Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
So this was interesting...
and then I searched for this...
Well, why not? Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
Reply to Hanover Me, too.
Edit:
Strictly, the experiment shows that we cannot know if event A caused event B, or B caused A. The meaning of "cause" breaks down here.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? According to a report in Physical Review Letters, a team of physicists from the University of Queensland and Grenoble’s Institut NÉEL have come up with lab evidence concerning the direction of causality that would have left Aristotle speechless. Dr Jacqui Romero from the ARC Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems explains that quantum physics offers a strange alternative to clear cut causes and effects: “The weirdness of quantum mechanics means that events can happen without a set order… This is called ‘indefinite causal order’ and it isn’t something that we can observe in our everyday life.” To observe this effect in the lab, the scientists devised a photonic quantum switch. “By measuring the polarisation of the photons at the output of the quantum switch, we were able to show the order of transformations on the shape of light was not set.” In other words, the transformation events were not taking place in a fixed order. Dr Fabio Costa sees much potential in the findings: “This is just a first proof of principle, but on a larger scale indefinite causal order can have real practical applications, like making computers more efficient or improving communication.”Link
and then I searched for this...
Quantum mechanics allows events to happen with no definite causal order: this can be verified by measuring a causal witness, in the same way that an entanglement witness verifies entanglement. Here, we realize a photonic quantum switch, where two operations Aˆ and Bˆ act in a quantum superposition of their two possible orders. The operations are on the transverse spatial mode of the photons; polarization coherently controls their order. Our implementation ensures that the operations cannot be distinguished by spatial or temporal position—further it allows qudit encoding in the target. We confirm our quantum switch has no definite causal order by constructing a causal witness and measuring its value to be 18 standard deviations beyond the definite-order bound.Link
Well, why not? Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
Reply to Hanover Me, too.
Edit:
Strictly, the experiment shows that we cannot know if event A caused event B, or B caused A. The meaning of "cause" breaks down here.
Comments (278)
But what if we link the quantum switch to Schrodinger's catbox? Then there is no truth to the suggestion that the death of the cat was caused by event A and not event B.
There's no need to give up causality. The paper isn't saying that the cause can happen after the event. It's instead saying that a photon can have an indefinite causal history. The experimenters send a photon through an interferometer where one path has event A followed by event B and the other path has event B followed by event A. The paths are recombined and measurements of the photon match the predictions of quantum mechanics rather than classical mechanics (where the photon travels only one of the paths).
Is the indefinite history only a product of thinking of a photon as a particle instead of a wave?
No. The experiment can also be considered at a macro scale using Schrodinger's cat as Banno suggests above. If QM holds true at a macro level (as most physicists expect) then the cat's history would similarly be indefinite.
It's really a matter of how one views counterfactual definiteness. If a measurement were taken after the first event on each path (whether event A or B) then a definite result (and thus history) would be obtained. It's similar to the double-slit experiment in that respect.
Wouldn't the cat be doing the equivalent of taking a measurement, creating a definite result? I never understood why the cat could be in a superposition, but the scientists conducting the experiments were not.
Yes.
Quoting Marchesk
They can be. It just depends on which joint system is being considered.
I would say it's actually classical physical explanations that break down rather than causality.
Events A and B are independent transformations which can be ordered differently. So, for example, on one arm of the interferometer the photon is rotated left then down, on the other arm the photon is rotated down then left.
Classically, it is expected that the measured result would be consistent with the photon having traveled along only one of the interferometer arms and thus there being a definite event ordering. But each result instead indicates a combination of both orderings as if the single photon traveled along both arms simultaneously.
This is analogous to the double-slit experiment where the detected photons don't build up behind the two slits as one would expect on classical assumptions. They instead build up an interference pattern as if each photon goes through both slits simultaneously.
This is still understood causally. It's just that both arms of the interferometer necessarily contribute to the result not just one arm as per a classical explanation.
I watched a documentary which explained that time runs at different speeds at different locations. Not a theory, proven fact.
Apparently matters effects time. A large body like a planet creates small but measurable differences in the rate at which time unfolds. So for instance time runs at a different rate at sea level than it does at the top of a mountain (farther from the center of the Earth). GPS satellites have to take this factor in to account or the data they produce would be way off.
On human scale the time rate difference is so small that it's not noticed. This is a good example of how phenomena can be seen inaccurately if one doesn't have sufficient perspective.
Right, the conceptions of time and space utilized by physicists are inadequate, such that they cannot distinguish the temporal order of such events. Physicist have no standard principles whereby they can get beyond the deficiencies of special relativity, which sees simultaneity as reference dependent. It appears like some physicists might take Einstein's relativity theories as the be all and end all to understanding the relationship between space and time.
That raises the problem of time asymmetry. Why is there a distinction between the past and future, in a way that there isn't for left and right? The most obvious difference seems to be that causation appears to only work in the past => future direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time
So, why doesn't retrocausation occur? Why doesn't the future determine the past just as much as the past seems to determine the future?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocausality
One difficulty that might arise if that happened is that we would get paradoxical loops such as those imagined in time-travel science fiction. So if causation behaved in a temporally symmetrical fashion, reality might take the form of a cosmic-scale superposition of possibility states. (Primordial chaos.)
Another consideration: It seems that the 'laws of physics' are almost all time-symmetrical. They work just as well in the future => past direction as in the past => future direction. So (perhaps) the asymmetry of time isn't inherent in the underlying physical 'laws'. That suggests that perhaps time asymmetry is the result of initial conditions.
So maybe (speculatively) the reason that our universe exists at all is that something, some local condition, forced all the causal chains nearby to propagate in the same temporal direction. The 'Big Bang' seems to fulfill that requirement. All causal chains in our universe seem to propagate away from it. Creating conditions favorable for a universe of to crystalize into actuality.
But conceivably (and speculatively) causation can still propagate in the pastward direction for very short intervals. So causal loops still occur on the microscale with superpositions of probability states. Maybe that's why quantum mechanics seems weird and why there's a distinction between physics on the microscale and the macroscale.
It's all just speculation, of course. (I'm a longtime science fiction reader.)
More speculation: Perhaps our universe is akin to a shockwave, propagating away from whatever caused it (the 'Big Bang'). Behind the shockwave lies the past, determined and frozen in amber. Ahead of the shockwave lies a space containing many superimposed possibilities. And perhaps the shockwave itelf is the present, 'now', and we are kind of surfing on a giant 'collapse of the wave function' as it expands into the future. Which would accord very nicely with our intuitions about time.
If there was any truth to any of this, it would seem to suggest an expanding-block model of time.
Do you mean "after the effect"?
Some events are causes. Causal events influence subsequent events. They are called "causal chains of events" because of that. We call the aforementioned influence - the "effect" - of the cause. We did not arrive at causality by virtue of inventing and/or imagining it. We arrived at causality by virtue of witnessing it happen... over and over and over again...
Which did I write?
Not interested. I don't even know what you meant.
Clearly we can be wrong when we attribute causality. We can also be right.
But with quantum mechanics, what is witnessed is violations of this simple classical model of causality "over and over and over again".
Why did the neutron decay? If its propensity to decay is steadfastly random, any moment being as good as another, then how could you assign a cause to that effect? It is a spontaneous event and so causeless in any specific triggering sense.
And the retrocausality implied by quantum eraser effects are just as big a challenge to classical locality. The decision the experimenter makes in the future becomes a constraint that affects the probabilities taking shape in the past. There is something spooking acting backwards in time - again, not as a triggering cause, but still as probabilistic constraint on what then is observed to happen.
Entanglement happens across time as well as space. And the OP-cited experiment is another example of QM challenging any simplistic cause~effect model of events "over and over and over again".
So sure, causes being followed by their effects is a model we might impose on reality quite successfully at a classical macroscale of observation. But with QM, we are still seeking to find some other way of understanding causality.
And we already know it must be the more fundamental model, classicality merely being the emergent description.
You might have some kind of superpower. I would check into. You could be investing successfully or winning the lottery before you use your money!
There's when you went wrong.
So far we know that the universe is deterministic, our known universe has a set axis of time. However, it seem to be based on the properties of probability. The larger the object or space, the more probable the consequences of causes becomes. The smaller you go, down to the quantum level, the less probable it gets. Now, by "large objects" I don't mean suns and galaxies, but even ourselves. You need to go down to extreme small scales before the quantum behaviour breaks down things.
But here lies a contradiction of sorts. If the universe is deterministic, how do we know that the quantum randomness aren't causes in a chain reaction of events? If you could predict every particle in the universe, that would mean you could predict all outcomes of all movements and states, but because you cannot predict quantum level events, since they are random, how then do we know that the consequences aren't affected by randomization on the quantum level?
If a large object in space, say, an astroid, speeds through space, it gets attracted and accelerated in different directions throughout it's journey, changing it's path slightly but so much that further down the line it's changed course by millions of light years. If random events on a quantum level change that asteroid's trajectory by a margin that is almost not measurable, it would still have changed the location billions of light years of travel later.
Now, I'm pulling hypotheses from educated guess work here since I'm not a theoretical physicist. Maybe the quantum level is random but cannot change the deterministic nature of the larger world since the only way for it to truly change the course of the asteroid is by expanding the randomness into observation, into levels of probability in which the randomness becomes so high in probable conclusions that it won't change the trajectory. Maybe the randomness and low probability of the quantum level through the process of going from 0% probable to 99,999999999999999999999999% (infinite decimals) probable, is part of how causality and entropy works and therefor the deterministic universe is still solid. If the randomness on the quantum level cannot effect movement of mass, it won't move particles of mass, but only charge their state.
So, as said, hypothetical guess-work here. I still don't know enough of things like Higgs fields and particles and there's also that little thing called unification theory that we haven't solved. However, while it's chaos on the quantum level it doesn't effect us on the larger scale. The general laws of the universe starts breaking down at a quantum level, but the laws prevents things to move backwards in time on any scale larger. I mean, we could also talk about the state of light, in which the speed of light makes only us experience light. Light in itself does not have a concept of time, since it's the speed of light, so at the start of it's journey it has already reached it's destination at the same in "it's own perspective". Because everything else is slower than the speed of light, we witness things going slower, but if you were speeding at the speed of light, you would be at the start and end of the destination at the same time, since time stops at that speed and would have been like that since the dawn of our universal laws.
Both at the quantum level and at the speed of light or at the maximum gravitational force exceeding lights speed, things break down and our laws of the universe cease to work in the way we perceive it. The big question is; if we had the means, could we make us perceive things outside of the perception we are slaves under now? Or are we forced to only understand as far as our perception goes? Even if we prove things like tachyons, would we fully understand them? Or would all the data get scrambled into a mess since we have no framework existing in our universe to even explain the basics of them?
If we live on a scale, at a slower speed than light and under normal gravitational conditions, the probability of events going against the laws of the universe are 99,9999% with infinite decimals. If there was a slim chance of a consequence causing a cause, that seem to never be, because infinitely unlikely that it will happen. It's that mind boggling thing in math where there is a chance of something, but a version of "infinite" makes it infinitely unlikely, even if it is likely.
But I'd rather point to a theoretical physicist on all of this, I can barely calculate basic math :sweat:
I've got a better idea, spend millions and then win the lottery.
What sort of a definition of causality did the folks who claim that cause follows effect use? Thanks.
One way I can make sense of this quantum weirdness is in terms of potential possibilites. The future has possibilities but they ''must be'' finite in number. So, in a way, the future does determin (''cause'') the past.
Unpredictability doesn't imply a violation of causality. Without knowledge or control of the underlying physical causes coin flips are also unpredictable.
The Schrodinger equation is deterministic and so, in principle, can predict when a particular neutron will decay. For a more practical experiment, the Schrodinger equation predicts that a beam of light sent through a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (with equal optical path lengths) will always arrive at the same detector, with certainty. Per Wikipedia:
Quoting Mach–Zehnder interferometer
As is usual in quantum experiments, the same result occurs when only one photon at a time is sent through the interferometer. Neither classical explanations nor randomness can account for that result. Both predict that a single photon should arrive at detector 1 or detector 2 with equal probability.
Right. So what I am arguing is that there are two models of causality here - the conventional atomistic/mechanical one, and a holistic constraints-based one. And there doesn't have to be a metaphysical-strength "violation" if the mechanical story is understood as the emergent limit of the underlying holistic constraints story.
In a nutshell, all events are the constraint on some space of probabilities. An "observation" is some set of constraints that restricts outcomes to a fairly definite and counterfactual result. So contextuality rules. And you can have relatively loosely constrained states - like entangled ones - or very tightly constrained ones, such as when the whole course of events is being closely "watched".
Atomistic causality presumes that everything is counterfactually definite from the get-go. Any uncertainty is epistemic. As with a coin flip, it is because you toss the coin without watching closely that you don't see the micro-deterministic story of how it rotates and eventually lands.
But a holistic causality says uncertainty or indeterminacy is the ontological ground zero. Then it is the degree to which a process is "watched" - contextually constrained by a decohering thermal environment - that places restrictions on that uncertainty. Effectively, in a cold and expanded spacetime, there is such a heavy weight of context that there is pretty much zero scope for quantum uncertainty. It all gets squished out of the system in practice and classical causal sequence rules.
So there is no violation of the classical picture from taking the holistic route. It simply says that the classical picture was never fundamental, only ever emergent.
Conceptually, that is a big shift though. It means that cause and effect are entangled in root fashion. When we come to talking about time as being a universal direction for change, a passage from past to future, we are talking about the emergent thermal view. The effective bulk condition. On the quantum microscale, past and future are "talking" to each other in a nonlocal fashion. Decisions an experimenter might make about which constraints to impose on the evolution of an event a million years in the future will then "act backwards" to restrict the possibilities as they looked to have taken shape a million years ago in the past.
Of course, respecting relativity, this retrocausal impact of constraints on probabilities can't be used to actually do any causal signalling. Time - as an emergent bulk property - does have a conventional causal structure in that sense. But it is a property that is emergent, not fundamental. That is the "violation" of conventional ontology.
Quoting Andrew M
It is only deterministic because some definite constraints have been put in place to limit some set of probabilities. The big problem for conventional causality is that the constraints can be imposed at some distant date in the far future, as with a quantum eraser scenario - while also, having to be within the lightcone of those "initial conditions". (So the lightcone structure is itself another highly generalised constraint condition on all "eventing" - causality is never some wild free-for-all.)
Another quantum result is the quantum zeno effect. Just like a watched pot never boils, continually checking to see if a particle has decayed is going to stop it from decaying. Observation becomes a constraint on its usual freedom.
This is another "weirdness" from the point of view of causality. But it illustrates my key point. Neutrons that are left alone exhibit one extreme of possibility - completely free and "uncaused" decay. And the same neutron, if constantly monitored, will exhibit the opposite kind of statistics. Now it can't decay because it is no longer free to be spontaneous. It is being held in place as it is by a context of observation.
So a mechanical view of causality presumes an ontology of separability. The OP experiment's demonstration of indefinite causal order shows that causal non-separability is a more fundamental physical condition. It is direct evidence for quantum holism. Spontaneity rules, but counterfactuality is what emerges, as an environment of constraints gets built up.
Quantum computing is bringing the issue into focus. Ordinary causality can be describe in terms of familiar logic circuits. There everything is strictly determined to follow a "normal" causal sequence. But quantum computing is now developing the kind of process matrix formalism which this latest experiment illustrates. If you relax the constraints, allow paths to be logically entangled, then you get the kind of causal indeterminism reported.
Causality is not a law of the universe in which we must adopt its priority and assume that it is not any better or any more than any human creation or imagination, which adds to and complements his opposing will to power..
The idea of an epistemological acquiescence or inheritance renders human knowledge a passive action. This is absolutely absurd with regard to philosophy. Knowledge could never be a passivity, for in terms of existence it relates to something absolutely beyond the passive and active. Knowledge must be in some form knowledge of existence, whose will is of an intention, something indesputably active. And so this activity is an illusory activity only a simulation of passivity, rendering what is only already before it? The activity of an epistemological intention is the reaction the counterpart of which would be termed passive, or capable of being apprehended. The whole of knowledge, relating to imposing upon experience and consequently our understanding of existence with a priori, postulates of sorts, these contain exploration and knowledge. Schools of thought are born out of this... Inseparable divisions the roots of which are excommunicated, in relation to one another.
The will to knowledge is the apprehension of passivity; a spiral the result of which a closed system has gained another dimensionality.
If your talking mechanics it's best to preserve the definition of cause for the sake of coherence. But, in the sphere of discontent apes such as myself the cause often comes after the event. Hence, inductive reasoning has a purpose. Knowing what an action in the present will result in the future is often the cause of the action.
An irony is that Boltzmann settled the argument in favour of atomism by establishing a statistical mechanics view of reality. His famous dictum was “If you can heat it, it has microstructure.”
The equipartition law says there is a direct link between macroscopic and microscopic physics because if you know the total thermal energy of a body - its temperature - you can calculate the number of microscopic degrees of freedom it must contain. Avogadro’s constant.
So atomism was "proved" by spacetime having a well-behaved statistics. A given volume could contain a given number of degrees of freedom. And then - the ontological leap of faith - by observational degrees of freedom, we would be talking about actual definite particles ... as that is what our causal interpretation most naturally would want to assume.
But who in particle physics believes in "actual particles" anymore? What we actually know to exist is the statistical formalism that describes the prototypically classical situation. We have equations that cough out results in terms of countable microstates or degrees of freedom.
So the classical picture and the quantum picture are pretty much aligned on that score. They boil down to the kind of statistics to expect given a physical system with certain global or macro constraints on local possibilities. Going beyond the statistics to talk about "actual particles" - conventional atomism - is a reach.
So in this way, quantum weirdness should cause us to go back and revisit the classical tale. Classical thermodynamics had already created an approach where atoms were modelled as the limit of states of constraint. The basic degrees of freedom of a system - the very "stuff" it was supposed to be constructed from - were emergent.
And getting back to the quantum level of the story, Thanu Padmanabhan is pursuing this way of thinking as a way to understand dark energy and spacetime geometry -
http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-universe-began-with-a-big-melt-not-a-big-bang
So Boltzmann's argument - if it can be heated, it has "atoms" - can be used to impute a quantumly grainy structure to spacetime itself.
But it is not that spacetime is actually composed of fundamental causal particles. Instead, it is the reverse story that regular spatiotemporal causal structure has a smallest limit. There is not enough contextuality to continue to imprint its regularity on events once you arrive at the Planck scale. You are foiled by all directions turning symmetric at that point - principally in the sense that there is no thermal temporal direction in which events can move by dissipating their localised heat.
So again, what we read off our successful statistical descriptions is the literal existence of hard little atomistic parts. Our conventional notions of causality encourage that. Possibility itself is understood atomistically - which is what makes an added degree of quantum uncertainty rather a mystery when it starts to manifest ... and eventually completely erases any definite atoms by turning everything in sight vanilla symmetric. A quark-gluon fluid or whatever describes a primal state of material being.
But we can turn it around so that atoms are always emergent. And classical atoms reflect another step towards maximal counterfactual constraint - one that takes a step beyond a looser quantum level of constraint, but then even a quantum level is still pretty constrained.
It is exactly the story with algebras. Normal classical number systems operate as point on a 1D line. Quantum number systems operate in one step more complex/less constrained realm of 2D imaginary numbers. Yet there are further algebras beyond - the 4D quarternions and 8D octonions, and then eventually right off into barely constrained structures of the even higher dimensional exceptionals.
So classical counting uses fundamental particles - 0D points on 1D lines. The emergent limit case if you were constraining the freedom of the act of counting. But then quantum counting leaves you with chasing your number around a 2D plane, which winds up behaving like an added rotation. When it comes to actual particles - like an electron - you have to in some sense count its spin twice to arrive at its spin number. To fix its state with classical counterfactual definiteness, you have to add back an extra constraint that eliminates the extra quantum degree of freedom it has from "inhabiting" a larger background space of probability.
Everywhere you look in modern fundamental physics, this is what you find. Classicality is emergent - where you arrive at the end of a trail of increasing constraint on free possibility. So causality needs to be understood now in these same terms.
And when it comes to quantum mechanics, it isn't even really that "weird" as it is already way more constrained in its dimensionality than the more unconstrained dimensional systems that could lie beyond it in "algebra-space". Quantum mechanics just has ordinary classical time baked into it at a background axiomatic level. That is why it is possible to calculate a deteministic wavefunction statistics for any given initial conditions. A definite basis has been assumed to get the modelling started.
But to move beyond QM, to get to quantum gravity, it seems clear that time itself must become an output of the model, not an input. And if you give up time as being fundamental, if you presume it to be merely the emergent limit, then of course conventional notions of causality are dead - except as useful macroscopic statistical descriptions of nature.
Math doesn't do anything observable. It's a tool of measurement. Quantum mechanics is math. Quantum mechanics is understood if someone understands the formulas, principles, and rules of doing it. The results of different experiments began a race to explanation. Hence, the different 'interpretations', all of philosophy, not science. All three of the most popular'interpretations' employ the normal everyday notion of causality and differ only insofar as they set out different consequences from different assumptions about the same experimental results.
The results were witnessed.
I'm still none the clearer about the distinction you wish to uphold.
What you said was....
Quoting creativesoul
And my reply is that we did invent a classical model of causality. And now a quantum model would challenge its predictions. We expect to witness a different statistics. And indeed we do, time and again.
I take it for granted that inventing a model and testing that model are two aspects of the one intellectual enterprise.
And then from the point of view of the scientifically-informed philosopher, one would be dubious about any "commonsense" claims that we instead just look out and see the world as it actually is. Any such folk theory of causality is only going to be an unthinking acceptance of the "evidence" of a history of classical physics and the logical tropes it has fostered.
So what are you trying to say? That our belief in classical causality is just some kind of direct "witnessed" knowledge and not instead a socially constructed belief (albeit a belief that "really works").
Or do you have a different point? I can't follow what you might want to say.
Which uses maths to account for anomalous observations. The whole history of physics is littered with them. SO maths makes predictions which then either account for, or fails to account for, the observation. So it is deeply intertwined with observation. The interpretations of the meaning of quantum mechanics are a completely different matter and really outside science per se.
To conclude that quantum mechanics operates on a more fundamental level is very questionable. It becomes apparent that that is gravely mistaken if and/or when we continue on to say that randomness is fundamental in it's relationship with causality. Quantum mechanics cannot effectively exhaust cause and effect. That's not a feature. It's a flaw.
That alone is adequate reason to deny placing much value upon the idea that quantum mechanics id somehow fundamental to classical mechanics.
If it were the case that randomness is more fundamental then we would need to ignore overwhelming fractal evidence to the contrary in order to sincerely assert this. Fractals are patterns. Pattern cannot happen without sequences of events. Sequence cannot happen without predictable time increments. Pure randomness has no predictable sequence. Randomness falls well short of the mark. It cannot produce what we do witness.
Yup. Not sure about my memory, but it seems to me that some of our very first conversations were on this topic. Do you recall?
Here's my take...
When observable entities are smaller than a planck length and the act of observing them includes shining light on them then the observation itself begins a causal chain of events as a result of the mass of the photon influencing the path(location) and movement speed(acceleration) of the subatomic particle being observed.
Hence... The Uncertainty Principle.
There's nothing random about it.
Quantum Entanglement intrigues me though...
Please explain.
As far as I know, retrocausality isn't ''possible''. Perhaps I'm stuck with the classical causal definition where reverse causation needs to be specifically ruled out and that we do by checking order of events in time.
To make sense of retrocausality we need to redefine causation. What is this definition? Pray tell.
It is a witnessed fact that the quantum account beats the classical one in terms of its predictive accuracy. I think it is only you who find it questionable that it ain't more foundational.
Though if you followed my own position, I am indeed arguing it isn't "foundational" in the conventional sense. It is indeed a less constrained picture of reality. My ontology is boot-strapping. So I am taking the conversation in quite a different direction there.
Then as to randomness, again a boot-strapping metaphysics expects a stable ontology to arise out of dynamical contrasts. So it is not that randomness is fundamental. Randomness is simply the dialectical complement to its "other" of deterministic constraint. You have two polar tendencies which together give rise to the third emergent thing of a structured reality - one which has the stability of a statistical system.
It is only because constraint is a thing that freedom is also a thing. So the more constrained a system, the more definite or fixed its freedoms. You can count the probability of a coin toss because you know that the coin can only either land heads or tails. Flip a quantum coin (or more accurately, a pair of them - the equivalent of two particles with spins) and the statistics are different because there is a loss of information due to the entanglement of the outcomes.
So perfect randomness can't exist by itself. It needs a matching degree of absolute constraint to define it as being a counterfactually definite possibility. If there are only two answers on offer - heads and tails - then a game of perfect chance becomes possible.
Quoting creativesoul
Fractals are a bad example for supporting your case because they in fact show that behind ordinary "classical" probability spaces - the kind described by a Gaussian bell curve - there is now the less constrained probability spaces of scale-free systems.
It is just like how QM was found hiding behind classical physics, and imaginary numbers behind real numbers. If you relax a major dimensional constraint, you still get organised structure. And now an actual mathematical structure that does a better job of accounting for nature "in the raw".
So fractals are the mathematical story of many natural random processes - especially dissipative thermodynamical ones, such as river branching and coastline erosion, because the spatiotemporal scale drops out of the physical picture as a constraint on the expression of randomness or spontaneity.
Deterministic chaos and fractals were a big deal because they revealed that chaotic nature was in fact predictably random even though any constraints were as minimal as could be imagined. So they speak to nature that has the simplest possible balance of chance and necessity. Gaussian systems are by contrast far more artificial in being overly-constrained (by the Universe's own foundational standards).
Quoting creativesoul
Pure randomness is pure vagueness. There couldn't even be a sequence to judge.
As I say, chaos theory was a big deal as it gave a mathematical understanding of what a minimal state of constraint looks like, and thus what a maximal state of randomness looks like. You had to have both to have either. Each becomes the effect of the other's cause.
It is this contextual mutuality that is a big part of the conceptual shift towards a holistic ontology here. QM showed that we have to take complementarity seriously. Chaos theory said the same thing.
Quoting creativesoul
That's one familiar pop science explanation. But why does the Planck scale create a sharp cut-off long before location or momentum are driven towards infinity?
Sure, the maths says things start to bend off sideways as you approach the Planck limit. Your effort to measure a system becomes so strenuous that at some point it produces such an energy density that the whole region of spacetime is going to collapse into a black hole.
But that is long before you approach infinite efforts. So you haven't actually explained anything about the causality of what is going on. You don't have the kind of holistic/contextual story that quantum gravity is seeking to establish.
Look up Cramer's transactional interpretation or the Wheeler/Feynman absorber theory.
But I tried to make clear that I am talking about retrocausality only in terms of backwards-acting constraints on probabilities. The future can determine the past to the extent that future experimental choices will limit the statistics of some past process. So the future doesn't produce the event in a determining fashion. It just affects the shape of the probability that existed back then.
The classic experiment is the quantum eraser. I can decide whether to measure an event as either a single slit or two slit situation. And even after the particle has passed through the slits - by a normal temporal view - I can make that decision and still see either kind of statistics.
So normal causality says that is impossible. The difference couldn't be imposed on nature after the fact. But in quantum theory, it is routine. Systems can be entangled across time.
I would warn here against conflating a report(conception if you prefer) of something with that something. The two are not always the same thing. Sometimes they're virtually indistinct. Sometimes that something exists in it's entirety prior to our very first report of and/or on it.
Causality is one such thing. Quantum mechanics is not.
:rofl:
Yeah.
There's an interesting correlation...
:smirk:
Causality is not.
Probability presupposes causality. It is nothing more than a mathematical description borne of our ignorance regarding all of the different influences in the causal chain of events.
It is much more interesting when when does not gape at it as 'causality tied to a long past post', but, on the contrary, when one apprehends it in its ambiguity, its continuity, its part of a continuum, and lastly, in its complexity-- showing us not the contingency of the world but its massive multidimensionality and metaphors.
This I get. Thanks. Am I correct in inferring that the definition of causation in quantum physics has been modified a bit from its classical form?
I was thinking about cyclical time but that doesn't make sense because time is defined in terms of physical change e.g. the swing of a pendulum or the vibration of an atom.
Since vibration is repetition between two states I was wondering if in a world where events swing between two or more states and nothing else it would be impossible to distinguish the temporal sequence of events and we'd be unable to distinguish cause and effect or, worse still, everything would be both cause and effect.
On circularity, there is obviously plenty of speculation about wormholes and what they would do to causality - https://www.iflscience.com/physics/wormholes-could-solve-a-key-problem-with-quantum-mechanics/
Further more all effect is a cause in itself, and what can be observed is that the cause exist fundamentally through the effect.
Under these terms we observe cause and effect fundamentally as the mirroring of structure equivalent to a form of replication of limits which occurs as a form of symmetry (or similarity conducive to a binding median) where the cause/effect linear chain (which can be dually observed in circular terms, with this dual circular and linear nature observing all causality existing through a form of self-reflection where any perceived multiplicity is merely an inversion of unity into multiplicity through 0 dimensionality.
This infinite replication of limit effectively observes all cause as non-movement as infinite change is non-movement itself. All change is the observation of multiplicity where the observation of cause is effectively the observation of a self-reflective structure considering what "was" is determined effectively by what it "will be" and the future inevitably determines the past as an extension of the past through itself.
What is change, as one structure relative to another, effectively is an observation of multiplicity where one reality effectively exists as a part of and composed of other parts which observe change as a boundary of movements giving premise to proportionality or the "ratio" as change through relation itself.
This change of part through part, observed mathematically through the fraction as both an observation of division and multiplication through "times" as a means of localizing a reality into parts, effectively is an observation of inversion of unity into multiplicity where all 0d dimensionality, or absence of structure, acts as a focal point of inversion and is not a thing in itself.
Yep, so you are making some confused epistemic point about our models of reality.
Now of course we can presume that reality exists as whatever it is, independent of our thoughts, wishes or conceptions about what it might be. But that kind of realism is still a presumption, even it it seems pretty reasonable. And then one problem that QM poses is that the observer no longer seems independent of the observables. As in the twin slit experiment, the choices an observer makes becomes part of the reality in terms of the statistical outcomes.
So even if you personally choose not to believe this fact of QM, it remains something that has now been witnessed time and again. The fact is not disputed, just how it might best be interpreted in the light of what we might want to believe in terms of defending more classical notions of causality, such as one that still models events in terms of the principle of locality.
So whatever causality is "in the noumenal raw", we are going to understand that in terms of a model. And that is fine if our modelling is based on a desire to model the world as accurately as we can. Which pragmatically, cashes out as a measurable minimisation of our uncertainty or surprisal when it comes to the physics of the world. We never "know" causality, but we sure as heck can work towards the models that make the best possible predictions and so leave us with the least possible surprises.
On that score, we know that classical models of causality work fine when the scale of the Cosmos is cold and large, but not when the Cosmos is small and hot. That is when the quantum model of causality would have to take over - and the Big Bang tells us it is the more fundamental story, being the condition that ruled at the beginning.
So there is no danger of conflating our models of reality with that reality if we are pragmatists. But what is clear is that science has found that different models sum up the story of causality at different scales of being. And yet you are insisting you can go beyond the models to see how things really are. You can believe in a classical causality as the true story rather than as merely one of a couple of models we can usefully employ to measurably good effect.
From a scientists point of view, this is a little crazy. Even classical Newtonian determinism is known to be full of causal paradox. The principle of least action is as basic a physical axiom as the principle of locality, and yet that involves "spooky action at a distance". Every event would have to know its future outcome so as to follow the path with the least action. Even Newtonianism has this "effect dictates the cause" back-arsewardness to it.
And even if we now have quantum theory as our most accurate predictive model, we know it doesn't completely capture the causal story. QM has been relativised. The need to account for observer collapse has been worked around by tacking on statistical mechanics - the contextual thermodynamic decoherence story - as a kluge. But including gravity and thus spacetime fluctuations in the formalism is work in progress.
So the point is that classical physics never actually supported a simple cause and effect ontology. It relied on some weird least action principle to actually determine every trajectory. And then QM brought least action to the fore as one of the causal things it was going to fix. The path integral formalism showed how reality must in some sense take every possible path and then sum over the possibilities. But QM can't yet deal with the contributions of gravitational fluctuations - at least right down to the Planck scale limit where they start to completely overwhelm any conventional causal structure.
Science thus tells us that we don't actually understand causality, but we have gone a long way towards telling a more complete feeling story. We are acknowledging the modelling gaps and seeking to plug them with mathematical machinery.
Yet you, in contrast, seem to be saying you can see cause and effect with your own eyes. Every question you could have about the way the world is has already been answered.
QM undermines classical causality. QM puts forward its own causal story. Experiment determines which story we are inclined to believe. It's really simple.
The point is clear, and not at all confusing or confused...
Pots and kettles...
I'm pointing out the inherent conflation in your position, namely that you're not drawing the distinction between your report and what's being reported upon(causality, in this case). Sometimes there is no relevant difference, as with QM. Other times, there is a substantial difference, as with causality.
To hold that QM is the basis of causality is asinine. We could debate this if you like. There's a forum for it.
:up:
I've just about finished Adam Becker's recent book What is Real? He says that Einstein's scientific realism was right all along, and Niels Bohr et al were obscurantists; he makes his disdain for Heisenberg palpable. And he says that the Bell theorem and Aspect experiments have also undermined the Copenhagen interpretation. I don't agree with his analysis at all, although it's a pretty well-written and researched book. (I think Everett comes across dreadfully and again am baffled by the traction his ideas have gotten.)
Quoting creativesoul
What I was taking issue with was the first sentence: that maths doesn't do anything observable. It makes predictions, which are then validated against observation. So maybe pure maths doesn't 'do anything observable', but mathematical physics does a great deal. Also that quantum mechanics is more than maths, it is applied maths. But agree that obviously quantum mechanics is baffling, to paraphrase Bohr again, if you don't think it's baffling then you don't know what it's about.
Quoting creativesoul
But from a philosophical point of view, I still think what is being challenged is indeed the reality of the physical realm. If you find that 'the observer' is inextricably a part of it - and this seems to be the very problem that Everett's drunken epiphany sought to eliminate - then you cast doubt on the scientific worldview qua worldview. It was the absence of 'observer independence' that bothered the s***t out of Einstein and Bell:
John Stewart Bell (1928-1990), quoted in Quantum Profiles, by Jeremy Bernstein [Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 84]
Maybe you still just fail to understand pragmatism then?
How could I be conflating the model with the reality when I am talking about our models of reality? But then the "report" in your terminology must be the mediating thing of a measurement, or observation, or sign. And the "report" does underwrite the conception. It is the particular that inductively confirms the generality of some theory.
That is how it is meant to work. You haven't shown any problem with it.
If you get hit by a rock falling out of the sky, you could assign that physical fact to various theories. It could be a malicious god taking careful aim at you. Or it could be a random accident - a bit of falling space junk.
In the one example, you would report being struck by a divine missile. In the other, you would report being struck by a fluke accident.
So "what is being reported" is some particular ... that relates interpretatively to some generality. You have two possible causal interpretations. You wind up reporting the version you have some habit of believing.
Pragmatism draws out this full triadic relation of theory, measurement and world. It does the opposite of conflating in doing so.
Quoting creativesoul
But that is just your weird phrasing of what is being said.
I said QM challenges the kind of classically linear, cause-and-effect, model of causality which you would appear to hope to assimiliate all your experiences to.
So you have some habit of mind. You think you know what causality actually is in its true natural form. But as I've argued at length, even classical physics conceals basic challenges to that. The least action principle doesn't fit that story.
And then QM really rocks any remaining faith in it. We know that causality can't be locally real. Or at best, that it is only a macroscale emergent phenomenon. Like the liquidity of water, it is a collective state of order that arises when the Universe has got so large and cold that any lingering QM uncertainty or weirdness has been shrunk mostly out of sight.
So what is asinine is pretending that simple linear causal logic ever really applied to the observable physical world. Even Newtonian physics knew there was more to the story. QM proves there has to be much more.
I can understand how that could be a statement hard to agree with. It's true though.
In the context, it was a direct reply to apo claiming "with quantum mechanics, what is witnessed..." That is nonsense talk. Apo glosses over too many clear problems and/or refutations. We can do all kinds of stuff with math. Math doesn't do anything. Same with words. The point I was making is a basic one. I offered adequate argument against the notion that QM is fundamental to causality. Apo ignored all of it.
What do you mean, 'do'?
Have you ever encountered Eugene Wigner's essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences? It was one of the first things I encountered when I started posting on forums. All grist to the Platonist mill, as far as I'm concerned.
Incoherency...
Next?
You want to claim that you're not... then draw and maintain the distinction between causality and a report thereof. Then, do the same with QM...
How many options are there given the context? It has no ability - in and of itself - to do anything.
Quoting Wayfarer
I haven't. Math is effective as a result of it's rigid definitions. 2+2=4 and it always will because we will not let it be any different. Math is not real in the sense of existing in it's entirety prior to our inventing it. I'll go check out that essay...
Is mathematics real 'in and of itself'? I would have thought that it is inextricably bound to the act of calculation. I don't presume to present any kind of answer to such conundrums, but I do say, without much equivocation, that maths is powerful and the ability to 'do math' is behind a great deal of human invention and discovery.
Nice essay. I sped read but was left with distinct impression. I like the notion he skirted around throughout the paper...
How our framework will largely determine what things we pay attention to and how.
This bit caught my attention...
Of course you know why....
No doubt. Math is language. Language is powerful.
In what way am I failing to distinguish between model and world by drawing close attention to the mediating role played by "the report"?
The sign (or measurement, observation, witness statement, report, fact) is the basis of the semiotic mechanism by which the model and the world are kept apart, and thus why they can then stand in some relation.
So - dealing with your conflations - we have the three elements of the world as it may reveal itself to our inquiries, our conceptions that form the generic basis to our inquiries, then the reports that seem the right kind of particular evidence in favour of some habit of belief we might be forming.
If you keep just talking about the two things of the report and the world, you are collapsing the account of the epistemology to the point it can make no sense. You are going to remain stuck in the usual dualistic confusion of the realists vs the idealists.
Because.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
In those ways...
Causality is not a description. QM is.
Where is the distinction between your report of causality and causality drawn and maintained? It's not there. Failing to draw and maintain that distinction has led you to claim that that which exists prior to something else emerged from that something else... which is utterly impossible.
Causality did not emerge from QM.
QM did not exist - in it's entirety - prior to our discovery. Causality does. QM is existentially dependent upon language. Causality is not. QM is our invention. Causality is not.
:wink:
Hey, we agree upon something!
Ja, hooda thort? :chin:
And so you dumbly repeat something that I never said? I said classical physics might give us one model of causality. QM might give us another.
And I wouldn't call a model an "invention" exactly. It might be a free creation of the mind, but it also has to show itself to work in the real world. It is not yet clear whether you would dispute or agree with this obvious qualification.
Likewise, I would point out that "causality" is a linguistic term. As such - by your own account even - it is a concept, a model, an interpretation of "the world". But you struggle so much with writing clear posts that who knows what you really want to commit to on this score.
Quoting creativesoul
Again you are guilty of conflating epistemology and ontology. Or simply of being utterly confused in your thoughts.
QM didn't exist as a model until we invented it (although for some reason you now say we "discovered" it). But clearly, we have no reason to think that the world wasn't always "QM".
And likewise causality didn't exist before we invented/discovered/modelled it - at least not as an articulated conception. And again clearly, however we understand causality with any clarity, there would be no reason to thing the world wasn't always "that way".
So you have to stick to some consistent epistemic story. Either you are talking about QM as a model of reality, and so causality is also a modelling construct, or you are shifting registers to talk about QM as the putative ontology of reality, just as you seem to be employing the term "causality" as being a noumenal fact of the world.
To try and maintain that QM is just an invention, causality is just a fact, is conflating an epistemic linguistic register with an ontic linguistic register.
It makes no sense. And that incoherence would indeed explain why your posts just seem a confused babble - the sound of naive realism wrestling with its own demons to no useful end.
Not a free creation of the mind, but a constrained creation of the world, since the mind is also a constrained creation of the world. Poetry might be thought to be "a free creation of the mind", but even there...
Yes, some models work better than others.
Some models - and this is what I'm pointing out - are of that which exists in it's entirety prior to the model. Causality is one such thing. QM is not. QM is the model...
So, I've never claimed that you said that. I'm pointing out that you need to think about it.
Follow the logic.
QM is math. Math is language. QM is existentially dependent upon language. Causality is not. QM cannot be prior to causality. In order for something to emerge from something else more fundamental, then that something else more fundamental must exist prior to what emerges from it.
Causality cannot emerge from QM.
There's the conflation... full faced!
There it is yet again!
This would be a devastating reply, if it wasn't based upon something other than what I've been arguing. Then, it could even be true. But alas, it was and so it cannot.
It's always easiest to argue against someone else by first misrepresenting what they've said. Looks like this exchange has come to an end...
Til next time apo...
Cheers!
I was just citing Einstein there. I think he knew what he was talking about.
It is basic to pragmatism that you could say absolutely anything about the world as a hypothesis. And that modelling freedom is what Einstein was stressing. It is science because you don't have to start with "the truth", just some reasonable conjecture.
Of course the corollary is that models must be testable. The world does have to be able to constrain the conjecture in some measurable fashion.
Anyone here understand what @creativesoul's position is? Someone care to hazard a guess.
No, it's not.
How can an experiment using "classical" causation provide evidence of a different kind of causation?
If you perform a experiment in the "classical" causal manner and come up with an "answer" that says that "classical" causation is flawed, then what does that say about your experiment in the first place?
Sure, and that's the constraint; that conjecture must be rational, sensible, related to experience or else empty, which would mean no real conjecture at all.
What we tend to disregard is that what we know as "the physical realm" is only what our senses present to us as "the physical realm". So "the physical realm" is what is created by sensing beings. That's what Kant pointed to as phenomena. What we call the physical realm is only "real" to the extent that our senses have the capacity to show us what is real.
"
I answer’d: ‘All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics; for when you ran away, I found myself on a bank by moonlight hearing a harper. But now we have seen my eternal lot, shall I show you yours?’ He laugh’d at my proposal; but I, by force, suddenly caught him in my arms, and flew westerly thro’ the night, till we were elevated above the earth’s shadow; then I flung myself with him directly into the body of the sun. Here I clothed myself in white, and taking in my hand Swedenborg’s volumes, sunk from the glorious clime, and passed all the planets till we came to Saturn. Here I stay’d to rest, and then leap’d into the void between Saturn and the fixed stars. 140
‘Here,’ said I, ‘is your lot, in this space—if space it may be call’d.’ Soon we saw the stable and the church, and I took him to the altar and open’d the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which I descended, driving the Angel before me. Soon we saw seven houses of brick. One we enter’d; in it were a number of monkeys, baboons, and all of that species, chain’d by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but withheld by the shortness of their chains. However, I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with, and then devour’d, by plucking off first one limb and then another, till the body was left a helpless trunk. This, after grinning and kissing it with seeming fondness, they devour’d too; and here and there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off of his own tail. As the stench terribly annoy’d us both, we went into the mill, and I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotle’s Analytics. 141
So the Angel said: ‘Thy phantasy has imposed upon me, and thou oughtest to be ashamed.’ 142
I answer’d: ‘We impose on one another, and it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics.’ 143
I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the Only Wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning. 144
Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho’ it is only the Contents or Index of already publish’d books. 145
A man carried a monkey about for a show, and because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceiv’d himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg: he shows the folly of churches, and exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious, and himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net. 146
Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth. Now hear another: he has written all the old falsehoods. 147
And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, and conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions. 148
Thus Swedenborg’s writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime—but no further. 149
Have now another plain fact. Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s, and from those of Dante or Shakespear an infinite number. 150
But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine."
It's not as though there is "the real over there" and our senses show it to us "over here": it's the "showing" itself that is real. The physical realm is not created by sensing beings, sensing beings are created by the physical world, in the sense that they only come to be in the physical world; and in turn the physical world only becomes manifest in sensing beings.
It makes no sense to challenge the reality of the physical world, since physically embodied experience is the very definition of reality.
No, it's quite clear that the physical world is created by the sensing beings, not vise versa. It is created by the nervous system. I am a being over here, you are a being over there, and there is a medium of separation between us. Through sensation and conceptualization we create an image of this medium and call it the physical realm. Our terms refer to the various aspect of that image, not the medium itself, so what we refer to as "the physical realm" is the image, not the medium itself..
Thanks anyway, MU, but I don't eat fairy floss.
The causes that are the best guesses... These are the causes of so much of what is called 'causality'.
Seems you recognize that it's pointless to argue your false claim, so you make up some fairy tale.
Quoting Blue Lux
What does "the physical" refer to other than the interpretations of our sensations.
The sensed?
It's how I know about our neighbor.
Would be a bit rude if I walked over and said "Hi neighbor, you're just my sensations".
red marks conundrum (to some)
It seems that all attempts to understand something always lead back to an attempt at understanding existence (inevitable teleologies), which always leads to an attempt at understanding Human Existence. What greater attempt at this is psychology? Yet, what has psychology granted us? What has it given other than methods of diagnosing certain ailments, maladies and distinguishing types of behaviors and experiences? What has any attempt at a human knowledge given us? Reference after reference to a plot point said to be by virtue of reason and per reason that will shine light on everything? What are these games of knowledge seeking? What is it any more than a positing of a potential power? What is it any more than exerting power in an effort to control? What is it any more than trying to control nature, to rise above nature, to become the Overhuman? Or... To become God? We see the reason for God now. In the end it is to be united with God; to in some way be God: this is the root of spiritual belief in God, and is it the result of, perhaps, the unconscious understanding that not a 'God damn' thing is to be understood in this extraordinarily confusing, undoubtedly infinitely complex existence? Is the only thing left astonishment? Awe? Beauty? Is that where the Truth is to be shone? Is the beauty that mankind seeks to be found anywhere? Or is it all a dream? Is it all a part of a sequence of events, of an unfolding, of the existence of life into something greater? A higher form of intelligence? Is this human existence a part of some other plan? Or, for lack of better words, is human existence shaped and influenced by unseen forces? Perhaps it is, but all of this boils down to the most important question of all. The question of meaning. What does anything mean at all? What will it mean, in the end? Perhaps that is the greater question, and in that, all of eternity will be held in a moment. Perhaps then the truth will be revealed as it is. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everhthing would appear as it is-infinite." William Blake
Whose poetry? The beginning was well written.
I wanna tell ya a story 'bout Texas radio and the big beat...
RIP Jim
The question works from dubious presuppositions...
All interpretation is of something already meaningful. The meaning is precisely what is being interpreted. Sensations aren't meaningful in and of themselves. They are necessary but insufficient for the attribution of meaning. All sentient creatures use sensation by virtue of autonomously drawing connections between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or themselves. The complexity of the correlation translates to the cognitive ability and/or capability of the candidate.
Physiological sensory perception - all by itself - in utterly incapable of presenting meaning. It is a necessary but insufficient part thereof. Sensory perception allows detection of that which is not the perceiving creature.
Existence is necessarily presupposed within all thought and belief formation.
The difference is between a gecko perceiving the toaster only as a part of a more complex thought process, say in some spatial relation with the primary objects of interest. A tasty morsel ran behind the toaster. The gecko goes around it while giving chase. It doesn't perceive it as a toaster. It perceives it as something to go around while looking for and/or chasing the insect.
The primary correlations were between the food source and the drive to eat. They all influenced the behaviour.
We're talking about reality here, not your fantasy world. In reality, the word "neighbour" above just refers to some possibility you've created.
Quoting Blue Lux
I agree.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, one ought to be dubious of any proposition, in the way of the skeptic. But you turn things around, as if it is the proposition which is dubious, rather than yourself who doubts the proposition. Are you really that confused? Do you really believe that it is the proposition which is dubious, and not yourself who is doubting the proposition? Why not state things to reflect the true reality, rather than creating such an illusion?
Quoting creativesoul
Sure, but the point is that "objects" are created by the sentient creature, through the act of sensation. And, a very important part of what you call "the attribution of meaning" is the act of creating objects which occurs within the sentient being, Psychologically speaking, you might say that this act occurs at the unconscious level of the being, but nevertheless, it is an act carried out by the being. The attribution of meaning goes to much deeper levels of being than consciousness does.
So consider that "objects" are presented to the conscious mind of the being. You cannot take it for granted that the objects are external to the being, just because the objects appear as "given" to consciousness. You ought not dismiss the reality that it is the unconscious part of the being which is creating the objects and presenting them to the conscious mind, and therefore the objects are not external to the sentient being. And the act of "attribution of meaning" which is carried out by the conscious mind is just a layer on top of the substantial act of attribution of meaning already being carried out at the unconscious level.
Huh?
I chat with my neighbors all the time.
Why on Earth would they just be my sensations? :o
Are you hearing them? Are you seeing them? Are hearing and seeing, sensations? Why assume anything more than what is clearly the truth?
Robert Anton Wilson ( a prize loony, but a thinker nonetheless) describes in his book "Quantum psychology" how the effect can chronologically precede its cause. It was a QM thing, involving entangled particles, but I can't remember any more details than that. It convinced me, when I read it, but I'm no QM expert! :wink:
The idea of "the purpose of existence" makes no sense on my view... unless a thing is created with the sole intention to serve a specific purpose. A chair's purpose is to be sat on. Purpose presupposes a creator's intent for the creation. I would warn here against unnecessarily multiplying entities...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Oh, the irony...
Ad homs won't do here Meta.
Your position is based upon a gross misconception of "sensation". Sensations aren't meaningful. All interpretation is of that which is already meaningful. It is precisely the meaning which is being interpreted. Saying "our interpretations of our sensations" shows a gross misunderstanding hard at work. It's a fatal flaw.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There's the proof!
You agree by saying "sure" and then continue on unabated as if what you agreed to was not a problem for your position. It was and remains to be.
You are failing to draw and maintain the distinction between what you're reporting upon and your report. You've got plenty of company in philosophy.
Does it even make sense to differentiate between "before" and "after" on the quantum level? I've heard that no, because the arrow of time for a quantum system only gets defined when the system decoheres into a classical system (the wave function collapses), thereby increasing entropy.
And if there is no difference between "before" and "after", what sense does it make to differentiate between cause and effect?
Even the experts aren't experts... We have no idea about the nature of light(in terms of what it is, what it consists in/of).
We typically say that fire causes smoke: Fire -> Smoke. But as the saying goes, 'there is no smoke without fire', which gives us 'Smoke -> Fire'. If we remove the temporal aspect - that the fire started before the smoke did, it becomes as valid to say the smoke caused the fire as it does to say the fire caused the smoke.
Similarly for when some people argue that we can infer the existence of God from the existence of the world. So we have World->God to match the usual statement that God->World.
In ordinary language, as well as in the philosophical definitions of people like Hume or Russell, part of the definition of a 'cause' is that it temporally precedes its 'effect'. It becomes a contradiction in terms to say an effect precedes its cause.
So when somebody says 'causes can occur before effects', it becomes more crucial than ever to ask them what they mean by 'cause' and 'effect'. Odds are they won't be able to answer the question.
Well, strictly speaking one can find knowledge if it exists in it's entirety prior to it's being found. To talk of "creating" knowledge seems fraught. Objectivity is yet another notion that leads to nowhere... "point of view invariant" is better for the same tasks.
It's no problem that the effect is entailed in the cause (and in the laws of physics) and that the cause is entailed in the effect (and in the laws of physics). However, what differentiates the effect from the cause is that the cause is prior to the effect in time. So you need both logical and temporal ordering to explain causality, where the temporal ordering (the arrow of time) is defined by the increasing entropy of the universe along the time axis of spacetime.
This probably gets into interpretation territory, but I don't think quantum systems do collapse into classical systems (for example, even if one observes a system in a precise location its momentum is still indefinite). Instead the physical context (and thus the observer's perspective) changes whenever there is a physical interaction between quantum systems. This defines an arrow of time, but it is indexed to the observer rather than being absolute. (Which is an idea we're used to with relativity anyway.)
So "before" and "after" are physically well-defined for the observer. In the case of interference effects, the history of the observed particle is the sum of the particle's component histories. "Before" and "after" are still well-defined for the particle (i.e, it goes into an interferometer, unitary processes occur and it is finally observed at a detector). However each component history must be considered separately, with cause preceding effect in each separate case. What doesn't make sense is to apply "before" and "after" in aggregate when no measurement has been performed (which would of course result in a singular observation where "before" and "after" are well-defined for that component history).
Here's an excellent video (Witnessing causal nonseparability) that demonstrates the indefinite causal order experiment that the OP describes. (It also has a nice demonstration of the Mach-Zehnder experiment.)
Like I was born yesterday?
Quoting creativesoul
That's correct, there's no distinction to be made there. Philosophers agree. Why do you bother to argue otherwise?
Quoting andrewk
This I agree with. There is no point in speaking about cause and effect if you do not maintain the necessity of temporal ordering. That's what the concept is based in. And, by the way, it can be demonstrated that all logical ordering is reducible to temporal ordering, so the assumption that one can avoid temporal ordering by referring only to logical ordering is unfounded, because logical ordering becomes completely ungrounded, and random in an absolute sense, without temporal ordering.
For instance, there is no reason to the ordering of the natural numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., without a temporal referencing. The ordering would be completely random, without the temporal act of counting, in which 1 is prior to 2, etc.. You might argue that 2 is greater than 1, but by what principle would this be true, other than the fact that 2 comes after one in the act of counting. If we were subtracting, then 1 comes after 2, and might be apprehended as greater than 2. If you say that 2 is more than 1, we have to ask "more" in what sense. And we are turned toward a temporal ordering in any determination of quantity due to the necessity of counting. A determination of quantity requires counting and therefore relies on the temporal order.
Quoting litewave
I don't agree that you need both temporal and logical ordering to explain causality. All that is needed is temporal ordering. The requirement for logical ordering leads to the problem of induction. We want the cause to be within a particular spatial radius because that's what experience and induction (consequentially our inductively produced premises) tell us must be the case. But if we release the need for logical ordering with premises derived from references to spatial relations , we can focus specifically on temporal ordering and avoid the problems which may be created by faulty spatial conceptions and the derived premises..
Solipsism isn't "clearly the truth", more like radical parsimony, haphazard reduction.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
They do not; your sentiment is towards the bottom.
Dead end.
Meaning and purpose coincide.
If I find it a purpose of mine to protect certain people, there must necessarily be meaning there specifically that constitutes such a purpose, and furthermore the will to carrying out any relevant action.
If you find it hard to answer the question about the purpose of existence you must inevitably be resorting to the conclusion that there is absolutely nothing of this sort to be found, and consequently defaulting to the idea that we are strangely alienated in a strange universe with absolutely no meaning more than what we ourselves, arbitrarily, give it?
And so what is the impetus of science? Of philosophy?
But since laws of physics don't differentiate between past and future and there is no entropic arrow of time for a particular component history, how do you know where is past and where is future for a particular component history?
A set of 3 elements will always have a greater cardinality than a set of 2 elements, no matter whether someone counts them. This fact is not dependent on anyone counting the elements. Counting only confirms this fact (unless the counting person makes a mistake). So you don't need a temporal order to order natural numbers.
Actually, it seems that temporal ordering can be reduced to logical/mathematical ordering. In the theory of relativity, time is treated as a special spatial dimension and space is a mathematical structure with no need for reference to time. On the time dimension of spacetime we can then define the arrow of time from past to future as the direction of increasing entropy (disorder) of the mathematical structure of each time slice.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Temporal order doesn't seem sufficient to explain causality: if one event precedes another in time, it doesn't necessarily mean that the earlier event caused the later.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How do you determine the particular spatial radius though? It seems that you must formulate a theory that involves laws of physics and based on this theory you deduce the effect from the cause, in the context of an arrow of time.
Clearly I was talking about "the ordering" of numbers, as the topic was "logical priority". So cardinality is irrelevant to my example.
Quoting litewave
Notice that you've reversed things. The product of your reduction is disorder, not order. A reduction with order as the subject, rather than disorder, brings the opposite result, logical ordering is reduced to temporal ordering.
Quoting litewave
Right, now we're getting down to the subject matter. Temporal ordering is not in itself sufficient to account for causality, I will grant you that. But if we maintain the principle that it is essential, as the concept of "cause" dictates, then we have a platform from which we can assess other possible conditions of "cause". We can treat the other elements as necessary accidentals, necessary in the sense that they are needed, but accidental in the sense that no particular one is required. We then place the various spatial relations associated with causation as secondary conditions, accidentals, and not essential to the nature of causation. So when the described spatial relations give the appearance of causation, without the necessary temporal order, we must dismiss the description as inaccurate. There cannot be causation without the appropriate temporal order therefore something is wrong with the description which says such.
Quoting litewave
That's the point, there is no need to determine a particular spatial radius. Such determinations are made from experience and inductive reasoning, so they may be inaccurate due to empirical limitations. The true spatial radius can only be determined posteriorly, after the proper context, the true "arrow of time" has been represented. We maintain the logical principle, that temporal order is the necessary condition for causation, then when an event appears as a cause of another event we direct our representation of the "arrow of time" in this way, despite the fact that it contradicts empirical principles, because empirical principles are known to be, by their very nature, fallible. And the way to determine mistaken empirical principles is to strictly adhere to logical principles.
Set cardinality expresses the same as natural numbers: how many things there are. That's the property that orders natural numbers from the smallest to the biggest. Time is not needed for this ordering.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The disorder I talked about is entropy, not absence of time ordering. Entropy is a measure of the randomness of the structure of the universe. High entropy = lots of randomness, much disorder; low entropy = little randomness, little disorder. According to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy of the universe increases with time. It is generally accepted that the arrow of time is defined as the direction of increasing entropy of the universe. So entropy of the universe provides time ordering of the states of the universe.
Per the earlier video (from 1min:32), that is known from the experimental setup. One component history has Alice applying operation A to the photon and then Bob applying operation B, whereas the other component history has the opposite ordering.
If detectors were placed at the ends of those paths just before they merged at the final beam splitter, then a definite causal order would be observed (i.e., either the first path or the second path).
Whereas in the setup as shown, the final observer (the causal witness) does not singularly observe A occurring before B or vice-versa. The observer calculates from the interference effects that both must have happened. There is a definite causal order on a per path basis, but an indefinite causal order in aggregate.
Note that no issue need arise about a supposed failure of causality or a failure to distinguish the past from the future. The only issue is that it is a fallacy of composition to assume a single causal ordering for an aggregate of paths.
Such a question wasn't posed. I answered the one that was.
Quoting Blue Lux
Asserting that meaning and purpose coincide carries a much larger burden than your personal example can carry. It can be the case that your purpose is meaningful, and also that not all meaning has purpose alongside.
Quoting Blue Lux
The question was answered, and it was not at all difficult. All meaning requires a plurality of things and a creature capable of making connections between them. So, it is clear that existence precedes meaning, unless one posits some supernatural creator of the first things, which has a host of it's own issues. I do not. I do not claim any knowledge of the sort, nor could I care any less...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
All interpretation is of that which is already meaningful. Sensations aren't meaningful. It makes no sense at all to say "the interpretations of our sensations".
What is a sensation if not a sensory experience? I see. I hear, I taste, I smell, I feel; those are sensations, experiences. What is interpreted if not those experiences?
What is already meaningful?
That's true, except you are missing the premise which forces the conclusion that time is necessary for this ordering. Cardinality must be determined, and this is the process which takes time. Counting takes time, requiring numbering in the order of 1,2,3,4, etc.. Therefore time is required for this ordering. Set cardinality requires time.
Quoting litewave
Right, the point though is that since you place temporal order as posterior to logical order you derive the conclusion that time creates a disordering. But if you work from the other direction you will see that temporal order is prior to logical order. Any example of logical order which you give (like the ordering of numbers above), can be demonstrated to rely on a temporal order for its validity.
Quoting litewave
See, you are disregarding the ordering which is necessarily prior to the disordering of entropy which you describe. So an ordered universe is necessarily prior to the disordering which the arrow of time brings about. Therefore order is temporally prior to disorder. The logic which brings about the conclusion that disorder follows from the flow of time, assumes already a prior temporal order. It relies in the assumption of temporal order.
Quoting creativesoul
I really cannot understand this at all. The statement that sensations are not meaningful appears as blatantly false. So until you back this up with an explanation, or a demonstration of a sensation which is not meaningful (because sensations seem to all be meaningful to me), I'll have to dismiss what you say as nonsense.
NOTHING is more fatal to discussion than having questions answered by questions.
Our criteria for what counts as "sensation" differs. Mine excludes all things informed by language.
All meaning is attributed. All attribution of meaning requires a plurality of things and a creature capable of drawing a correlation, connection, and/or association between them. In order draw a correlation between different things, those things must first be perceptible. Physiological sensory perception facilitates this capability to detect the perceptible.
Sensations are detection based The sensation becomes meaningful when the perceiving creature draws a correlation between it and something other than it.
Quoting Janus
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting Janus
The quality of the question plays a significant role too, right?
No, as I said, cardinality of a set exists whether or not someone counts it. The number of electrons in the atom of carbon was 6 even before anyone counted them. Counting does not create cardinality; it can only confirm it.
If the one questioned thinks the question is poorly conceived or irrelevant or otherwise deficient in whatever way, then the onus is on the one questioned to demonstrate that such is the case. Mere assertion or insinuation are not sufficient for, and are in fact fatal to, fruitful discussion.
As to "quality of questions" questions that purport to answer questions have none because they are evasions that attempt to shut down further discussion.
Your questions were based upon your framework(your notion of "sensation" to be exact). Your framework is different than mine. That's a problem all by itself if you're looking to criticize my position.
I claimed the following(basically)...
Sensation is not meaningful. All interpretation is of that which is already meaningful. There can be no interpretation of sensation.
You offered a description of "sensation" that is remarkably different than my own, and then proceeded to ask a question that ignored what you were supposed to be critiquing. You asked me what was being interpreted in your own conception of "sensation". The only appropriate answer from me was to ask you to further elucidate upon your own candidate.
What was already meaningful?
Whoops. Off the rails already.
Sure, language takes semiosis to another level. But sensation is also fundamentally semiotic.
You assume too much about what my "framework" is. Such presumptuousness is not helpful to discussion. In any case I have defined sensation according to what I take to be the common understanding: you are yet to explain what your definition of "sensation" is. I know at least that you purport to hold to some other understanding of sensation; and I critique that purportion just on the basis that it apparently gratuitously deviates from the common understanding. I assume that such a deviation has no intellectual value unless I am shown that it does have such value or that it is not in fact a gratuitous deviation from the common understanding. You have failed to do that so far.
You have merely asserted that sensation is not meaningful, without any arguments, explanations or examples..What is usually referred to by "sensation" is sensory experiences; seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching. Leaving aside the question of whether those experiences are "meaningful'; I asked you what sensation could consist in if not in those kinds of sensory experiences.
Sorry creativesoul, but I just can't follow what you're saying. It's completely foreign to me.
Quoting litewave
A set is artificial, and so is its cardinality. So your comparison to an atom, which is a naturally occurring object is not relevant. Here's a more relevant example. That a circle has 360 degrees is also something artificial. A circle would not have 360 degrees unless human beings designated this. Likewise, a set would not have a cardinality unless human beings designate the cardinality, because even the human designation of "set X", requires an interpretation of what is meant by "X" in order to create the set. You seem to be confusing the naming of the set, with the actual existence of it.
Regardless of this disagreement over cardinality, even if just naming a set gave that set existence, the naming itself is a temporal process requiring a temporal order. So your argument, even if it were acceptable, doesn't prove what you need it to prove because the existence of the set itself is dependent on a temporal order. You ought to realize that you cannot get beyond the priority of temporal order. All forms of order are dependent on and based in temporal order. Time gives us the fundamental intuition of "order". If you take the time to consider this proposition you will realize its truth.
Well, we could always compare/contrast our respective conceptions of "sensation"...
Something tells me that none of you will.
That's false.
You weren't leaving aside the question of whether or not experiences are meaningful when you first asked me what was being interpreted if not for those experiences.
I think you are just being asked to justify your sweeping statements on the issue.
You said sensations weren't meaningful. That would startle most psychologists. Why would the nervous system go to all the bother of conceiving of the world as a system of signs otherwise?
Is it existentially dependent upon language?
I would argue in the negative.
I'd love to have an audience capable of allowing that to take place. You'd be a great participant in such a situation.
So you don't believe that an atom of carbon had 6 electrons before someone counted them? That would be pretty outlandish. Those 6 electrons determine carbon's chemical properties without which no humans would come into existence.
The circle consisted of 360 wedges even before someone called them degrees. Just as it also consisted of 370 (smaller) wedges or any other number of wedges, which no one called degrees. Just because someone called 360 wedges degrees doesn't mean that those 360 wedges were not there before.
A set is just a collection of objects. Its existence doesn't depend on whether some human names it or counts the objects.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
Really? Then quote where I said that experiences are meaningful. And of course, in your usual evasive mode you have failed to answer the question as to what sensation is if it is something other than the kinds of sensory experiences I enumerated, and you have also failed to answer the question as to what gets interpreted if not those kinds of sensory experiences (which is really the same question in a different guise).
Now I am not saying that experiences or sensations are not meaningful; I am merely leaving the question aside while waiting for you to man up and answer the questions posed to you rather than continuing to evade them.
Quoting creativesoul
So, are you implying that if having sensation is not dependent on linguistic capability it therefore cannot be meaningful? Or...?
This bears repeating...
That's still false.
All interpretation is of something already meaningful. The meaning is precisely what is being interpreted. Sensations aren't meaningful in and of themselves. They are necessary but insufficient for the attribution of meaning.
Sensation is but one part of meaningful experience. It is not equivalent to.
Venus Flytrap.
All experience, on my view, must be meaningful to the creature. I do not conflate sensation with experience. Rather, the latter consists, in part at least, of the former, but not the other way around. Physiological sensory perception alone is inadequate/insufficient for meaningful experience as a result of it's being inadequate/insufficient for the attribution of meaning by the creature.
Venus Flytrap.
No. Meaning is not existentially dependent upon language. Nor is sensation. Sensation is a necessary elemental constituent of both meaning and language.
I'm saying that sensation is not existentially dependent upon language. There are everyday examples of creatures replete with physiological sensory perception that are otherwise incapable of drawing correlations between different things. Where that capability is absent there can be no meaningful attribution.
As I said, the example is irrelevant because a set is artificial and an atom is not.
Quoting litewave
The point is that those wedges were created, and counted in the act of creating them. The question would be whether the circle had 360 wedges without having been counted as 360. Since there was a reason why the circle was given 360 wedges, rather than some other number of wedges, they were obviously counted prior to assigning 360 to the circle. That's the thing with artificial things, they are created by intentional design, so the count is prior to the existence of the artificial thing.
Quoting litewave
Don't be ridiculous.
So sensation is part of experience? You apparently agree with me that it is, so is sensory experience (the sensation part of experience) not, just as with the rest of experience, interpreted?
Yes, sensation is part of meaningful experience.
No. In and of itself, sensation is utterly meaningless. Venus Flytrap.
I can see a sense in which we can say that objects are dependent on human perception and understanding, and a sense in which we can say that they are not. I cannot see any sense in which we can say that a collection of objects is not dependent on human perception and understanding.
So what is "sensation in and of itself" apart from sensory experiences?
Sensations are detection based The sensation becomes meaningful when the perceiving creature draws a correlation between it and something other than it.
I don't see any reason to believe that "all meaning is attributed". Do you have an argument to support that contention?
I also don't see any need to, or advantage in, employing the kind of anthropomorphic language exemplified in phrases like "drawing a correlation, connection, and/or association between them".
As I see it you commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, by attributing the kinds of conceptualizations to animals (and not just the 'higher" animals either!) that humans are capable of due to their linguistic abilities.
Your view is thus a tissue of confusions, and therefore not helpful in any way.
As I indicated way back when this particular topic arose, there are correlations, connections, and associations which are drawn by the living being, at the subconscious level, which are prior to, and necessary for the occurrence of sense perception. So sensation is inherently meaningful.
Sure. Glad you asked.
Do you have an example of meaning that does not consist of a plurality of different things and a creature capable of drawing correlations, connections, and/or associations between them? All meaning requires something to become sign/symbol, something to become significant/symbolized and a creature capable of connecting the two.
That's a strong claim. All it takes is one example to the contrary. It agrees with current convention in terms of theories of meaning, and there are no examples to the contrary. That's more than adequate reason to warrant belief that those statements are true.
You've misunderstood.
A quick perusal of the thread will clearly show the astute reader that I draw and maintain the distinction between that which is existentially dependent upon language and that which is not. Animals without language cannot have the same complexity of thought and belief(conceptualizations) that linguistic animals such as ourselves can have... nor do they need to.
To accuse me of anthropomorphism is to neglect all sorts of things I've been arguing, which amounts to an invalid objection.
A prima facie example of a conclusion that is false as a result of it's having been based upon false premisses borne of misunderstanding(assuming sincerity in speech).
In terms of QM tho. I mean - I don't know. I'm quite sure that, at most, 2 of us here are qualified to talk about this stuff w/r/t to metaphysical implications, and those 2 are liars.
This presupposes that a creature can draw correlations, connections, and/or associations between things that have yet to have been perceived, sensed, and/or detected.
Impossible.
Before long we will need to draw and maintain the distinction between some and all...
How do we know that anything means anything to an animal? We know only because we can observe that they respond to things in appropriate ways. We have no evidence that they "draw correlations, connections, and/or associations between things". Unless you can explain how you know they do that, I will remain convinced that you are indulging in anthropomorphic thinking.
By knowing what all examples of meaning are existentially dependent upon(what they all consist of) and the subsequent judicious application of that knowledge as a measuring device to determine whether or not animals are capable of drawing correlations, connections, and/or associations between different things.
This is falsifiable/verifiable. Pavlov's dog, the sound of the bell(the sensation), the drive to eat, and getting fed after hearing the bell.
Quoting Janus
When a specific sound is made just prior to feeding, and it is only made just prior to feeding, then the capable creature will make a connection between the sound and what happens afterwards, assuming enough repetition. We can know that that connection has been made by virtue of careful study. The differences in behaviour prior to and after the connection has been made are undeniable. Involuntary salivation. Going to the food bowl. Etc.
I'm wondering...
Do you have the same skepticism about knowing another human's thought/belief?
All we know is that the animal has come to habitually respond to the sound. Talk of "connections, "correlations' and "associations" is superfluous and anthropocentric.
You actually haven't added or explained anything, you've just repeated the same old tired refrain.
Your rhetoric is boring.
What counts as "superfluous and anthropocentric"?
Pots and kettles...
This coming from someone who has yet to have offered a valid refutation to the argument on any level.
Are you actually denying that the sound of the bell is meaningful/significant to Pavlov's dog?
Involuntary salivation and heading towards the food bowl is more than adequate evidence that the bell is meaningful/significant to the dog.
What's the word "appropriate" doing here? Being appropriate requires following some pre-existing standard for acceptable behaviour.
There is yet to appear any argument from you to refute.
Quoting creativesoul
Where have I denied that?
Quoting creativesoul
"Appropriate behavior" here indicates that it is the predicted behavior.
Oh good!
We agree then? The sound of the bell is meaningful/significant to the dog?
It elicits a response; is that not what you mean by "meaningful"?
Unpack this...
What is "it" referring to...
The sound of the bell, what do you think?
Venus Flytrap and an insect on it's interior...
That's a strong claim. All it takes is one example to the contrary. It agrees with current convention in terms of theories of meaning, and there are no examples to the contrary. That's more than adequate reason to warrant belief that that statement is true.
We do commonly imagine that the responses of (so-called higher, at least) animals are not mere reflexes, such as seems to be the case with insectivorous plants. If you want to say that meaningfulness for animals is more than a feeling response, then what evidence do you have that the bell is meaningful to the animal in some such sense?
Not that I have noticed: perhaps I missed it, so indicate where it has been answered then.
No, it is relevant, because you said that a number doesn't exist until it is counted. So the carbon atom didn't have 6 electrons until someone counted them.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course it had, that's what I said. And it also had 370 wedges and any other number of wedges. Just because someone didn't name, count or draw them doesn't mean they were not there.
A collection is constituted automatically by the objects it is a collection of. Don't you think there was a collection of Sun, Earth and Moon before humans existed? If there wasn't then at least one of those objects didn't exist. And btw, each of those objects is itself a collection of smaller objects.
Correlations, connections, and associations, are drawn completely within the creature itself. The being does this completely internally. Therefore sensation of things exterior to the creature is not necessary for such activity, nor is it necessary for meaning, consequently.
You argue by asserting falsity.
Quoting litewave
No, we were talking about the existence of sets, not the existence of numbers. I see very little point in discussing this with you if you're not going to at least try to follow what I say. I made one reply to you which had a section that was directly on topic for the thread, and you didn't even respond to that section.
Quoting litewave
No, the circle didn't have this. The fact that it could potentially have been divided into 370, 400, 500, or an infinite number of wedges, doesn't mean that it had these wedges.
Quoting litewave
Yes, that's exactly what it means. I could potentially build myself a very nice house. Because I didn't actually do this, means that this very nice house is not there. Likewise with your conception of a circle with 370 degrees, if no one actually conceived of this, the conception is not there. Otherwise, you could insist that all sorts of contradictory "conceptions", the square circle for example, are "there". However, for a concept to "be there" it really requires that someone determine the meaning of terms, defining words, producing logical coherence and consistency. Logical coherency is something which is produced through reasoning, (as creativesoul says,correlations, connections and associations) it isn't just "there".
You said natural numbers are not ordered from small to big unless someone counts them, which is nonsense. The magnitudes of numbers, which order them, are already there by definition of the numbers, no matter whether anyone counts anything.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But the circle is already there and thus the points on its circumference and the point in the center of the circle define all possible wedges. Someone just arbitrarily selected wedges that are 1/360 of the circle and called them degrees.
Yes that's approximately what I said, but your rebuttal is false. Without the act of counting, starting from 1, and proceeding to 2, 3, etc.., there is no reason why one number is "prior" to another. 2 is not prior to 3 for example, nor is 5 prior to 10, without that order which starts at 1. You might say that 10 is larger than 5, or of greater magnitude, but our subject is not magnitude, it is priority.
Quoting litewave
Again, you are relying on falsity. A set of points does not create wedges, nor angles. This requires further definitions, lines. The point at the centre with the points on the circumference, without the lines, provides no wedges. So the definitions of "the circle", and "the line" must be created with coherency and consistency in order that they actual exist as compatible concepts. And there is a problem here with the relationship between the line and the circle, which makes pi "irrational". Despite tireless effort by the Pythagoreans, this irrationality could not be overcome. This is how we know that circles don't actually exist. A circle is an "ideal" which cannot be obtained in actuality because it contains an irrational ratio, i.e., it is contradictory.
But the magnitude determines the order of natural numbers from smallest to biggest. So if there is a magnitude of numbers, there is also their ordering from smallest to biggest.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A line is defined as the set of points whose coordinates satisfy a linear equation. All the points are already there, in the space in which the circle is contained, and their geometrical relations are already there. All lines and all other possible curves in that space are defined. A human just selects those he finds useful for a particular purpose and may give them names.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Irrational numbers are not contradictory. A perfect circle exists in an infinitesimally grained space, which may or may not be the physical space we live in. Anyway, you don't need a circle to define angles; an angle is a relation between two lines.
There was the Sun, Earth and Moon, but no collection...
There is no group over and above the Sun, Moon and Earth themselves, apart from the idea of them as a group, and there is no idea of them as a group absent the human.
There are things such as organisms, planets, stars, land forms, rocks and so on which can be made up of other things. These are not arbitrary groupings of objects. On the other hand, you could say there is a group of things consisting of your nose, my left buttock, a particular camel and Donald Trump's right ventricle; but that is a completely arbitrary grouping which has no reality apart from the objects it consists of and its being thought about.
So, the "collection" of Sun, Moon and Earth could be thought to be real as part of the larger group: the Solar System, which is not an arbitrary collection, but not as a separate "collection" of just those three things.
Yes arbitrariness is on a spectrum, it is not "black and white': there is nothing absolutely arbitrary or non-arbitrary. But it seems reasonable to say that groups of things which are physically connected really belong together independently of human thought on account of their physical connectedness.
Perhaps in terms of quantum entanglement this is so; but in terms of energetic (gravitational, electromagnetic) physical connection there would be a tremendous spectrum of variance from intimate connection to almost zero connection.
What alternative criteria for deciding objective existence would you suggest?
I disagree because your position disqualifies any talk about the objective existence of anything.
We are a part of nature, which means that our experience and understanding is also a part of nature, so why should we not think that our understanding and experience reflects something of objective nature?
It's all about what it is reasonable for us to think, not about knowing anything with absolute certainty. If you want to demand absolute certainty and then reject any and all criteria because none of them can offer that, it's up to you; to me that seems patently unreasonable.
First, objective existence doesn't depend on whether anybody talks about it. Second, even if we accept that everything exists we can still talk about the ways in which this or that object exists.
Quoting Janus
I didn't say that.
Yes, and a good example of that is the realization that arbitrary collections exist only in thought.
Quoting litewave
Then I don't know what you are saying or how it differs from what I have been saying.
Why would they only exist in thought? A collection is constituted by the objects it is a collection of. If Sun, Earth and Moon exist outside our thoughts why should the collection they constitute exist inside our thoughts?
Quoting Janus
I am not denying that our understanding and experience reflect something of objective nature. I am talking from my understanding and experience too.
Because we can arbitrarily think of any old selection of objects as a collection. Do we really need to go over this again?
Quoting litewave
The fact that our understanding can reflect nature does not entail that all our understandings do reflect nature, or that they all reflect nature equally well.
Just because we can think of something doesn't mean it only exists in our thoughts.
If we can think about something we know that it at least exists in our thoughts. If we want to impute additional existence to it beyond that we need some reason for doing so. Observed physical connection is such a reason. I cannot see any reason to impute extra-mental existence to arbitrary collections of objects whether those objects are themselves real or merely imagined.
No. the magnitude does not determine the order. There is nothing inherent within magnitude which says that 100 is before or after 200, or 50, or whatever. Whichever arbitrary ordering that you choose could be completely random. That one is of a larger magnitude than another does not necessitate any order. It is a size, not an order. To produce an order of different magnitudes would require a stipulation, that the bigger are prior to the smaller, or vise versa, but then this would be the order, not the magnitudes themselves It is only when we assume a first, a second, third, etc., that there is a convention of order inherent within the numbering.
Quoting litewave
You're being ridiculous again, claiming "all lines and all other possible curves in that space are defined", without the existence of any definitions. Come on litewave, think about what you are saying.
Quoting litewave
The point is that these circles are conceptual only, they can't exist in any space at all. This is proven by the irrational nature of the ratio between circumference and diameter. The perfect circle cannot exist in space.
What are the contents of this purported correlation? What things are being connected, correlated, and/or associated with each other?
Do you have an example?
I'm just curious... you and litewave are talking about a subject that underwrote our discussion as well...
What's the difference between arbitrary and not? What's the criterion?
In this context arbitrariness could be understood to be inversely proportional to physical connection as i already explained.
So, the animal body is not an arbitrary collection of parts but a dynamic organic unity. On the other hand, a collection consisting of a table, a mountain,, a drawing of Mickey Mouse and the Pacific Ocean is arbitrary because there is no special physical relationship between them.
Thanks.
And a worldview(a collection of one's own thought and belief about themselves and the world)?
Clearly there are different accepted usages for the term "arbitrary", and not all place adequate value upon our own thought and belief.
And so it is not always possible to know the cause.
If the principle of causation is that every event has a cause, then the experiment is perhaps not so philosophically interesting, since what it shows is not that there are events with no cause, but that it is sometimes not possible to know the causal sequence.
So what the experiment does, is to place a limit on our knowledge such that it is not always possible for us to know the causal sequence of some set of events.
Nuh, again. It's your expectation that physics ought be able to distinguish the temporal order of events that is inadequate. Again, you have it backwards.
What follows from the experiment is that there is no reason to suppose that the big bang, a quantum event, has some particular place in a given causal sequence.
An argument, for instance, that held a cause to be essential, and in the absence of a physical cause invoked a supernatural cause, would be fraught.
No, we don't.
Then the experiment breaks that definition, at least in that we do not know which event is cause, and which is effect.
The magnitude says that 100 is smaller than 200 and thus orders the numbers from smaller to bigger.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
All points in space exist and thus they constitute all possible groups of points, that is, all possible lines and curves in that space.
But that's what you are doing. You are imputing extra-mental existence to collections of objects based on arbitrary criteria.
Sorry, I'm not clear what the question is.
Actually not knowing the causal sequence is not the issue in this experiment. What "indefinite" means here is not "unknown causal sequence" but "no singular causal sequence".
In a classical model, the photon would travel either the first path of the interferometer (where transformation A is applied to the photon followed by transformation B) or the second path (where transformation B is applied to the photon followed by transformation A). Thus there would be a single causal sequence, whether known or unknown.
But that's not what happens. Instead the measured state of the photon shows that it must have traveled both paths in superposition (i.e., the interference pattern can't be reproduced with a single causal sequence). Thus the photon has both causal sequences in its history. For an illustration of this experiment, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hGw5jjdHO0.
It's analogous to the double-slit experiment where the interference pattern can't be reproduced classically. The photon has both slit paths in its history.
A physical connection of arbitrary kind and to arbitrary degree. Everything in the universe is physically connected in some way. And Sun, Earth and Moon are gravitationally connected, yet you deny that they constitute a group.
Quoting Banno
I think it's philosophically interesting from a language perspective. Thinking about the mathematical description of the experiment (and QM generally) and translating it into intuitive language.
I don't deny the objects are "out there". I can, and do, deny the collectedness (read "connectedness") of things which are "loosely (read "arbitrarily") connected". For example, there is no special or significant connection whatsoever between your nose and my arse, unless you happen to be sniffing it. :razz: :rofl:
If we observe that some things are physically interacting and hence connected, then that is our experience and understanding, which you have already agreed we have reason to believe reflects reality. So you are contradicting yourself, and your position is not consistent or coherent.
Rather it illustrates the contextuality of causation, the falseness of the presumptions of local realism.
Your conventional notion of causality was already dead and buried. This latest experiment dumps another truckload of dirt on the grave.
If that counts as philosophically uninteresting, so be it.
And I am far from being alone in this. Most mathematicians think that mathematical objects objectively exist, and these objects may not even be physical things.
For example, thoughts and ideas are connected and correlated. This occurs entirely within the being. Therefore sensation is not necessary for such activity. That is my argument, these connections and correlations occur entirely within the being, therefore sensation is not necessary. Have you ever had a dream?
Quoting Banno
So you accept it as an epistemological principle that physicists ought not try to determine the temporal order of events?
Quoting litewave
As I explained, to say 100 is smaller than 200, does not establish an order from smaller to bigger, it just states that one is smaller than the other. Size, and order are two distinct things. Why wouldn't the bigger be prior to the smaller?
Quoting litewave
A line is a specific set of points. All possible groups of points does not make a line, nor does it make a curve.
This is the sort of reply that has me wondering why I bother to reply to you.
I guess my answer is that physics ought not try to determine the temporal order of events were there is none.
You mean when the events are simultaneous? Isn't simultaneity frame dependent though?
No; I mean as in the example in the OP.
What the OP describes is an inability to determine temporal order, not a lack of temporal order. That was my point. Your reply was that you thought it was somehow wrong to expect that physicists should be able to determine temporal order. Do you hold this as a principle?
That's just not so. What the OP describes is exactly a lack of a causal sequence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's right. If there is no temporal order, it would be wrong to expect it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Principle. What do you have packed away in that little bag?
A lack of causal sequence refers to unrelated events. What the quoted article in the op describes is related events in which the temporal order cannot be determined.
When physicists cannot determine the order of events, we cannot conclude that there is no order to those events, because this would require the premise that every time that physicists can't determine something it is indeterminate. I think you would agree that this is a nonsense premise. Therefore, when physicists cannot determine the order of certain events, we ought not conclude that there is no order, only that the physicists cannot determine the order. Is that not agreeable to you?
I was going to show the inherent inadequacy of "arbitrary" when defined as you have, but it's no matter now. Banno wants the thread back on track. I'll oblige.
I've seen the chat. There's a big problem. When something appears to be indeterminate it is impossible to prove that it actually is indeterminate, until all possible techniques for determination have been ruled out. Quantum mechanics is far from that point, it actually appears quite primitive in its capacity for devising possible techniques, so failures in determination are most likely failures of technique.
What's the point in telling me about something you were going to attempt to do? :roll:
Quoting litewave
I don't believe you. You don't experience an arbitrary collection of objects. BTW, an actual collection of objects may also be arbitrary or non-arbitrary. An example of the former would a book, a chicken's egg, a bucket of dirt, and a handkerchief. An example of the latter would be a bunch of plants. The actuality of the collection consists in its being able to be viewed (edit; sensed). But just nominating a bunch of random objects and calling it a collection does not make it any more than a conceptual collection.
As to the purported existence of mathematical objects: what kind of existence do they have? We know that things exist for us materially (things we can sense) and also ideally (things we can think or imagine); what other kind of existence can you think of?
You asserted that physiological sensory perception isn't necessary for drawing correlations or meaning.
Now you claim that thoughts and ideas are connected and correlated. So if your objection want to be coherent, you must now admit that thoughts and ideas are not existentially dependent upon sensory perception.
Have fun with that. I'm out.
If reality includes other people it most certainly cares about that.
:wink:
Go back a page or two... I already did. No need to do it again. I won't reply to you here in this thread about that though. Banno's back on track.
Nothing but vague suggestions, innuendos and promissory notes, nary an actual argument to be found as usual!
No, I gave thoughts and ideas, as examples of connections and correlations which are carried out completely within the living being, to support my premise that connections, correlations and associations are carried out completely within the being. Sensations are of things external to the living being and are therefore not a necessary part of such processes.
Quoting creativesoul
If you want to demonstrate faults with my premises or my logic, then be my guest. If the logic is sound, and you'd prefer to ignore it and live in your own fantasy world, which excludes the possibility of such processes without sensation, then that choice is open to you as well.
It can - it is the reversed order to "smaller prior to bigger". Magnitude defines both orders.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Some of those groups do.
Why not? I experience any collection of objects as a collection.
Quoting Janus
You mean sensed? Why would the objective existence of anything depend on whether some creature can sense it?
Quoting Janus
We can also infer the objective existence of things we can't sense from things we can sense and think. I think that's the case with some sets/collections and other mathematical objects.
No, you experience many actual collections of objects; trees, dogs, parks, cities, people, etc, etc, but you only imagine or think of arbitrary collections of totally unrelated objects. ( I say "totally unrelated" because the only relation they have with one another might be merely that they both exist, or that they could be tenuously associated by thinking about them in relation to categories that might have some overlap).
Quoting litewave
Yes, sensed: I believe our very idea of real existence comes from the idea of the existence of those objects we can sense. There is also ideal existence; the existence of the content of our ideas, but why should we think that such content exists independently of us in any way analogous to the way we think the publicly available objects of sense do? And you haven't answered the question already posed: is there another mode of existence we can conceive of apart from the ideal existence of the content of our thoughts and the concrete existence of the objects of sense. That's the question you need to answer if you want Platonism to be taken seriously.
Quoting litewave
Yes, but what exactly is that "objective existence" if it is not concrete material existence and yet is something more than the merely ideal existence of the contents of thought?
Then I infer that even objects that I can't sense together as a collection, in fact constitute a collection. I infer it from what collections have in common. It seems arbitrary, without any ontological relevance to say that some objects constitute a collection and some don't. Why do you think a city is an objective collection, for example? Because when you see it from a plane it seems to form a relatively compact object? And when you are inside that city, do you still see it as a collection?
Quoting Janus
And I find it absurd to believe that something only exists objectively when someone can sense it. Did the Moon exist objectively before anyone sensed it?
Quoting Janus
It may be an object in a different universe which we may never be able to sense. There may or may not be other conscious beings in that universe that can sense it. It may be an object in a world that only has space and no time - and no life, so it cannot be sensed by anyone. And then there are abstract objects like numbers, which don't have any particular position in space or time and so can't be sensed, and yet the truths about numbers seem to be objective truths, independent of humans, and also reflected in our physical world.
I haven't said that the objective existence of anything depends on its actually being sensed; I have said that our idea of objective existence comes from the idea of things being publicly available to sense. Of course this idea just is, contrary to the idea that the objective existence of things depends on actually being sensed and only obtains when things are being sensed, that the things of sense exist even when not being sensed.
Quoting litewave
This speaks to the evolved common invariances of human reasoning, which I would say are themselves objective (in the sense of being independent of what anybody thinks about them, and of whether anybody is thinking about them) and are plausibly reflected in neural structures.
You still haven't attempted to answer the hard question I posed to you.
I gave you examples of objects that may exist outside of our minds and unable to be sensed: abstract objects and objects in worlds without time.
Yes, but you haven't explained what kind of existence such purported objects might have, beyond being concrete (would be able to be sensed if the appropriately equipped percipient were present) or ideal (actually thought). It's true that we can all think numbers, but it does not seem to follow from this that numbers exist as objects, independently of being thought as objects. Our idea of concrete objects, on the other hands, is an idea of objects that exist independently of being sensed.
Objects that can be sensed are parts of spacetime. But what is spacetime? Theory of relativity treats spacetime as a mathematical structure, a kind of metric space where the dimension of time is a special kind of spatial dimension. And there are many other possible mathematical structures, for example pure spaces, without a time dimension. So objects that are parts of such spaces cannot be sensed, yet they are not in our heads either. And then there are mathematical structures that are not even metric or topological spaces, for example functions.
Existence, in its most general sense, is identity: any object that is identical to itself, exists. And it exists in the way in which it is defined. (note however that it must be defined consistently in relation to everything, otherwise its identity would be violated)
I'm not interested in considering Relativity theory in the context of this discussion. Spacetime is a theoretical construct; the question of its mind independent existence encounters exactly the same problems as that of mathematical objects as far I can tell.
So magnitude allows for opposite orders. It also allows for any other order that one might like to use, counting by tens by twenties, odd numbers, even numbers, Fibonacci order, subtracting magnitudes, dividing or multiplying magnitudes, any possible order. Since it allows for the possibility of opposite orders, and any other order, it really doesn't define order at all.
Quoting litewave
Your condition was "all possible groups of points". If you restrict this to some groups, then we no longer have that initial condition. And if you restrict the group of points, to the definition of a line, then clearly we are not talking about all possible groups of points in a given space, we are talking about a defined line.
No, it defines all those orders you mentioned.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But the group of points that define a line is contained in the group of all possible groups of points, which is the space itself. So the line exists in the space, together with other lines and curves.
Obviously that's wrong, just like your claim that all the possible points in a space define al the lines, curves and angles. For an order to be defined, it must be defined, just like for a line, curve, or angle to be defined, it must be defined. The possibility of infinite different orders does not define those orders.
:yikes:
No... and then explain why the correct answer is "yes"...
So, you admit that thoughts and ideas are not existentially dependent upon physiological sensory perception...
Right, so meaning does not require sensations, it appears like we now agree. So making connections, correlations and associations whereby a being establishes meaning, could be carried out by a being which does not sense. And in the evolution of living beings it is possible that they evolved so as to develop the capacity to make connections correlations and associations prior to being able to sense.
Where we disagree is whether sensation requires meaning. If it does, then meaning is prior to sensation and those primitive living beings which do not sense actually do establish meaning. Don't you see that sensation necessarily involves making connections, correlations and associations, through memory, and therefore sensation does requires meaning? Without these connections and associations and correlations to the past, each sensation would be like an entirely new experience to the being, and the being would be lost in the apparent randomness of it all, having completely new experiences at every moment of its life. This is not the case though as sensation is a useful thing to the being. It is useful because the being is drawing connections, correlations, etc., and therefore sensation itself is meaningful.