The underlying presumption, though, is that there is something conceivable that does differentiate "this marble." Even if it isn't apparent to the observers in this scenario, the presumption is that there does in fact exist some level of potential differentiation on some microscopic level that would justify the idea of "this marble" being "this marble" and not others. And thus we believe that there still is a "this marble" at the end, even if we can't say for sure which it is. The big difference with the electron, though, is that, as far as I understand, you're telling me that this kind of underlying presumption theoretically can't exist. By definition, there is no underlying presumption of there being a "this electron," but at the same time you describe the problem as if there is.
The electron's distinct identity emerges when you collapse the wavefunction, i.e., interact with it. In the sense of it being certainly non-distinct prior to interaction and all.
Further, there aremultipleconsistentanswers to the question "What is the electron doing while we aren't measuring it". This leads me to believe that that isn't a well posed question.
The underlying presumption, though, is that there is something conceivable that does differentiate "this marble." Even if it isn't apparent to the observers in this scenario, the presumption is that there does in fact exist some level of potential differentiation on some microscopic level that would justify the idea of "this marble" being "this marble" and not others. And thus we believe that there still is a "this marble" at the end, even if we can't say for sure which it is. The big difference with the electron, though, is that, as far as I understand, you're telling me that this kind of underlying presumption theoretically can't exist. By definition, there is no underlying presumption of there being a "this electron," but at the same time you describe the problem as if there is.
The electron's distinct identity emerges when you collapse the wavefunction, i.e., interact with it. In the sense of it being certainly non-distinct prior to interaction and all.
That isn't actually what particle indistinguishability says. The distinction between 'this electron' and 'that electron' is meaningless beyond the fact that, at the moment you say it, there are two distinct electrons in different states. You can, outside of cases where Pauli exclusion is violated/doesn't apply, always momentarily distinguish particles on the basis of their distinct state vectors, but over any period of time it's impossible to 'track' a single particle and name it Ed. Ed will go wherever Ed wants, and there is (apparently) literally no way to tell Ed apart from his fellows from moment to moment.
For particles that can occupy the same state vector simultaneously...you can't even distinguish them momentarily. This is physically meaningful in the case of superconductivity. The particles composing a superfluid (like the current carriers in a superconductive material) behave as though they all occupied the same quantum state simultaneously, so any change applied to the system has to be applied uniformly to the entire system simultaneously. You can't poke one electron in a superconducting wire because, effectively, every electron in there is the same electron.
When you say "same quantum state", what are you referring to? Spin, momentum, location..? And what do you mean that the electrons in a superconducting wire are "effectively" the same electron?
"Every electron in there is the same electron" is a sentence that, as a proposition, does not express a coherent idea (which is part of the problem, since a lot of the ideas QM deals with can't be expressed in a way that is, in the traditional sense, coherent).
"Hidden" and "non-existent" aren't functionally identical, at least not in terms of the meaning of "hidden" used in reference to so-called "hidden variables". The supposed variables are hidden in that we hadn't figured out any way to observe them or predict them, but they were presumably guiding certain aspects of apparently random behavior. So, had they existed, evidence of their existence would have been visible, just not in a way that we could use to any effect.
If a standard incandescent lightbulb is opaque then it has a "hidden variable" tied up in the state of its filament. Either it's burnt out or it isn't. The only way to tell if it's burnt out is to turn on the light; there's no way to predict based on observation of the turned-off state of the bulb whether or not the filament is burnt out. Obviously you could shake it or something so it's not a perfect analogy, but that's basically the idea. The hidden variable of the filament has an obvious impact on the behavior of the bulb, but not one that you can predict ahead of time. Hidden variables were offered as a solution to the strange behavior of quantum-scale phenomena. Subsequently Bell proved that there could be no hidden variables that determined entangled particle behavior without causing other quantum effects to be inconsistent with observations.
Philosophical problem!
Explain the difference between "something we can't observe or predict" and "something that doesn't exist." In your light bulb experiment, we observed it by turning on the light and getting no light.
"Hidden variables" are actually an age-old philosophical problem that comes up in science. One of my personal favorites is "instinct."
Q: "Why does a bird fly south for the winter?"
A: "Instinct."
Translation: "I have no idea."
Philosophically, "hidden variables" are basically null theory. "There is this thing I can't say anything at all about, but I'm going to give it a name and then say it's the cause for all these things that we can't figure out the cause of." Philosophically, such a theory is a default, inherent explanation of absolutely anything that can't currently be explained.
Functionally, hidden still means the same thing as non-existent. Functionally, there is no difference between "no one observed it" and "it doesn't exist."
"Hidden" and "non-existent" aren't functionally identical, at least not in terms of the meaning of "hidden" used in reference to so-called "hidden variables". The supposed variables are hidden in that we hadn't figured out any way to observe them or predict them, but they were presumably guiding certain aspects of apparently random behavior. So, had they existed, evidence of their existence would have been visible, just not in a way that we could use to any effect.
If a standard incandescent lightbulb is opaque then it has a "hidden variable" tied up in the state of its filament. Either it's burnt out or it isn't. The only way to tell if it's burnt out is to turn on the light; there's no way to predict based on observation of the turned-off state of the bulb whether or not the filament is burnt out. Obviously you could shake it or something so it's not a perfect analogy, but that's basically the idea. The hidden variable of the filament has an obvious impact on the behavior of the bulb, but not one that you can predict ahead of time. Hidden variables were offered as a solution to the strange behavior of quantum-scale phenomena. Subsequently Bell proved that there could be no hidden variables that determined entangled particle behavior without causing other quantum effects to be inconsistent with observations.
Philosophical problem!
Explain the difference between "something we can't observe or predict" and "something that doesn't exist." In your light bulb experiment, we observed it by turning on the light and getting no light.
"Hidden variables" are actually an age-old philosophical problem that comes up in science. One of my personal favorites is "instinct."
Q: "Why does a bird fly south for the winter?"
A: "Instinct."
Translation: "I have no idea."
Philosophically, "hidden variables" are basically null theory. "There is this thing I can't say anything at all about, but I'm going to give it a name and then say it's the cause for all these things that we can't figure out the cause of." Philosophically, such a theory is a default, inherent explanation of absolutely anything that can't currently be explained.
Functionally, hidden still means the same thing as non-existent. Functionally, there is no difference between "no one observed it" and "it doesn't exist."
When you use the word "functionally," what do you mean? Do you mean it has no impact on my daily life?
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Has no impact on anything that we can see. i.e., doesn't exist.
So only things that impact things we see exist? How loosely are you using "impact" here? Like, if it causes someone to form certain beliefs then is that an impact?
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
When you say "same quantum state", what are you referring to? Spin, momentum, location..? And what do you mean that the electrons in a superconducting wire are "effectively" the same electron?
"Every electron in there is the same electron" is a sentence that, as a proposition, does not express a coherent idea (which is part of the problem, since a lot of the ideas QM deals with can't be expressed in a way that is, in the traditional sense, coherent).
They don't share the same location*, but the rest of their state (spin and whatnot) are identical. It's been quite a while since I did anything involving superconductivity, but my recollection is that the states of the participants form something like a shell in phase space (the six-dimensional space of location and momentum vectors that define the character of a system in the Hamiltonian formulation of mechanics) and that any effort to impact one particle is spread across the entire shell. The fact that they share a quantum state (and so are, in a sense, 'entangled'; it's not exactly the same as standard entanglement but that's a more generally popular concept you're probably familiar with) causes them all to react simultaneously and uniformly. You can't physically distinguish between 'this electron' and 'that electron' anymore.
* Actually they sort of do, but an explanation requires explaining conduction band topology which is significantly more effort than I'm willing to put forth for this. If you'd like you can start by googling "reciprocal space", followed by "spatial frequency", "brillouin zone", and "conduction band" before heading over toward the superconductivity end of Wikipedia.
When you say "same quantum state", what are you referring to? Spin, momentum, location..? And what do you mean that the electrons in a superconducting wire are "effectively" the same electron?
"Every electron in there is the same electron" is a sentence that, as a proposition, does not express a coherent idea (which is part of the problem, since a lot of the ideas QM deals with can't be expressed in a way that is, in the traditional sense, coherent).
They don't share the same location*, but the rest of their state (spin and whatnot) are identical. It's been quite a while since I did anything involving superconductivity, but my recollection is that the states of the participants form something like a shell in phase space (the six-dimensional space of location and momentum vectors that define the character of a system in the Hamiltonian formulation of mechanics) and that any effort to impact one particle is spread across the entire shell. The fact that they share a quantum state (and so are, in a sense, 'entangled'; it's not exactly the same as standard entanglement but that's a more generally popular concept you're probably familiar with) causes them all to react simultaneously and uniformly. You can't physically distinguish between 'this electron' and 'that electron' anymore.
* Actually they sort of do, but an explanation requires explaining conduction band topology which is significantly more effort than I'm willing to put forth for this. If you'd like you can start by googling "reciprocal space", followed by "spatial frequency", "brillouin zone", and "conduction band" before heading over toward the superconductivity end of Wikipedia.
I figured that the answers here would be a bit esoteric, but I appreciate the answer (and I already grasp the notion/function of a superconductor better because of it) to the extent that it is reasonable to provide one!
"Hidden" and "non-existent" aren't functionally identical, at least not in terms of the meaning of "hidden" used in reference to so-called "hidden variables". The supposed variables are hidden in that we hadn't figured out any way to observe them or predict them, but they were presumably guiding certain aspects of apparently random behavior. So, had they existed, evidence of their existence would have been visible, just not in a way that we could use to any effect.
If a standard incandescent lightbulb is opaque then it has a "hidden variable" tied up in the state of its filament. Either it's burnt out or it isn't. The only way to tell if it's burnt out is to turn on the light; there's no way to predict based on observation of the turned-off state of the bulb whether or not the filament is burnt out. Obviously you could shake it or something so it's not a perfect analogy, but that's basically the idea. The hidden variable of the filament has an obvious impact on the behavior of the bulb, but not one that you can predict ahead of time. Hidden variables were offered as a solution to the strange behavior of quantum-scale phenomena. Subsequently Bell proved that there could be no hidden variables that determined entangled particle behavior without causing other quantum effects to be inconsistent with observations.
Philosophical problem!
Explain the difference between "something we can't observe or predict" and "something that doesn't exist." In your light bulb experiment, we observed it by turning on the light and getting no light.
Well, I can't, because there isn't one. But that's why hidden variables are different from non-existent variables. A hidden variable has a visible effect. In my light bulb example, the state of the filament is hidden but has a measurable impact on the observable on/off state of the lightbulb when I flip the switch. So the variable is hidden, but its effect is not. That's why Einstein and Rosen thought they were a reasonable explanation for the stuff that quantum physicists were observing.
Bell went on to show that if variables existed (but were invisible) which impacted the visible behavior of particles in the experiments that Einstein & Co. said they were, they would necessarily also impact other behaviors. The fact that they did not do so tells us that they don't exist.
Hell, Einstein didn't even say that we could never see these variables; he just suggested that there were properties we weren't currently measuring which impacted the outcome of entanglement experiments. Roughly, he said "The lightbulb didn't turn on when I flipped the switch. Perhaps there is something inside the light bulb which determines whether it will turn on or not." Then Bell came along and said, "Okay, but if I hook up a battery to the light bulb directly then whatever internal properties it has should make it still not turn on. And it does turn on when I do that, so no, that's not the problem here."
So only things that impact things we see exist? How loosely are you using "impact" here? Like, if it causes someone to form certain beliefs then is that an impact?
If you can observe such a thing happening. That's more the kind of impact I'm talking about. An impact that results in observation and/or enables successful prediction.
Well, I can't, because there isn't one. But that's why hidden variables are different from non-existent variables. A hidden variable has a visible effect. In my light bulb example, the state of the filament is hidden but has a measurable impact on the observable on/off state of the lightbulb when I flip the switch. So the variable is hidden, but its effect is not. That's why Einstein and Rosen thought they were a reasonable explanation for the stuff that quantum physicists were observing.
Bell went on to show that if variables existed (but were invisible) which impacted the visible behavior of particles in the experiments that Einstein & Co. said they were, they would necessarily also impact other behaviors. The fact that they did not do so tells us that they don't exist.
That's all fine, as long as it's understood that "hidden variable" just meant "something we don't know anything about." And in my limited physics understanding, I would say that Bell couldn't possibly have disproven such a null theory, all he could have done is proven that "no, we still don't know anything about them, as thus for now we continue to say they don't exist."
I mean, that's all that went on IMO between Bell and Rosen. Rosen says, "what if there's something there that defies all current capability to measure or observe?" and Bell said "I used our best current capabilities of observation and measurement, and didn't see anything." Philosophically, they are talking past one another, and about a subject that is philosophically fairly simple to rule out.
In the picture of a battery, the function of electrons is to do electrochemical work. I know everyone wants to outpedant J, but he is correct in his use of function.
_J_ isn't really being a pedant, he's just moving goalposts.
When being asked a question about probability, ultimately the question is about conscious knowledge. From a determinist perspective, for example, there is one and only one marble that will be pulled form the bag, and no possibility of any marble but that one being pulled. Hence probability is not a calculation about material reality, but about quantifying the relationship between what a conscious mind knows vs. what it doesn't know.
This is a very important point: Probability has to do with epistemology, not ontology or metaphysics.
Whatever is, is.
There is no chance or odds "out there". Chance and odds is just a way of talking about our finite, limited knowledge of the way things be.
Edit: Yar and others have been doing a good job of pressing on this point. Physicists sometimes seem to confuse "what there is" and "what is known". They also sometimes tend to confuse how a thing is known, for the thing that is known.
So only things that impact things we see exist? How loosely are you using "impact" here? Like, if it causes someone to form certain beliefs then is that an impact?
If you can observe such a thing happening. That's more the kind of impact I'm talking about. An impact that results in observation and/or enables successful prediction.
So if something cannot be used to predict, and is not observable (which I take to mean detectable through some sense, or through a modified sense), it doesn't exist?
I disagree as emphatically as one can disagree. Having just finished a graduate seminar in metaphysics, there are so many things that exist that aren't observable, and that cannot be used to predict anything (unless you take a really loose meaning to predict).
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no chance or odds "out there". Chance and odds is just a way of talking about our finite, limited knowledge of the way things be.
Strict Copenhagen interpretation all up ins.
There isn't necessarily any particular reason to believe that there is an objective reality more precisely defined than that represented by the probabilistic wavefunctions of QM.
Of course, since both physics and neurobiology cannot occur without the logical tools of philosophy, philosophy is a necessary condition for both physics and neurobiology to occur.
"Hidden variables" are actually an age-old philosophical problem that comes up in science. One of my personal favorites is "instinct."
Q: "Why does a bird fly south for the winter?"
A: "Instinct."
Translation: "I have no idea."
Philosophically, "hidden variables" are basically null theory. "There is this thing I can't say anything at all about, but I'm going to give it a name and then say it's the cause for all these things that we can't figure out the cause of." Philosophically, such a theory is a default, inherent explanation of absolutely anything that can't currently be explained.
One of my professors has a nice quip about this sort of situation:
"'Force' is the word a physicist uses when he no longer knows what he is talking about."
A hidden variable has a visible effect. In my light bulb example, the state of the filament is hidden but has a measurable impact on the observable on/off state of the lightbulb when I flip the switch. So the variable is hidden, but its effect is not.
How is it known that the effect results from the hidden variable?
Is it just:
1) X happens.
2) Fuck if I know what caused X.
3) There is a hidden variable that caused X.
The United States of America
Democracy
The number 2
Uninstantiated Properties
Possible Worlds
None of these things are observable through any senses (unless you want me to start asking you what color Democracy is), and while some can be used for prediction (if you're taking prediction to be pretty broad, or use pretty broadly), others quite specifically cannot.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I disagree as emphatically as one can disagree. Having just finished a graduate seminar in metaphysics, there are so many things that exist that aren't observable, and that cannot be used to predict anything (unless you take a really loose meaning to predict).
Just to be clear, are you equating "observable" and "knowable"?
So only things that impact things we see exist? How loosely are you using "impact" here? Like, if it causes someone to form certain beliefs then is that an impact?
If you can observe such a thing happening. That's more the kind of impact I'm talking about. An impact that results in observation and/or enables successful prediction.
Well, I can't, because there isn't one. But that's why hidden variables are different from non-existent variables. A hidden variable has a visible effect. In my light bulb example, the state of the filament is hidden but has a measurable impact on the observable on/off state of the lightbulb when I flip the switch. So the variable is hidden, but its effect is not. That's why Einstein and Rosen thought they were a reasonable explanation for the stuff that quantum physicists were observing.
Bell went on to show that if variables existed (but were invisible) which impacted the visible behavior of particles in the experiments that Einstein & Co. said they were, they would necessarily also impact other behaviors. The fact that they did not do so tells us that they don't exist.
That's all fine, as long as it's understood that "hidden variable" just meant "something we don't know anything about." And in my limited physics understanding, I would say that Bell couldn't possibly have disproven such a null theory, all he could have done is proven that "no, we still don't know anything about them, as thus for now we continue to say they don't exist."
I mean, that's all that went on IMO between Bell and Rosen. Rosen says, "what if there's something there that defies all current capability to measure or observe?" and Bell said "I used our best current capabilities of observation and measurement, and didn't see anything." Philosophically, they are talking past one another, and about a subject that is philosophically fairly simple to rule out.
Bell's inequalities are more nuanced than just "Stuff we can't in principle detect is undetectable."
Let's backtrack a bit. Rosen's whole issue with Quantum Mechanics was that he thought reality was Local Realistic. From wikipedia:
Local Realistic theories satisfy:
1. Objects have a definite state that determines the values of all other measurable properties, such as position and momentum.
2. Effects of local actions, such as measurements, cannot travel faster than the speed of light (in consequence of special relativity). Thus if observers are sufficiently far apart, a measurement made by one can have no effect on a measurement made by the other.
So, take an entangled pair of particles. The EPR thought experiment suggests that you can perform measurements on these entangled particles that would violate the uncertainty principle, suggesting that Quantum Mechanics is incomplete. Essentially, their gripe was, "How does one of the entangled particles 'know' to be in the complementary state to whatever you measure for its pair?". It seems to suggest that something is getting communicated faster than light (as is often brought up when talking about entanglement).
One way of getting around this is introducing a hidden variable. Again, from wikipedia, where Alice and Bob each receive one particle from an entangled pair:
To illustrate this idea, we can formulate a very simple hidden variable theory for the above thought experiment. One supposes that the quantum spin-singlet states emitted by the source are actually approximate descriptions for "true" physical states possessing definite values for the z-spin and x-spin. In these "true" states, the electron going to Bob always has spin values opposite to the electron going to Alice, but the values are otherwise completely random. For example, the first pair emitted by the source might be "(+z, -x) to Alice and (-z, +x) to Bob", the next pair "(-z, -x) to Alice and (+z, +x) to Bob", and so forth. Therefore, if Bob's measurement axis is aligned with Alice's, he will necessarily get the opposite of whatever Alice gets; otherwise, he will get "+" and "-" with equal probability.
This seems to fix the problem of faster than light communication, because Alice and Bob always get correlated measurements, and nothing is getting communicated. The particles just have some hidden local variable that keeps track of how their spin is oriented with respect to the other. But there's a problem. If you ran this experiment multiple times, Bell demonstrated that quantum mechanics suggests that Alice and Bob's measurements will be more correlated* than they could ever be, even in principle, using a local hidden variable theory.
*This is a bit technical, but to measure the orientation of the spin of your particle, you have to orient your detector. If Alice and Bob put their detectors at 90 degrees to one another, they always get perfectly anticorrelated measurements. If the angle between the detectors is not exactly 90 degrees, you get a certain probabilistic form for the expected correlations. A plot of this is here. Solid line is the best a local hidden variable theory could do. Dotted line is what quantum mechanics, and Bell's inequalities predict.
So the upshot of this is that no, local hidden variables can't fix the issue with information seeming to travel faster than light. There are many ways around this, hence the many different interpretations of QM. It all comes down to either abandoning local realism, or abandoning counterfactual definiteness.
The entire adversarial stance of this discussion is kind of baffling. I don't think talking about "winning" is very constructive.
That language is a carryover from the battles that occur in academia, many of which involve funding and various political aspects of the academy.
It'd be nice if we could have a conversation about the relation between Physics and Philosophy that didn't manifest those kinds of grudges. But old habits die hard.
I disagree as emphatically as one can disagree. Having just finished a graduate seminar in metaphysics, there are so many things that exist that aren't observable, and that cannot be used to predict anything (unless you take a really loose meaning to predict).
Just to be clear, are you equating "observable" and "knowable"?
Nope
I specified that observable had to engage one of the five senses
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
The United States of America
Democracy
The number 2
Uninstantiated Properties
Possible Worlds
None of these things are observable through any senses (unless you want me to start asking you what color Democracy is), and while some can be used for prediction (if you're taking prediction to be pretty broad, or use pretty broadly), others quite specifically cannot.
Ok. What do you mean by "observable"?
Cause, by my understanding, I'm observing the number 2 right now. Even if you want to make a distinction between the symbol and its referrent...there's still 2ness right there.
My guess is that you're saying "observable" has to do with empirical sense data, as opposed to knowing.
I disagree as emphatically as one can disagree. Having just finished a graduate seminar in metaphysics, there are so many things that exist that aren't observable, and that cannot be used to predict anything (unless you take a really loose meaning to predict).
Just to be clear, are you equating "observable" and "knowable"?
Nope
I specified that observable had to engage one of the five senses
That's fine.
Provided that you don't make the mistake of saying that all knowledge begins with the senses. Cause, if so, then you've rendered unobservable things unknowable. I don't think you want to do that...given the list you constructed.
A hidden variable has a visible effect. In my light bulb example, the state of the filament is hidden but has a measurable impact on the observable on/off state of the lightbulb when I flip the switch. So the variable is hidden, but its effect is not.
How is it known that the effect results from the hidden variable?
Is it just:
1) X happens.
2) Fuck if I know what caused X.
3) There is a hidden variable that caused X.
That's basically the path that led Rosen and Einstein to suggest it. Moridin wrote what I was gonna regarding why we know it's not the case.
A hidden variable has a visible effect. In my light bulb example, the state of the filament is hidden but has a measurable impact on the observable on/off state of the lightbulb when I flip the switch. So the variable is hidden, but its effect is not.
How is it known that the effect results from the hidden variable?
Is it just:
1) X happens.
2) Fuck if I know what caused X.
3) There is a hidden variable that caused X.
That's basically the path that led Rosen and Einstein to suggest it. Moridin wrote what I was gonna regarding why we know it's not the case.
At some point, this all starts to sound like little more than a new version of Epicycles.
A hidden variable has a visible effect. In my light bulb example, the state of the filament is hidden but has a measurable impact on the observable on/off state of the lightbulb when I flip the switch. So the variable is hidden, but its effect is not.
How is it known that the effect results from the hidden variable?
Is it just:
1) X happens.
2) Fuck if I know what caused X.
3) There is a hidden variable that caused X.
That's basically the path that led Rosen and Einstein to suggest it. Moridin wrote what I was gonna regarding why we know it's not the case.
At some point, this all starts to sound like little more than a new version of Epicycles.
I can see where it might feel that way for someone looking at it with only a surface knowledge. For all their apparent complexity and checkered history, the theories composing the modern standard model are, in their natural formulations, pretty elegant. There are holes, certainly, but the picture of reality that we currently have goes in a very natural and logical way step-by-step up from quantum field theory to everything else.
I mentioned it up-thread in passing, but one of the leading reasons that people believe there is a level of composition below our current understanding of leptons (electrons and electron-like particles and quarks) is that there are too many of them and their interactions are complicated. Prior to the formulation of Quantum Chromodynamics that gave us a model of the Strong force unified with the electroweak force (which was, itself, unified out of the Weak and Electromagnetic forces by Quantum Electrodynamics) there was a similar feeling, that there were all of these many types of particles that had similar properties but no apparent connection to one another. The theories all worked and fit together, but were oddly disconnected and had issues with scale.
There's something called Gauge Theory, which holds that a "good" physical theory should be highly symmetric. It should work anywhere in the universe, and any sort of physical transformation that you make to the system (rotating it around, inverting it, etc.) should have either no or trivially-expected impact on the theory's behavior. There isn't any obvious reason why physics should be Gauge Invariant like this. Why shouldn't things work different in different places, or under different circumstances? Yet it is, and every strong theory is Gauge Invariant. Generally when a theory isn't invariant like this it turns out to be wrong, and the correct theory (with gauge invariance) is significantly more elegant. All of the components of the standard model (which describes every non-gravitational interaction at the level of quarks on up, including gravitation in the macroscopic regime) are gauge invariant, and are pretty elegant -- unlike epicycles. Hell, the reason there are no theories of quantum gravity in the standard model is that none has been worked out that the scientific community agrees isn't half-assed.
Modern physics is a fantastically deep and complicated subject, but it's pretty solid from top to bottom. There are patchy and weird sections out on the edges, but science is always going to be that way. All of your commentary about how physicists are just making shit up, or don't know what they're doing, really just betrays your own ignorance of the subject. If I were to come in here and say that the field of modern philosophy was full of shit on the basis of a few out-of-context quotes, I'd be rightly told that I didn't know what I was talking about and probably given a long list of shit to read before I was qualified to have any opinion.
But this is empty sophistry. You're defining "functionally identical" in terms of what "function" we assign a thing. Electrons don't have a "function". Unless you're invoking some kind of divine purpose, the term as you have defined it is meaningless for a fundamental particle.
I'm pretty sure electrons have a function.
Wait, are you joking, here? Is this a serious post?
I find it mildly entertaining that your initial reaction to this is to consider it a joke.
We can speak of the function of an electron in terms of what it does, its habits of action. We can justify the notion that electrons have habits of action by appealing to the ways in which electrons are used by persons to accomplish various tasks. Electrons tend to act in manner X, and so they can be used to power various electronic devices. Their regularity of action allows for them to be used for various ends.
Unless, of course, batteries do not use electrons.
This is just bizarre beyond comprehension. You're so far away from having any knowledge or understanding of the physics involved that I'm not sure it's even productive to continue the conversation in this direction.
First, you accuse physics of being solely concerned with electrons being "functionally identical" rather than "really" identical (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean). Then, you explain that by "functionally identical" you mean that they perform equivalently in engineering applications. Pardon my French, but are you fucking kidding me? You think that the sum total of our knowledge of electrons and their behavior is that they are interchangeable in commercially-sold batteries? That our analysis of them doesn't go any further than that? Have you understood nothing whatsoever of all the arguments for electron indistinguishability that have been addressed to you in this very thread?
This thread has become a weird microcosm for the very issue raised in the OP. I am starting to understand what Krauss could become so disillusioned with and aggressive towards "philosophy" as a profession.
What silly goosery.
I don't think that J was indicating what the state of our current physical theories are. Like, he wasn't actually stating what the "sum total of our knowledge of electrons and their behavior is."
Either it is the case that electrons have
1. No location in time and space
2. Electrons have a location in time and space
3. Electrons have more than one location in time and space, or a range of locations in time and space.
Of these, the third one is correct. This leads to a number of situations where it becomes impossible to distinguish one electron from another, even if you consider location a distinguishing characteristic.
Also, you're being quite silly about the word function. There is a function of electrons, just as much as there is a function (or functions) of my liver. It does something. Notice how I didn't have to talk about any divinity or human assigning this function. Things have functions, get over it.
It would be nice if you'd read things like this in context. I asked -J- what he meant by "functionally identical" and he posted a picture of some cell phones in different colors. I pointed out that that does not apply to electrons since they're not engineered--calling them "functionally identical" is meaningless if "function" means "what they're designed to do", which is all I was able to discern from -J-'s smarmy cell phone photo post.
He followed this up with another smarmy post involving a picture of a battery, and implied that this is the "functional identity" he's talking about when he accuses physicists of being solely concerned with such an identity.
See, this is why we need philosophy, because you're being incredibly sloppy with your use of concepts and language.
Not only does "we need philosophy" in no way follow from my (hypothetically) being sloppy with English, but I think if you re-read the exchange (after taking off your "I'm a philosopher, ra ra ra!" hat) you'll find that my response is totally consistent with what -J- wrote.
1. No location in time and space
2. Electrons have a location in time and space
3. Electrons have more than one location in time and space, or a range of locations in time and space.
Also, you're being quite silly about the word function. There is a function of electrons, just as much as there is a function (or functions) of my liver. It does something. Notice how I didn't have to talk about any divinity or human assigning this function. Things have functions, get over it.
See, this is why we need philosophy, because you're being incredibly sloppy with your use of concepts and language.
On the snark of being sloppy, you do seem to be implicitly assuming that there are individual electrons with individually-attached ranges of locations in time and space.
if not, what does it mean to say "electrons"? what does it mean to distinguish different atoms with different numbers of electrons?
n objects in a bag without any of them being individually distinguishable from each other. I think.
But the "objects" language puts us right back in the initial problem, it seems. As would the language of "things".
It seems like, maybe, persons do not want to construe electrons as things...and yet they continually language them as nouns.
Hey, it's not physicists fault that the behavior of excitations of quantum fields are hard to explain with words.
If they're going to keep talking about it, then perhaps they ought to construct a more accurate linguistic framework by which to articulate their concepts.
Maybe.
Edit: Otherwise they're acting like Plotinus. We can't talk about The One. Here's a book about The One.
We did construct this framework; it's called "mathematics".
Don't fault physicists for being unclear in their attempts to communicate with you when you're the one refusing to learn their language.
It would be nice if you'd read things like this in context. I asked -J- what he meant by "functionally identical" and he posted a picture of some cell phones in different colors. I pointed out that that does not apply to electrons since they're not engineered--calling them "functionally identical" is meaningless if "function" means "what they're designed to do", which is all I was able to discern from -J-'s smarmy cell phone photo post.
Whoa there, Huckleberry. Come on back to the stable.
1) They weren't cell phones. They were nintendo 3DSs.
2) Their functional identity is found in their ability to perform the same function (play nintendo 3DS game) while not being identical (they are different colors).
3) "function" does not mean "what it was designed to do". Function means what it does. A 3DS plays 3DS games. A liver does what a liver does. A toaster toasts bread. A tree grows and makes CO2 and etc. None of those rely upon a "designer" or an "intention". They are simply descriptions of what the objects do.
-Function
-Purpose
-Design
-Intention
These are all different words. They are neither identical, nor functionally identical.
He followed this up with another smarmy post involving a picture of a battery, and implied that this is the "functional identity" he's talking about when he accuses physicists of being solely concerned with such an identity.
The battery picture was meant to contrast with your claim that electrons don't have a function. Electrons do have a function; electrons have predictable habits of action. That's why we can employ them to accomplish various tasks.
There's something called Gauge Theory, which holds that a "good" physical theory should be highly symmetric. It should work anywhere in the universe, and any sort of physical transformation that you make to the system (rotating it around, inverting it, etc.) should have either no or trivially-expected impact on the theory's behavior. There isn't any obvious reason why physics should be Gauge Invariant like this. Why shouldn't things work different in different places, or under different circumstances? Yet it is, and every strong theory is Gauge Invariant.
This just made me think of the pornstar of the same name. Then I became distracted.
Modern physics is a fantastically deep and complicated subject, but it's pretty solid from top to bottom. There are patchy and weird sections out on the edges, but science is always going to be that way. All of your commentary about how physicists are just making shit up, or don't know what they're doing, really just betrays your own ignorance of the subject. If I were to come in here and say that the field of modern philosophy was full of shit on the basis of a few out-of-context quotes, I'd be rightly told that I didn't know what I was talking about and probably given a long list of shit to read before I was qualified to have any opinion.
I think I agree with most of this.
That being said, when someone employs a noun to describe something that they claim is not a thing, I think a criticism can be offered. Or when someone says that "nothing" means "Quantum Fields", then a criticism can be offered. Or when someone mistakes an epistemological claim for an ontological claim. Etc.
1. No location in time and space
2. Electrons have a location in time and space
3. Electrons have more than one location in time and space, or a range of locations in time and space.
Also, you're being quite silly about the word function. There is a function of electrons, just as much as there is a function (or functions) of my liver. It does something. Notice how I didn't have to talk about any divinity or human assigning this function. Things have functions, get over it.
See, this is why we need philosophy, because you're being incredibly sloppy with your use of concepts and language.
On the snark of being sloppy, you do seem to be implicitly assuming that there are individual electrons with individually-attached ranges of locations in time and space.
if not, what does it mean to say "electrons"? what does it mean to distinguish different atoms with different numbers of electrons?
n objects in a bag without any of them being individually distinguishable from each other. I think.
But the "objects" language puts us right back in the initial problem, it seems. As would the language of "things".
It seems like, maybe, persons do not want to construe electrons as things...and yet they continually language them as nouns.
Hey, it's not physicists fault that the behavior of excitations of quantum fields are hard to explain with words.
If they're going to keep talking about it, then perhaps they ought to construct a more accurate linguistic framework by which to articulate their concepts.
Maybe.
Edit: Otherwise they're acting like Plotinus. We can't talk about The One. Here's a book about The One.
We did construct this framework; it's called "mathematics".
Don't fault physicists for being unclear in their attempts to communicate with you when you're the one refusing to learn their language.
Physics did not create mathematics.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I was under the impression that hidden variable accounts could be rescued, but at the cost of giving up locality, and that this was a move some people were interested in--seeing how to make sense of things if one gives up locality. Is this a thing? Or is it totally fringe?
It sounded to me like you were chastising Albert for being an unwitting tool of the religious crazies (but perhaps instead you were only describing how Kraus' et all see him?) But now I am not so sure. Either way: I'd agree that academics can and should be careful in their presentation of their views to the public. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's new book critiquing natural selection is perhaps a good example of a failure in this regard, and Nagel might well also have been less careful than he should. But I don't think that, even when we are concerned about presentation to the public, Albert has made any mistakes. First, his critique of Kraus is correct. Second, it is actually quite simple (and correspondingly difficult to misinterpret). If the public absorbs it, it is all the better for the public. They will know more afterward than they did before.
1. No location in time and space
2. Electrons have a location in time and space
3. Electrons have more than one location in time and space, or a range of locations in time and space.
Also, you're being quite silly about the word function. There is a function of electrons, just as much as there is a function (or functions) of my liver. It does something. Notice how I didn't have to talk about any divinity or human assigning this function. Things have functions, get over it.
See, this is why we need philosophy, because you're being incredibly sloppy with your use of concepts and language.
On the snark of being sloppy, you do seem to be implicitly assuming that there are individual electrons with individually-attached ranges of locations in time and space.
if not, what does it mean to say "electrons"? what does it mean to distinguish different atoms with different numbers of electrons?
n objects in a bag without any of them being individually distinguishable from each other. I think.
But the "objects" language puts us right back in the initial problem, it seems. As would the language of "things".
It seems like, maybe, persons do not want to construe electrons as things...and yet they continually language them as nouns.
Hey, it's not physicists fault that the behavior of excitations of quantum fields are hard to explain with words.
If they're going to keep talking about it, then perhaps they ought to construct a more accurate linguistic framework by which to articulate their concepts.
Maybe.
Edit: Otherwise they're acting like Plotinus. We can't talk about The One. Here's a book about The One.
We did construct this framework; it's called "mathematics".
Don't fault physicists for being unclear in their attempts to communicate with you when you're the one refusing to learn their language.
Physics did not create mathematics.
No, but mathematics is the language in which its key ideas are expressed. Any verbal explanation or analogy is going to be inaccurate pretty much by definition. This goes double for anything to do with quantum mechanics or quantum field theory, precisely because the universe does not work at those scales in a way that is remotely similar to everyday macroscopic experience.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Look, the liver has a function in that it performs certain tasks that help a normally functioning human body to keep on going. It's not a function we assigned to it, it was performing that function in our body even when we thought it governed one of the four humors. Function can possibly be a laden tern, denoting that something was given to it by some designer.
But seriously, do you think that's what J and I are after?
I don't think that 'function' was a good word choice on your and J's behalf, if all you meant by it was something like 'causal powers' or 'counterfactual behavior across ordinary circumstances.' This precisely because it is a more loaded term. If all you really want to talk about is those latter things, it is easier just to talk about them directly. Unless, of course, function is supposed to be something over and above causal powers or counterfactual behavior, but then it loses its purported claim to metaphysical innocuousness.
It sounded to me like you were chastising Albert for being an unwitting tool of the religious crazies (but perhaps instead you were only describing how Kraus' et all see him?) But now I am not so sure. Either way: I'd agree that academics can and should be careful in their presentation of their views to the public. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's new book critiquing natural selection is perhaps a good example of a failure in this regard, and Nagel might well also have been less careful than he should. But I don't think that, even when we are concerned about presentation to the public, Albert has made any mistakes. First, his critique of Kraus is correct. Second, it is actually quite simple (and correspondingly difficult to misinterpret). If the public absorbs it, it is all the better for the public. They will know more afterward than they did before.
As an empirical matter I am doubtful that first, a critique (however correct) is absorbed in any way beyond "atheist physicist writes book claiming to replace Genesis, philosopher gives him a public smackdown", and second, that an absorption of said critique (however correctly) has, shall we say, a monotonic relationship with the quality of the zeitgeist, regardless of the welfare of the people whose heads this zeitgeist inhabits.
In my own pet field, at least, it is most clear that salvos in this manner behave in a fashion that would render only the most misanthropic cynics happy. I can give you many examples but I think casting your mind to recent public discourse on policy moves would probably bring to mind some - expansionary austerity, say, which was (honestly speaking) an interesting and thought-provoking possibility that suddenly seized vast swathes of the intellectual territory of what respectable people considered to be reasonable. It is quite possible for the movement of an idea into the popular space to cause damage, I think, because the leap from "knowing more" to "making politics, in areas where policy matters" is a space where plenty can go wrong.
I don't think David Albert has been actually destructive for the simple reason that Krauss' book has not appeared to have made any waves at all, bluntly speaking. But I think it is a mistake to focus exclusively on the book - it is merely one of a wider trend of the new-atheist hard scientists trying to assert popular authority across the old détente that was the separate magisteria. The prospective territory is occupied by not only layman theology but also philosophers, however. That laymen theologians and high philosophy coexisted in the same sphere of discourse at all is proof that there doesn't have to be public dispute between people who disagree, and I think the NA people want chiefly to displace the laymen - I think they are not, and they will probably never, going to offer any standard of argument that would satisfy an undergraduate philosopher.
So we're going to see The God Delusion played out over and over again until the new atheists lose steam or win their key political battles, and there is going to be plenty of fodder for philosophers to attack, in the same way most academic fields right now already provide fodder for philosophers to attack but merely don't attract attention. And we're presumably going to have argument after argument on this here forums and elsewhere on whether such and such refutations of careless antitheism hold any water, and they probably would, and it's still going to be beside the point of "so, who should get to exercise popular authority on subjects that are getting alarmingly close to religion". It isn't about "who is, in fact, more rigorous on subjects alarmingly close to religion", which was always "high philosophy, not laymen theology" but that's never mattered, has it? Given that we non-philosopher-kings are always going to have a laymen's grasp and it is merely the direction of our collective misapprehensions that can be steered by whoever is influential for unrelated reasons at any given time. This is applied politics, not philosophy, if you will.
1. No location in time and space
2. Electrons have a location in time and space
3. Electrons have more than one location in time and space, or a range of locations in time and space.
Also, you're being quite silly about the word function. There is a function of electrons, just as much as there is a function (or functions) of my liver. It does something. Notice how I didn't have to talk about any divinity or human assigning this function. Things have functions, get over it.
See, this is why we need philosophy, because you're being incredibly sloppy with your use of concepts and language.
On the snark of being sloppy, you do seem to be implicitly assuming that there are individual electrons with individually-attached ranges of locations in time and space.
if not, what does it mean to say "electrons"? what does it mean to distinguish different atoms with different numbers of electrons?
n objects in a bag without any of them being individually distinguishable from each other. I think.
But the "objects" language puts us right back in the initial problem, it seems. As would the language of "things".
It seems like, maybe, persons do not want to construe electrons as things...and yet they continually language them as nouns.
Hey, it's not physicists fault that the behavior of excitations of quantum fields are hard to explain with words.
If they're going to keep talking about it, then perhaps they ought to construct a more accurate linguistic framework by which to articulate their concepts.
Maybe.
Edit: Otherwise they're acting like Plotinus. We can't talk about The One. Here's a book about The One.
We did construct this framework; it's called "mathematics".
Don't fault physicists for being unclear in their attempts to communicate with you when you're the one refusing to learn their language.
Physics did not create mathematics.
No, but mathematics is the language in which its key ideas are expressed. Any verbal explanation or analogy is going to be inaccurate pretty much by definition. This goes double for anything to do with quantum mechanics or quantum field theory, precisely because the universe does not work at those scales in a way that is remotely similar to everyday macroscopic experience.
Given that math comes from logic, I'm wondering what you take it to be more useful than a clear non-numeral articulation of the same thing.
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Further, there are multiple consistent answers to the question "What is the electron doing while we aren't measuring it". This leads me to believe that that isn't a well posed question.
That isn't actually what particle indistinguishability says. The distinction between 'this electron' and 'that electron' is meaningless beyond the fact that, at the moment you say it, there are two distinct electrons in different states. You can, outside of cases where Pauli exclusion is violated/doesn't apply, always momentarily distinguish particles on the basis of their distinct state vectors, but over any period of time it's impossible to 'track' a single particle and name it Ed. Ed will go wherever Ed wants, and there is (apparently) literally no way to tell Ed apart from his fellows from moment to moment.
For particles that can occupy the same state vector simultaneously...you can't even distinguish them momentarily. This is physically meaningful in the case of superconductivity. The particles composing a superfluid (like the current carriers in a superconductive material) behave as though they all occupied the same quantum state simultaneously, so any change applied to the system has to be applied uniformly to the entire system simultaneously. You can't poke one electron in a superconducting wire because, effectively, every electron in there is the same electron.
"Every electron in there is the same electron" is a sentence that, as a proposition, does not express a coherent idea (which is part of the problem, since a lot of the ideas QM deals with can't be expressed in a way that is, in the traditional sense, coherent).
Philosophical problem!
Explain the difference between "something we can't observe or predict" and "something that doesn't exist." In your light bulb experiment, we observed it by turning on the light and getting no light.
"Hidden variables" are actually an age-old philosophical problem that comes up in science. One of my personal favorites is "instinct."
Q: "Why does a bird fly south for the winter?"
A: "Instinct."
Translation: "I have no idea."
Philosophically, "hidden variables" are basically null theory. "There is this thing I can't say anything at all about, but I'm going to give it a name and then say it's the cause for all these things that we can't figure out the cause of." Philosophically, such a theory is a default, inherent explanation of absolutely anything that can't currently be explained.
Functionally, hidden still means the same thing as non-existent. Functionally, there is no difference between "no one observed it" and "it doesn't exist."
When you use the word "functionally," what do you mean? Do you mean it has no impact on my daily life?
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
So only things that impact things we see exist? How loosely are you using "impact" here? Like, if it causes someone to form certain beliefs then is that an impact?
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
They don't share the same location*, but the rest of their state (spin and whatnot) are identical. It's been quite a while since I did anything involving superconductivity, but my recollection is that the states of the participants form something like a shell in phase space (the six-dimensional space of location and momentum vectors that define the character of a system in the Hamiltonian formulation of mechanics) and that any effort to impact one particle is spread across the entire shell. The fact that they share a quantum state (and so are, in a sense, 'entangled'; it's not exactly the same as standard entanglement but that's a more generally popular concept you're probably familiar with) causes them all to react simultaneously and uniformly. You can't physically distinguish between 'this electron' and 'that electron' anymore.
* Actually they sort of do, but an explanation requires explaining conduction band topology which is significantly more effort than I'm willing to put forth for this. If you'd like you can start by googling "reciprocal space", followed by "spatial frequency", "brillouin zone", and "conduction band" before heading over toward the superconductivity end of Wikipedia.
I figured that the answers here would be a bit esoteric, but I appreciate the answer (and I already grasp the notion/function of a superconductor better because of it) to the extent that it is reasonable to provide one!
Well, I can't, because there isn't one. But that's why hidden variables are different from non-existent variables. A hidden variable has a visible effect. In my light bulb example, the state of the filament is hidden but has a measurable impact on the observable on/off state of the lightbulb when I flip the switch. So the variable is hidden, but its effect is not. That's why Einstein and Rosen thought they were a reasonable explanation for the stuff that quantum physicists were observing.
Bell went on to show that if variables existed (but were invisible) which impacted the visible behavior of particles in the experiments that Einstein & Co. said they were, they would necessarily also impact other behaviors. The fact that they did not do so tells us that they don't exist.
Hell, Einstein didn't even say that we could never see these variables; he just suggested that there were properties we weren't currently measuring which impacted the outcome of entanglement experiments. Roughly, he said "The lightbulb didn't turn on when I flipped the switch. Perhaps there is something inside the light bulb which determines whether it will turn on or not." Then Bell came along and said, "Okay, but if I hook up a battery to the light bulb directly then whatever internal properties it has should make it still not turn on. And it does turn on when I do that, so no, that's not the problem here."
If you can observe such a thing happening. That's more the kind of impact I'm talking about. An impact that results in observation and/or enables successful prediction.
That's all fine, as long as it's understood that "hidden variable" just meant "something we don't know anything about." And in my limited physics understanding, I would say that Bell couldn't possibly have disproven such a null theory, all he could have done is proven that "no, we still don't know anything about them, as thus for now we continue to say they don't exist."
I mean, that's all that went on IMO between Bell and Rosen. Rosen says, "what if there's something there that defies all current capability to measure or observe?" and Bell said "I used our best current capabilities of observation and measurement, and didn't see anything." Philosophically, they are talking past one another, and about a subject that is philosophically fairly simple to rule out.
_J_ isn't really being a pedant, he's just moving goalposts.
This is a very important point: Probability has to do with epistemology, not ontology or metaphysics.
Whatever is, is.
There is no chance or odds "out there". Chance and odds is just a way of talking about our finite, limited knowledge of the way things be.
Edit: Yar and others have been doing a good job of pressing on this point. Physicists sometimes seem to confuse "what there is" and "what is known". They also sometimes tend to confuse how a thing is known, for the thing that is known.
So if something cannot be used to predict, and is not observable (which I take to mean detectable through some sense, or through a modified sense), it doesn't exist?
I disagree as emphatically as one can disagree. Having just finished a graduate seminar in metaphysics, there are so many things that exist that aren't observable, and that cannot be used to predict anything (unless you take a really loose meaning to predict).
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Strict Copenhagen interpretation all up ins.
There isn't necessarily any particular reason to believe that there is an objective reality more precisely defined than that represented by the probabilistic wavefunctions of QM.
Of course, since both physics and neurobiology cannot occur without the logical tools of philosophy, philosophy is a necessary condition for both physics and neurobiology to occur.
Edit: Removed the winning.
One of my professors has a nice quip about this sort of situation:
"'Force' is the word a physicist uses when he no longer knows what he is talking about."
How is it known that the effect results from the hidden variable?
Is it just:
1) X happens.
2) Fuck if I know what caused X.
3) There is a hidden variable that caused X.
Off the top of my head:
The United States of America
Democracy
The number 2
Uninstantiated Properties
Possible Worlds
None of these things are observable through any senses (unless you want me to start asking you what color Democracy is), and while some can be used for prediction (if you're taking prediction to be pretty broad, or use pretty broadly), others quite specifically cannot.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Just to be clear, are you equating "observable" and "knowable"?
Bell's inequalities are more nuanced than just "Stuff we can't in principle detect is undetectable."
Let's backtrack a bit. Rosen's whole issue with Quantum Mechanics was that he thought reality was Local Realistic. From wikipedia:
So, take an entangled pair of particles. The EPR thought experiment suggests that you can perform measurements on these entangled particles that would violate the uncertainty principle, suggesting that Quantum Mechanics is incomplete. Essentially, their gripe was, "How does one of the entangled particles 'know' to be in the complementary state to whatever you measure for its pair?". It seems to suggest that something is getting communicated faster than light (as is often brought up when talking about entanglement).
One way of getting around this is introducing a hidden variable. Again, from wikipedia, where Alice and Bob each receive one particle from an entangled pair:
This seems to fix the problem of faster than light communication, because Alice and Bob always get correlated measurements, and nothing is getting communicated. The particles just have some hidden local variable that keeps track of how their spin is oriented with respect to the other. But there's a problem. If you ran this experiment multiple times, Bell demonstrated that quantum mechanics suggests that Alice and Bob's measurements will be more correlated* than they could ever be, even in principle, using a local hidden variable theory.
*This is a bit technical, but to measure the orientation of the spin of your particle, you have to orient your detector. If Alice and Bob put their detectors at 90 degrees to one another, they always get perfectly anticorrelated measurements. If the angle between the detectors is not exactly 90 degrees, you get a certain probabilistic form for the expected correlations. A plot of this is here. Solid line is the best a local hidden variable theory could do. Dotted line is what quantum mechanics, and Bell's inequalities predict.
So the upshot of this is that no, local hidden variables can't fix the issue with information seeming to travel faster than light. There are many ways around this, hence the many different interpretations of QM. It all comes down to either abandoning local realism, or abandoning counterfactual definiteness.
That language is a carryover from the battles that occur in academia, many of which involve funding and various political aspects of the academy.
It'd be nice if we could have a conversation about the relation between Physics and Philosophy that didn't manifest those kinds of grudges. But old habits die hard.
So, yeah, oughtn't have used "win".
Nope
I specified that observable had to engage one of the five senses
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Ok. What do you mean by "observable"?
Cause, by my understanding, I'm observing the number 2 right now. Even if you want to make a distinction between the symbol and its referrent...there's still 2ness right there.
My guess is that you're saying "observable" has to do with empirical sense data, as opposed to knowing.
That's fine.
Provided that you don't make the mistake of saying that all knowledge begins with the senses. Cause, if so, then you've rendered unobservable things unknowable. I don't think you want to do that...given the list you constructed.
That's basically the path that led Rosen and Einstein to suggest it. Moridin wrote what I was gonna regarding why we know it's not the case.
At some point, this all starts to sound like little more than a new version of Epicycles.
I can see where it might feel that way for someone looking at it with only a surface knowledge. For all their apparent complexity and checkered history, the theories composing the modern standard model are, in their natural formulations, pretty elegant. There are holes, certainly, but the picture of reality that we currently have goes in a very natural and logical way step-by-step up from quantum field theory to everything else.
I mentioned it up-thread in passing, but one of the leading reasons that people believe there is a level of composition below our current understanding of leptons (electrons and electron-like particles and quarks) is that there are too many of them and their interactions are complicated. Prior to the formulation of Quantum Chromodynamics that gave us a model of the Strong force unified with the electroweak force (which was, itself, unified out of the Weak and Electromagnetic forces by Quantum Electrodynamics) there was a similar feeling, that there were all of these many types of particles that had similar properties but no apparent connection to one another. The theories all worked and fit together, but were oddly disconnected and had issues with scale.
There's something called Gauge Theory, which holds that a "good" physical theory should be highly symmetric. It should work anywhere in the universe, and any sort of physical transformation that you make to the system (rotating it around, inverting it, etc.) should have either no or trivially-expected impact on the theory's behavior. There isn't any obvious reason why physics should be Gauge Invariant like this. Why shouldn't things work different in different places, or under different circumstances? Yet it is, and every strong theory is Gauge Invariant. Generally when a theory isn't invariant like this it turns out to be wrong, and the correct theory (with gauge invariance) is significantly more elegant. All of the components of the standard model (which describes every non-gravitational interaction at the level of quarks on up, including gravitation in the macroscopic regime) are gauge invariant, and are pretty elegant -- unlike epicycles. Hell, the reason there are no theories of quantum gravity in the standard model is that none has been worked out that the scientific community agrees isn't half-assed.
Modern physics is a fantastically deep and complicated subject, but it's pretty solid from top to bottom. There are patchy and weird sections out on the edges, but science is always going to be that way. All of your commentary about how physicists are just making shit up, or don't know what they're doing, really just betrays your own ignorance of the subject. If I were to come in here and say that the field of modern philosophy was full of shit on the basis of a few out-of-context quotes, I'd be rightly told that I didn't know what I was talking about and probably given a long list of shit to read before I was qualified to have any opinion.
It would be nice if you'd read things like this in context. I asked -J- what he meant by "functionally identical" and he posted a picture of some cell phones in different colors. I pointed out that that does not apply to electrons since they're not engineered--calling them "functionally identical" is meaningless if "function" means "what they're designed to do", which is all I was able to discern from -J-'s smarmy cell phone photo post.
He followed this up with another smarmy post involving a picture of a battery, and implied that this is the "functional identity" he's talking about when he accuses physicists of being solely concerned with such an identity.
Not only does "we need philosophy" in no way follow from my (hypothetically) being sloppy with English, but I think if you re-read the exchange (after taking off your "I'm a philosopher, ra ra ra!" hat) you'll find that my response is totally consistent with what -J- wrote.
Don't fault physicists for being unclear in their attempts to communicate with you when you're the one refusing to learn their language.
Whoa there, Huckleberry. Come on back to the stable.
1) They weren't cell phones. They were nintendo 3DSs.
2) Their functional identity is found in their ability to perform the same function (play nintendo 3DS game) while not being identical (they are different colors).
3) "function" does not mean "what it was designed to do". Function means what it does. A 3DS plays 3DS games. A liver does what a liver does. A toaster toasts bread. A tree grows and makes CO2 and etc. None of those rely upon a "designer" or an "intention". They are simply descriptions of what the objects do.
-Function
-Purpose
-Design
-Intention
These are all different words. They are neither identical, nor functionally identical.
The battery picture was meant to contrast with your claim that electrons don't have a function. Electrons do have a function; electrons have predictable habits of action. That's why we can employ them to accomplish various tasks.
This just made me think of the pornstar of the same name. Then I became distracted.
I think I agree with most of this.
That being said, when someone employs a noun to describe something that they claim is not a thing, I think a criticism can be offered. Or when someone says that "nothing" means "Quantum Fields", then a criticism can be offered. Or when someone mistakes an epistemological claim for an ontological claim. Etc.
Physics did not create mathematics.
I was under the impression that hidden variable accounts could be rescued, but at the cost of giving up locality, and that this was a move some people were interested in--seeing how to make sense of things if one gives up locality. Is this a thing? Or is it totally fringe?
@ronya
It sounded to me like you were chastising Albert for being an unwitting tool of the religious crazies (but perhaps instead you were only describing how Kraus' et all see him?) But now I am not so sure. Either way: I'd agree that academics can and should be careful in their presentation of their views to the public. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's new book critiquing natural selection is perhaps a good example of a failure in this regard, and Nagel might well also have been less careful than he should. But I don't think that, even when we are concerned about presentation to the public, Albert has made any mistakes. First, his critique of Kraus is correct. Second, it is actually quite simple (and correspondingly difficult to misinterpret). If the public absorbs it, it is all the better for the public. They will know more afterward than they did before.
No, but mathematics is the language in which its key ideas are expressed. Any verbal explanation or analogy is going to be inaccurate pretty much by definition. This goes double for anything to do with quantum mechanics or quantum field theory, precisely because the universe does not work at those scales in a way that is remotely similar to everyday macroscopic experience.
I don't think that 'function' was a good word choice on your and J's behalf, if all you meant by it was something like 'causal powers' or 'counterfactual behavior across ordinary circumstances.' This precisely because it is a more loaded term. If all you really want to talk about is those latter things, it is easier just to talk about them directly. Unless, of course, function is supposed to be something over and above causal powers or counterfactual behavior, but then it loses its purported claim to metaphysical innocuousness.
@MrMister
As an empirical matter I am doubtful that first, a critique (however correct) is absorbed in any way beyond "atheist physicist writes book claiming to replace Genesis, philosopher gives him a public smackdown", and second, that an absorption of said critique (however correctly) has, shall we say, a monotonic relationship with the quality of the zeitgeist, regardless of the welfare of the people whose heads this zeitgeist inhabits.
In my own pet field, at least, it is most clear that salvos in this manner behave in a fashion that would render only the most misanthropic cynics happy. I can give you many examples but I think casting your mind to recent public discourse on policy moves would probably bring to mind some - expansionary austerity, say, which was (honestly speaking) an interesting and thought-provoking possibility that suddenly seized vast swathes of the intellectual territory of what respectable people considered to be reasonable. It is quite possible for the movement of an idea into the popular space to cause damage, I think, because the leap from "knowing more" to "making politics, in areas where policy matters" is a space where plenty can go wrong.
I don't think David Albert has been actually destructive for the simple reason that Krauss' book has not appeared to have made any waves at all, bluntly speaking. But I think it is a mistake to focus exclusively on the book - it is merely one of a wider trend of the new-atheist hard scientists trying to assert popular authority across the old détente that was the separate magisteria. The prospective territory is occupied by not only layman theology but also philosophers, however. That laymen theologians and high philosophy coexisted in the same sphere of discourse at all is proof that there doesn't have to be public dispute between people who disagree, and I think the NA people want chiefly to displace the laymen - I think they are not, and they will probably never, going to offer any standard of argument that would satisfy an undergraduate philosopher.
So we're going to see The God Delusion played out over and over again until the new atheists lose steam or win their key political battles, and there is going to be plenty of fodder for philosophers to attack, in the same way most academic fields right now already provide fodder for philosophers to attack but merely don't attract attention. And we're presumably going to have argument after argument on this here forums and elsewhere on whether such and such refutations of careless antitheism hold any water, and they probably would, and it's still going to be beside the point of "so, who should get to exercise popular authority on subjects that are getting alarmingly close to religion". It isn't about "who is, in fact, more rigorous on subjects alarmingly close to religion", which was always "high philosophy, not laymen theology" but that's never mattered, has it? Given that we non-philosopher-kings are always going to have a laymen's grasp and it is merely the direction of our collective misapprehensions that can be steered by whoever is influential for unrelated reasons at any given time. This is applied politics, not philosophy, if you will.
Given that math comes from logic, I'm wondering what you take it to be more useful than a clear non-numeral articulation of the same thing.