug addled nutter.
For this shared grammar and these language games, in his view, form part of much larger ritualistic mechanisms that connect human activity with human knowledge, as deeply as DNA connects to human biology. It is also a perfect example of how evolution works by using pre-existing mechanisms to generate new behaviours.
Did you know how 'Peer Review' in Academia came into being? Originally we lived in small bands of hunter gatherers. Everybody went foraging in a different direction but returned to share what they had gathered. They also shat together so as to keep tabs on what each member had eaten. If your shit contained extra berries or rabbit meat, you were cheating.
The conclusion from all of this is that interpretation and representation in language and mathematics are little different than the supernatural explanations of ancient religions.
Moreover, Academia is just a repurposing an evolved instinct relating to communal shitting and examining each others' faeces.
Trying to resolve the debate between Bohr and Einstein is
easy enough because Bohr shot down every objection of Einstein's and, later on, there was empirical verification.
like trying to answer the Zen kōan about whether the tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one can hear it.
That's Bishop Berkeley. It isn't a Zen koan. In reality, there is no forest, no sound, and no sentience that hears or sees.
One cannot say definitely yes or no, because all human language must connect to human activity.
Yet a lot of human language has to do with the activities of vampires & werewolves & ghosts & goblins.
And all human language and activity are ritual,
None are save those performed as part of a ceremony.
signifying meaning by their interconnectedness.
Which is why farting is physics.
To ask what the wavefunction means without specifying an activity – and experiment – to extract that meaning is, therefore, as sensible as asking about the sound of the falling tree.
It is perfectly sensible to ask about that sound. Would it have been heard from the forester's house? He says he was at home all last night. The tree must have been toppled between three A.M and four A.M because it crushed a type of badger which only emerges from its burrow at that time. If the forester says he heard the tree fell at around that time, then his alibi checks out. He couldn't have been in town murdering his wife.
It is nonsense.
In the opinion of a cretin.
As a scientist and mathematician, Wittgenstein
who was neither
has challenged my own tendency to seek out interpretations of phenomena that have no scientific value – and to see such explanations as nothing more than narratives.
Narratives of a potentially very useful type. But J.K Rowlings's narratives too are valuable.
He taught that all that philosophy can do is remind us of what is evidently true.
We need no such reminder. Also, if we happened to shit ourselves during Swahili class, we resent those who remind us about it fifty years later.
It’s evidently true that the wavefunction has a multiverse interpretation, but one must assume the multiverse first, since it cannot be measured. So the interpretation is a tautology, not a discovery.
It is a hypothesis. It may be unfalsifiable. That doesn't make it a tautology.
I have humbled myself to the fact that we can’t justify clinging to one interpretation of reality over another.
Sure we can- at least to ourselves. Convincing a shithead isn't worth the bother.
In place of my early enthusiastic Platonism, I have come to think of the world not as one filled with sharply defined truths, but rather as a place containing myriad possibilities –
including the possibility that sharply defined truths exist?
each of which, like the possibilities within the wavefunction itself, can be simultaneously true.
only in the sense that they may also be farts.
Likewise, mathematics and its surrounding language don’t represent reality so much as serve as a trusty tool for helping people to navigate the world. They are of human origin and for human purposes.
But humans may be of divine origin. Human purposes may be divine purposes. Alternatively, they may be some sort of higher dimensional fart.
To shut up and calculate, then, recognises that there are limits to our pathways for understanding.
There are very severe limits to my ability to calculate. Smart people tell me to shut up. This dude can calculate. Good for him.
Our only option as scientists is to look, predict and test. This might not be as glamorous an offering as the interpretations we can construct in our minds, but it is the royal road to real knowledge.
It wasn't the road Witless took. But then, he wasn't a real smart dude. Gentzen was. Fucking Nazi but a bona fide genius.
