I am an ex-physist who stopped after his PhD in particle physics. I love physics but while money does not bring happiness, it is better to cry in a Mercedes than on a bike (this is not true, I just laughed when I first read it).
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.
Off topic, but eureka moments are my favorite go-to evidence for the absence of free will. No one chooses to have a eureka moment. They just arrive. And not just those moments, but every thought in every moment. They all just arrive, none are choosen.
The presence of subconscious processes doesn't deny the existence of conscious ones.
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.
I don’t think it rules out free will, but perhaps free will is more limited. There is a self reflective part of your mind, probably physically located in your frontal lobe, but there are also many other parts of your mind and brain that do important things, but aren’t self reflective. I’ve come to think of my brain as a committee. There are many things I can do, like walk or even do a mathematical proof, that I cannot really describe the process. We see in things like addiction that the self reflective mind also does not always (or maybe even often) have ultimate control over behavior. Kahenaman and Gallwey talk about this as System 1/2 and Self 1/2. Julian Jaynes even thinks that people used to have complete other simulated people inside of themselves that they called gods, and this still happens to people with Schizophrenia.
I choose thoughts - I can conjour images, or scenes into my mind. I can choose not to think about things.
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.
As the famous quote goes, you are free to choose, but you aren't free to choose what you choose.
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.
I think, at this point, if someone says free will exists, beyond mere compatibilism, it should be required that they very carefully specify what the hell they are talking about.
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?
One of the many contradictions in a religion is that a sinner could claim "God is all powerful, so he made me do that sin". So early religious thinkers had to make an exception for something that God has no power on, and called it "free will".
Why would you assume it's all or nothing? Will (free or otherwise) implies something like effort and clearly we're not constantly applying effort. Believing in free will doesn't mean believing that everything results from it.
You can still have free will with "locked in" events.
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)
Yes they are, look at the derandomization program in computational complexity, or if you're slightly more forgiving with your definition of logic, then look at mixed strategies and Monte-Carlo algorithms.
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 :)
That does not follow, a robot following the rules of correct reasoning can conclude (to a reasonable probability) that a statement is false. You may have very strong requirements in your definition of "understanding", but the robot can output a number between 0 and 1, and that's good enough for a conclusion by everyday language.
Saying an airplane concludes to tell the pilot to "pull up" is correct as far as I think most people see it.
Mathematicians have proven that there are true statements that can not be concluded to be true by following a set of rules or axioms.
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.
There are ways to detect that to an extent and abort in machine systems, and for humans you can see kind of analogous attacks against the immune system (it gets really, really crazy in there, real arms race stuff), but in general why do you expect humans to be specially invulnerable to Godel attacks? To the extent they're hard to attack, it's because they don't actually execute math.
Not true in practice, not enough energy on the universe to algorithmically derive everything. Also, someone with understanding and will would have to set up the program :)
Well then, how do you suppose the human brain does it ? Magic ? The answer of course is: it's heuristics all the way down.
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.
Eureka moments, is the subconscious assembling conclusions and deductions and presenting them to you. That the subconscious is engaged and busy, is fed with information to build stuff from and rewarded for its actions - thus repeats it, is all conscious choices, thus subject to free will. The horse does pull of a record and the rider barely had to steer, is not a indicator of wild horses.
One thing I've discovered and utilised from a relatively early age was synergising the difference in how my conscious and subconscious processes information. It's really just the usual advice of "when stuck, go for a walk" but in my experience it's a very useful tool when done mindfully.
i don't believe in free will either, but this isn't very convincing evidence.
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.
Beyond that logical tantrum easily refuted - I'm 52% on free will, say a tenth of a bip on god and magic:
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?)
People who disbelieve in free will are often not educated in the fact that the laws of physics don’t include explanation of most of what is observed and clearly lack in the area of the existence of mind, and are therefore extremely incomplete.
Also, it’s impossible to disprove the existence of free will because it requires will to make a conclusion like that.
Why? A robot should be able to disprove free will by following the rules of correct reasoning, if such a thing is relatively easy, i.e. you would expect humans to ever solve it.
This is just a free will version of "god-of-the-gaps", where you can shovel the basis of any unknown into the gaps of scientific understanding. We know far more about physics and the mind than we did 100 years ago, and the boundaries for free will to exist in have done nothing but shrink. Not even leaving a mark or hint behind.
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.
You haven't thought about this enough. Make it small so it's understandable - say any game involving choice. One has free will within the predetermined set of conditions of the game. A choice to buy a property or not in Monopoly seems like free will but it isn't really. Life is the same.
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.
Complexity is unbounded, so the discussion around free will probably makes more sense on the opposite end of the choice spectrum. We have a countably infinite number of choices (due to thermodynamic energy limits) to make even within a framework of quantum mechanics, where electrons can only have discrete energy levels (limited number of ‘choices’). Choosing meaning from the infinite looks more like free will than deciding heads or tails.
I experience having mo free will whenever I am in the break of a meditation retreat. During those breaks it’s sometimes quite easy to observe my thoughts, given that I focus 10 hours per day on making my internal chatter very very quiet.
The most fascinating thing to me is how subtle body sensations lead to thoughts and vice versa.
You should read about compatibilism, e.g. the work of Daniel Dennett, which argues that the parts of free will worth wanting are consistent with determinism. He definitely doesn't believe in magic or god!
> it is better to cry in a Mercedes than on a bike
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.
Hoooooooo, it was a joke! (and I noted that). Honestly, this does not require a comment like that.
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.
Humans are not “generally intelligent”; our intelligence is extremely well adapted to being a hominid family animal in a tribe or clan in a savannah habitat with large predators and hostile members of our own species lurking about.
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.
It's actually debatable given our capability for abstract thought and creating things like mathematics.
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.
I've always thought of mathematics as something that reveals itself - self evident for those who know to look for it.
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
According to a few (related) mystical schools of thought (that share a boundary with Jungian psychology) there is a distinction to be made between mind and intellect. The former, the mind, is held to be effectively a super-sense and its content and preoccupations naturally (as with the elemental senses) are bound firmly to the body. The intellect however is seen as the realm of knowledge whose domain extends to the transcendent.
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.[..]
Epidemics generally follow a logistic curve, like most "exponential" processes. It looks exponential at first, but at some point, it decays. COVID is no exception. It is now in "fuzzy up and down" mode.
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.
And yet, counterintuitively, it's in precisely these areas (relativity, quantum physics) that our theories are best (most predictive with the strongest mathematical foundations) and the areas where our human intuition ought to supply the most assistance (psychology, sociology) where we seem to be lost at sea.
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.
The biases you have are different than mine or rather, I'm aware of most of my bias and can account for them - I have many, many predispositions, assumptions, inferences, unknown incorrect conclusions, etc.
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...
I agree with what you are saying, but I find it interesting that physics can also predict properties of planets, stars, and galaxies interacting over cosmic distances. At that scale, you can zoom out and reduce the complexity again back to a handful of rules.
This depends on how many digits of accuracy you are looking for. With living things, we care more than with hot rocks, because the entropy gradients are so much higher.
I could write a book about your comment. I am incredibly impressed how well you articulated our "human subject biases" - that is an excellent starting point for understanding the human condition, the root of all of our bias.
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.
This got me thinking about the radio lab episode where they had to vote on which animals they thought were the smartest. The idea was to put yourself in the context and environment of these animals and see which one has developed the best intelligence given what senses and capabilities the animals had to work with. The first round is Crows vs Slime Molds. I never thought about it, slime molds decision making abilities to find food are actually really fascinating and given that it’s a unicellular organism it’s adapted suprisingly well for the limited resources it has. I never thought about intelligence relative to other organisms before.
I love this comment! Why have I never read this key insight in the form of an essay. Having recently watch Chimp Empire on Netflix I have a good feel for the “lower” foundational levels of our stack.
I don’t think “general” means like, equally suited for all cases. Rather, being able to handle the things successfully at all, even after working past wrong intuitions, and taking much time, still counts.
I think that's pretty ignorant of historical materialism.
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.
I could have been a theoretical physicist, but got out after my master’s. Subconsciously I think I had already come to this (the OP’s) conclusion then.
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.
This is bit of a commonly misheld perception in my opinion.
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 depends a bit on the field. If you were doing particle physics (in particular using earth-borne accelerators), the second half of the 20th century would probably be best. But if you're into astroparticle or cosmology, the best time is literally right now. The 21st century has been one giant thing after another thanks to Sudbury, WMAP and Planck, the EHT, LIGO, the Pulsar Timing Array and tons of other experiments. When it comes to understanding the universe as a whole, there is no better time to work in physics than today. Similar goes for quantum and condensed matter, albeit with a focus on real world applications rather than understanding the universe.
I’m into usefulness. And I’m not convinced by your argument. I still doubt very much that I will see any new models as useful as those that transformed the world in the 20th century. I’d love to be wrong though.
Usefulness usually means real world use. It took the theory of general relativity 70 years before we saw a real world application make use of it. The theory that led to modern hard drives (GMR) went from new fundamental physics in the late 80s to full commercial use within a decade. Things like the blue LED (1990s) or frequency combs (early 2000s) were even faster and can be found truly everywhere now (unlike GR). There are far more useful models out there than the high level overview stuff you might get from an intro to fundamental physics class. And even if you're into explaining the universe rather than improving day to day life, as I said, there's tons of stuff going on right now if you're in the right field.
Do we care about "real" reality if we can, more or less, make sense of some of its manifestations through our senses?
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.
> Why should a finite carbon brain be able to map out a coherent and finite model of something much, much bigger than itself.
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 didn't bring quarks or quasars into existence, we "discovered" them as and when we extended our senses far enough using technologies
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.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The idea that the act of observation impacts an experiment (or how particles behave) is one of the most counterintuitive and surprising “truths” I’ve ever heard. I would love to hear a logical explanation of why (not just a description of it).
Observation doesn't impact experiments. Interaction does. In fact, it is quite difficult to formulate the "collapse" of the wavefunction as a physical interaction and to the extent that we can, the experimental evidence seems to suggest that it is not. This is a common misconception about quantum mechanics, partly because even undergraduate texts conflate the uncertainty principal with observation.
The logical explanation: "observation" has nothing to do with conscious woo, it's just that in order to have a definite answer we build experiments so they collapse the wavefunction.
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?)
The point I was trying to make is that if we are indeed in a simulation, and I'm not saying that we definitely are, but if we are - one possibility to design such a simulation in a way to make it more efficient is to actually make computations depend on the observer, meaning that sorry, but in this case it would have conscious "woo" built in.
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.
One problem is that gravity is universally coupling, so no part of the universe is technically "unobserved." I suspect that we could look back at the dynamics of large scale systems and see deviations from GR if the simulation were neglecting any part of the universe in the absence of observation/interaction.
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.
The reason for my personal choice to not take simulation theory seriously is because simulations are an instance of Russell's Teapot. Anything which can be explained as S simulating T can be explained more simply as just T (or, in the opposite direction, even more complicatedly as R simulating S simulating T, etc. Can* we go all the way to a countably infinite tower of simulations?).
* 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.
If you were to believe the universe was a simulation, would you do anything differently? could you?
(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 we were in a simulation, due to the hard problem, it would be impossible for the simulators to know whether anything in their simulation had qualitative experiences, so they could not make conscious observation a prerequisite of detail rendering, only interaction. No woo necessary.
I had an experience where I knew(not believe) I was the kind of the screen in which everything appears(including the human body). Lasted for a couple of hours.
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.
I don't think the ego has any intent. I think it's a collection of memories and emotions that you have accumulated over the past. Like a cache that is outdated.
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.
I am a theoretical physicist, and I am very much in tune with the author. Take quantum mechanics (my field), it is clear that even though we have a working model of it, it doesn't explain how nature instantiates it. Entanglement is a prime example of this: I know exactly how to describe it, but nobody has a clue of how it works. In other words, physics is a mostly coherent and certainly useful story about reality, but it isn't grounded on "bedrock" reality, rather on our perception of it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think of entanglement as less forming an actual binding relationship to two particles, and more as setting them up exactly the same way.
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.
Yes you're on the right track: there isn't any 'action' between the two systems, it's a correlation. However, here's the thing that fries my brain: for classical systems correlation means the pre-existing value of some property is correlated (e.g. if I take a random glove out of a pair, the moment I look at the one I picked I know the handedness of the other). In the quantum case there isn't a pre-existing value for the property you're measuring (because you're free to pick the measurement basis), and you can't say one measurement outcome caused the other because you can set up the measurements to happen outside of each other's light cone (so you are free to pick which measurement happens first by changing reference frame).
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?
Eh, that's still just correlation across a state vector. Honestly, quantum entanglement is proof that the many worlds / simultaneous superposition interpretation of quantum mechanics is bollocks.
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.
That's only half of the argument though. The other half is how does entanglement correctly coordinate the probabilistic outcomes, when there's no causal order? (meaning, you can't assume there's a sort of signal that travels between them, because in a different reference frame the signal would have to travel back in time)
No, it’s the whole argument. You could imagine a probabilistic gate splitter that outputs two bits. Such that bits AB are either 01 or 10 with a probability distribution. That is you don’t know which of the two states you’re in, but you do know that bit A is always opposite of bit B. You can then take the bits as far apart as you want. And then measuring bit A will tell you the state of bit B. Nothing collapsed across interstellar space. Bit A and B were always in a certain state. We just don’t know which until we take a measurement. And since they’re correlated, we only need to measure one of them.
Hehe I wish. You are forgetting that you can locally decide the measurement setting. For a setting the bits are (anti)correlated, for another one they are uncorrelated. If they always had a value, not only it wouldn’t work: even assigning a value per measurement setting wouldn’t work because it is what we call local realism, which is disproved by Bell’s theorem. Look up the GHZ game for an example of a system where you cannot assign pre-existing values consistently. (In the CHSH game, which is the equivalent of Bell’s theorem the explanation is a bit more subtle). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_pseudo-telepathy
Entanglement is neither a bond between two objects nor a setting up of two objects in the same way. Entanglement derives from the fact that quantum mechanical systems have properties which are non-local with respect to the "process" of measurement that do not depend on the physical size of the system in question. Its actually suspect to say that "particles" are entangled at all - the entanglement is a property of the wave function in which the particles identities are (with respect to the quantity that is entangled) indistinct.
Basically, could I say something like, QFT is about fields, but what are the fields, are they in something, are they self instantiated, what makes the fields?
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?
What do you mean by "how it works"? In my book, being able to predict the outcome of experiment is exactly understating how it works. Anything beyond this is the question of philosophy, not physics.
Sure, quarks and leptons are maybe a high-level concept that masks a more messy underlying reality, but surely quarks and leptons are less messy than dogs? There is an arrow of progress in the development of physical theories. I don't see a reason why a perfect description should not be possible.
Even wrong theories can be useful in some contexts, Newtonian gravity for example. Take it to an extreme: say quarks aren't useful at all for science, but are a useful conceptualization pedagogically, it can still be worth.
It seems that different people often use "not wrong" to mean two different things. Some people are using the word to mean "useful as far as it's meant to be," like you. Some people, like the GP, are using it to mean "the truth." It's important to clarify what you mean when you're discussing, otherwise there's heat and not much light.
In case of physics we do not really have access to the later kind, every theory is a current best guess that might at any time turn out to be only approximately correct or under certain circumstances. General relativity is almost certainly not the truth, the universe probably has no singularities hiding behind event horizons, but does it help us to 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.
I somewhat agree with you, but I think it's very important to distinguish between the two meanings, because different points on the continuum of correctness cause you to come to completely opposite conclusions about the nature of the universe. A bit of quantity leads to a totally different quality. In other words, truth and usefulness are continua, but they are two different and orthogonal continua, and going right on one may mean going left on the other.
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.
Counterpoint: Newtonian Gravity could be considered profoundly wrong since it presupposes a structure for space and time which is fundamentally wrong. What I mean is that ontologically Newtonian Gravity is a total non-starter, implying the existence of relations which are simply totally absent in this universe.
Everything falling at a constant speed of 9 m/s takes this probably a bit too far, on Earth this will only be true for tens of milliseconds before the speed is of by a few percent. Had you said every objects accelerates with 9.81 m/s², that would be a pretty good theory of gravity on the surface of Earth, probably still the dominant theory for solving gravity related problems on Earth.
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.
The difference is that the region your theory of gravity is a good model in, is not inhabited, whereas the region that Newtonian gravity is a good model in is the one where most of us spend most of our time.
It's refreshing to me to read articles like this. In the current climate of consensus science, and settled science. Here is someone well versed in Physics, and the Philosophy of it. Reminding people that we need to be humbled again.
Science is an open system. Everything is open to being "wrong"/"updated". There is nothing that grounds the system. You must be always open that your prediction of unobserved things will be wrong. To actually believe that science will one day solve the great mystery of the universe is scientism.
Is there any stronger tool for rational truth seeking than the scientific method?
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?
Anyone that has actually utilized the scientific method truthfully to solve a problem or to verify truth ought to be able to identify several limitations or even identify it's more obvious flaws.
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.
This is a little bit out there from a rationalist point of view, but I think there are domains in which not all of the requisite concepts for the scientific method actually exist. An example that comes to mind is the nature of conscious experience - having spoken to a lot of meditators, for instance, I'm convinced that there really are commonalities to it that you can experience yourself by sitting down and paying attention. But I don't think there's anything to really falsify here, because there's nothing to measure!
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.
Reality/nature/the world grounds science. Whether it can all be figured out depends on whether that information is contained within the universe. Are you prepared to say an advanced civilization millions of years old doesn't know the "great mystery" of the universe? It's a little premature.
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?
This is a semantic debate, but "science" is the process of finding those rules. If we find an "ultimate" rule, we're still using science. (Assuming science is capable of finding that ground truth rule.)
I assumed "open system" here meant there is no ultimate rule, implying science can continue indefinitely. This aligns with our experience so far, and it does feel right to me, but I don't think we have evidence either way.
I completely agree that the scientific process is our best/only tool for meaningfully advancing our understanding of the world.
I'm not a physicist. An idea from physics that I recently learned and found very unnerving was that the solid objects we see and feel in the world are actually mostly empty space. We just see them as solid because of the way light interacts with the particles. So in a sense our visual and tactile perception of the world is just one representation of the underlying reality and you can imagine there being infinitely many other possible representations.
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.
"Solid" doesn't really have meaning at the sub-molecular level. All space has something in it, even if it's just vacuum energy. Virtual particle pairs come and go all the time. Some space has particles with electromagnetic charge. Each of these has some interaction radius. Technically, this is infinite. Electric field reaches everywhere, but thanks to inverse square law, only other particles within some much smaller radius than infinity will interact with enough force to change velocity noticeably. Gather together a large enough collection of these into chemically bonded distinct macroscopic objects, and there you go. The radius at which particles are repelled from each other is smaller than the distance between these bonds. That's all "solid" means.
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.
This is more of an intellectual parlor trick than anything else. Like literally what else could "solid" mean besides "that which we call solid based on our perception." When you say that matter is "mostly empty space" you are really writing is a sentence which implicitly uses two definitions of solid in one place without distinguishing between them.
I think I can be more clear. When you refer to what something looks like you are referring to the way we perceive things, which is with electromagnetic waves. In a very real sense, with respect to that, (that is, with respect to the electromagnetic field), solid objects really aren't "full of empty space," they are chock full of electromagnetic fields. Like the idea of "empty" is actually just sort of not a great way of thinking about small stuff. In fact, if we want to operationalize our notion of full or empty, we'd probably end up back at our intuitive notion of the idea.
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.
Thanks! This is helpful. It seems like I took an overly-simplistic explanation of the small scale and took it too literally. There's still a nugget of truth to the idea that our perceptions only partially tell us what the universe is really like, but it's not as disturbing as my initial thought that I was somehow observing something ghost-like as if it were solid.
why is this unnerving? fog isnt transparent while air is and since these are gases they are "emptier" than solid things. the emptiness properties is disconnected from visual or tactile properties.
i cant understand what you mean by knowing reality. reality is sui generis and knowledge is a relational concept.
Fog is a great analogy here and indeed much less unnerving. I think what I mean is that I'm unnerved by the fact that our perception only gives us a partial view on what really makes up the universe.
Disclosure: I'm not a theoretician, but just an old industrial physicist who helps design measurement equipment.
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.
I'm in the final year of my PhD, and I feel very lucky to be working on the question of what it means for an explanation to be "good". The closest thing to a satisfactory resolution of the question of "reality" in theories, to me, is Dennet's Real Patterns [1]
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 ;)
> 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 :-)
There is some discussion below about evil, part of my study.
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.
Physics is an empirical inquiry into the structure, composition and dynamics of the observable usensorium we inhabit. I find it just short of hybris to entertain any promise that the outcome can be more than a metaphor of the underlying reality.
The whole quagmire of “the measurement problem” in quantum mechanics seems to largely come from misunderstanding Bohr’s philosophical objections on this difference between a theory of the measurable and the interpretation of the theory’s internal mechanics as evidence of the true reality it models.
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.
It's funny that you mention hubris and yet you fall victim to it by dismissing the measurement problem and Bell's theorem. It's true that our theories are not a perfect description of "true reality", but they do tell you something about what "true reality" must be.
> 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.
My point is that theorems are provable in a logical sense. How will you prove that the mathematical representation of an empirical measurement of nature is true in the same sense?
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.
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.
> It is even possible that some of the laws of nature will be in conflict with each other in their implications, but each convincing enough in its own domain so that we may not be willing to abandon any of them. We may resign ourselves to such a state of affairs or our interest in clearing up the conflict between the various theories may fade out. We may lose interest in the "ultimate truth," that is, in a picture which is a consistent fusion into a single unit of the little pictures, formed on the various aspects of nature.
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.
Yes, our models are never complete. As someone here already wrote: "all models are wrong, some are useful".
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.
From 1954 to 1975, theoretical physics created the standard model of particle physics. Experimental verification of the theory continued through 1980s and 1990s, and finally the Higgs boson in 2011.
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.
Near the end: "I believe that the quest to understand the reality of the universe must contend with the truncations imposed by the perceptual and cognitive limitations of the mind." Totally agree with him. Interestingly AGI will have different limitations. In fact different AGIs (transformers vs something not yet invented; or an AGI with an huge encyclopedic memory vs one without; or ones with different limitations of compute; etc. This touches on computability with limited or unlimited resources.) will have different limitations and be literally unable to understand each others' versions of reality.
There is little doubt left that materialistic reality (what people and even physicists usually mean when they say “reality”) is not the fundamental nature of reality.
This is the main philosophical, scientific and even cultural challenge today.
How can he be sure he's a theoretical physicist if he doesn't know reality exists at all?
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.
The Indian Philosopher that is gravely missing from the article is Nagarjuna. The kinds of questions the author raises, the path he is treading on, will benefit from the study of Shunyata Philosophy of Madhyamika school, especially Nagarjuna.
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.
I remember when I took my course of "Theoretical Physics" (so called, it was an Introduction to Quantum Field Theory in actuality) and I realized that particles do not exist. It was quite an enlightenment. Particles are a convenient description of Quantum Fields in the perturbative regime, but what Quantum Fields are is not known, not even at the mathematical level. When you live at frontier of knowledge, as a Theoretical Physicists, reality becomes fuzzy. But that's life.
The book Sublime Object of Ideology (Zizek) and a second volume due soon attempts an interdisciplinary reframing of the theory of everything - working with Quantum Physicists and Material Hegelian/Lacanian philosophy. I am a philosopher who works with theoretical physicists.
Philosophy is the science of ideas. Ideas are the basis for all understanding - it is good that you are you there, this topic is inherently the realm of philosophy. Theoretical physicists must be very focused on theory to frame a "Theory of Everything" - what they kno will get in the way.
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 mean, leptons are definitely real, not just concepts. An electron is a lepton, and an electron surely exists? You can spray individual electrons. If an electron is just a concept, it is in a sense that a tiger is just a concept, and in a sense it is, but that is not very useful thing to say.
An electron is just an excitation of the electron field, a vast probabilistic something that's ever-present everywhere in the universe, with a different complex-number amplitude (not observable directly) at each and every point. Sometimes that vagaries of its ever-changing amplitudes cause it to locally coalesce into something that looks like an individual electron if you squint at it in the right manner, and that vision persists until a strong enough interaction with another vast and nebulous field shatters the illusion, at least in the tiny corner of the probabilistic multiverse your local version of your consciousness brazenly imagines to be the objective reality. What kind of existence is that?
An existence that mistakenly took fundamental reality to consist of point particles instead of fields. But we still found out about fields and quantum mechanics.
We don't know that fields are real. We just know that the mathematical language of fields is the most convenient and concise to describe the experimental results we see.
As a starting pint, the magnetic field can be shown to be real with metal filings. Whether fields are the fundamental building block is another matter.
We do not craft models of reality because reality and models have any kind of intrinsic connection. We craft models of reality because we value models.
“Yet these are concepts that reify a certain approximate sketch of the structure of the world. Physicists once thought that these categories were fundamental and real, but we now understand them as necessarily inexact because they ignore the finer details that our instruments have just not been able to measure.“
Thanks to Vijay for a thought provoking post. I like the juxtaposition of quantum gravity and neuroscience.
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.
So this is the new zeitgeist. Between AI, quantum fundamentals, disinformation, and a few other less obvious trends, "reality" is going to get less and less concrete and more and more contextual and non-binary.
Most likely, the nature of consciousness and reality are rigged in such a way that we cannot use our consciousness to decipher them. Any progress in that direction is useless and, at this point, almost ridiculous.
I didn’t know that Physics was about understanding reality (sure, from a romantic perspective yeah). I always thought it was about making our lives better (like any other branch of science).
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 reality makes our lives significantly better. No room for primitive religions leading us to stagnation or even reversal, when we can understand very well what sun, moon and stars are, why they move as they do, or why lightning happens and why weather patterns are what they are.
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.
> No room for primitive religions leading us to stagnation or even reversal, when we can understand very well what sun, moon and stars are, why they move as they do, or why lightning happens and why weather patterns are what they are.
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?
> Understanding reality makes our lives significantly better.
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.
Is all potentiality that exists unlocked and harvested? Is science even looking in all the right places? Can a mind on science even care about such things (or better: to what degree do individual and a culture/society of minds on science have the ability to care (have non-constrained curiosity))?
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.
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.