An Essay Concerning Human Misunderstanding: Why It Cannot Be Inferred From Empirically Acquired Information That The Higgs Boson Has Been Observed by Marcoen J.T.F. Cabbolet

Hi Rick,

I'll second Marcoen's opinion. Well said. Any disagreement we have ever had is over detail, not principle.

My own worldview, including my view of science and its role in objective knowledge, has taken quite a turn in the last few years -- though I find it as true as ever that no science is objective without strict correspondence between theoretical prediction and physical result, my opinion is softening in favor of that which you and Marcoen share, with a caveat:

You speak often of reality; the implied assumption is that something is "really" there. I don't think experimentalists start with such an assumption. They are working within theoretical limits -- parameters that are adjusted according to experimental evidence -- as the saying goes, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Hence, my comments on adjusting the "unification energy" upward.

You're right, though, this doesn't indicate what "reality" is -- only where certain limits lie. The reality of the question is impossible for any experiment to answer: what happens when an absolutely hot body meets an absolutely cold surface? That's why I'm more comfortable with the degrees of freedom that theory affords to bound those limits.

Where I differ with you and Marcoen, though, is that I don't call that "reality," either. I still maintain that reality has nothing to do with objective knowledge.

All best,

Tom

Sure, Marcoen. Just to recapitulate and expand the points I made in the post that started this thread:

None of us are sure that fundamental particles exist as physically independent, real things (" ... having a physical effect ... not affected by physical conditions.")

The products of physically real things -- what we measure following an event -- only tell us that the event was made of smaller though more energetic things that we cannot say existed "before" we observed the event; i.e., we don't know that those elements whose tracks we record are causal. If we knew that they were, we could say that the unicorn was responsible for creating everything, and the tracks that he left are his signature.

OTOH, if the field is real and causal, the unicorn and his tracks are from one and the same continuous source. Field theoretical predictions apart from the standard model of particle physics, are invested in general relativity, quantum field theory and string theory. If the field is irreducible -- where, how? Our measured values are not good enough to tell us that that they existed before we made a measurement; the objective knowledge that we glean from a measurement, therefore, is independent of the source. Does the wavefunction collapse to a unicorn and the tracks he left, which implies an observer quantum entangled with the unicorn -- or does the wavefunction never collapse, which implies that the observer is continuous with the unicorn's creation?

My bet is on door number two. Wheeler's participatory universe.

Tom

Marcoen,

You're right. Kant does influence my view -- I imagine a thinkng machine: is it self aware? Consider the android character that Sean Young portrayed in the movie Blade Runner -- (the movie is based on Philip K. Dick's story, *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?*) -- she doesn't know that the source of her consciousness is a program.

In Dick's future world, authorities have devised elaborate interrogation methods and technology to detect distinctly human emotional reactions, reminiscent of the Turing Test for intelligent machines -- I think it is significant, though, that the "Replicant test" is for emotional response, not knowledge or logic. My guess is that Dick's message is that the human tribe will not forbear persecuting the android tribe even if the two are shown equal in every rational respect. Kant being a major figure of the Enlightenment, I would like to think that he would support the equality of sentients of the same species, no matter their origin.

However, while androids may possibly be shown to dream of electric sheep as a result of their programming -- the human mind is capable of dreaming of androids dreaming of electric sheep. Though we may be born with noumenal qualities, they are not transferable to the objects of our creation. I am convinced thereby, that we are not programmed creatures -- programs are replicable; consciousness is transcendant.

All best,

Tom

Marcoen,

Thanks for sharing your free will paper. I appreciate the high level of thinking that went into it, though my own view of free will is simpler and absolute; i.e., when you say, " ... since motion in a wavelike state is universal in the framework of the EPT, it also applies to tangible objects such as stones: it can thus also be said that a stone has a body and a spirit ..." and then argue that a stone does not have body/spirit, I would say that the stone exists in an absolute continuum of body and spirit. Thus, as a human being is a corporation of cooperating cells, a stone is a corporation of cooperating quantum mechanical events. Gell-Mann has a similar view. It is a rationalist perspective; as a matter of measured outcomes, there is no way in principle to determine random motion from pseudo-random. One may as well accept the free will of every particle and system of particles; start with infinite degrees of freedom, and variables become bounded by evolution of events. (Qua Quine, "To be is to be the value of a bound variable.")

All best,

Tom

Dear Marcoen,

You defended your point very well, using the artillery of critical thinking, and I agree that we can be certain about very little. I can't name one thing about we can have absolute certainty. The Higgs boson is not singular in this respect. One can't be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that it even raised this morning. Or even that there is a sun! When we look on the window, we assume that the world will be there, but what makes us so sure? We can never have absolute certainty. So I must say that I agree with you, and not only in the case of the Higgs boson. How people deal with this uncertainty? They had to learn to deal with it, because there are not few the situations when a fast decision, even wrong, is better than indecision. While we were living in the wilderness, often running or attacking were better options than carefully analyzing what to do. People learned to justify their choices, so that they can run or attack without hesitating. Very often people feel very certain about their opinions in politics, religion, science, UFOs, etc., and maybe the explanation is that we can't do anything if we doubt of each of our steps, so we learned to believe in our choices. Toddlers can't learn to walk if they wait to gain certainty that at the next step they will not fall, so believing is doing.

So people learned to make bets, and justify them, for the peace of their souls. Anything is a bet, and the explanations around it are justifications of the choices made while betting. We bet that the Sun will rise tomorrow. We even bet that the universe will still exist. We bet, so that we find a reason to earn our food for tomorrow, to send the children to school, to have health insurance etc. And if we will see the sun rising, as you pointed out, we merely observe the photons. Or are we even sure that we observe photons?

Science is full of bets too, and it is in the spirit of science to acknowledge that and never forget it.

The existence of the Higgs boson is just a bet, and the odds that a particle with properties that can be assigned to Higgs was find are given by the 5 sigma. The odds are probably much greater, if we remember that the Standard Model, which needs the Higgs boson, explains so many phenomena, and makes prediction with so big accuracy. But, there is no absolute certainty.

Best regards,

Cristi Stoica

Marcoen,

"things like tables, bears, needles, or any other macroscopic object subjectable to contact forces can be observed directly."

My point was that even direct observation is circumscribed by the limitation of the 5 senses themselves. If we claim to know anything in itself, then we cannot discover anything more about it....since we allegedly know it intrinsically.

"Particles get their mass - at least according to the Standard Model - by interaction with the Higgs field. The Higgs boson is a wave in the Higgs field.'

- The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is an elementary particle - not a wave - of mass ~125 Gev.

- How can particles be particles when they move through a Higgs field before acquiring mass... that is, how can they be particles without mass?

- What experiment has observed the acquisition of mass by a massless particle moving in an Higgs field?

- How does Higgs mass creation differ from pair creation by convergent gamma rays?

Cristi

Be careful to differentiate between the practical and the metaphysical when considering the difficulties of knowing. Contrary to Tom's view, objective knowledge is the equivalent of reality, for us. And that has nothing to do with perception/thinking, which has no affect on the physical circumstance.

Something exists independently of the mechanisms whereby we are aware of it. But we can only have knowledge of it, and by virtue of a physical process. So, while we must assume that there is the possibility of an alternative, this is irrelevant, because we cannot know it. We can know what it is possible for us to know, ie there is some definitive body of knowledge, but there are a number of practical difficulties in doing this. We will know, in any given situation, that we have 'got it right' by default, that is, after a sufficient duration, no new knowledge arises, despite efforts to discover such. At which point we can then deem that knowledge to be the equivalent of our reality.

Paul

Marcoen

"I side with Kant: by sensory observation we cannot possibly get to know what the thing-in-itself is"

Yes we can. Because if we know how light works we can then reverse engineer what is received and discern what occurred which the light represents.

One, especially philosophers, might still want to argue that this is a function of light. To which you point out that science deals with the real world as it is manifest to us.

Paul

Paul

Marcoen

"for every individual it is an absolute certainty that he exists. But that's also where the consensus ends"

Really? So what is the difference between being aware of oneself and being aware of the rest of physical existence?

Paul

The whole strategy of understanding the laws of nature solely using mathematics is running out of steam. Statistically, there is supposed to be a higgs particle that gives mass to weak force particles. Whatever statistical ghost the higgs might be, it deserves the prize as being the most useless discovery in physics. The Higgs boson and Higgs field seem to have nothing to do with inertia, gravity or speed of light/relativity/time dilation.

I am surprised that nobody in the science community has said: what mysterious phenomenon is this special relativity that particles are not allowed to pass each other at speeds exceeding c. What is the "it" that demands this "bit", this relativistic calculation of v^2/c^2? It is, as if by some invisible magic link that time dilation and length contraction are forced to occur between particles that pass each other at relativistic speeds.

What is this "it" that restricts particles to the speed of light, and causes funny time dilation (time progression effects)? Is this "it" some kind of mechanism for time itself? Can we figure out how to speed up and slow down the time progression of regions of space the same way we can speed up and slow down computer processors by adjusting the clock speed. By discovering the mechanisms of time dilation and relativity, can we create TIME DILATION FIELDS? With time dilation fields, can we hijack mechanisms of gravity?

You can chase Higgs statistical ghosts if you like, but I guarantee it's going to convince everyone that homo sapients won't discover the warp drive.

Marcoen: you have a mistaken view about what it is to observe something. You suppose that to observe something we have to observe it *directly* (you say we haven't observed the Higgs boson because we've only observed its decays). But this is absurd. To observe something's decays to is observe *its* decays -- that is, it is to observe the thing *indirectly* by virtue of its effects.

A simple example to illustrate: suppose I see my wife in a mirror. Have I seen her? Yes. But not *directly*, only by the effects of light bouncing off the mirror. By a similar token, if our theory states that a Higgs Boson will have effects X, Y, and Z but *not* A, B, and C, and then we observe those very things, we have observed the thing *by* its effects.

You seem to think that this commits a logical fallacy. That if a theory T says p-->q and we observe q, it is wrong to infer p. In one sense you're right, in another sense you're wrong. There are always an infinite number of different theories that can imply the same observations. So, we might distinguish the Higgs Boson theory from the Schmiggs boson theory from the Schliggs boson theory...all of which imply the observations made at the LHC, the only difference is that the Schmiggs boson theory implies that we will observe garden gnomes if we travel to alpha centauri and the Schliggs boson theory implies that we will observe beer spontaneously combust on the planet Gliese. *All* of these theories are consistent with the LHC observations...but does this mean we shouldn't think the Higgs theory is more likely to be true than the others? Of course not.

The reason why the Higgs theory is the *best* theory -- and one that counts as "confirmed" -- is because, is science, confirmation is a matter of *matching* the implications of our simplest, most powerful theories with observation. This is, as you note, not correct *logically*, but then again science isn't *deductive* in nature; it is *inductive* and *abductive*. And the logic of induction and abduction is quite different. It is not fallacious to assume p in the case of p-->q and q is observed as an *abductive* matter because, in that case, the theory T might be the *best* explanation of why q was observed.

Anyway, that's where you've gone wrong. You've supposed that observation and confirmation must be deductive in nature when that's just not how science works.

Boy, for a guy who thinks the universe is an analog of 'Halo', you sure have a lot of opinions.

Marcoen

You are confusing two issues. The point is we can potentially know, but it is, practically, very difficult, if not impossible in some areas. The argument that we can never know, is spurious, because that is stated in respect of the fact that there may alternatives. But these are possibilities which we cannot know, so whilst the statement is true, it is irrelevant and misleading. Science deals with what we can potentially know, this is, for us, physical existence.

Paul