Jesus, the Foundation of Science

[Touchstone]

JP2Admirer:

Does this not force us to ask the question: can reality be both intelligible and unintelligible?

Yes. That’s not a new question. Reality is a big place. It’s a wonder that we can make as much sense of QM as we do. But scale matters. What we cannot comprehend (so far as we can tell, at length) at the quantum level is that which Aquinas could not even have suspected existed as it does.

Another pedagogical nugget: how far can you get with naïve set theory? Pretty damn far! But yet, naïve set theory is demonstrably contradictory, logical inconsistent (see Russell’s Paradox, Berry’s Paradox). Again that’s a crude analogy, but a good one, even so. Does the utility of naïve set theory collapse with the discovery of Russell’s Paradox?

Hardly!

You can still build nearly all of classic integer arithmetic out of it. It works. Not perfect is not perfectly failed. It’s just “imperfect”. And imperfect is plenty good for us humans.

At the level of sense experience it is intelligible. At the QM level it is seemingly unintelligible – so why is it not just as much of a “fundamentalist” position to state de facto that nature is unintelligible, when from what I can gather, it seemingly is very intelligible as the very search for answers that science seeks seems to suggest. Why not even ask, “Why the search if all is meaningless?”

Because you don’t know how far you will get until you try. The goal of science is discovery, the enterprise of seeing what models can be built, if any, that perform. It’s not metaphysically necessary that science succeeds at all. It’s just something our inquisitive minds want to pursue – given the advantages our inquisitiveness has realized for us in terms of evolutionary success.

When statements are qualified with, “It could some day be proven otherwise, but as of now they challenge our normal way of thinking,” it seems to suggest that it is just as much of a fundamentalist approach to claim de facto the world is unintelligible.

Well, you’ll have to explain what you mean by ‘fundamentalist’, then. Because that’s a flexible, corrigible, humble position, and I understand fundamentalism to be dogmatic, incorrigible, certain.

The world is NOT de facto unintelligible. The a priori position is “unknown”. We venture out with methods to see how far we can get. The results of our efforts are the answer, and it’s not something we can decide at the beginning.

Please, let’s keep the labels out of the argument – it does not serve the discussion to start waving the “your close minded” label out there. Because, as I have just shown, the same thing can be said in the reverse.

I don’t think it can, but am interested to see how that would work in your view.

I guess I just need to know what you mean when you say it’s not an either, or…please parse this out on the possibility of an intelligible and unintelligible world.

Thanks.

It’s a false dichotomy, the choices being only ‘perfectly intelligible’ or ‘not intelligible at all’. Not only are those not the only options, I can’t see why those options are anything more than options as logical possibilities for completeness; there’s no reason we have to think either of those reflect our world. We are able to point at many things which substantiate the claim that some sense can be made of the world around us, and to good practical effect (I can fly from Minnesota to London in 9 hours once a month, safely – hard to believe that is actually happening if the world isn’t intelligible to a significant degree)/

Other aspects confound us. And they don’t ‘hide’ from us like a mystery or some unknown area we haven’t gotten around to charting, yet. They present themselves as fundamentally contradictory, unintelligible. They are largely removed from our day to day lives, but it’s knowledge that we have, nonetheless.

That’s not dogmatic, polar thinking. It’s just a description of the state of our knowledge and understanding of the world. The world is as intelligible as we can show it to be, and that frontier moves forward in fits and starts over time. Some parts just don’t yield – parts of QM have defied the ardent efforts of some of the world’s greatest minds for over a century – but that’s the wonder of science: we don’t know what discoveries lie ahead. Science is eternally optimistic as a stance toward the process of discovery. But the frontiers of intelligible are advanced with difficult, and there are no guarantees. The world is what it is, and we just continue chipping away at it to discern what that “is” means in terms of models and paradigms.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

The more I think about this the more questions arise…

I think, in my musings, I may have come across an argument, Touchtone, that says it is all or nothing…that things are intelligible or unintelligible. Let me bounce it off of you and you can respond.

If QM states that the ground of existence is unintelligible, but at the sensory level we state that things are intelligible – science relies on essentially linked causality at the macro level so as to make modern technology possible. So we have an unintelligible intelligible world.

Yeah. Although it’s worth pointing out that for all the challenges we struggle with interpreting and sense-making QM (Copenhagen Interpretation, MWI, etc.) quantum physics is the crown jewel of science, far and away the most precise, powerful and reliable discipline of physics that’s been staked out. The precision tolerances in modern quantum physics are just breathtaking.

So clearly, we have a solid handle on physics at quantum scales in many important and practical ways. It’s not a “fail” for science, but the greatest success science has every marked.

I don’t think the “unintelligible intelligible” progression is conceptually that difficult. If you can understand how purely random throws of dice produce beautiful, predictable statistical distributions at large scales, I think you have a handle on the problem.

This itself is a contradiction – i.e. at one level of experience the world is intelligible, at another it is unintelligible.

It’s not a contradiction at all. There is no simultaneous affirmation and negation of the same attribute in the same context, here. Which is what you need for a contradiction. If I look at one square centimeter of Monet’s The Bridge At Argenteuil, I can’t determine that I’m looking at the point of a flower petal from just that. Stepping back, and seeing more, it becomes intelligible.

The painting hasn’t changed. All that’s changed is the data set and perceptual framework I have to work with. That’s you clue. The problematic element is our brains. Out “intelligentator” is just not well suited for some parts of nature, and very well honed for others.

So it is both intelligible and unintelligible.

It appears so, and that’s not a controversial position, I think. To say otherwise is to deny a whole bunch of evidence and knowledge we have, one way or another. We may one day discover the “theory of everything” that provides a robust model for us a means of rendering all phenomena intelligible, perhaps.

Therefore, it is unintelligible.

Does not follow, I suggest. Or, tell me what you mean precisely by “unintelligible”. Is a model that performs empirically in ways we can rationalize for the vast majority “unintelligible” if intractable or seemingly contradictory features also exist in the model? It seems to me that what performs, performs. If we can predict the perihelion of Mercury to mind-bending accuracy, how is that diminished by the seeming contradictions of particle/wave duality, even if we stipulate them to be actual contradictions in terms of our understanding of that term? Is Mercury’s perihelion thereby unpredictable, unintelligible, in your view?

Being both A and not A, makes reality ultimately unintelligible and Nietzsche was right!

He may be right. But the common theme I’m getting here is that you equate contradictions in part of the system to be identical with all propositions being declared contradictory/meaningless. See my question above about Mercury’s perihelion and particle/wave duality. There’s an equivocation running through your comments, just like there was in The Exodus, which switches out “local contradiction” for “exhaustively self-contradictory”, effectively saying that if some propositions are undecidable or problematic for our paradigm, then ALL propositions are undecidable. That doesn’t follow.

If you think it does, I’m interested to see how one comes to that conclusion.

So, maybe the ad hominem “fundamentalist” term should not be used at all. Perhaps it is the case that it is all or nothing and it is *perceptive *to recognize this (as the greatest modern philosopher, Nietzsche did – not that I agree with him).

Well, it does appear to be “nothing” from a fundamentalist perspective. If you force the options to be just “perfectly and exhaustively intelligible” and “not intelligible at all”, you’re forced to latter, or simply denialist proclamations of the former, because problems do appear to exist.

But even (especially!) for Nietzsche, that kills “perfection” and “ideal” in the same way (and for the same reason) we God is killed by modern thinking. Just as the errancy of scripture doesn’t make scripture necessarily ALL false, all worthless, neither does facing the limitations of our minds as “sense-makers” of the world around us. Good enough is good enough.

Nietzsche didn’t conclude that all was lost once we’d killed God. Instead, this just removed the barriers for man to create his own myths out of his chaotic passions. In that sense, he was a kind of pure optimist as well as a pragmatist, very much embracing the struggle between what we can know, understand, and render sensible, and what lies beyond that frontier.

-TS

 

[grannymh]

The link in the OP leads to a paper that begins with this summary: “In an attempt to account for the origin of modern science, I will argue that the Judeo-Christian world view played a crucial role in this birth. I will cite four lines of evidence to support this hypothesis and respond to objections at the appropriate places.”

It is the designation of modern science which strikes this Pooh bear with a very little brain. When one looks at the intelligibility of the universe as part of modern science, one might well ask – what was before the birth of modern science? When one looks at a drawing of the ancient Hebrew conception of the world (sometimes found in the first few pages of old bibles) there is loud laughter in every scientist’s lab and living room or parlour. Yet, the question remains – did the ancient universe itself become more intelligible in recent centuries or did modern science cause people to become more intelligent about the universe?

Seems most likely that the intelligibility of the universe has existed as long as the universe itself. Counting mythology, people have been curious about our surroundings since day one. Somehow, humans have always known that the universe is knowable.
Thus one would be able to posit a relationship between the intelligibility of the universe and the intellect of humans, something like that of a giver and receiver. Thinking along this path, the Creator responsible for the intelligibility of the universe would actually be the founder of science, primeval and modern.

When one continues on this path, curiosity may lead to another question as to Who is this Creator Who is responsible for the intelligibility of a vast universe, Since humans have the ability to seek answers about the universe, there would come a time when humans would seek answers about intelligibility’s Creator.

Blessings,
granny

“The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?”
from the poem “Christmas” by George Herbert

 

[JP2Admirer]

I understand the argument, but that is a pre-scientific perspective. Even if you suppose God made the world, the history of man’s evolution is such that we have a answer for that question. We have cognitive patterns and mental abilities that make sense of the world around us based on our sense-(name removed by moderator)uts because those adaptations are superior, advantageous toward the continuing survival and development of our genes.

Why is a puddle flat on top, and shaped exactly like the shape of the hole it fills? Because nature seeks states of least energy and optimized equilibria. We are the “puddle” that is conforming to shape of our ecological niche, and satisfying the imperative toward optimization. Our mental faculties are preserved precisely because they provide correspondence maps to the extramental world, if crude and error-infused ones. A crude map is still a huge advantage over no map.

You still haven’t answered why technology is possible? You’ve only stated a kind of epistemology – I can agree to some extent because of its realist position – but even if the approach I am giving is "pre scientific’, and if our “mental faculties provide correspondence maps to the extramental world,” it still does not seem to follow that what we take in (especially if it is just our minds making the unintelligible intelligible so as to provide for preservation of the species) would provide us with the ability to make extramental existence conform to the maps we’ve created in our heads. That suggests to me there is a rational structure to *ens reale, *to the territory and not simply the map.

Consider that the concept of law itself presumes a kind of uniformity, symmetry and isotropy that can ONLY work in some physical models as statistical aggregates. And in fact, that is what this world of ours looks like, in important respects. The timing of a single decay event for an unstable isotope is completely impenetrable to us – couldn’t be more unintelligible as to the timing – but as a statistical ensemble of decay events, you can set your watch by it.

So you have quantum “froth”, not just unintelligible, but unknowability in principle at work at Planck scales. But it al resolves probabilistically, so at our scales, nature is highly ordered, predictable, intelligible.

And is the probability so high that statistically at our level we can always expect the same results from our scientific examinations? Or is it so high that we can come to expect the expected? i.e. we can repeat experiments and determine the same results time in and time out?

I think this is what you’re stating here. So if the accidentally linked causality (as we have at the quantum level) rounds itself out statistically in essentially linked causality because the probabilities are so high – does not Aquinas’ statement that “things of a good disposition happen always or *for the most part” *(my emphasis) help hold together the intelligibility of nature?

What if, as I began my argument with hecd, there are probabilities that suggest the existence and the non-existence of God? What if faith is a theological virtue and there is no knock down, drag out, argument for materialism or for theism? What if probability is woven into the fabric of existence because faith requires belief in things unseen? What if there is evidence for both sides?

So here is the trouble I am having: if the ‘territory’ is unintelligible, and the map seeks ‘intelligibility’ then I think scientific pursuit becomes an unimportant game. It becomes a “Socratic optimism” and nature seems to have played a tragic joke on us as seekers of knowledge.

Why the pursuit? Vanity? Self-delusion?

 

[JP2Admirer]

It’s not a contradiction at all. There is no simultaneous affirmation and negation of the same attribute in the same context, here. Which is what you need for a contradiction. If I look at one square centimeter of Monet’s The Bridge At Argenteuil, I can’t determine that I’m looking at the point of a flower petal from just that. Stepping back, and seeing more, it becomes intelligible.

The painting hasn’t changed. All that’s changed is the data set and perceptual framework I have to work with. That’s you clue. The problematic element is our brains. Out “intelligentator” is just not well suited for some parts of nature, and very well honed for others.

So when you look at Monet’s painting in large scale and small scale, you are not looking at the same thing from different perspectives? Does the substance or essence of the painting change from one perspective to another? How so? How is it not a contradiction to make two different claims about the same thing from different perspectives? It seems to me you are making contradictory claims about the nature of “being” when you claim it is intelligible from one perspective and unintelligible from another. (By unintelligible I mean, incapable of being understood by nature). I really do think this is an either or situation because if at a fundemental level the world is unintelligible, then why would it be intelligible at another? The change of perspective should not change the nature of what we are studying…which is what I think you are suggesting.

Does not follow, I suggest. Or, tell me what you mean precisely by “unintelligible”. Is a model that performs empirically in ways we can rationalize for the vast majority “unintelligible” if intractable or seemingly contradictory features also exist in the model? It seems to me that what performs, performs. If we can predict the perihelion of Mercury to mind-bending accuracy, how is that diminished by the seeming contradictions of particle/wave duality, even if we stipulate them to be actual contradictions in terms of our understanding of that term? Is Mercury’s perihelion thereby unpredictable, unintelligible, in your view?.

You are starting to argue my own position for me. Thanks. I think, the fact that some things seem by nature unkowable suggest two possibilities, 1) they are unknowable in the sense of being spontaneous accidental cause and effect with no essential attachment to each other, or 2) they are knowable, we just don’t know how to know them yet. I think the statistical probability is so immense that the world is intelligible even if there are mysterious inexplicable events in it.

He may be right. But the common theme I’m getting here is that you equate contradictions in part of the system to be identical with all propositions being declared contradictory/meaningless. See my question above about Mercury’s perihelion and particle/wave duality. There’s an equivocation running through your comments, just like there was in The Exodus, which switches out “local contradiction” for “exhaustively self-contradictory”, effectively saying that if some propositions are undecidable or problematic for our paradigm, then ALL propositions are undecidable. That doesn’t follow.

I guess I would ask you to show me how a change in relation to an object changes the object itself? I don’t think this is an equivocation at all…we are referencing the same thing at different levels of perception and making two different claims about the nature of that thing. Thus, we are making contradictory statements about the same thing, relative to how we are perceiving it (i.e. ideoscopically vs. cenoscopically.)

Well, it does appear to be “nothing” from a fundamentalist perspective. If you force the options to be just “perfectly and exhaustively intelligible” and “not intelligible at all”, you’re forced to latter, or simply denialist proclamations of the former, because problems do appear to exist…

I don’t think this is what I am arguing. What I am trying to state is that there is evidence that the world itself is intelligible, more evidence than suggests that it is not. I would claim that the world is most likely exhaustively intelligible, but that doesn’t mean we will ever have exhausted what can be known about it – our mind’s are too weak for it. Will there be things that always appear unintelligible – quite possibly since our mind’s are so feable. The exhaustive intelligibility of the world is the very premise on which science rests…does that mean we will have all the answers someday – probably not.

 

[grannymh]

In itself, the intelligibility of the universe has a direct connection with human intellect. Perhaps, this is why it is appealing. This direct connection flies over the difficulties of metaphysics or the changeability of natural science.

 

[Touchstone]

You still haven’t answered why technology is possible? You’ve only stated a kind of epistemology – I can agree to some extent because of its realist position – but even if the approach I am giving is "pre scientific’, and if our “mental faculties provide correspondence maps to the extramental world,” it still does not seem to follow that what we take in (especially if it is just our minds making the unintelligible intelligible so as to provide for preservation of the species) would provide us with the ability to make extramental existence conform to the maps we’ve created in our heads. That suggests to me there is a rational structure to *ens reale, *to the territory and not simply the map.

To me as well. Just from the intelligibility of the world around us we’ve established (even in being able to read/write this post!) we understand that the world is this amenable to model-making to some substantial degree.

I don’t think we disagree on that – that what we show to be intelligible, predictable, navigable – evinces structure, order and principle (e.g isotropy) in the world. The departure comes from my remaining scientifically optimistic but formally agnostic about the rest of the uncharted territory, whereas you, I take it, understand on principle that it all must be intelligible, as a theist would naturally do, as “God understands it”, all the way down, in that view, even if we have no other basis.

On theism, we are not gods, but the reality of “the” God is the proof of the exhaustive intelligible of the universe, as God apprehends (and more, has ordained) it all.

And is the probability so high that statistically at our level we can always expect the same results from our scientific examinations?

Probability makes “always” a problem. In principle, no. There is always a very small chance of absolutely freaky rolls of the dice. A physics professor will explain to his students that it’s possible a human could go through a cement wall, leaving both undamaged. It astronomically unlikely, but since we are dealing with probabilities, it is a possibility.

That said, at our scales, things wind up behaving predictably and uniformly all the time, for practical purposes.

Or is it so high that we can come to expect the expected? i.e. we can repeat experiments and determine the same results time in and time out?

Yes. The classic challenge of working out gas distribution in a chamber allows that, for example, all of the molecules in a chamber could be on one half of the box if we insert in a divider, finding high pressure gas on on side, and a vacuum on the other. You could try that test for 100 years, and get 10,000 friends to do it along with you, and you’d never expect to have that result come up, experimentally. But the necessary implications of the models we have that do perform well (statistical mechanics) are that this is not an abstract concept, but a potential actual outcome, just a highly, highly improbable one.

I think this is what you’re stating here. So if the accidentally linked causality (as we have at the quantum level) rounds itself out statistically in essentially linked causality because the probabilities are so high – does not Aquinas’ statement that “things of a good disposition happen always or *for the most part” *(my emphasis) help hold together the intelligibility of nature?

Right. And to jump ahead to where this becomes problematic for Aquinas (he couldn’t have known) – if the start of the universe was a quantum event, as we have reason to suspect it was – all the statistical, large-scale rules he’s leaning on are useless, irrelevant. If, at Plank scales, somethings come from nothings (for purposes of consideration, here), then Aquinas’ macro-scale intuitions about the impossibility of something coming from nothing goes out the window. Aquinas’ intuition is reasonable at his scale, there is no “nothing” and what nothing exists as he can understand it not unstable. But if nothingness is inherent unstable and probabilistically tends toward “somethingness” at the quantum level, Aquinas’ intutions don’t apply. Epic fail.

What if, as I began my argument with hecd, there are probabilities that suggest the existence and the non-existence of God? What if faith is a theological virtue and there is no knock down, drag out, argument for materialism or for theism? What if probability is woven into the fabric of existence because faith requires belief in things unseen? What if there is evidence for both sides?

I don’t see that as an “if”, but a given. Even the most vitriolic atheist will allow that if a supernnatural deity of some kind exists, then that would be a potential explanation for the order and structure we do find in the universe. That’s not disputable, as I see it. The dispute hangs on the warrant for accepting the proposition that such a god exists, not whether given a god, we would see that as a sufficient explanation for an ordered universe. By all accounts, I think we would.

So here is the trouble I am having: if the ‘territory’ is unintelligible, and the map seeks ‘intelligibility’ then I think scientific pursuit becomes an unimportant game. It becomes a “Socratic optimism” and nature seems to have played a tragic joke on us as seekers of knowledge.

Science has always been predicated on socratic optimism. We have no guarantee or logical proof that the world around can be reverse-engineered, in part or in whole. It’s important (for many, anyway), because it produces practically useful results. And it satisfies our innate desire for discovery, too. Both are important, but on different levels.

Why the pursuit? Vanity? Self-delusion?

Because we are able to pursue and discover!

-TS

 

[Charlemagne_II]

JP2

Why the pursuit? Vanity?* Self-delusion?** *

There is no want of either vanity or self delusion in the scientific community. Wisdom is not what scientists are famous for. Knowledge of the physical world is their territory, and they can abuse it just like the rest of us can abuse our own talents.

Self-delusion was paramount in the case of Einstein, who urged FDR to build the bomb. After the effects of the bomb were seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein sang a different tune and regretted his involvement in the whole affair.

Today the whole human race, along with Einstein, is wishing that in the 1940s somebody had spoken up and said, “Do we really need to pursue and discover this particular monster?”

Indeed, we all wish those on the Manhattan Project might have considered the corollary of old fashioned wisdom from you-know-who:

“Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.”

 

[The_Exodus]

To me as well. Just from the intelligibility of the world around us we’ve established (even in being able to read/write this post!) we understand that the world is this amenable to model-making to some substantial degree.

Your “map” vs “territory” is a meaningless division. If the “territory” is unintelligible to our minds, then it is absurd to claim such a thing exists. It is equivalent to saying “what exists is what we know not what,” which says nothing at all. The whole idea is fueled by the imagination, but, when stripped of the mysterious aspect of being and existence, is absurd. It is an impotent, vacuous term, for it means “that which is completely beyond conception or thought.”

This same error was brought forth by atheists (rightly, I think) with the “via negativa.” If all we could say about God was what he was not, we actually wouldn’t be saying anything about him, and would similarly have no way of justifying his existence. The same applies to your “territory.”

touchstone:

But if nothingness is inherent unstable and probabilistically tends toward “somethingness” at the quantum level…

If “nothing” tends toward something, it is not quite nothing, is it? It has a tendency, an actual characteristic pertaining to “it,” which it would be false to deny about “it.”

 

[Touchstone]

Your “map” vs “territory” is a meaningless division.

Hmmm. Perhaps this view explains some of the problem, here!

If the “territory” is unintelligible to our minds, then it is absurd to claim such a thing exists.

No, because we’re not predicating this on existence, not all of it, anyway. When we look at the evidence, and the math models that fit the observations, and come to the uncomfortable realization that photons are both particle and wave in such a way that its “particle-ness” excludes “waveness”, we have a contradiction. But there is no dispute over the fact of the photons existence. Wave/particle duality is a “spooky region” of the territory, but there’s no dispute over its existence. The photon exists, it’s just making sense of its dynamics and interactions with the rest of the world that is problematic, and leads us toward contradictory understandings, held in tension, simultaneously.

If we are to apply the map/territory analogy, there are parts that are terra incognito. It’s territory, but it’s unintelligible to some significant degree. It resists ‘mapping’, even if we can circumscribe it, locate it, and even probe it somewhat.

It is equivalent to saying “what exists is what we know not what,” which says nothing at all.

Existence as an attribute of entities in our model is not denied when we fail to understand the particulars of their behavior, or even so those interactions as self-contradictory with respect to each other. If a photon is a particle, and a ‘not-particle-but-wave’ as it goes about its business, it’s NOT meaningless to say it exists. We can LOCATE the photon, and we can see evidences of its movements (on film, for example).

The whole idea is fueled by the imagination, but, when stripped of the mysterious aspect of being and existence, is absurd. It is an impotent, vacuous term, for it means “that which is completely beyond conception or thought.”

This same error was brought forth by atheists (rightly, I think) with the “via negativa.” If all we could say about God was what he was not, we actually wouldn’t be saying anything about him, and would similarly have no way of justifying his existence. The same applies to your “territory.”

Yes, but you aren’t grasping what’s in evidence. There ARE positive things we can say about photons (to keep with that particular example). That’s precisely how we get to the conundrum – we see that it has the nature and dynamics of a wave, which is decidedly not-particle-like, and it has the nature of a particle, in a profoundly non-wave-like way.

The problem is not what you are thinking of with the via negativa, which I agree with, by the way. The problem is that we have POSITiVE, EVIDENCE-DRIVEN propositions that disagree. They don’t deny existence, or even say what something is not (that’s just implicit in understanding what is positively proposed – a wave is not a particle, and vice versa). We have two “here’s how it is” propositions, and they can’t be resolved in our current models, or even cast as “two perspectives on the same underlying unity”.

We’re dealing with, er, via positiva, where positive propositions from our observations clash.

If “nothing” tends toward something, it is not quite nothing, is it?

It can be perfectly nothing if perfect nothingness is unstable toward somethingness. Such a tendency wouldn’t necessarily change the nothingness at all. That’s just tautological language wrapped around the event: That which goes from a->b has a tendency to go from a->b. TRUE BY DEFINITION.

And only by definition.

Maybe such a nothingness does have something internal that agitates toward somethingness. But maybe not. We don’t know, and don’t have any way to know. Or even guess beyond pure caprice.

It has a tendency, an actual characteristic pertaining to “it,” which it would be false to deny about “it.”

We don’t know there’s any “actual characteristic”. Your “tendency” is just a tautology, a restatement of “a->b”. Just like we might say, tautologically that anything that is hot has a “capacity for heat”. Well, yes, true by definition. But only trivial true. Nothing has been said about the real world in either case beyond “a->b”, no underlying reasons, processes or dynamics are even contemplated in such language.

-TS

 

[The_Exodus]

.But there is no dispute over the fact of the photons existence. Wave/particle duality is a “spooky region” of the territory, but there’s no dispute over its existence.The photon exists, it’s just making sense of its dynamics and interactions with the rest of the world that is problematic, and leads us toward contradictory understandings, held in tension, simultaneously.

On one hand you *generally *affirm non-contradictory nature to the photon, but on the other hand you occasionally describe a *particular * mode of existence which is simply untintelligible – meaningless. A photon may possess seemingly contradictory traits, but as soon as you say it actually possess a contradictory nature – a nature in which one part is affirmed to exist which necessarily excludes the other part that you are affirming – you’re speaking to an entirely different mode of existence from which you are generally claiming for the photon itself.

touchstone:

It’s territory, but it’s unintelligible to some significant degree. It resists ‘mapping’, even if we can circumscribe it, locate it, and even probe it somewhat.

If it is absurd, regardless of whatever language dance you continue to make, it is beyond affirmation, and hence, it is meaningless to say it exists – i.e. meaningless to call it “territory.”

touchstone:

Existence as an attribute of entities in our model is not denied when we fail to understand the particulars of their behavior

Obviously. That has been my entire point – that we simply fail to understand the behavior. Not, however, that such behavior is mutually contradictory or absurd. That is simply empty language and impossible to affirm, even hypothetically.

touchstone:

Yes, but you aren’t grasping what’s in evidence.

Correct, and neither do you, if you claim that an actual absurdity is obtaining.

touchstone:

There ARE positive things we can say about photons (to keep with that particular example). That’s precisely how we get to the conundrum – we see that it has the nature and dynamics of a wave, which is decidedly not-particle-like, and it has the nature of a particle, in a profoundly non-wave-like way.

Conundrums are a dime a dozen. Look at the history of science. That doesn’t mean we have a contradiction. It only means we are ignorant.

touchstone:

The problem is not what you are thinking of with the via negativa, which I agree with, by the way. The problem is that we have POSITiVE, EVIDENCE

The problem is the same, though not absolutely so. I only brought up the via negative to point out that the predication you’re implying is meaningless in the same way, since each characteristic of a mutually contradictory proposition becomes the “not” of the opposite proposition. Hence, affirming that a photon is a wave (in your view), means affirming simultaneously that it is not a particle, and vice versa. And so we eventually have affirmed that a photon is not a wave and not a particle, and yet also a wave and also a particle, in the same mutually exclusive relationship, and have ended up saying nothing intelligible at all. Thus when we attach such empty words to “territory” we’ve failed to say anything positively meaningful, in the same way via negativa fails to say anything positively meaningful.

You’re equivocating with your use of photon, and are using it as a sort of shield-word. When it suits you, you describe the photon as being “existent” in some way that is not contradictory, but, when you want to justify other claims, you pull out its “characteristics” (which describe what it is) which are mutually contradictory.

touchstone:

It can be perfectly nothing if perfect nothingness is unstable toward somethingness. Such a tendency wouldn’t necessarily change the nothingness at all. That’s just tautological language wrapped around the event: That which goes from a->b has a tendency to go from a->b. TRUE BY DEFINITION.

Then you’re not describing “perfectly nothing” by any means. You’re describing a certain state of existence, which has a certain tendency toward some end.

touchstone:

But only trivial true. Nothing has been said about the real world in either case beyond “a->b”,

But that’s all that needs to be said in order to refute the idea that we are dealing with “perfect nothingness.” It has been given properties and characteristics, and thus become “a” or an “it.”

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Except for post # 107, this discussion seems to be moving increasingly away from Jesus as the foundation of science. Wonder why?

Patricius, as the originator of this thread, would you be interest in ampliflying on your reason for starting the thread? Post #1 is interesting, but it doesn’t really ask a question or present a challenge.

 

[JP2Admirer]

Except for post # 107, this discussion seems to be moving increasingly away from Jesus as the foundation of science. Wonder why?

Patricius, as the originator of this thread, would you be interest in ampliflying on your reason for starting the thread? Post #1 is interesting, but it doesn’t really ask a question or present a challenge.

Charlemagne,

I understand if you think this thread has derailed…but I find it absolutely fascinating. If we take intelligibility of nature to signify the Word and Its creative work designed into nature, then we really haven’t strayed all that far even though it looks so on the surface.

Furthermore, I think the greatest argument against the existence of God is if the universe is unintelligible, so a lot is at stake in this argument.

I have found Touchtone’s scientific musings enlightening, and I think we have a true blood philosopher in Exodus.

So I am of the opposite opinion in that I would love for this discussion to continue.

Touchtone,

You said something interesting above when you stated that the universe could have had its beginning in a quantum event. I am sensing, perhaps not a contradiction, but an equivocation in your thought.

The scientist in you seems to want to uphold the “socratic optimism”, but the atheist in you wants to uphold the “unintelligible haphazard becoming, or accidental causality.”

I know you don’t see these as mutually exclusive, which is where I am having trouble comprehending your argument. The atheist in you seems to uphold the unintelligibility model (as, indeed, any astute atheist should do because intelligibility provides strength for the proof from motion); whereas the scientist wants intelligibility as the predictability and theories absolutely appeal to our nature’s as seekers of knowledge – they are science.

I haven’t had a chance to go back through all the posts (I miss so much in being away for two days) so I apologize if this is a redundancy.

I just cannot comprehend – its not a matter of you being wrong or right – but I cannot grasp how we can have both when referencing the same objects from different perspectives, which leads me to one of three conclusions 1) your argument is unintelligible, or 2) I am too dimwitted to understand it, or 3) the nature of the argument is unintelligible because the nature of its subject matter is such.

I will return to previous posts now to see if I can make sense of it from your latest responses. If you could clarify (if you haven’t already) that would be great.

 

[grannymh]

I understand if you think this thread has derailed…but I find it absolutely fascinating. If we take intelligibility of nature to signify the Word and Its creative work designed into nature, then we really haven’t strayed all that far even though it looks so on the surface.

I, too, am interested in the intelligibility of the universe as a possible demonstration for God since I may need a back-up proof in the future. However, I would think that the first thing to establish would be that intelligibility is spiritual. Taking the leap from intelligibility to Pure Spirit would be tricky. In other words, I am a tad worried about going straight to the concept that intelligibility of nature signifies the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Nonetheless, I do like the idea of creative work designed into nature.

Blessings,
granny

The human person is worthy of profound respect.

 

[Touchstone]

On one hand you *generally *affirm non-contradictory nature to the photon, but on the other hand you occasionally describe a *particular * mode of existence which is simply untintelligible – meaningless.

I think there’s some confusing about what is meant by “intelligible” and “unintelligible”, here. If we understand “intelligble” to mean “capable of being understood, apprehended”, then “unintelligible” doesn’t get us to meaninglessness. I understand “meaningless” to be a word you are using to disparage cases where the evidence is problematic, but “unintelligible” aspects of a system do not render the enclosing system meaningless. For example, randomness is a (pure) form of unintelligibility. “Random” is a label we apply to phenomena that have no discernible pattern, plan or purpose.

But we have randomness identified all over the place in physics. And while we can’t describe the patterns (or purpose, etc.) “inside” the random process, we can and regularly do speak about them in meaningful ways, incorporate them into performative models. The time of decay of events for an unstable isotope we call “random”, and yet we can speak about the phenomena meaningfully as part of our physics. For example, for a given unstable isotope, individual decay timings are “unintelligible”, but we can predict the “half life” of the process with great accuracy.

Here is a good example that shows the breakdown in your semantics. Random (unintelligible) decay event timings are a meaningful and predictable part of our physics model. We can’t say anything meaningful about how a particular decay event triggered when it did. But we can capture those events into statistical ensembles that are themselves predictable, intelligible – modeled structure out of randomness, intelligibility arising out of aggregated unintelligibility.

A photon may possess seemingly contradictory traits, but as soon as you say it actually possess a contradictory nature – a nature in which one part is affirmed to exist which necessarily excludes the other part that you are affirming – you’re speaking to an entirely different mode of existence from which you are generally claiming for the photon itself.

There are no “general” modes of existence in physics. There are just models, that either perform or don’t perform, to some degree or another. Our current model has the photon behaving in ways we can predict, measure, observe, which provides us grounds for the semantics we use for “exist”. But science is descriptive – antiThomist, so to speak, and considers concepts as “modes of existence” apart from descriptive models… theology.

In physics, if it walks like a duck, it’s a duck. That is, what behaves according to our semantics for ‘exist’ – extended in space/time in some measurable, empirically discrete way (for a short summary of the idea) – exists, by definition. That’s the only criterion we have. “Being qua being” isn’t coherent in scientific epistemology.

So we say the photon exists, because it satisfies the criteria we apply for the term, scientifically. If it has spooky kinds of behavior as it does so does not change the observability/measurability/extension of the photon. Doesn’t impinge on its exist, and can’t.

If it is absurd, regardless of whatever language dance you continue to make, it is beyond affirmation, and hence, it is meaningless to say it exists – i.e. meaningless to call it “territory.”

No, it’s clearly meaningful, as per above. It satisfies all the criteria we apply elsewhere, demonstrably. It has all the same empirical credentials for anything we would say “exists” in our physics model. Just to show that your dismissal doesn’t hold, we might simply take a photograph, and we could predict the image to be taken. How could we do that if “existence is meaningless” for the photon? We haven’t solved or harmonized particle/wave duality, and yet, we can model very accurately what photon patterns will exist where and when.

Avalanche photodiodes can’t detect single photons. You test it by shooting (or not shooting) photons, and it will pass your test, with flying colors [sic]. The empirical basis for the meaningfulness of “exists” for photons is overwhelming. To say a photon “exists” is to make a testable, falsifiable, measurable statement about the world. Doesn’t get more meaningful than that.

Obviously. That has been my entire point – that we simply fail to understand the behavior. Not, however, that such behavior is mutually contradictory or absurd. That is simply empty language and impossible to affirm, even hypothetically.

See above my comments on randomness. It’s not empty language – it’s descriptive, even and especially if the internals of what we are describing are opaque. Just that word “opaque” is a good example. It’s meaningful because it says we can’t see through/beyond.

The timing of decay events may one day have a working model, where we can predict them accurately, fully (although we have reasons to think this is impossible for us to know in principle, but that’s a physics rabbit trail for another day).

There’s no basis, epistemologically, for certainty that we “just don’t understand the behavior”. Eternal optimism for scientists is a dispositional stance, rather than a dogmatic metaphysic. We pursue working models as far as we can, ever optimistic of further break-throughs, because this is the mind of discovery. But as a matter of accounting for the knowledge we do have, we have no basis for supposing that, say, the timing of particular decay events is amenable to our models EVEN IN PRINCIPLE.

It may be. But it may not be. We don’t know, and can’t say. We always try to learn more, but trying guarantees us nothing.

-TS

(con’t)

 

[Touchstone]

Correct, and neither do you, if you claim that an actual absurdity is obtaining.

Yes, because understanding the unintelligibility of a part of the system IS understanding. Declaring that all is exhaustively intelligible is a dogmatic stance, and neither needs, nor can bear the witness of any and all evidence. Your position doesn’t need to take counsel of the evidence at all. It understands a priori, as a fundamentalist canon, that all is intelligible.

My position is that what is intelligible is no more and no less than what we can make sense of – intelligible is as intelligibility is demonstrated. That depends crucially on understanding the evidence. It makes no dogmatic declarations about what must or must not be intelligible.

Conundrums are a dime a dozen. Look at the history of science. That doesn’t mean we have a contradiction. It only means we are ignorant.

Maybe. We don’t know. Unless you have a crystal ball or a line to God, there’s no way to support such a claim. Indeed, many contradictions have been resolved. But many remain, and have remained for a long time. Science proceeds in the hope that it can make progress on any and all conundra. But hope isn’t knowledge, which is a distinction I make that I suspect is where we part ways.

The problem is the same, though not absolutely so. I only brought up the via negative to point out that the predication you’re implying is meaningless in the same way, since each characteristic of a mutually contradictory proposition becomes the “not” of the opposite proposition.

If you’re making a positive claim, even if it stands (putatively) opposed to some other positive claim, it remains a positive claim, or in this case, empirical observations. Real world measurements and evidence. A particle is “not a wave”, but that’s not the positive claim; rather, it’s the negative field of the positive claim. We observe “waveness” in a positive, objective measurement sense.

Hence, affirming that a photon is a wave (in your view), means affirming simultaneously that it is not a particle, and vice versa. And so we eventually have affirmed that a photon is not a wave and not a particle, and yet also a wave and also a particle, in the same mutually exclusive relationship, and have ended up saying nothing intelligible at all.

Maybe it helps to view if from a historical context. No matter the resolution – permanent contradiction, or harmonized model eventually – we are we ahead of where Aquinas was, left back in the 13th century. We can say with meaning that “light behaves like a wave”. We can provide the substance of that semantics of that statement in objective, non-controversial experiments and observations. Same with “light behaves like a particle”.

It takes knowledge, and clear semantics to even arrive at a contradiction. This is a major piece of the puzzle you continue to miss. It’s only because the terms and observations have meaning and substance that there’s anything to even consider as a contradiction. If “wave-like” and “particle-like” were not meaningful, and the observations were not abundant for both, you WOULDN’T EVEN HAVE A PUTATIVE CONTRADICTION.

Aquinas would have no clue what you were talking about if you teleported back to explain. You’d have to go over the terms, the experiments, the concepts behind the model that produces the contradiction to get him to understand what modern physicists do. When he had learned, he would also be without a way to harmonize the apparent contradiction, but would have the knowledge (and the semantics that underwrite it) now available to make sense of this conversation.

Thus when we attach such empty words to “territory” we’ve failed to say anything positively meaningful, in the same way via negativa fails to say anything positively meaningful.

Well, maybe I should just ask: is “random” meaninful as a term? Have I said something meaningful about the timing of decay events for unstable isotopes if I say the timing of each was “random”?

I can we can, and can show we do, even if the “inside” mechanism remains opaque. “Opaque” is meaningful in the same way.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

You’re equivocating with your use of photon, and are using it as a sort of shield-word. When it suits you, you describe the photon as being “existent” in some way that is not contradictory, but, when you want to justify other claims, you pull out its “characteristics” (which describe what it is) which are mutually contradictory.

I can’t think of anything I’ve said that has questioned or diminished the photon’s existence, in all of this. That’s not controversial. It does all the things we implicate semantically in our physics for the term “exist”. The photon’s existence is not in question in any way, so far as I can see. How it behaves as it exists is another question, a different question.

Then you’re not describing “perfectly nothing” by any means. You’re describing a certain state of existence, which has a certain tendency toward some end.

The map is not the territory. Our conceptual abstraction we call “nothingness” is a mental construct, not nothingness. If “nothingness” is, by your definition, imperfect if it is unstable, then so be it. I don’t need to quibble over the terms. That would perhaps be “maximally nothing” as it gets in reality – there being no more perfect nothing metaphysically. If that’s a “something” to you, fine. But it may still be the ‘fundamental nothing’/‘most minimal something’.

But that’s all that needs to be said in order to refute the idea that we are dealing with “perfect nothingness.” It has been given properties and characteristics, and thus become “a” or an “it.”

Yes, but only if we are fetishizing our maps, and unconcerned about the territory. If the territory, in some atemporal “maximal nothingness” is unstable toward a something (and this does have precedent in the most “nothingness” we can probe in our context, which may or not suggest anything metaphysically transcendent), then that’s the “most nothing” there can “not” be. Reality doesn’t care a whit for your or my predilections toward a particular concept of “perfect nothing”.

I heard Michio Kaku answer a similar complaint once, and his response was a shrug; call it “something” if you want, but for him, that was as “nothing” as “nothing” gets. And for the reason you point out – the “nothing-most” case as he sees it is still a “case”, and still “something” enough to be meaningful as “unstable”. “But really, it’s nothing”, he finished with a wink. I think that wink was toward the idea that the “philosophical perfect nothing” as apart from the “maximal nothing/minimal something (if you insist)” in reality is meaningful, but just not interesting as a matter of knowledge, discovery, and model building.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

Touchtone,

You said something interesting above when you stated that the universe could have had its beginning in a quantum event. I am sensing, perhaps not a contradiction, but an equivocation in your thought.

The scientist in you seems to want to uphold the “socratic optimism”, but the atheist in you wants to uphold the “unintelligible haphazard becoming, or accidental causality.”

I suppose that’s a charge you could level, but rather, I’d say it’s the scientist in my that yields to the evidence, experiments and competing models/interpretations we have available. That is, I was a Christian for 30 years, and “unintelligible becoming” was/is as counter-intuitive as it gets for me, just like anyone else. But if you go get immersed in the science, in the model-based epistemology that implies, these are options that cannot be denied, and indeed come with (disturbingly) strong empirical backing.

The scientist hold these two imperatives in tension: 1) eternal hope for scientific progress and breakthroughs in model-making, 2) dispassionate reckoning of what we know, how our current models perform.

1. is a stance, an attitude, 2) is an analysis.

I know you don’t see these as mutually exclusive, which is where I am having trouble comprehending your argument. The atheist in you seems to uphold the unintelligibility model (as, indeed, any astute atheist should do because intelligibility provides strength for the proof from motion);

whereas the scientist wants intelligibility as the predictability and theories absolutely appeal to our nature’s as seekers of knowledge – they are science.

We always want and hope for more knowledge. But it’s essential to stand on the performance of our models. This isn’t religion, science stands on the empirical performance of its models. So, first and foremost, the understanding of what we have in evidence, and what we can count as knowledge today. “Hope as attitude” doesn’t compete with that.

It comes down to this: it’s a triumph of science to say that some parts of fundamental physics are random, stochastic, probabilistic, non-deterministic. This is where Aquinas’ intutional/rationalist model fails, in any century. Empirically pure rationalism is obsolete, flat-earthish in its naïvete.

It’s a wondrous achievement for science to be able to identify the randomness in fundamental physics. Just to build the statistical models of QM is a monumental achievement in human knowledge. Would we like to go further? Sure. But in saying “this is random, this is not”, we have established a frontier, a perimeter of performative knowledge, something philosophy and theology simply can’t do, haven’t done, and can merely covet.

Which is just to say, don’t underestimate the difficulty in identifying conundra, randomness, and ostensible contradictions. Philosophers and theologians can’t even discover them, let alone resolve them.

I haven’t had a chance to go back through all the posts (I miss so much in being away for two days) so I apologize if this is a redundancy.

I just cannot comprehend – its not a matter of you being wrong or right – but I cannot grasp how we can have both when referencing the same objects from different perspectives, which leads me to one of three conclusions 1) your argument is unintelligible, or 2) I am too dimwitted to understand it, or 3) the nature of the argument is unintelligible because the nature of its subject matter is such.

It’s not an argument, at least in the way you are using it (I think). It’s an observation, an acknowledgment of the evidence at hand, which, oversimplifying (but only a bit) is:

1. We have solid empirical support for photons-as-particles.
2. We have solid empirical support for photons-as-waves
3. What we mean, in technical terms for “particle” and “wave” conflict with each other in the sense that ‘waveness’ is ‘not-particleness’ and vice versa.

You can build the contradiction there yourself. But there is no argument per se. 1), 2) and 3) are just nods to the what we’ve discovered from watching and measuring the natural world around us.

As for dimwitted, I think you’re in good company if so. No one has figured this out. And the central question has been pressing for going on 100 years now. If you can figure this out, you’ll be famous by Friday.

I will return to previous posts now to see if I can make sense of it from your latest responses. If you could clarify (if you haven’t already) that would be great.

A real key under all this is the “polar thinking” problem, the intuition that if nature is fundamentally unintelligible in some respect, than all is lost, and the quest for natural knowledge is a failed enterprise.

That doesn’t follow. It really is “black and white thinking” of the worst kind. Not saying you’re committed to such, but that is a foundation of dogmatic rationalism, a superstition about one’s intuition. If wave/particle duality is fundamentally unintelligible for humans, and it’s impossible IN PRINCIPLE to make any more headway on this that we have (not saying this is our future, but consider the scenario), then… what?

All of physics performs just as well as it already does. Airplanes fly. fMRIs still give us important insight into brain activity. Nuclear reactors still power submarines all around the planet for months and years at a time. Science pushes the perimeters of knowledge on a thousand different fronts, even if it remains stymied, permanently stuck in reducing the particle/wave thing.

-TS

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Touchstone

All of physics performs just as well as it already does. Airplanes fly. fMRIs still give us important insight into brain activity. Nuclear reactors still power submarines all around the planet for months and years at a time. Science pushes the perimeters of knowledge on a thousand different fronts, even if it remains stymied, permanently stuck in reducing the particle/wave thing.

Your slobbering love affair with science is touching, at the very least.

If Al Quaeda manages to detonate a nuclear device in a great American city, or if the Arabs pull the rest of the world into a nuclear war, will you be so smug about science pushing “the perimeters of knowledge on a thousand different fronts”?

Indeed, will there even be a thousand “different fronts” left in which to push it?

 

[LogisticsBranch]

All of physics performs just as well as it already does. Airplanes fly. fMRIs still give us important insight into brain activity. Nuclear reactors still power submarines all around the planet for months and years at a time. Science pushes the perimeters of knowledge on a thousand different fronts, even if it remains stymied, permanently stuck in reducing the particle/wave thing.
-TS

Thanks Touchstone. I wish people would review my messages on page 2. Jesus or God isn’t the foundation of Science! Science isn’t spiritual. I also support **The Office of Science **–U.S. Department of Energy which has a wonderful website:

What is Physics?

*Physics is all around us. It is in the electric light you turn on in the morning; the car you drive to work; your wristwatch, cell phone, CD player, radio, and that big plasma TV set you got for Christmas. It makes the stars shine every night and the sun shine every day, and it makes a baseball soar into the stands for a home run.

Physics is the science of matter, energy, space, and time. It explains ordinary matter as combinations of a dozen fundamental particles (quarks and leptons), interacting through four fundamental forces. It describes the many forms of energy—such as kinetic energy, electrical energy, and mass—and the way energy can change from one form to another. It describes a malleable space-time and the way objects move through space and time.

There are many fields of physics, for example: mechanics, electricity, heat, sound, light, condensed matter, atomic physics, nuclear physics, and elementary particle physics. Physics is the foundation of all the physical sciences—such as chemistry, material science, and geology—and is important for many other fields of human endeavor: biology, medicine, computing, ice hockey, television…the list goes on and on.

A physicist is not some geek in a long white coat, working on some weird experiment. Physicists look and act like you or me. They work for research laboratories, universities, private companies, and government agencies. They teach, do research, and develop new technologies. They do experiments on mountaintops, in mines, and in earth orbit. They go to movies and play softball. Physicists are good at solving problems—all kinds of problems, from esoteric to mundane. How does a mirror reflect light? What holds an atom together? How fast does a rocket have to go to escape from earth? How can a worldwide team share data in real time? (Solving this last problem led physicists to invent the World Wide Web.).
*er.doe.gov/Sub/Newsroom/News_Releases/DOE-SC/2005/What_is_Physics.htm

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