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zBrown
Ice climber
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Mar 19, 2018 - 08:47pm PT
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“But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.”
-Kesey
Ken and I agree
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Mar 19, 2018 - 09:50pm PT
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Curious about the Wheeler "quote." The woo people latch onto it worshipfully, in desperation, but it may be wishful thinking on their part. Even were it true, it might have been an off-hand comment rather than a studied and serious opinion.
JL is good at documenting these things (Dennett's Folly, e.g.) , so I leave it up to him.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 20, 2018 - 09:38am PT
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It's interesting to see how people scramble around in an attempt to disqualify an idea or quote.
There seems to be three basic methods (at least in terms of logic): A) The "old data" argument. That is, the person who made the challenging quote was not privy to the new data, which disqualifies his statement. And B) X didn't actually say the quote in question; and C) you can never really get what X means without understanding the equations.
Another wonky take is the idea that we are cherry picking a quote that bolsters a certain woo take on things, while in fact in my case I am only asking a very basic question(s): What does this or that quote mean; by what means did the person arrive at the conclusion, and if you disagree, what is your disagreement based on.
The quote was: “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”
More commentary here on the subject:
http://bigthink.com/robby-berman/we-survive-because-reality-may-be-nothing-like-we-think-it-is
A more nuanced view of the same, offering the same quote, is found here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/theres-no-such-thing-as-reality-and-its-a-good-thing-too/#!
Again, asking such simple question is not joining the ranks of those who have jumped on the bandwagon and with minimal understanding
and posited all sorts of untenable conclusions from Quantum Theory. The question is not about "my" theory, rather about what a noted QM expert actually said, and wondering out loud what the implications are. And then asking: If you disagree with this, what is your understanding and why?
For the record, the entire Wheeler quote was:
“Useful as it is under everyday circumstances to say that the world exists 'out there' independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld. There is a strange sense in which this is a 'preparatory universe.'”
A last thought from an interview with Hoffman:
Gefter: It doesn’t seem like many people in neuroscience or philosophy of mind are thinking about fundamental physics. Do you think that’s been a stumbling block for those trying to understand consciousness?
Hoffman: I think it has been. Not only are they ignoring the progress in fundamental physics, they are often explicit about it. They’ll say openly that quantum physics is not relevant to the aspects of brain function that are causally involved in consciousness. They are certain that it’s got to be classical properties of neural activity, which exist independent of any observers—spiking rates, connection strengths at synapses, perhaps dynamical properties as well. These are all very classical notions under Newtonian physics, where time is absolute and objects exist absolutely. And then [neuroscientists] are mystified as to why they don’t make progress. They don’t avail themselves of the incredible insights and breakthroughs that physics has made. Those insights are out there for us to use, and yet my field says, “We’ll stick with Newton, thank you. We’ll stay 300 years behind in our physics.”
It's interesting to see what the many divergent views have to say about all of this. Even more interesting is to probe the thinking and first assumptions about what and why people believe this or that. Where it gets especially muddled is when people want it both ways - using quantum insights to argue this point, and classical beliefs to argue that.
And Ed, the statement very widely attributed to Wheeler is one we've heard for ages from certain QM folks. Are you saying that there is some context in which they might say: "No question, the world exists 'out there' independent of us." What, specifically, in there in QM that would support such as assertion?
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Mar 20, 2018 - 12:18pm PT
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For the record, the entire Wheeler quote was . . .
Still no authentication? This happens so often on this thread: "Many say","Generally accepted", "Some contend", "Known as", etc. This tactic weakens an otherwise decent philosophical argument.
Not to say the Wheeler "quote" is not of interest and does not inspire intelligent conversation.
However, I think it probable the moon is still "there" when not being contemplated by a human. Or is it magic thinking?
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Mar 20, 2018 - 01:42pm PT
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On Sunday, I hooked a thermal right off of tow (1200 feet) and milked it. It was maybe a hundred yards in diameter. At about 3000 feet I entered a very cold layer. The thermal expanded so much that I could not get out of it. After an hour or so, above 7000 feet, I started freezing to death. I was desperate to get down. The lift was everywhere, and even in a crazy dangerous deep spiral dive, I was still going up. Finally I worked my way over a forested area and hit sink. 20 minutes later I made it down.
Crazy flight. After that everyone put on a lot of clothes. I was toast for the rest of the day.
So now I know what it is like to want to come down but can't. I'd brought it up the night before around the fire. The best technique didn't slow me down at all (big ears with speed bar), hence the dive, which can get out of hand on a paraglider.
Now I check the sounding not so much for the winds aloft, but the temperature aloft. I was literally freezing. In Florida.
I like to share real life stories so you guys no what it is like outside.
Carry on.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 20, 2018 - 02:42pm PT
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Ed,
I don’t think I found an answer in your response, but that’s probably me.
Truth seems to me to be a concept. I’m not sure what to make of it anymore. I no longer think I’m all that much interested in it.
I understand that you say that all science does is make predictions. I hear you. I’m not sure its predictions is only about physical systems, as you claim, however. I guess what is physical has become increasingly murky to me these days. When I feel the table top or this couch I’m sitting on at the moment, my mind also dredges up a number of concepts that seem to say that almost all of what I feel is empty space and energy. None of it seems very clear.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 20, 2018 - 05:02pm PT
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Truth seems to me to be a concept.
It is NOT a concept.
Otherwise, you would never ever even exist to begin with .........
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Mar 20, 2018 - 06:07pm PT
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Truth seems to me to be a concept. I’m not sure what to make of it anymore. I no longer think I’m all that much interested in it.
This is a very scary development in our species. Up until now, truth had led the way as an overall trend in our evolution. Truth basically meant the ability to assimilate and evaluate empirical evidence intelligently with respect to enhancing our individual survival. Memes have destroyed that. Memes (can) trump our own survival mechanisms. Memes are like invasive species. Memes are why Trump's base so obviously votes against their own self-interests. Memes are why MikeL believes the way he does, IMO. Control of false memes, if it can be done, is going to be the savior of secular humanism.
As much as I am a fan of Steven Pinker and his uplifting assessment of the march of human progress and empathy, I believe that our ability to disseminate false information through memes so effectively, and then live in meme-driven, empirically-deficient echo chambers, is going to be our downfall as a species.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 20, 2018 - 06:08pm PT
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https://todayinsci.com/W/Wheeler_John/WheelerJohn-Quotations.htm
Here you go, John. Thirty quotes where Wheeler basically says the same thing: "No phenomenon is a physical phenomenon till it is an observed phenomenon."
While our classical minds tell us that the moon is "out there" no matter is we are observing it or not, Wheeler (former teacher of Feynman) said, not so.
What's most interesting to me is to know what led Wheeler to say such things, and if someone differs from this view, from what particular aspect(s) of QM did they derive their belief.
As mentioned, what we see a lot of on this thread are those who want it both ways - both a classical and a QM take on the world. Seems strange to me that as bizarre as QM seems to a non-scientist like me, something as fantastically different as human consciousness is from the normal objects of science is by some expected to conform to classical mechanics and causation.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Mar 20, 2018 - 06:22pm PT
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While our classical minds tell us that the moon is "out there" no matter is we are observing it or not, Wheeler (former teacher of Feynman) said, not so.
For my own database -- so you are basically saying that you are a rationalist, no?
Because, to point out the empiricist's premise, there is a world out there independent of any observer. If you do not believe so, then you are a rationalist. Somebody tell me that my logic is wrong.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Mar 20, 2018 - 06:28pm PT
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"Reference is often made to a person's attempt to treat the semantic clarity of a construction as a variable with a maximum value which must be approximated as a required step in solving the problem of constructing a credible definition of a situation
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 20, 2018 - 06:49pm PT
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Eyonkeee, my exercise here is not to label this belief or that, be it yours or mine; rather to ponder what one eminent thinker (Wheeler) said, try and understand what experiences/discoveries he had that led him to that belief, and if someone differs in their belief, hearing what they say and listening to what specifically they have encountered that led them to their belief.
In other words, this is the discovery phase of the investigation, not the labeling phase.
Consider for a moment this quote from Wheeler:
"It from Bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe."
What do you make of this, and if your ideas differ from Wheeler's, from where are your beliefs derived?
A little more on Wheeler can be found here:
http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 20, 2018 - 09:09pm PT
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so the quote wasn't from Wheeler?
I know Largo has a disdain for "the dry facts," but when I am asked the question:
"What do you think Wheeler meant when he said...?" I take the task seriously and try to find out what Wheeler was talking about. When I find out that Wheeler didn't make such a statement I wonder why the question wasn't:
"What do you think Wheeler would have meant had he said...?"
which is obviously a fool's errand, as we have no idea if Wheeler would have said such a thing. In that case, I have no understanding of Wheeler, and could have none, since the hypothetical question is not worth pursuing.
The appeal to a Wheeler quote is the appeal to authority, and since we all know that Wheeler was a famous physicist, we can measure the veracity of what other physicists say compared against his statement. If Hartouni thinks something different than Wheeler, who are we to believe.
My response has always believe you can't believe Hartouni or Wheeler, but they both could probably tell you how it is they thought about something, at least if it is physics.
Interesting statement in the message Largo posted on the Wheeler quotes,
"As mentioned, what we see a lot of on this thread are those who want it both ways - both a classical and a QM take on the world."
we have it both ways, Classical physics works, Quantum Mechanics works, we use them both to make precise predictions about the universe. One spans the domain of the entire universe, the other down to the sub-nuclear scales.
It is still a mystery how we might reconcile the two, a work in progress. But until we have that reconciliation (if indeed these two must be reconciled) they work fine independently.
The statement is strange if only that it seems to demand that we can only have one or the other but not both. Strange because the explanation of the universe we have constructed is entirely a product of our culture. The things about that explanation that seem to transcend our humanness are the quantities that we measure that we use to test our predictions, and similarly the observations we make that demand explanation. These are quantitative measures, humans make them, humans test them.
If you want to base it all on qualitative statements you imagine the situation is like the Fundamentalists assaulting the Hari Krishnas on Sproul Plaza, something that happened frequently in the 1970s when I was a student at Cal. Who of those two groups were right? and how would you know?
Of those quotes of Wheeler's which someone assures you "basically says the same thing" we can now look at the references to find out just what the context of the quote was:
"No phenomenon is a physical phenomenon till it is an observed phenomenon."
'The universe does not exist “out there,” independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe. Physics is no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into time and space. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself. '
'The vital act is the act of participation. “Participator” is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term “observer” of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can’t be done, quantum mechanics says. '
this last one is in a book that I at least have on my bookshelf, Gravitation by Misner, Thorn and Wheeler, also lovingly referred to as "the telephone book" by those physicists old enough to know what a telephone book was.
Considering it a quote from Wheeler one must weigh what the role of his co-authors was in writing it, and the context in which the quote appears, the last section of the book, a section entitled "Beyond the End of Time, The Reprocessing of the Universe". The chapter is most likely greatly influenced by Wheeler, it is where the idea of "pregeometry" is discussed, and one finds the appeal to the anthropic principle there also, referring to the idea Dicke wrote in 1961, these are not new ideas, nor are they particularly "magical," at least not the ways Wheeler, Dicke, Dirac etc were using them.
I think that you missed the quote (I assume that you do not have a copy of "Gravitation" on your bookshelf, though):
"Dicke ["Dirac's Cosmology and Mach's Principle," Nature 192 440 (1961)] had pointed out that the right order of ideas may not be, here is the universe, so what must man be; but here is man, so what must the universe be?"
and continuing:
"In other words: (1) What good is a universe without awareness of that universe? But (2) Awareness demands life. (3) Life demands the presence of the elements heavier than hydrogen. (4) The production of heavy elements demands thermonuclear combustion. (5) Thermonuclear combustion normally requires several billion years of cooking time in stars. (6) Several billion years of time will not and cannot be available in a closed universe, according to general relativity, unless the radius-at-maximum-expansion of that universe is several billion light years or more. So why on this view is the universe as big as it is? Because only so can man be here!"
Here we have a linear, reductionist line of thought which starts out sounding like "woo" and ends up embedded in physics calculations, and back again!
There have been many uses of the "anthropic principle" in physical cosmology and we could wonder, just as Wheeler did (and apparently Misner and Thorne also) at humans in the universe.
The quote ('The vital act is the act of participation...') from the link Largo provide above appears later on in that section (two long paragraphs below). It is the start of a large number of questions in that paragraph.
Some of these questions have resulted in interesting physics, others not yet.
Wheeler didn't have the slightest idea what he meant, but he was curious, and it was worth his time as a physicist to ponder the questions.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Mar 20, 2018 - 09:16pm PT
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Thanks, John.
Wheeler:
"The universe does not exist “out there,” independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe. Physics is no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into time and space. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself."
"The vital act is the act of participation. “Participator” is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term “observer” of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can’t be done, quantum mechanics says."
There's no question we are involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. For what appears is in our minds. I wonder how he would have answered the question of the moon's independent existence.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Mar 20, 2018 - 10:41pm PT
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There was absolutely no way it could change anything, but it just kept kicking and kicking and kicking. And then all of a sudden, the sour cream was churned into butter. Then the frog stood on the butter and jumped out of the can. So you look at the sour cream and you think, 'There is no way I can do anything with that.' But sometimes, unexpected things happen.
Good to know it's not always the turtles!
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 21, 2018 - 08:41am PT
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eeyonkee: This [that truth is a concept] is a very scary development in our species.
I can think of others that would outrank it. You’ve fallen into hyperbole. Look at the words you’re using: scary, evolution, intelligently, survival, invasive, false, human progress, false information, downfall of the species.
Not finding anything that one can be sure of presents the end of a world order. The classical notion of an objective, measurable, material world “out there” no longer can be held consistently. Instead, we find ambiguity when we look closely at just about anything. A ambiguous world requires a paradigm shift, not just a different way of thinking but a different way of being.
The world, by almost every account, is not a simple physical, material, measurable, conceptualized world. Ideas are not more important than what ideas point to. One can see exactly that if one looks at almost any scientific discipline, increasingly in contemporary religious thinking, and in all forms of art.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 21, 2018 - 09:10am PT
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Excellent MikeL .....
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 21, 2018 - 09:18am PT
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Attempts to disqualify or reframe Wheeler's words seem like pretty weak sauce to me, especially when the link provided renders the original quote in much the same terms. The unconscious psychological drivers behind questioning the verity of the Wheeler quote are telling. Do you think anyone would be questioning the quote had Wheeler said that there is every reason to believe there is a stand alone universe "out there" that exists separate from an observer? Not a chance on this thread. This shows pretty clearly people's fear of taking the quote seriously. If you run into an idea that runs counter to your own beliefs, simply disregard it, explain it away.
But to me, the most fantastic quote of them all in this regards is Ed's claim that "Wheeler didn't have the slightest idea what he meant." This, we can clearly understand, is an attempt to say that Wheeler wasn't saying anything at all. This is the scientific version of sticking your head in the sand.
And what the hell does "magical" mean?
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