Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist
nautil.us
nautil.us
I went through the stages of OP (on a way smaller scale, I do not have his experience) and I think this is awesome. You continuously go from "oh yeah, now I get it" to "crap". This always have you on the bleeding edge between "this si physics, I know that" and "yes, but what if...". To me this is the essence of knowledge though curiosity.
I started my PhD on a specific topic and at some point I was a bit stuck (not panic mode stuck but pissed off stuck). I had dinner with a friend, we were discussing about my work (she is also a physicist) and she off-handly suggested something. And bam! my world changed. The direction of the thesis changed. I added an extra thesis director because what I was about to do was a world where the hands of men did not step on yet.
I thanked her profusely for her help in the thesis and suggested a joined publication (which she did not want to take because she was not interested and asked me to stop stalking her :))
And this is how science moves: because of eureka moments under the shower or at dinner or because someone thought "hmmm..." (looking at you Nikola Tesla).
So the fact that this guy doubts about what the world is, and that he is a theoretical physicist (so hopefully will not switch to some insanities) is awesome.
The most fascinating thing to me is how subtle body sensations lead to thoughts and vice versa.
Also, it’s impossible to disprove the existence of free will because it requires will to make a conclusion like that.
Free will is much closer to leprechauns (we still haven't mapped every forest!) on the truth spectrum than it is to cancer cures or fusion energy.
Considering that we as human beings don't get to decide what exactly we remember, recall, when we recall or how much we recall - that is memory. What we remember and what we forget. I point this out because it's not a conscious activity but also determines actions, greatly so even.
In the Monopoly example perhaps a property is bought bc its a favorite color or they remember winning before with it or its the one they kno their cousin wants. Whatever the personal reasons, there are reasons - nobody plays Monopoly with all logic and reason.
So we have limited circumstantial choices and predetermined biased assessments of those choices - both beyond our control.
What is free will in that context?
At least in Judaism there is sizable chunk of believers who believe in God and that everything is God's will and thus there is no free will - Hashgachah Pratit - so at the very least only one direction of your argument could hold, though I don't understand why it's a coherent idea to begin with.
(also, which particular audience are you trying to insult with that categorical statement and why?)
(Although free will is required to make any conclusion about the presence or absence of free will, so the point is moot).
Definitely random generators can be a subset of logic, not the superset.
Each series of words and arguments is equivalent because no understanding actually exists.
There is no mechanism behind picking one series of words over the other because a random number generator is behind anything.
You can’t trust such a system to produce any logical outcome, therefore free will (embodied understanding and decisions etc.) is required to conclude that free will doesn’t exist :)
Saying an airplane concludes to tell the pilot to "pull up" is correct as far as I think most people see it.
Turing machine based robots will get stuck until the end of time stuck in infinite loops that humans are able to easily step out of. This is one of the requirements for understanding, so examples of robots aren’t very illuminating.
But I don't think we can agree on anything here, I am a materialist and you seem to be a dualist. You may believe in some kind of god(s), (Otherwise how could will-ful humans emerge from will-less matter ?) and I don't intend to debate this here.
My worldview is that our brains exist in a material universe that is governed by physical rules, and until I see proof of the existence of some kind of soul that is somehow able to make decisions detached from our material condition (culture, health, environment, past history), I think my position is the most reasonable one.
In fact, this is a proof of free will. If you were compelled to consider the consequences of your actions then evil would be impossible. The fact that we see evil means that people can choose not to think about what will happen when they do evil things.
Think carefully. Think friend, think.
Unpacking: assuming you aren't coerced, you choose one of N options "freely". But all the factors (many inscrutable) that contribute to the ultimate choice are predetermined from your biology to all your lived experience (which ultimately is encoded in your brain in some manner).
Sam Harris has a short (7 minute) video with a demonstration of this. The demonstration starts about 1:20 in, but it is worth watching the minute setup.
P.s. Am I wrong for assuming that whenever someone talks about free will without mentioning compatiblism, they most likely talking about some other form?
What's your definition?
It’s an illusion but that doesn’t negate we must operate as though our will is free!
Time is a fourth dimension but think of everything that has and everything that will happen as a three dimensional cube for a moment.
Now step outside the cube and observe everything that has and ever will happen.
Does that mean there was no free will because it's all observable and was "locked in" ?
No of course not. It's a unique box of time. If you look around there could be another unique box of time with different free will choices being made inside it.
(btw this is one way they attempt to theorize an excuse for quantum entanglement, it "knows" the outcome already by also existing outside the box)
If you choose to focus entirely on baking you'll have eureka moments about that.
It’s like white swans. If you’ve never seen a bird, you might think that nobody has ever seen a white swan.
Focus/diffuses modes are widely known/accepted.
You can direct the unconscious thoughts too. If I spend some time intensely trying to solve a problem on the conscious level, often I get new ideas on how to approach it in the morning or during a long run (without thinking about it on the conscious level).
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Unrelated: the discussions about free will often miss that the existence of atoms doesn't imply that a wooden table doesn't exist: they are on different levels of abstraction--no point in comparing.
And than one thinks hard.
And then one fine day "eureka!"
But they do not happen on their own. It takes effort to make them possible, even though there is no guaruantee that they will come (Dead ends exists).
eureka moments don't hit like bird poo in the middle of the street. they hit people who have spent months-decades thinking about the problem.
a more convincing argument is that they didn't have a choice in choosing that ball of yarn to pick at - mostly it comes along as an irrepressible urge to figure it out.
Do you perceive bicycle as a poor man's mode of transport?
Rich countries is where everyone can travel by public transport or bicycle (or car). Poor countries is where everyone HAS to travel by car (locked in car dependency)
I see what you are trying to say: its better to cry and have wealth than to cry and not have wealth. But bike=poor, car=rich is not a good analogy. It sends the message bikes/public transport are for loosers, when its not. Well it might be in car-centric societies, but not in more fair societies.
This is from someone who commutes to the office by bike daily (30 km) in a country where biking=good! :)
Actually the joke was Mercedes vs "trottinette" but I did not have a good translation of this French work handy (a kind of scooter you stand on and you traditionally move by pushing your foot on the ground - now they are electric). Which of course does not change anything because the scooter is good and comparing this in car-centric countries etc.
30k is a good daily ride. Keep it up!
Our senses and brains are well suited to reasoning about and making decisions in environments at “human” scales. By that, I mean that humans don’t receive relativistic, atomic or quantum phenomena directly with our unaided senses, and therefore our brains never developed intuition for these phenomena.
So it’s no surprise at all that our intuition completely fails us at those scales.
Again, our intelligence is not “general”; it’s hominid.
Linear growth or fuzzy up and down growth/swings seems way more commonplace
True, unbounded exponential processes don't exist in nature. There is a simple explanation about why not: assuming the speed of light is the speed limit of causality and we don't have weird things like warp gates, then the influence of something cannot go further than a sphere around it expanding at the speed of light. The volume of this sphere of influence increase following a cubic function. Now, if an exponential process happen withing that sphere, for example a population growth, it will run out of space at some point, because an exponential function will always beat a cubic (or any polynomial) at some point. The fastest growth possible is cubic, not exponential.
One explanation that I've come up with to explain this apparent paradox is that while humans may not have any special insight or intuition into microscopic or macroscopic phenomenon, at least we don't have any biases either. Thus, we are able to make progress in these areas by simply pouring in huge amounts of time and brainpower.
On the other hand, for subjects that are more "human," we come pre-equipped with a large number of instinctive insights; or to put it another way, we're burdened with a huge number of innate biases. These are mostly shortcut heuristics that only vaguely approximate the truth, and are deeply and unavoidable biased in ways that we ourselves are blind to. Thus, no matter how much time and brainpower we pour into these subjects, progress remains slow and theories remain poor.
It's a well-known theorem in machine learning that an ensemble of weak (only slightly better than random chance) but unbiased learners will eventually converge to a strong learner, but a collection of biased learners will never become unbiased unless their biases are all uncorrelated. In humans, of course, the biases are shared across all members of the species so do not cancel out in this way.
There isn’t enough energy in the universe to calculate the full Schrödinger equation of a human. That tells us something…
I love your example bc it highlights the bias of science of for me. We know that quantum equations can't be looked at - I'd say that's near trivia level "known" at this point. What it actually means functionality is obviously more complicated but simply stated - reality is aware of our observation of it and reacts, at least at a quantum level.
Scientific bias is so great that they can literally work with a system that must account for that rather incredible fact, while ignoring it bc they can't explain it.
The placebo effect, NYT crossword experiments, the Stanford University 60some% threshold for an idea to be adopted/accepted by all of a society as a known/true belief - those 3 facts reshape our understanding of the world if they are actually facts. All three are undeniable facts that have simply never been acknowledged or examined further.
Further bias is displayed with the insistence that all things spontaneously came into existence from nothing, despite nothing coming from nothing for no reason - that's impossible, as no example within reality exists I can't just take that at face value, but it's the accepted "theory" - despite common sense stuff like, say a future corporation created this universe - or an inexplicable being even, BOTH trillions of times more likely to be the origin of the universe than nothing exploding for no reason.
I could write a book about the incredible biases that allow some of the smartest people to actually talk about the multiverse is a serious sense - the universe is not infinite, so a new universe can't come into existence for every possibility, that would be an incredibly stupid waste of resources - with any thought at all the commonly understood definition of the multiverse fall completely apart. It may be the dumbest thing we believe rn frfr
This is all without discussing the ACTUAL bias in science that comes from who funds stuff and etc...
So much bias in science
It isn't only instinct tho. Heritage and culture. Societal beliefs. Personal experience. Expectations. What we recall and forget, how and when we recall - all automatic functions of memory. Your brain is biased and actively attempts to deliver a reality that adheres to that bias - it can do so. An example is that we don't choose what we look at or when we do - to maintain a smooth image, without choppiness, our eyes dart to the next object of our attention before our eyes begin to move.
Perception is reality. We see what we want to see... except that we rarely actively choose to look, see and observe - we outsource the whole thing. If buying a new car is in the back of your mind bc it's necessary, your subconscious will see your anxiety, and high light every car dealership to you in a hundred mile radius - that can also be a little stressful - it's trying to help.
You don't actually think about the words that come out of your mouth in conversation - nobody does that at speed of talk. We just have a mental idea prompt and we talk.
All that we don't decide outright is fundamentally biased - that's the root of it, what has been before, what we/the body liked and how to get more of that and nothing it doesn't want. The choice of tacos or burgers - the presentation of your "craving" as maybe one or the other is biased framing.
Most of what the endless stream of thoughts says - the words that flow into our conscious mind, often for reasons not clearly defined, all of that is bias.
The intellect and knowledge we accumulate is what we use with logic and reason to make sense of reality as we live it - knowledge once learned becomes a newspaper unless well tended - unchanging, unadaptable and less applicable over time.
An old dog can learn new tricks but it might have to let go of the tricks it thinks it knows now - so an old dog just doesn't do that. Old tricks still be old tho - want isn't part of the adapt or die equation.
All of this is bias, fundamental bias - as humans all experience aspects of these things but no two people have identical bias it cannot simply be ignored.
This is the base of the "right view" that Buddha talked so much about. We think we are something we are not, that we do things we do not and the stuff we do we don't know we do or why we do anything at all. Where we sit amidst all this automation and optimization is critical.
We are not what thinks. We are what is aware of the thoughts being thunk. The view from there is better, like 3rd person view vs 1st person in video games. Most of the body is like this, most of our habits and routines are just habit and routine, with nothing real behind them - more like randomness repeated into normalcy.
Like, one day you decide to read a mystery series and you enjoy them. You begin to read them when you wake up. Then you finish the series. Ten years later you still read every morning but it doesn't matter what.
The last movement that your body made... did you consciously decide to move? Did you decide to scratch your arm? Have you ever drank all the coffee without realizing it til the cup was at your lips? Ever drive for hours a very familiar route and realize you can't exactly remember doing most of it. Our brain fill in the corners of rooms for us - ceilings at familiar places can surprise us, bc we've never bothered to look up. When you walk, do you decide to take a step?
Everything you are, all that you have not actively decided to be, is essentially just bias. That is what most people are but that doesn't make it correct, there is a right view that reveals what is.
This is a rant. This is huge tho and deserving of one, especially on a dead comment thread.
Scientists be dealing with all this bias too, they are no different from you.
I think it's better to say that our minds have built in optimization for some patterns of behavior and thought but it doesn't mean we aren't "generally intelligent".
Just as if you have Turing complete language designed for accounting it doesn't mean you can actually write anything in it, even if that would be not optimal.
Humans are absolutely "generally intelligent" - the languages we all come preloaded with provide a substantial base hominid intelligence.
Were one to compare all known species and their respective forms of intelligence, humans would be the standard for general intelligence and intelligence in general - this is only debatable if you entirely ignore the works of humanity, as it is only us that can see all known things as resources or potentially so.
Let a tree be known by it's fruits. Not to discredit the intelligence of dolphins, octupi/squids, chimps, ravens, certain dogs and cats but by no means are they, in any measurable way, comparable generally to a human or even specifically, save species specific intelligence, like how to operate a built in ink cloud organ.
If the point of evolution is to create endlessly more complex iterations of life forever, which it might as well be, we are the finest known example of evolutions success - we are the earth's magnum opus. Furthermore, were Earth alive and we its offspring, we are more than it - as a child is more than it's mother or father alone. We are the most important thing here rn.
At least so far. Definitely win overall.
Can another species do math, identify everything, name it all and turn a tree into a chair? That's base reqs to challenge for the smart crown.
tl;dr: I agree with the comment I'm replying to - I just like to write books
Humanity itself, insofar as its brain was made possible by new modes of nutrient-assimilation from the environment, is inherently technological. Nature is updated by work.
Edit: here’s the link https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4YtbQkzLo1E
While our intuition is indeed informed by experience it should be understood that speculative meditations (should one care not to believe in inspiration "from above") can enrich mental content and provide structural elements for conceptualization that transcends ordinary perception.
So the intellect is indeed superior to mentation. And for many of us this distinction is informative of our belief in the incompleteness of our self-perception.[..]
Since then I’ve worked a bit in statistics and machine learning. There’s a saying in this field that captures my subconscious conclusion well: “all models are wrong, but some models are useful”.
I’ve often said that I would have loved to do a PhD in physics in 1910, but less so in 2010. The models physicists found in the 20th century were extraordinarily useful. I have little hope that I will see anything comparable in my lifetime.
Don’t get me wrong: More models will undoubtedly be found, and there’s beauty and honor in that work. But they will most likely all be “wrong”, and far less useful than e.g. the models that let us harness nuclear reactions.
It took 30-50 years for anything in the 1910s to become particularly useful. Even the photoelectric effect itself took over 30 years before the first devices (photomultipliers) were even developed.
The much celebrated quantum mechanics likely wasn't so useful either until 30-40 years later with electronics such as transistors.
General relativity didn't really find a use until GPS and that was over 70 years later.
The only field that contributed 'relatively' quickly during that time period was nuclear physics, but that field saw an extreme concentration of effort due to the war.
Meanwhile theoretical condensed matter physics today is rife with things that are on the cusp of being useful with 2D materials, superconductors, quantum simulators, etc
That there is something deeper and unknowable and "informationally huge" seems obvious. We didn't bring quarks or quasars into existence, we "discovered" them as and when we extended our senses far enough using technologies (which are themselves a result of us becoming comfortable enough with our immediate reality, as a sort of positive feedback loop).
There is every reason to suspect that this deeper reality does not stop where our technologically extended abilities peter out. Our imperfect and tentative understanding when reaching the extremes of scales (of time, space, complexity, etc) is perfectly understandable. Why should a finite carbon brain be able to map out a coherent and finite model of something much, much bigger than itself.
On the other hand over millennia of brainstorming (literally) we have collected some interesting datapoints about this deeper reality: it is not "malicious", and somehow it agrees to be mapped by us (mathematically), even if in disconnected parts.
In fact this benevolent aspect of deeper reality has made us unusually cocky. Imagine the existential angst if the universe changed its laws at whim. We'd be back to praying. E.g., that gravity remains stable for a while so that we don't drift into space. This premature self-assuredness explains repeated scientific episodes of proclaiming "we have explained everything". This also feeds the sterile chase of "a theory of everything".
In fact the limits of our understanding are in front of our eyes, everywhere. We haven't really explained a single phenomenon in the so called "complexity science" domain. Deeper reality is all around us and the most dramatic and impactful scientific revolutions are still ahead of us.
Maybe
Have asked that and have a guess: Darwin-style selection rewarded getting some rational understanding of the most important parts of nature -- fire, rock tools, clean water, agriculture, staying warm in winter, basic geometry, bows and arrows, the Pythagorean theorem, levers, wheels, boats, etc. -- we encountered. Well, it so happens that in this universe such "rational understanding" is enough to understand basic math, physics, chemistry, biology, ... back to the Big Bang, the 3 K background radiation, cells, reproduction, nutrition, diseases and immunity, ....
I gave up on the US education physics community when my teachers couldn't give a valid proof of Stokes' theorem, explanation of Young's double slit, or the beginnings of quantum mechanics.
So, now I have several polished treatments of each of Stokes' theorem, Maxwell's equations, and special relativity. Got a good background in probability (Neveu, Poincaré recurrence, martingales, etc.), enough to get a good path through thermodynamics. From Rudin, etc., got enough solid Fourier theory to check carefully the uncertainty principle in physics (doubt that what physics does there is fully justified) -- also carefully treated in a great course in "Analysis and Probability". For differential geometry, an Andrew Gleason student gave me some lectures and explained that the keys are the inverse and implicit function theorems, proved in a book by W. Fleming and just exercises in a Rudin book -- local nonlinear versions of what is easy in linear algebra. So, now I attack physics as a curious amateur!
I do remember a remark from a good mathematician: "Physics abuses its students." Well, they can abuse me no longer, and I can still do high quality study of physics.
we can - Who is the we?
our senses - Whose senses? What experience the sensory input?
After the experience all the religious teaching started to make sense instantly.
I think the thing is Self, Soul, Consciousness, Atman, Reality, Simulation, Screen or whatever you call it.
It's what all the world religions point to.
Though teachings has been made so hard to grasp by culture and dogma.
It's something you(the ego) cannot know without experiencing it. You can try to believe it. But the ego will not let you.
Imagine your knowingness as an information stream of images (memories included), smell, feelings, sound etc.
For most people the information stream has the ego dominating.
When the ego is strong people identify themselves with the idea of them based on their memories, beliefs, culture etc.
When the ego goes away I think you are left with who you really are which when you experience feels eternal and permanent and is a placeholder in which everything appears.
Maybe it likes all the drama and want it to forget who really it is? Like how we play games or watch movies?
Or maybe the forgetfulness is a side effect of creation and not intended.
Maybe it has no intent.
I am not sure. I can only guess as an ego by referring to things I saw in the past.
Did we? If we're in a simulation instead of base reality, it's possible that simulation have actually created them for us when we started looking, depending on the scope and paramaters of simulaiton scenario.
It's like asking someone on a date: maybe they were in a superposition before, but now they have to answer, and having answered ("been observed"), that answer is highly likely to stay constant in the short term.
(when you think about it from this point of view, it's classical physics that's counterintuitive: why should we expect that asking questions about one projection of state doesn't affect the answers we get from later asking about others, not even in the slightest?)
Does that make sense?
Just in the same way as that only visible from current perspective objects are being drawn on a frame of a 3D game.
Currently unobserved parts of the simulation might exist in different form.
It's okay to disagree with simulation theory, but it is a perfectly valid possibility according to everything we know.
Personally, I don't think it's the only possibility, but i think it's quite probable and should be taken seriously.
* if yes, then I'd have to admit that the omega-tower could be as interesting to study as the 0-tower, but if no then I'd maintain the 0-tower is way more interesting than any of its successor towers.
(this line of approach, less formal and perhaps more congenial to CPS' other culture, is inspired by Dewey and James' pragmatism, in which philosophical problems are only well-posed if they have "cash value". We hackers don't make comparisons without subsequently using the flag value; they didn't ask questions whose answers are moot)
If I were building a simulation I would just have not made gravity universally coupling because it makes it hard to chunk reality up into parts. Thus it seems like the universal coupling of gravity is evidence against a simulation hypothesis.
So it's not that you have two magnetic marbles and rotating one rotates the other, it's that you're rolling two dice with identical parameters and can expect that at any given slice of time they'll be doing the same thing.
Is that incorrect?
So: how does particle A "know" how to produce the correct correlation if 1) the value is produced 'on the spot' and 2) there isn't a well-defined causal order between measurement of A and B?
Really all QM says is that there's some probability distribution of an outcome, and you don't know what outcome occurred until you take a measurement.
For example, you could imagine a world simulator that uses probabilistic logic gates. Where with some probability a bit could be 0 or 1. Now you could say that the bit is in some superposition or is 0 in world A and 1 in world B, blah blah.
But that's dumb. Really, the bit is 0 or 1 with some probability of the universe simulator. And you don't know which, until you observe its value.
We can describe the fields, but we can't get behind them, the how and why? At least we can't get behind them yet, but if we do, do we know the how of that or is it just another layer?
Newtonian gravity is not wrong, it is pretty good model of gravity in a certain region of the parameter space.
It’s not wrong, it’s just a pretty good model of gravity in a certain region of the parameter space.
Except of course, that it is wrong.
Your example reminds me more of the difference between Aristotelian and Newtonian physics. Aristotle - looking at the world around him - thought that the natural state of motion is being at rest and that it requires a force to make an object move. Newtonian physics realizes that this is not the case, that without forces objects keep moving instead of coming to rest, that Aristotle lacked a proper understanding of the role of friction.
To come back to gravity, space flight probably still heavily uses Newtonian gravity and it works, for that reason alone I would not call it wrong. Objects falling at a constant 9 m/s seems to have much less practical use and does not even get the most important characteristic of gravity - that it accelerates objects - right, so I will agree with you and call it wrong.
There is reality and there is series of better and better mathematical models of reality and all of them are wrong in the strict sense until we eventually find the final theory but even then it is not clear that we could even recognize that we have arrived at the destination. In the end a binary characterization as right or wrong does not make too much sense for physical theories, they occupy a continuum of correctness.
My view of the universe is going to be totally different if Newtonian mechanics is the "truth", versus if something like quantum mechanics is the "truth." The former depicts a totally deterministic and knowable-in-principle clockwork universe, whereas the latter has randomness and ignorance that cannot be removed even in principle. Quantum mechanics may not be the whole truth, but it's certainly so different that it shows earlier approaches to be not just incomplete but totally incorrect about their fundamental assumptions, even if they can be used to make useful predictions. Quantum mechanics isn't just more useful, it's more true, whereas Newtonian mechanics might be more useful than some other theory, but actually less true in some sense.
I dunno, I'd rather clean up an accident from a dog than from a particle accelerator.
Observe. Hypothesize with falsifiable statements. Form experiments that could disprove the falsifiable statements. Observe. Publicly make falsifiable statements to peers capable and incentivized to disprove them.
How can this fail to lead us to truth that is as close to objective as possible? What greater method exists?
You can't tell someone "here's this totally objective way you can pick apart your conscious experience into a bunch of statistics, and when you do change X I predict you'll see the statistics vary like Y". You can kinda just point their brain in a direction and hope that they experience it for themselves.
Another example, I think, is domains that are under optimisation pressure or control of some kind (like an ecosystem, or much more simply a thermometer). There was a post on HN a few days ago about causality, and how the standard statistical methodologies for determining causality kinda break down when you start measuring systems like this. Correlation is not causation, but in these systems causation no longer necessitates correlation either! Perhaps a different kind of epistemology would be useful here too.
Anyway, not sure this is making sense. Would be curious to hear your thoughts.
It is merely a formula - a method to determine, what is to be determined, why and to what end ALL is Science - the method alone is nothing, method cannot be without data and a hypothesis cannot be without someone to make it and the knowledge required to make a hypothesis. Without logic and reason the method, data, hypothesis and results would be nothing. Without society to allow for and direct progress there would be nothing to hypothesize.
Science is the sum of all of that. The method is a tool - not even the most effective necessarily. The method with make a light bulb - if allowed 200+ tries. Other tools allow for more direct results.
Tesla who transformed Edison's power delivery system into something infinitely more useable and that was only the beginning of his demonstrating mastery of a whole new thing - much of his inventions couldn't come of the scientific method. The method could be used to verify his brilliance but wasn't the source of it.
Tbh, it's literally just predefined, recorded, trial and error - that's it. Just guess, try and repeat - according to the rules so it can be replicated by anyone, super simple really.
It's like a brute force password hack - not the sharpest tool in the shed, but an effective one.
To date, but I doubt this is a law of nature. What prevents the next big discovery from being the final piece that grounds the system making everything else fall into place?
I completely agree that the scientific process is our best/only tool for meaningfully advancing our understanding of the world.
I'm just crudely saying the same thing as the author I think, but I wanted to emphasize how uncomfortable this makes me. In some sense it feels like being a prisoner in a perceptual cell you can't escape from surrounded by a reality you'll never know.
Having philosophy as a counterpoint (in my case dabbling in Buddhism) has been essential to keep me calm and relaxed.
For example. We might say that a helium atom is "mostly empty space" because if we measured the position of one of the electrons it would tend to be far away from the other one (maybe the right way to think of this is to look at the spread of coherent position states). But, in fact, around a helium atom the electrons interact pretty strongly (enough to distort their wave functions substantially) so in that sense the region around a helium atom is significantly less empty than the space around the sun between (say) mercury and venus, which have very little effect on one another. What I am getting at is that all this idea of "atoms are mostly empty space" gets at is that our definition of "empty space" is pretty vague. Vague enough to do some silly word gymnastics.
i cant understand what you mean by knowing reality. reality is sui generis and knowledge is a relational concept.
Whether particles truly have any material extent at all, or are simply literal points representing the center of various interaction radii, is unknown and probably unknowable. It's not even clear what the difference would mean. Can a particle somehow "take up space" and prevent another particle from occupying that space if it interacted with no force at all? I'm not a physicist and kind of talking out of my ass here, but I think the Pauli exclusion principle implies maybe, but it doesn't apply to all particles.
Human perception relies entirely upon electromagnetism. Once you get down to distances less than the wavelength of the highest frequency photons and electrons, we can probe and describe the relationships mathematically, but I don't think it makes sense to try and conceive of what these things "are" in some greater ontological sense. We inherently analogize to what things look and feel like, but looking and feeling like anything is a higher-level emergent phenomenon of electromagnetic interactions.
What I've noticed is that most physicists are aware of the great epistemological puzzles, and may even have briefly dabbled in them, but also tend to ignore them if there's work to be done. There's a lot of pleasure and utility to be gained from just finding a hard problem and working on it, maybe even solving it, or inventing something.
When people find out that I'm a physicist, and ask me about those puzzles, I usually plead ignorance. I'm not dismissive of them, or anti-intellectual, but I think you shouldn't let them be an obstacle to the enjoyment of physics, either as a spectator or practitioner.
It may well be that multiple explanations are consistent with the most basic phenomena. The criterion for the reality of the theory is whether it does better than random (its predictive power, equivalently how well it can compress the observational data). We can try to find the simplest explanation, but we can never know if we have it [2]. We can stop thinking of theories as being real or not in a binary sense, and merely ask how well they compress the data. Of course, different theories can achieve the same compression by compressing different aspects of the data! Your pattern can look like my noise :-)
Luckily and interestingly, the physics of the macroscopic world is in many cases effectively independent of the underlying microscopic rules [3], with the details of the microscopic physics being screened off as complexity emerges.
Personally, I like to think of abstraction as a kind of hierarchy of hardware + software: at each level, some useful ontology is picked out for stable patterns to emerge (e.g. the software of "fluids" emerging from the hardware of quantum "particles"). Layers of software at one level become the hardware substrate for the next rung up the abstraction ladder.
Luckily, we get to choose the software that runs on us, so don't forget to vote this fall ;)
[1]: https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/cla...
Chomsky coined the technical term "explanatory adequacy" for that, which is used/recognized among linguists and psychologists.
Love this, thanks for these insights.
There could evil as judgement, as nature, as action, as consequences or as being.
One starting point is somehow someone can judge a being, a thought, an action and a consequence as evil. Is killing … it depends upon context so much … or should we just back to I or God or whoever think it is evil itbis evil?
Action if assume above seems easy. I or some beings know it is evil or not and act on it. It is an evil act.
It is when consequence are considered it is really complicated. It can change over time as an evil act can have good consequence in certain place and time.
Nature as evil or not is part of one major Buddha sect - Tien Tai claim Buddha has evil in its nature forever just not do it (if … )
Evil as a being like God?
The problem of evil in the religion context has a much wider issue one has to consider.
Givens that twentieth century physics (apart from General Relativity) is based on Bohr’s foundation, no wonder people get confused.
The mathematization of physics hasn’t helped either. That Bell’s theorem “proves” something is language applicable to a mathematical structure, not to the physical world itself.
Mathematics alone cannot reflect on its conditions of possibility, and mathematical physics is as inept in that domain. The reason why the quantum physics vs. general relativity thing can't be resolved is not because we don't have the right math, its because to overcome it requires a paradigm shift away from the mathematization of physics, and to actually gain a familiarity with the conceptual apparatus that engendered these theories.
> That Bell’s theorem “proves” something is language applicable to a mathematical structure, not to the physical world itself.
This is simply wrong, Bell's theorem definitely applies to the "physical world". A world that does not violate Bell's inequality would look vastly different to ours.
Arguably this is down to philosophy of science, and I admit to take to the ideas of Karl Popper on falsification as a criterion for sound physical theories.
Do you not accept the validity of experimental verification?
From the responses to my comment, it may seem pedantic, but it is the wording that strikes me. "Proof" belongs in a different category than experimental verification [1], as it imply logical consistency, or even an equivalence between the model and the object it attempts to model. So in mathematics, proofs make sense because it is dealing with relationships within a closed axiomatic structure. We haven't discovered the axioms of Nature, and therefore everything we propose, as a law, of nature rests on the relative foundation of our experiments.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you are a hardcore empiricist (like Bohr, in a sense, were) reasoning beyond the measurable is not physics. That is why the Copenhagen Interpretation doesen't deal with what the probability distribution of a wave-function actually is, simply that it is a useful construct to represent the possible outcomes of a measurement, until an expectation value is calculated. Perhaps that is also why Wheeler's many-world interpretation got off to a bad start, as it didn't provide any new measurable predictions.
[1] or rather lack of falsification, to adhere to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
What makes me optimistic here is that since the enlightenment we have a good track record with arriving at better and better models. In the language of David Deutsch: We are arriving at better and better explanations, where the quality of an explanation is determined by rigidity ("how hard it is to vary") and reach ("in how many situations does it apply"). His books "The Fabric of Reality" is a great book by the way, he describes how the theories of evolution, quantum physics, epistemology and the theory of computation are connected with each other. The bit about good explanations is from "The Beginning of Infinity", also a very good read.
But if we follow the dictionary definition of scientific theory "A coherent statement or set of ideas that explains observed facts or phenomena and correctly predicts new facts or phenomena not previously observed" or "a hypothesis confirmed by observation, experiment etc.", then after the 1970s, theoretical physics about the fundamental building block of reality hasn't really been theoretical physics, but rather hypothetical physics. They have worked on lots of theories (or rather: hypotheses) that they have not been able to test and verify experimentally.
This is the main philosophical, scientific and even cultural challenge today.
The truth is, instead of reality, he would be better off questioning theoretical physics, which indeed does not exist outside the heads of academia.
His "questioning of reality" only happens philosophically (in other words, it is an academic farce), once he gets up to do some grocery shopping he sure knows what to buy so he can eat in order to survive. There is your objective reality.
Humans understand reality if they do not bury their heads in the sand. But academia can get in the way.
I am not alone in thinking this. I was surprised to see Carlo Rovelli talking about it in multiple occasions.
Heres one [0].
Nyaya and Madhyamika Philosophies still have many lessons that are not yet discussed in the spotlight.
The Theory of Everything is just our modern way of saying "God" - they occupy the same position in our lives and society. We need to understand and it needs to make sense to us rn, in this time and space - like religion once did.
Even if incorrect, believing that we have a Theory of Everything is necessary. We have killed God and now find it necessary to create an idea that can encompass the void where God once was. Functionality is key.
I doubt the physicists ability to be objective. This is easily explained by adapting God into a Creator of a Game, us to fully uploaded VR Players, reality to the engine, mechanics and programming - all executed as science has already identified with the laws of the universe, etc.
A future version of Microsoft could easily hypothetically make this game. We already are testing reality to determine if it is a hologram.
I believe Stanford already declared it more likely we live in a simulation than it isn't - bc someday, if we can, we will totally make an exact copy of reality - maybe this it. Maybe we are dead and chose to upload ourselves here. Perhaps Musk is right and we are the NPCs of an alien game...
All of those things are far more likely than a spontaneous universe, coming into existence without cause, creating the universe for no reason and only time + chance allowing for what we call reality.
Far far more faith is needed to believe this not a created thing. I find it almost illogical that this being the simplest and most likely conclusion, that it is ignored. Where is the objectivity?
A working model is all we need to move forward - we can figure out later if it's right or not. I'll bet a seriously considered hypothetical" reality as a construct" would explain a lot of stuff.
You need include the placebo effect, how reality knows when I look at it and how only 60 some % of a society need believe something for all of them to declare it true - the collective unconscious, not as defined now - the NYT crossword experiment collective unconscious, the Theory of EVERYTHING must be all of that.
Purely philosophically I can account for much of reality - including ideas, what they are, how we have them, how they evolve and what they do. I'm not sure everything can actually be accounted for outside of a construct - I can't rn and I've tried.
I wish you all the best of luck.
(Well, the only kind on offer, really.)
Have you informed Dr Balasubramanian?
That is arguably very funny.
I think that it carries two messages, one trivial and one deep.
The trivial one is that physics builds on the human nature to build concepts. Both a jaguar and a quark are ideas that we extract from our perceptions, that we share with others and that help us to model and predict the world - quarks just need a more expensive microscope like the LHC. Sure eagles and prawns may have slightly different versions of concepts since they have different colour perception, but only marginally so.
A practical fellow like a physicist will be clear that when the concepts can make measurable predictions they are worthwhile (we call this meta concept "real"). It is not possible to store the full state of or compute the evolution of anything macroscopic to full precision - such as the positions and momenta of all the particles in a table. So concepts are the only things we can know about reality.
They argue that we may never be able to attain the deep underlying reality - either because it is theoretically unattainable or that we will continue to be resource limited. I contend that this dichotomy is false. It just may never be possible to attain deep underlying reality. The best we can do until we get there is to find some probabilistic rules that work in a pragmatic sense and to refine these tools over time.
[That's pretty much a restatement of the Copenhagen interpretation of 1922].
The deep one is that we are probably looking down the wrong end of the telescope. As far as I can tell (from popular neuroscience) is that our ability to model the perceptual / conceptual processes and how they compose into intelligence remains in the dark ages.
But, given that we each have 70 billion neurones or so, there is a lot of classical physics going on in our heads to make these concepts and we have practically no hard, proven theories about how this works. We are doing layers of pattern recognition and extraction and feedback that allows us to avoid being eaten by Jaguars.
So let's get a proper theory of intelligence. One that let's us work out which aspects of quantum mechanics are philosophically necessary to sustain our subjective experience of space and time. With a substrate with branching / collapsing features. Where time has an arrow with memory in the past and uncertainty in the future. Where cause and effect are loosely coupled. Where there is a notion of free will.
Some endnotes: - The quantum measurement problem is perhaps a limit of this theory - Perhaps the notion of computational reducibility is a stab in this direction [Wolfram] - Probably all you need is emergence for this and not a quantum brain [Penrose]
> Perhaps the notion of computational reducibility is a stab in this direction [Wolfram] - Probably all you need is emergence for this and not a quantum brain [Penrose]
Well, yes, but I'm not sure you can have both of those at the same time without getting very clever. You'd need to make a version of compatibilism that's not just the next in a long line of increasingly convoluted magic shows.
I believe we will never find out what’s the real nature of reality. That doesn’t mean we should stop doing science, though: it makes human live better.
I believe that the “meaning of life” is not about the answer (science telling us what’s the actual meaning) but about the discovery process we embrace: knowing beforehand that we’ll never understand everything and nevertheless keep waking up every day to do the job.
Understanding of reality via physics gave us all electronics too, including one I use to write this and one you use to read it. That's a noble goal on its own, no need to meddle with that.
Pursuit of meaning of life is completely different topic, for different folks, no need to try to mix those two. Plus its very subjective - tons of folks already found it or simply don't care about it.
Of course on the whole understanding makes our lives better, but if you're asserting this for everything, it's probably some kind of a survival bias. The understandings that aren't really useful are often forgotten, while the useful ones are passed down through generations.
It's actually very easy to get caught in understanding niche topics that genuinely find very little application.
In my experience, something about the mind makes it think it is able to know the correct answer to these questions, which is a remarkable but little studied phenomenon.
Do you mean this literally, as in this is knowledge (JTB) that you possess?
> Pursuit of meaning of life is completely different topic
Is this a part of reality, or of something else?
> no need to try to mix those two
How does one go about accurately determining what is needed?
That's Engineering not Physics.