Commonsense versus physics

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Quoting jkg20

It sounds a little bit contradictory to say that physics does not aim at the literal truth, but perhaps I'm being unimaginative. Anyway, is it really the case that modern physics undermines commonsense?

A way of looking at it is that commonsense supports an objective notion of realism. We naturally believe that we exist in a world of "medium-sized dry goods", to use the metaphysical phrase. The world is composed of material, mind-independent, objects like cats, chairs, mountains, stars.

But physics itself is a disguised idealist, or internalist, project as it accepts that minds only model realities. So there is a world "out there", but we only gain knowledge of it via the rather particular thing of a pragmatic modelling relation.

This epistemology puts us somewhere in-between the two extremes being suggested - either that physics sees things as they really and truly objectively are, or that instead physics simply spins some essentially arbitrary human fairy tale.

This in itself ought to be obvious, not a surprise.

So what then becomes interesting is the particular distortions that may arise due to this being so. What is physics getting righter than "commonsense" and its object-centric notions of reality, and what might it be getting wronger to achieve that?

One of the big issues would be the way that physics made its quick gains by leaving the observer out of its models. The conscious self was made a mystery because physics became a model of an observer-free universe. It became a story of deterministic matter - parts in motion following laws.

As I say, that was a pragmatically realistic way to go. It defied commonsense - the kind of commonsense that used to believe in a nature that was animistic and divine - in a way that seems deeply right. The universe does appear to be objectively composed of particles and forces. But then, with quantum mechanics in particular, the observer turned out to matter.

Much progress had been made in squeezing the mind out of the physical picture. But in the end, we still need a theory large enough to account for the presence of mind - or some physically general notion of observers and points of view - along with the objectively robust looking observables.

So the situation really is that commonsense just takes a baseline biological view - the way the world would look to a species that just has to move about, mate, find food, get by. It is a pretty physics-free view. We just need an intuitive sense of how heavy objects behave in contrast to light ones, and how inanimate objects react compared to live ones. We need to make useful distinctions in heuristic fashion. End of.

But physics took on the task of separating out the distinctions in a robust dichotomous fashion - along the lines suggested by metaphysical thought.

A first such rational distinction was between animate and inanimate. It kind of seemed obvious that lions and boulders were different in some deep way. Eventually that became the dramatic difference of mind vs matter. And physics reduced everything it could towards the material pole of being ... as us humans could then supply all the mindfulness, or understanding and purpose, needed to animate the states of matter.

So physics clarifies things in the fashion we find most useful. And it is a trade-off. We make part of our reality - the mindful part - more mysterious, or more contingent and free, to the degree that we make the other - the material part - subject to fixed and explicit laws, or objective notions of existence.

Thus commonsense was a kind of self~world division - the one that evolved as a neuropsychological level view of reality. And physics is a systematic development of that which worked by making a very strong division between the self and the world.

And key here is not to get hung up on the idea that physics has thus left out the "mystery of consciousness" - the soul, the spirit, the ineffability of qualia, etc.

There is psychological science, after all. There is information as well as matter, complexity as well as simplicity, to consider.

So where physics does make strong contact with the "mindful" aspect of nature is its fundamental mathematical patterns - the symmetries and symmetry breakings that have turned out to be the deep ontic structure of reality.

We discover the world of mathematical "objects" through rational exploration. And for physics, they are real, not subjective. So physics is more balanced than its arch-materialism might first suggest.

It is still targeting an observerless or objective view of reality. But this does include the world of Platonic form as much as the world of material things. There is a reduction going in both directions. Or rather, a dichotomisation - a separating out - that places us ever more explicitly poised between two polar extremes of conception.

So commonsense is the rather tame and biologically adaptive view of reality. It is the simplest way to for a smart primate to make ecological sense of its perceptual environment. We just have to be able to tell boulders from lions in terms of the way these kinds of things might behave. We just have to be able to make our way in a reality imagined in terms of a clutter of medium-sized dry goods.

And then physics divides this view as sharply as it possibly can. We get a pretty much complete separation in terms of material actions and formal organisation. We conceive of reality in terms of these complementary categories - material/efficient causes opposed to formal/final causes. We generalise the matter~mind divide so that it becomes a division between the naked materiality of quantum action and the pure form of mathematical structure.

Now which is the "real" view of reality - the rather humble evolved view of commonsense neuropsychological mechanism, or the rather exalted view of mathematical physics which sees everything in terms of structured excitations?

Well, both would be that in-between thing of being simply the pragmatic view - the modelling relation that produces the greater thing of a "self" and "world" in productive interaction. But the commonsense view would be the rather embedded biological view - what you really need back in the ordinary world of boulders and lions. And the physics view is the sweeping view that may deliver some extraordinary new benefits - of great use to humans with an interest in controlling their worlds - but which might also be criticised if it tips over into the unpragmatic.

In the end, physics is only a human endeavour. And so it becomes an issue if it pretends to be an actually objective and detached exercise.

What I am saying is that physics has to include the realisation that it exists as part of a modelling process. It has to strike a balance that neither pretends to be a completely human-less and objective thing, and alternatively, a completely human-centric and subjective thing.

Again, the usual epistemic quandry is whether physics is realist or idealist, a fact of the world or an artifact of the mind? But it is this third thing, this in-between thing, of being an example of a pragmatic modelling relation. And that is how its truth claims - especially versus those of commonsense phenomenology - need to be judged.

Quoting apokrisis

Again, the usual epistemic quandry is whether physics is realist or idealist, a fact of the world or an artifact of the mind? But it is this third thing, this in-between thing, of being an example of a pragmatic modelling relation. And that is how its truth claims - especially versus those of commonsense phenomenology - need to be judged.

That was an awesome post.

It quite resonates with a few pages that I was reading, earlier today, from Michel Bitbol's book De L'intérieur du monde (From within the world). This was the section titled L’autonomie du schème par rapport au langage (The autonomy of the scheme with respect to language) in the first chapter titled La relation cognitive, en l’absence d’« extériorité » (The cognitive relation in the absence of "exteriority"). Bitbol is of course a neo-pragmatist who also owes much to Pierce. In this section, he also credits Dewey, James, Piaget, Giulio Preti (who I didn't know), Wittgenstein, Hintikka and Pickering.

apokrisis:We generalise the matter~mind divide so that it becomes a division between the naked materiality of quantum action and the pure form of mathematical structure.

This is an equivocation of "mind".

It is also equivocation to mention "the world of Platonic form", and then use "reality" to primarily refer to existence.

The "deep ontic structure of reality" and existence includes Pure Data (General Form) consisting of idea (transcendental or universal) asymmetries, and Empirical Data (Particular Form) consisting of object (physical and/or mental) asymmetries.

These asymmetries may be encoded by a conscious agent through mental representation as a set of variables having values, hence; meaning. So, the "deep ontic structure of reality" and existence also includes Semantic Data (Form) consisting of mental representations (such as Quantum Mechanics).

Reply to Pierre-Normand :up:

Reply to Galuchat So your pure data vs empirical data distinction is less equivocal here?

You would have to explain.

tim wood:Science is description. The idea is to make really good descriptions. As mathematics, it all works pretty well. As language, well, language comes with its own set of problems. For example, what, exactly, do you suppose the author meant by "common sense"? Working through that renders the essay moot.

In the article I linked to it seems pretty clear that the author is talking about that part of commonsense that views the world as populated with colourful, shaped and solid things, and physics is supposed to undermine that (at least that seems to be the gist - the argument is attributed to Bertrand Russell).

As to taking physics etc as offering pragmatic models, isn't that just exactly to adopt the instrumentalist view that the article's author recommends?

Reply to jkg20 The article argues for a hard binary choice. Which isn't really pragmatism.

In fact, what Russell’s argument actually shows is that we face a choice: either we can be realists about modern physics, and ditch commonsense or we can regard the deliverances of modern physics merely instrumentally.

So yes, in some sense instrumentalism has to be the position of last resort. Given that any construction of reality might be faulty, we have to accept we are trapped within our own cognitive states of belief. The noumenal, or thing-in-itself, lies forever beyond out phenomenal grasp.

But then, pragmatically, we can also discover that our phenomenology contains invariances. We can arrive at concepts that don't seem budgable - as Kant also recognised with his synthetic a priori. Both empiricism and rationalism do seem to lead to general invariances of experience when inquiry is taken to its reasonable limits. Both experimental facts and mathematical facts emerge as basic looking.

So now we must contrast commonsense realism with the kind of realism we arrive at following exhaustive rational/empirical inquiry. Does one paint a more real picture of reality than the other - even given both are pragmatic exercises (one largely conducted by biological evolution, the other largely by human cultural advance)?

It seems pretty clear - looking back at commonsense from the larger science-informed perspective - that when it sees the world as a clutter of coloured objects, it must be the less real view. Colour is a mental property ... somehow explained by electromagnetic radiation being a universal material state and brains doing some kind of information processing to extract a useful signal from the world.

So as I argued, the mental does become increasingly mysterious to us as we depart commonsense and describe reality in terms of its mathematically structured observables. We seem to be seeing through to the brute material world - at the expense of manufacturing a matching amount of uncertainty about whatever it is this thing called mind could be.

On that score, what we gain on the one hand in terms of our pragmatic realism, we seem to lose on the other. If we have to wind up calling colour experience an epiphenomenal illusion, then our realism - in regard to our own subjective reality, which we epistemically agree is all we have got at the end of the day - hasn't been done justice.

However, psychological science - and the sciences of information or semiotics generally - can be turned on precisely that problem. We can treat the modelling relation itself as a universal reality to be accounted for by a model or theory.

And modern physics itself has moved on to start to take that step. So the idea of fermions and bosons - as the new names for bits of matter - is dissolving as physics shifts to a holistic and information theoretic point of view on "reality".

Commonsense can't really move on like this. You can't unsee colours even if you learn colours "aren't real".

And that is what makes physics, or rational inquiry in general, a step up in terms of pragmatism. It separates out the two necessary parts of the whole business - the theories and the measurements, the concepts and the impressions.

Commonsense is a biologically hardwired view. Rational inquiry is an open-endedly provisional view. So commonsense has hit its limit of inquiry - for us, as a species at this point in time. But rational inquiry can keep going, perfecting its view in terms of theories and measurements. And it can also show that it is increasingly approaching a limit as it does so.

The mathematical options for accounting for the structure of reality keep becoming less. The empirical evidence that might shake our beliefs keeps becoming ever more well explored. Every century, we get exponentially closer to the limit of the knowable.

So yes, we can ditch commonsense for something better. But also, physics is itself just a pragmatic construction - a modelling relation. So physics ain't completely different in principle. Just very different in regard to it being the view we are actually free to construct and not merely the view we had to inherit as a consequence of our being evolved and ecologically embodied observers of reality.

Reply to apokrisis Thanks apokrisis for the detailed reply. I have a couple of points/questions:
1:

Colour is a mental property ... somehow explained by electromagnetic radiation being a universal material state and brains

Isn't that precisely the kind of view that the author of the article is saying involves a contradiction?
2:

So the idea of fermions and bosons..is dissolving

Is it? The last time I looked at a physics text book (admittedly only at undergraduate level) fermions and bosons were very much still in the picture. Do you have a reference to research that is trying to do away with them?

Quoting jkg20

Isn't that precisely the kind of view that the author of the article is saying involves a contradiction?

It would be a contradiction if both are treated as direct realist claims - the reality is either that the world has to be coloured entities, or that it is really just is only "electromagnetic radiation".

But if both of these are simply understood to be pragmatic models - ie: indirect realism - then why can't we have many models of the same reality?

So physicists (and neuropsychologists even more so) will argue that the scientific model is more realistic than our "commonsense" biological experience. But it is these guys who would be making the point that perception only models reality - commonsense wouldn't say that. And these guys who - if they respect pragmatism as the basis of science - would say their scientific models of reality are still at the end of the day only models.

Once the indirectness of experience is recognised, that is what sets it up for constant improvement. We start finding ways to step outside our own experiential limitations with an "objective" approach to modelling reality.

Quoting jkg20

Is it? The last time I looked at a physics text book (admittedly only at undergraduate level) fermions and bosons were very much still in the picture. Do you have a reference to research that is trying to do away with them?

Again, if it is all just reality modelling, then older cruder models can live alongside the newer, more exiciting ones, without being a big deal. It is standard practice in science to use Newtonian models and forget about the relativistic or quantum corrections when they would be "contradictions" that don't make a practical difference.

So what I mean is that an example of a big shift in the mental picture would be the move from thinking of reality as being composed of substantial particles - of the fermionic or bosonic type - to instead classes of excitations of fields which exhibit either fermionic or bosonic behaviour.

Condensed matter physics tells us that this is the "reality" now. Collectively, as in superconductors, fermions can combine so as to become condensates with bosonic character. To put it crudely, rather than a bunch of individual fermionic particles, you have instead a bosonic fluid.

And back at the Big Bang, when there was only a hot relativistic soup of particles/excitations, a world ruled by a vanilla GUT force, the fermion/boson distinction would be moot - a chiral symmetry yet to be broken. The half-spin that characterises a fermion would not be seeable if all fermions were still effectively moving at light speed.

At the Big Bang temperature, bosons become fermions, and fermions become bosons, freely. There is no effective distinction, only a latent one.

And in current theory, the dissolving keeps on going. The original Dirac picture of a fermion has given way to Weyl and Majorana fermions - two different ways of conjuring up the same effective excitatory mode of behaviour.

As we drill down to the bleeding edge of science, it explodes into thousands of models of the underlying reality. Enough for every researcher to build a career.

So your cited article concludes...

Despite what some French philosophers might say, it is a rule of reason as basic as they come that contradictions cannot be true, so the story being fed us by those who want to interpret modern physics realistically, is contaminated not only by muddle-headedness, but more importantly by falsehood.

...but my reply is that first, science generally accepts it just pragmatically models reality. But second, neuropsychology tells us that is what brains only do as well - indirect realism is the case.

Then third, "commonsense experientialism" is epistemically inferior because it lacks the kind of open-ended evolvability of the scientific method. All we can ever do is look and see a colour as a colour. We are trapped subjectively in our evolutionary biology. But scientific modelling - a method targeting "objectivity" - can escape those confines to give a more direct model of reality. It is more direct to the degree it is less "subjective". It is a game we can set up and control.

Your article claims....

Consequently “out there in the real world are just fermions and bosons” means at least “out there in the perceptible world are just fermions and bosons”. However, according to the second phrase I highlighted, the perceptible world is supposed to be a mind-dependent construction brought into being by the effects of light on sentient beings. So, on the one hand fermions and bosons must exist independently of the perceptible world, in order to participate in causing that world’s coming into existence, yet on the other hand they are supposed also to be things that exist in that perceptible world, and so cannot be independent of it.

...but note that physics actually turns the perceptual part of all this into the business of reading numbers off dials. What we experience is not the "qualia" of consciousness - colours and features - but symbols that stand for mathematical or rational concepts.

So science is saying, "in here" I register the click of a geiger counter or a needle pointing to some number representing a velocity. And science can accept that in the end, that is all there is. This is the default instrumental position represented by the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. All we end up being able to say is that we seem to be able record sets of measurements when we pose questions of reality in certain prescribed ways.

So your article is targeted at physicists who say that physics sees reality more clearly. And that sounds like a claim that neuropsychology shows human mentality to be indirect modelling, while physics has direct access to the underlying reality. And that can't be true, for the reasons the article outlines.

But physics could also be starting from a position of far greater epistemic humility - accepting it really is only modelling, and that in the end, even its observations are just experience reduced to dial readings - and then using that sound epistemic base to launch itself into the boldest kind of objectivising project.

That wouldn't be believing a contradiction. It would be dealing with a contradiction already implicit in "commonsense" realism by placing it squarely on the table and wrapping a rational method around it.

OK, so it sounds like apokrisis is agreeing with the article to the extent that the article is targetted only at those physicists that take physics other than instrumentally. As it happens, when I was doing my doctorat in chemistry, I was well acquainted with a few physicists working on things like string theory and the so-called Standard Model, and as apokrisis indicates, they regard the kind of issues being discussed here about "reality" as not really their domain - they leave that to metaphysicians - they just get on with developing their mathematical models and (to a more limited extent) conducting their experiments. If they had any metaphysical commitments about commonsense reality, they seemed to be largely idealists (but that could just have been the beer talking). I think it's the "folk" physicists who try to popularize the subject on TV and in books that tend to give the misleading idea that physicists presume that what they are doing is furnishing us with the literal truth. As for where that leaves commonsense - or that part of it that deals with perceptible qualities - as the article suggests, if you take physics instrumentally, you can keep thinking that commonsense allows us to glimpse what is real, but the epithet "reality" is not a halo - something's being real does not make it any better, purer or wiser than something's being ('merely') theoretical.

Reply to ProcastinationTomorrow

but the epithet "reality" is not a halo

Isn't it? I would have thought physicists wouldn't be too happy to be told that when they talk about electrons etc that they are not talking about real things. It's not like they are writing novels is it?

[I]Common sense[/i], if it means non-mathematical wisdom, is at best confined to Earth and at worst to a community - patterns that are local.

Physics, mathematical as it is, strives for the universal and extends its reach to stars and even the universe itself.

Physics subsumes common sense. We can always explain common sense with physics but the reverse isn't always true.

Quoting TheMadFool

Common sense, if it means non-mathematical wisdom, is at best confined to Earth and at worst to a community - patterns that are local

No. Common sense is the life-blood of physics, without which no physics would be possible.

Quoting charleton

No. Common sense is the life-blood of physics, without which no physics would be possible.

Not really. Common sense would have you believe a feather should fall slower than an iron ball but physics shows that that's untrue.

That said common sense is an essential part of living successfully.

Reply to TheMadFool Common sense is right about the feather and the iron ball, at least insofar as dropping them from the top of the tower of Pisa is concerned. Of course, if you could create a vacuum for them to fall in, common sense would be asphyxiated.

Physics subsumes common sense

- the original article I linked to actually argues (or rather points to other people's arguments) that physics undermines common sense, and then goes on to say that common sense rules, so physics has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Einstein's relativity theories rule out common sense. It's not just physics that goes against common sense, but virtually every science. In genetics, we know that there is a greater variance in the DNA of two randomly selected black people as opposed to a comparison of their DNA with a randomly selected white person. In economics, we know that a country can be less efficient at producing every single good and service compared to another country, but can still gain in trading with that more efficient nation. In neuroscience, we know the brain is modular and there is no unified "I" running the show. Science has come up with all sorts of counter-intuitive insights that a person using common sense would fail to see.

Wouldn't common sense vary over time as to what the common man of a particular era might know? Common sense previously was that the world was flat, but not now.