Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

[darrelljs]

Started a new job in earnest and wont be able to contribute for a while. I wanted to thank everyone for the discussion so far, though, it helped clarify and sharpen some thoughts around the subject, and stimulated coming up with some nice examples.

Congrats on the new job .  Even more, congrats on the attitude.  I believe the benefit of these conversations is to sharpen your personal philosophy, and the way that happens is with an open mind and a willingness to listen to all sides.  I'm constantly humbled and amazed by the RB community's ability to do this; not typical of The Internet as we all know.

There's no answer here, IMO.  Physics has done more to answer the what and the how, but the why eludes.  Everyone has a right to their own belief, and their own reasons for that belief  .

Darrell

[T-hawk]

For example, we can quite scientifically estimate the mass of the Sun, thanks to general relativity, without any references to particles whatsoever. We could then use that data to estimate how many particles the Sun is probably made of, but it clearly shows that the particle picture is, in this case, derivative.

An estimate is not reality, and its usefulness is a function of perception.  For every purpose that you can use an estimate for, I can construct a scenario where the difference between that estimate and reality represents a critical threshold.  Maybe you want to send a spacecraft to observe a particular emission from a sun-grazing comet, but misestimating the sun's mass by even one particle will throw its trajectory far enough off from your intention that it fails to intercept and measure the particle you wanted.  The particle picture is not derivative, the estimate is.  Every particle matters from some perspective.

Just briefly, my biggest problem with your view, T-Hawk, is that you don't quite go all the way. You correctly hold everything up to be a tool of the mind, but you still want to leave something objectively knowable to hang our understandings on, and you think particles can play this role.

I understand what you mean here.  I've been implicitly including in my position that something has to be fundamental and not subdividable.  I actually have wondered whether my position would be even stronger and more self-consistent to claim that the particles and forces too are also just a matter of perception.  Whether gravitational force draws matter together is moot and unobservable; all that we can ever know is that is we perceive matter as drawn together.  I hesitate to make that claim since it's unsupportable: there can't be experimental evidence, and that impossibility is part of the position itself.  But I see what you mean, that perhaps it's even more justifiable by Occam's razor to claim that nothing is fundamental as to claim that particles are fundamental.  I don't disagree with that position; it's just not supportable, but that doesn't preclude it being the case.

[TheHumanHydra]

Sorry, I'll respond to your post tomorrow, I hope -- this is just wide-eyed speculation, but what if we found there is nothing indivisible, i.e. that the divisions and substrates are infinite? 

Edit -- Okay, there's supposed to be a quote in there, lol.

[ipecac]

I know the non-physical can't be ruled out simply by logic; stop trying to say that I'm claiming that.  What we do have is experimental evidence: we've established falsifiable hypotheses to describe particle behavior and conducted measurements to confirm it.  We don't have experimental evidence of anything non-material.

You certainly have evidence that particles tend to behave in certain ways, yes. But that's not the point at question, it's irrelevant to the discussion. What you don't have is any evidence that the non-physical doesn't exist.

I'm also not dropping Occam's razor, it just didn't come up there.  Occam's razor is a heuristic that argues against your middle-ground solution.  Rather than that particles sometimes do and sometimes don't fully describe an organism's behavior, it's simpler to conclude that the particles go all the way all the time.  And I contend that the burden of evidence/proof is on the more complex solution.

That's just the same nonsense misusing Occam's razor. We could similarly say that intuition is another important heuristic, and it's simpler to conclude that intuition wins, and the burden of proof is on the less intuitive solution.

And I mean complex in terms of first principles, not what you describe as the 'complex chemical cascade' that is only perceived as complex in deriving from so much aggregation of the simple laws.

I'm not convinced by this. What are your first principles, that there are particles that interact in certain fields?

And what happens if you can get a away with a grievous crime, if there are no societal consequences because no one knows about it?

Dangerous to society does not at all preclude its reality.  As I said before, that's a reason you seek to disbelieve materialism, not an argument against its truth.

I've given plenty of reasons against the truth of materialism, its utter amoralness is just a bonus, a cherry on the top of it all.

So what just happens if you can get away with a grievous crime, if there are no societal consequences because no one knows about it?

[ipecac]

Also, I would like to say that your clarity of thought on issues without prior background in the subject is amazing, THH.

Edit: skimming through the Career thread, saw that shallow_thought is a particle physicist, someone ping him -- I'd enjoy hearing how hilariously wrong we all are.

I could be quite wrong on this, but I seem to recall that contemporary physicists generally don't think in terms of fundamental particles but in terms of fundamental fields.

In other words, there are fundamentally no 'real' substrates or particles but field excitations.

Ah yes, something like this: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article...-of-fields

[ipecac]

T-Hawk, I haven't seen you answer a stronger point, which is that if you deny meaning of all higher-order things then language and logic don't have any meaning and your argument declares itself to be meaningless.

Here's another: you place so much weight on scientific evidence. Let's sharpen some point I've made, that in the picture humans are mindless bags of cells: if scientists themselves are mindless bag of cells, then why should we retain the traditional trust in the scientific evidence, which after all (in the spirit of reductionism) can be reduced to hearsay?

Why should we even entertain scientific evidence in the first place?

[ipecac]

Started a new job in earnest and wont be able to contribute for a while. I wanted to thank everyone for the discussion so far, though, it helped clarify and sharpen some thoughts around the subject, and stimulated coming up with some nice examples.

I've disagreed with 'atomistic' reductionism for some time, the bottom-up approach, but hadn't thought about how to address it head on. Your posts were a great example of how to meet the issue, thank you for that. I've learnt quite a bit there.

[ipecac]

I could be quite wrong on this, but I seem to recall that contemporary physicists generally don't think in terms of fundamental particles but in terms of fundamental fields.

In other words, there are fundamentally no 'real' substrates or particles but field excitations.

Ah yes, something like this: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article...-of-fields

Dear me, this is quite interesting. These physicists appear to, having spent maybe too much time in the world of mathematical abstractions, reified some mathematical objects and declared these 'fields' to be the fundamental (or at least more fundamental than particles).

[ipecac]

I could be quite wrong on this, but I seem to recall that contemporary physicists generally don't think in terms of fundamental particles but in terms of fundamental fields.

In other words, there are fundamentally no 'real' substrates or particles but field excitations.

Ah yes, something like this: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article...-of-fields

Dear me, this is quite interesting. These physicists appear to, having spent maybe too much time in the world of mathematical abstractions, reified some mathematical objects and declared these 'fields' to be the fundamental (or at least more fundamental than particles).

To digress a little, this is a possible answer to 'do mathematical objects exist in any sense?', the answer being that reified ones are the basis of all physical reality.

[Bacchus]

An estimate is not reality, and its usefulness is a function of perception. For every purpose that you can use an estimate for, I can construct a scenario where the difference between that estimate and reality represents a critical threshold. Maybe you want to send a spacecraft to observe a particular emission from a sun-grazing comet, but misestimating the sun's mass by even one particle will throw its trajectory far enough off from your intention that it fails to intercept and measure the particle you wanted. The particle picture is not derivative, the estimate is. Every particle matters from some perspective.

I have to come back here, because I phrased my claim badly. Let's assume that General Relativity is a valid description of reality (not an estimate), at least of mass -- as far as I can see, there is no reason to deny GR this status, if you are willing to ascribe it to quantum mechanics. In GR, there are no 'particles' at all, it's not particles that have mass as a quality, and the total mass of a system is not a bunch of particle masses added up. An account of mass given by GR cannot be wrong 'by a particle', because it admits no particles at all. It can be wrong by a degree of curvature of spacetime, it can be wrong by some other field characteristic, a coefficient, but not by a particle (unless we introduce particles as a way to describe particular patterns of local spacetime curvatures, in a similar way that we introduce a macroscopic phenomena in your account to describe particular sets of particles). The picture offered by GR is that of a single, 'fundamental' spacetime, which exists it whatever convoluted state that it does, and some of those convolutions can perceived to be particles by humans just because we are used to think of the world as split into discreet and disctinctive objects. In a GR-like reality, there is no non-arbitrary boundary to a "particle" though -- there is a spacetime effect which is pronounced locally, but which trails off (if I understand correctly) in a gradual fashion, ultimately to infinity. This is why GR doesn't have anything at all to say about what constitutes a "body" in its model -- a body can be anything as large as the Sun, or as small as a molecule, they are equally arbitrary localizations of spacetime.

This links to what ipecac said about fields -- we can characterize the entire world as a single field, where 'particles' are just characteristic excitation of what is 'actually' (in terms of the model) a single unbroken structure, in which we, for our understanding, pick out quantized bits and call them names. This of course links back to the infinite divisibility discussion -- a real number field IS infinitely divisible. As for lack of experimental evidence, well the lack applies to any particle model just as much. All we can say is that an account given in terms of particles lets us make effective predictions, as does an account given in terms of fields. In any case, the lack of experimental evidence should lead us to avoid making a strong claim (i.e. claim that particles are fundamental) and instead lead towards a weaker claim (that we don't even know what's fundamental).