The Mind and the Limitations of Physics by Noson S. Yanofsky

Dear Noson,

I agree with your overview of our limitations and found your writing easy to follow. Because of that, I don't have much else to say really! Given your overview, you may enjoy the Godelian chess game in my entry.

Kind regards,

Jack (Entry: The Misalignment Problem)

I enjoyed reading your essay from beginning to end. I like the question of when is an object the same and when is it different. Clearly a dead cat is not the same as a live one in many ways, and a broken poison flask is not the same as an intact one. There is also difference between the sources of sensory stimuli, the potential stimuli and the perception generated as a result of stimulation. For example the smell 'of a pig'. The experience is generated by the observer, from sensory input; airborne chemicals received by the nose of the observer.That the smelly perception of the pig relies upon the mind that generates it, and is different from the material animal does not mean there is no material animal existing independently of observation. Feynman and the steak, Einstein and the moon come to mind. Photons'reflected' from the surface of a material concentration of existence we would call an apple (associating the material source with the perception generated) are not the source apple or the observation product and perception of an apple. They form a receivable signal allowing frequency and intensity information to be obtained. IMO, We don't need to unlearn the persistence of objects, but recognize observer generated perception is different from non perspectival existence. Food for thought. Despite my disagreement I like your essay a lot. Regards Georgina.

Wonderfully written essay Prof Yanofsky!!!

Your words ... "New York Yankees baseball team that has existed for more than a century. Every few years the players change; the fans change; the owners change; even Yankee Stadium moved. Why are the Yankees still considered the same team...???"

Very nice logical base you have developed. I like to add that in the "Dynamic Universe Model" also the "Universe is constantly changing its positions, and slowly masses also, how calculate Motion in these multiple gravitations of various masses?" was presented.

Hope you will look at my essay give your valuable comments

Best

SNP. Gupta

Hi,

If you are replying any of comments I posted on your essay, I request you to post a copy or intimation that you posted reply, on my essay

"A properly deciding, Computing and Predicting new theory's Philosophy"

also,so that I can continue discussion....

Best Regards

=snp.gupta

Georgina,

just in case you want to keep this interesting discussion alive...

What precisely do you think remains in the absence of ANY observer? What would that mean for what we call prehistoric past?

regards,

Heinz

Heinz,

Take an ancient bone as an example. As Noson explains in his essay there is not a definite, clear boundary between object and not object. In this case bone and not bone. Some of its minerals may have leeched into the soil and soil may be ingrained in the structure of the bone. However on the macroscopic scale there are regions of mineral and organic structure that are distinct from the surrounding soil. As well as its organic and mineral structure (allowing identification as bone) it will also have a carbon 14 proportion (allowing age of the material measurement) The structure will also have a distribution or form (that may allow identification of species and age of individual at death.) It has a center of gravity (un-measured). These are qualities of the existing thing that do not require observation to be.

Measurements / observation (requiring an observer): Length, width, breadth, weight, age of material measurement, orientation, a geometric mapping of form, classification, colour/ colour distribution- an attribute of the seen 'image' of the bone generated by the observer not the material bone.

"What would that mean for what we call prehistoric past?" "Heinz. The bone is -Now as is all material existence but inferences can be made about former -Nows from the observations and measurements of the bone. Pre-history does not still exist. Artifacts and relics exist awaiting discovery. Not yet having been found is not the same as not existing (-Now).

Giorgina,

als regards e.g. C14: this method to determine the 'age' of certain materials not only builds on a vast range of theories but also requires experimental measurements. These decay measurements in turn require man-made machines called clocks, which measure 'time' in fractions of the rotation period of the Earth or other periodic=geometric systems. Isn't the question "how many seconds per second?" the proof of the illusionary nature of 'time'?

'Time' is a psychological not a physical dimension. It passes the faster, the more disorder there is. In physics there is 'phase' and 'constellation' - not 'time'.

Heinz

Heinz, I will reply to your points on my page "The Castle and elephants" so as not to take up room on Noson's.

Dear Noson,

regarding the notion of structure, there are various, not always completely overlapping, definitions. To me, structure is essentially what a system and its model have in common---basically, what makes another system a model of some object system. But it's more usual to phrase this in terms of relations, where 'structure' is essentially the set of relations that are born by the elements of some area of discourse (although I have recently come to be skeptical of this way of putting it).

The usual example I like to give is the set of your direct maternal ancestors, ordered by ancestry, and the set of books on your shelf, ordered by thickness. You can use the books as a model of your ancestors, with a book mapping to a more senior ancestor if it is thicker than another. The structure both share is then just the linear order both sets support. This is what allows you to take elements of one set, and draw conclusions about the other: if 'Moby Dick' is thicker than 'The Old Man and the Sea', and 'Moby Dick' maps to Ethel, while 'The Old Man...' maps to Mabel, you know that Ethel must be an ancestor of Mabel.

Granted, it's not terribly elegant, but I think it gets the point across. For another example, take an orrery and the solar system: the orrery models the solar system because of the arrangement of the little metal beads representing the planets, and because of the translation between the gears---all of which are structural facts about the system.

I don't believe (although some do) that this structure has any existence beyond its being instantiated in concrete objects---so this is rather more an 'Aristotelian' than a Platonic picture.

An important fact about structure is that merely specifying a structure doesn't suffice to fix the objects that bear it. This is the famous objection the mathematician Max Newman raised against Russell's philosophy of science, who held that all we know about the world is its structure (causal structure, to be exact). Newman argued that if that's the case, all we know about the world is its cardinality, since any set of the right cardinality can be considered to bear a given structure.

I essentially (and without further extending this) think that this is half the answer, with our knowledge of structure being impressed upon us by the external world (which is, again, a very Aristotelian 'hylomorphic' notion), but with our knowledge of the intrinsic properties of our minds supplying the necessary bearers of that structure (I have just had a paper accepted where I defend this sort of theory).

As for entanglement, yes, my aim was to agree with your view, by defending it against an argument that's sometimes raised to promote a kind of holism---an object-hood going beyond the sum of its parts---via entanglement. The argument, essentially, is that an entangled object is an irreducible whole, as its parts do not suffice to reconstruct it; incidentally, the same argument is also sometimes used to promote a notion of 'bare structure' or 'relations without relata'. Hence, whether an entangled object is just a collection of parts, or a unified whole, is then, according to that argument, not in the eye of the beholder.

I think this argument fails, however, because it intrinsically depends on a choice of tensor product structure, which is not provided by the bare Hilbert space of the system.

Anyway, lest I write another essay in response right here, let me just say I look forward to reading your comments on my essay... After all, it owes quite a bit to your own work!

Cheers

Jochen

Sorry, I accidentally got logged out... The above, obviously, was me.

Hello, congrats for your essay, I liked a lot and I shared it on Facebook, regards

Noson,

Welcome back.

Your essay was of great interest to me and prompted a number of questions along the way. The exclusive use of the "object" terminology calls to mind the great number of terms we use for things that we observe and are vague meaning and use: particles, matter, atoms, objects, molecules, etc.

Sean Carroll, for one, says that every particle is a field and, for example, an electron is an excitation of an electron field. I reference a study where researchers used the elements ytterbium, rhodium and silicon to create a type of metal in which the electrons act as a unit and not independently as they do in a regular metal like copper that seems to bridge the quantum and classical worlds. I know some believe that particles are real and most don't. I wonder how you define an object and what you think of the element study above.

You say, "All large-scale objects are created by us and we idealize them to make them applicable to the laws." In another passage you say, "It is a human mind that makes them into a whole." I agree that flaws mark our search for ultimate truths and that our theories are tentative and that we try to make our objects applicable to our theories and concepts. I can see that Kant has influenced current philosophy with his ideas on synthesis and transcendental deduction but I'm not too schooled on his thinking.

No one has a corner on the makeup of our physical universe. I think we are all searching. Hope you get a chance to read mine.

Jim Hoover

Dear Noson,

You tackle a very real question of persistence. In a response to Jochen you say: "I am not pushing subjectivism. But not because I believe in structure."

This is compatible with my belief that physicists project mathematical structure on the world and then believe that physical reality has this structure.

You say "the usual lesson one learns from the Ship of Theseus is that objects do not have persistence through time."

You also discuss measurements in special relativity. My essay deals with this in detail. I hope you find it interesting. The conclusion is, I believe, relevant to your essay. SR is 4D, and structures are frozen 'forever'. The alternative, (3+1)D ontology, sees universal time (the present) spanning the spatial universe. The energy-time theory conserves energy in the present, and thus lends structure to the reality of the present, but it is a dynamic, energy-based structure, compatible with the Ship of Theseus.

Thanks for giving me insight into 'persistence'.

I hope you are well. It's always good to read your essays.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Noson

I enjoyed reading your essay very much, although the way you express the topic left me with the impression that you are saying that we live in a simulated illusory reality, for you claim that there are no objects, and so on.

Regarding relativity you may interested to see my publication on why the speed of light gives c every time is

measured.

As for quantum mechanics, Bohmian mechanics is more intuitive than traditional one, I wish you had mentioned it in your work to have a wider view of quantum mechanics.

Your work is similar to mine regarding how humans understand reality, I hope you find some time to read my essay and enjoy it as much as I enjoyed yours.

Best regards

Israel Perez

Dear Noson,

This is a very interesting paper, brilliantly written as might have been expected from you, and food for thought. Very Kantian, in a way. It struck me that the overall idea, that human limitations induce the unpredictability of quantum mechanics, is quite explicit in the Copenhagen Interpretation as originally intended by Bohr and Heisenberg, namely (as I try to explain in detail in the Introduction of my 2017 book): the need for a classical description of the apparatus leads to the uncertainties in QM. However, you seem to believe this is true in all of physics. I doubt this myself, and your examples rather show that often one uses idealizations where in principle one could be more precise. The point of QM (but only of QM) is that in principle one cannot be more precise. I am increasingly beginning to believe that we should incorporate intuitionistic mathematics into (quantum) physics in order to deal with such issues.

But overall, anything stressing human limitations in setting boundary conditions on science has my deepest sympathy! All the best, Klaas