Infinte Regress Timeline...

[Juma]

So is "nice" and "regrettable"

I agree. So what we think is partially an effect from what is out there. There is an aspect of math out there which is probably a purer form of it.

No. There are no objects out there. Objects are "markers" in our mind. They are tokens for model components. Objects is the base for all mathematics.

 

[ryan]

I agree. So what we think is partially an effect from what is out there. There is an aspect of math out there which is probably a purer form of it.

No. There are no objects out there. Objects are "markers" in our mind. They are tokens for model components. Objects is the base for all mathematics.

How do you know that there are no objects out there? This seems like a very audacious claim.

 

[untermensche]

There is a multitude of stuff out there.

It takes a mind to make any kind of separation of the stuff.

Well, I don't necessarily agree that we can separate what is out there from our minds. Because, the mind might be interacting with what is out there.

You're not separating the mind from the world.

You're separating the things in the world from the things invented by humans not in the world.

 

[ryan]

Well, I don't necessarily agree that we can separate what is out there from our minds. Because, the mind might be interacting with what is out there.

You're not separating the mind from the world.

You're separating the things in the world from the things invented by humans not in the world.

Okay, I am completely confused about what your argument is.

You don't want to tell me if you're a dualist, so I won't even ask you if you're a monist.


We need a definition of the mind that we can agree on. Can we agree that the mind is a "place" where our thoughts are?

If you agree with that definition then please answer one of these questions:

Do you believe that the mind is causally connected to the brain?

Do you believe that the mind is made up of elementary particles and the spaces in between?

 

[none]

I say the mind doesn't exist.

 

[untermensche]

You're not separating the mind from the world.

You're separating the things in the world from the things invented by humans not in the world.

You don't want to tell me if you're a dualist, so I won't even ask you if you're a monist.

I don't think the mind is something that has existence apart from a working brain.

A mind is the subjective experience of brain activity.

But not everything experienced in the mind corresponds to something in the world.

Dreams are not a reflection of the world. They are a distortion of the world.

Just as the number six is not a reflection of the world. It is a distortion, an abstraction, of the world.

The world does not make separations and end up with six. Only a mind does that.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Any declaration that the universe is or not eternal is a decree.

The success story of science is a lesson in itself that in matters of the universe, sitting at the feet of Mother Nature to listen is the only reasonable thing to do. You ask her, not tell her what she is.

Metaphysics be damned. What exists is only persuasively determined by sophisticated observation.

I'm listening to myself.

Are you saying I'm not part of nature!?
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Yes, 2 exists apart from the human mind.

Where is it?

The chimpanzee mind, the macaque mind, the lemur mind, other mammals' minds, some species of bird's minds...

I'm sure a bee could be trained to distinguish between one droplet of glucose and two.

Probably nobody tested that but bees can do more. Bees can apparently be trained to distinguish between different human faces. In at least certain species with individual marking on their faces, wasps are able to distinguish without training fellow wasps based on their faces.
EB

 

[ryan]

You don't want to tell me if you're a dualist, so I won't even ask you if you're a monist.

I don't think the mind is something that has existence apart from a working brain.

A mind is the subjective experience of brain activity.

But this still detaches the mind from the brain.

But not everything experienced in the mind corresponds to something in the world.

Dreams are not a reflection of the world. They are a distortion of the world.

Yes, just like the number 2. Something comes to us in a different form than the number 2. And when it interacts with the brain, we get the thought 2.

Just as the number six is not a reflection of the world. It is a distortion, an abstraction, of the world.

The world does not make separations and end up with six. Only a mind does that.

Something from the outside must have caused us to think of 6, right? So whatever that something is is partially what we know as 6.

 

[Bomb#20]

They can't be examined at all. All we can do is use instruments to make measurements. And all instruments have limitations.

They are simply close enough such that our instruments can't tell the difference.

You're doing armchair science: drawing scientific conclusions from philosophical considerations. And you're doing it the way contemporary philosophers nearly always do it: by applying intuitions derived from the most up-to-date state-of-the-art knowledge of how the world operates that 19th-century physics has to offer. What you're saying would be perfectly reasonable if this were a matter of classical mechanics. But this is quantum mechanics, where human intuition is a trap. In quantum mechanics, we can tell identical particles from distinguishable particles by a systematic difference in their behavior that has no classical analogue.

In classical mechanics, if you want to calculate the probability of an observation, you take into account all the ways it could happen, calculate the probability of each one, and add them up. If you do that in quantum mechanics you get wrong answers: you get predictions of probability that don't match the observed frequency when you do an experiment over and over. You have to use a more complicated procedure. You still take into account all the ways the observation could happen, but then you have to carefully sort the ways according to whether you could, even in principle, tell whether or not that's the way it happened. If it's possible in principle to tell whether it happened this way or that way, then you add the individual probabilities, just as common sense dictates, which is to say, just as in classical mechanics. But whenever there's no way to tell whether it happened this way or that way, then you have to instead calculate the "amplitude" of each way it could happen. (An "amplitude" is sort of like a square root of a probability, but it also has an angular component called a "phase".) You add up the amplitudes for all the ways the observation could happen (using vector addition, which means an amplitude at 1 degree phase can actually cancel out an equal amplitude at 181 degrees phase), and then after you add up all the amplitudes, you have to square the total since they were all square roots of probabilities. Needless to say, this complicated procedure does not give you the same answer as if you simply added up the individual probabilities.

That's the tedious part. Here's where it gets interesting. When two particles get close enough to each other, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle kicks in, you can't follow their individual trajectories with infinite precision, and when they come apart again they might or might not have traded places. Now, if there is any physical difference between the two particles, you don't need to have tracked their trajectories -- you could just examine the particles after the fact to tell which is which, and determine whether they got swapped. But if they're identical then there's no way even in principle to tell whether they traded places. So that means that when you calculate the total probability of a particle going into a detector, the basic rule of all quantum mechanics says you have to take into account all possible ways for it to get there, including the possibility that the two particles traded places -- and you have to do it by one of two different procedures depending on whether there is any way in principle to tell the particles apart. So we apply both procedures, and we get two different answers for the probability of the particle going into the detector. One of the predictions matches the detection frequency we see when we run the experiment over and over, and the other prediction is wrong.

If you do this with two helium-4 atoms, the assumption that they're identical gives you the right probability, and the assumption that there's some subtle difference we haven't yet learned how to measure gives you the wrong probability. That is why modern physicists believe the atoms are identical. It has nothing to do with our instruments' technical limitations.

 

[untermensche]

They can't be examined at all. All we can do is use instruments to make measurements. And all instruments have limitations.

They are simply close enough such that our instruments can't tell the difference.

You're doing armchair science: drawing scientific conclusions from philosophical considerations.

I'm not doing science.

And I'll accept your claim. I'll accept it that as far as we can tell subatomic particles fall into identical groupings.

It is interesting but it has no bearing on my argument.

Subatomic particles are not numbers.

One aspect of a number is identical entities, another is isolation from everything else. To imagine the number "six" is to imagine six identical entities and also to imagine they are separated from all other things in some way.

Even if after humans discover quantum theory and the idea of identical entities they have not discovered a way to isolate some number of these identical entities from everything else without something like a human mind, or animal mind.

 

[untermensche]

I don't think the mind is something that has existence apart from a working brain.

A mind is the subjective experience of brain activity.

But this still detaches the mind from the brain.

Not detached, just an internal aspect of the brain that can't be observed externally.

To have a mind is to experience brain activity. But the mind is tied to that activity. It can't be detached.

There is no dividing line except the line separating one mind from another.

Yes, just like the number 2. Something comes to us in a different form than the number 2. And when it interacts with the brain, we get the thought 2.

We can think that from our vantage point, but who knows how long it took humans to formalize numbers?

Not to recognize quantity, but to formalize the idea of quantity into numbers that can then interact with themselves.

This is such a useful concept that once invented it spreads quickly and remains.

But I separate the idea of recognition of quantity from the idea of creating a system that uses numbers.

 

[ryan]

But this still detaches the mind from the brain.

Not detached, just an internal aspect of the brain that can't be observed externally.

To have a mind is to experience brain activity. But the mind is tied to that activity. It can't be detached.

There is no dividing line except the line separating one mind from another.

Are you saying that the mind is in addition to brain activity, or are you saying that the mind is brain activity? Or are you saying something else?

Yes, just like the number 2. Something comes to us in a different form than the number 2. And when it interacts with the brain, we get the thought 2.

We can think that from our vantage point, but who knows how long it took humans to formalize numbers?

Not to recognize quantity, but to formalize the idea of quantity into numbers that can then interact with themselves.

This is such a useful concept that once invented it spreads quickly and remains.

But I separate the idea of recognition of quantity from the idea of creating a system that uses numbers.

Unless I am misunderstanding you or cannot make the connection, I don't think this is a good argument; albeit I am not making great points either.

Let me try something that I have been thinking about during this exchange. If nature doesn't inherently follow mathematical "language", then how is it that nature follows a mathematical description of, say, a rock falling in a vacuum?

A specific experiment of dropping a rock in a vacuum has never been done before along with every experiment ever. Yet we know that nature is going to follow a mathematical distance/time formula with very close accuracy and precision. This really does seem to mean that nature is regular and follows certain laws that are "marked" with mathematics.

 

[untermensche]

Let me try something that I have been thinking about during this exchange. If nature doesn't inherently follow mathematical "language", then how is it that nature follows a mathematical description of, say, a rock falling in a vacuum?

Nature doesn't follow a mathematical description. It moves according to it's "nature", not by calculating the results of formulas.

Humans ASSIGN a mathematical description to the universe. This is a reflection of the cleverness of humans and the plasticity of mathematics. Mathematics could be used to describe any moving system that had regularity. What was difficult for humans and it took a Newton, was the discovery of some regularities that could be reduced to mathematical formulas, and he had to invent calculus to do it.

Mathematics is something beyond the universe. Meaning, it doesn't exist until something like a human invents it. And it takes a lot more than the discovery of mathematics to reduce the universe to mathematical schemes.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I can't possibly let the post below pass without reacting forcefully to the fantastic claims you make there!

They can't be examined at all. All we can do is use instruments to make measurements. And all instruments have limitations.
They are simply close enough such that our instruments can't tell the difference.

You're doing armchair science: drawing scientific conclusions from philosophical considerations. And you're doing it the way contemporary philosophers nearly always do it: by applying intuitions derived from the most up-to-date state-of-the-art knowledge of how the world operates that 19th-century physics has to offer. What you're saying would be perfectly reasonable if this were a matter of classical mechanics. But this is quantum mechanics, where human intuition is a trap. In quantum mechanics, we can tell identical particles from distinguishable particles by a systematic difference in their behavior that has no classical analogue.

In classical mechanics, if you want to calculate the probability of an observation, you take into account all the ways it could happen, calculate the probability of each one, and add them up. If you do that in quantum mechanics you get wrong answers: you get predictions of probability that don't match the observed frequency when you do an experiment over and over. You have to use a more complicated procedure. You still take into account all the ways the observation could happen, but then you have to carefully sort the ways according to whether you could, even in principle, tell whether or not that's the way it happened. If it's possible in principle to tell whether it happened this way or that way, then you add the individual probabilities, just as common sense dictates, which is to say, just as in classical mechanics. But whenever there's no way to tell whether it happened this way or that way, then you have to instead calculate the "amplitude" of each way it could happen. (An "amplitude" is sort of like a square root of a probability, but it also has an angular component called a "phase".) You add up the amplitudes for all the ways the observation could happen (using vector addition, which means an amplitude at 1 degree phase can actually cancel out an equal amplitude at 181 degrees phase), and then after you add up all the amplitudes, you have to square the total since they were all square roots of probabilities. Needless to say, this complicated procedure does not give you the same answer as if you simply added up the individual probabilities.

That's the tedious part. Here's where it gets interesting. When two particles get close enough to each other, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle kicks in, you can't follow their individual trajectories with infinite precision, and when they come apart again they might or might not have traded places. Now, if there is any physical difference between the two particles, you don't need to have tracked their trajectories -- you could just examine the particles after the fact to tell which is which, and determine whether they got swapped. But if they're identical then there's no way even in principle to tell whether they traded places. So that means that when you calculate the total probability of a particle going into a detector, the basic rule of all quantum mechanics says you have to take into account all possible ways for it to get there, including the possibility that the two particles traded places -- and you have to do it by one of two different procedures depending on whether there is any way in principle to tell the particles apart. So we apply both procedures, and we get two different answers for the probability of the particle going into the detector. One of the predictions matches the detection frequency we see when we run the experiment over and over, and the other prediction is wrong.

If you do this with two helium-4 atoms, the assumption that they're identical gives you the right probability, and the assumption that there's some subtle difference we haven't yet learned how to measure gives you the wrong probability. That is why modern physicists believe the atoms are identical. It has nothing to do with our instruments' technical limitations.

My reaction is that your post is articulate, well informed, detailed and to the point! Excellent! Well done Sir!

I just wish that over in the Philosophy Forum, self-styled former scientists, hardcore physicists and would-be champions of science, who apparently have nothing better to do than roam that part of cyberspace, could achieve the same quality in their very many, and unfortunately often irrelevant, posts (although traffic is slack these days, have you noticed?).

You set an example to all of them!
Congratulation!
EB

 

[fromderinside]

Been away for a while

What is the emergent construct?

Physical time.

Can it be physically justified?

Its existence would be entirely logical but would be nothing more than time as science think of it and use it so I'm not sure what "physically justified" would imply beyond that.

Failing that Maybe you should defend emergence logically and analytically.

I guess it's typically a physicist's problem. I'm not a physicist. Call on your acquaintances there.
EB

Events consequent to events emergent? What goes in produces what comes out so you're not saying anything by saying time is emergent.

The logic of consequences are determined by antecedent logic.

What you claim is a failure in your logic as I just pointed out.

 

[ryan]

Let me try something that I have been thinking about during this exchange. If nature doesn't inherently follow mathematical "language", then how is it that nature follows a mathematical description of, say, a rock falling in a vacuum?

Nature doesn't follow a mathematical description. It moves according to it's "nature", not by calculating the results of formulas.

Humans ASSIGN a mathematical description to the universe. This is a reflection of the cleverness of humans and the plasticity of mathematics. Mathematics could be used to describe any moving system that had regularity. What was difficult for humans and it took a Newton, was the discovery of some regularities that could be reduced to mathematical formulas, and he had to invent calculus to do it.

Mathematics is something beyond the universe. Meaning, it doesn't exist until something like a human invents it. And it takes a lot more than the discovery of mathematics to reduce the universe to mathematical schemes.

I should be theorizing that mathematical descriptions are fundamental to the behavior of the universe and not saying it positively. They may or may not be, but so far it's looking pretty promising.

Anyways, this is why I don't believe that you can be certain that the universe does not adhere to mathematical descriptions.

 

[untermensche]

I should be theorizing that mathematical descriptions are fundamental to the behavior of the universe and not saying it positively. They may or may not be, but so far it's looking pretty promising.

This position is anthropocentric.

Humans invent mathematics. Humans work for centuries to construct mathematical models that have a correlation to the movements of the natural world.

It is humans that have desperately tried to make mathematics fit the world, and when it didn't new mathematics needed to be invented.

The concept of infinity was invented, calculus was invented.

The world didn't give humans mathematics. The most the world could give is a notion of quantity, but real quantities, not abstract quantities. All the rest comes from the minds of humans.

Anyways, this is why I don't believe that you can be certain that the universe does not adhere to mathematical descriptions.

Do you think a leaf is performing incredible feats of mathematics as it falls from a tree?

Humans do mathematics. The world doesn't need to.

 

[ryan]

This position is anthropocentric.

Humans invent mathematics. Humans work for centuries to construct mathematical models that have a correlation to the movements of the natural world.

How do you know that our models are not at least partly right? How do you know that this isn't the way nature is?

I will understand if you theorize that the models are not true aspects of reality, but I can't agree if you say that you are positive.

It is humans that have desperately tried to make mathematics fit the world, and when it didn't new mathematics needed to be invented.

The concept of infinity was invented, calculus was invented.

The world didn't give humans mathematics. The most the world could give is a notion of quantity, but real quantities, not abstract quantities. All the rest comes from the minds of humans.

Anyways, this is why I don't believe that you can be certain that the universe does not adhere to mathematical descriptions.

Do you think a leaf is performing incredible feats of mathematics as it falls from a tree?

Humans do mathematics. The world doesn't need to.

I have never said that the nature does mathematics except if you include humans. I said that nature follows or adheres to math at least locally. And I will even say that it could be theorized that nature adheres to math in general.

A leaf is a function of its surroundings. A leaf even computes information about its surroundings.

 

[untermensche]

How do you know that our models are not at least partly right? How do you know that this isn't the way nature is?

In physics many of the models are just equations, but in organic chemistry many times the models are lines and letters and symbols for charge.

I can make organic chemistry predictions using models like this. Models that don't employ mathematics.

But I know that real molecules are not lines and letters. None-the-less I can make some predictions using just lines and letters written on paper.

So does nature work by mathematics, or does it work by lines and letters?

A leaf even computes information about its surroundings.

Not by employing mathematics.