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 think J's larger point is simply that saying "probability cloud" doesn't eliminate the property of location from an electron
the probability field is simply a location defined by a region, rather than by a point; the fact that we can refer to "an electron" means it has a location, fuzzy or otherwise.
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.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
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'm pretty sure _J_ is talking about function in the sense of "what does it do?". And unless you're saying that electrons don't actually do anything it strikes me that "Electrons don't have a "function"" is actually some empty sophistry.
All electrons behave exactly the same way. But that does not mean that they're all actually the same thing.
i think J's larger point is simply that saying "probability cloud" doesn't eliminate the property of location from an electron
the probability field is simply a location defined by a region, rather than by a point; the fact that we can refer to "an electron" means it has a location, fuzzy or otherwise.
Yup. The electrons in the battery in my closet are in different locations than the electrons in the battery in my kitchen.
Or, if you like, the electrons in the probability clouds in my batteries.
It's a silly question. Philosophy is not about discovering new particles, it's about the nature of science.
Yes. So: what has knowing more about the nature of science, contributed to advances in science (acknowledging that this is not its main purpose - just the purpose a lot of people care about)? Popper made its mark on how scientists think about themselves but nothing else has.
It's explicitly not it's purpose. Science advances science. No philosopher would consider themselves a Popperian falsficationist, with good reason, nowadays but that doesn't mean we advanced physics. It's not the point, let the scientists do the science.
Economics has done nothing to advance physics either, does that make it useless?
Irrelevant of whether that is its conscious purpose, I am asking you to suggest whether it has contributed anything - non-purposefully, perhaps. Certainly there seems to be a common desire to lay claim to some of the accomplishments of the hard sciences, e.g.:
And if philosophy serves to enhance thought, then it has done a great deal for science. (Duh.)
This matters because amongst philosophers of science Popper is (as you correctly say) widely disrespected, whilst amongst scientists Popper is widely held as a gold standard, and this has been the case for decades, and the divergence has always been a conflict in the making. Of which the "Team Philosophy" vs "Team Physics" attitude a la the OP was inevitable.
Okay, having skimmed the six pages of this thread and a bit about the Krauss dust-up. This remark seems relevant:
First, I think that Lawrence’s book makes a lot more sense when viewed as part of the ongoing atheism vs. theism popular debate, rather than as a careful philosophical investigation into a longstanding problem. Note that the afterword was written by Richard Dawkins, and Lawrence had originally asked Christopher Hitchens, before he became too ill — both of whom, while very smart people, are neither cosmologists nor philosophers. If your real goal is to refute claims that a Creator is a necessary (or even useful) part of a complete cosmological scheme, then the above points about “creation from nothing” are really quite on point. And that point is that the physical universe can perfectly well be self-contained; it doesn’t need anything or anyone from outside to get it started, even if it had a “beginning.” That doesn’t come close to addressing Leibniz’s classic question, but there’s little doubt that it’s a remarkable feature of modern physics with interesting implications for fundamental cosmology.
Casually speaking, there's a loose 'philosophy of science' that people do seem to adhere to, in a vague revealed-preference sort of way, that may not be philosophically rigorous but constitutes a plausible explanation for observed behavior nonetheless. Even for people whose profession it is to consider the place of scientific knowledge in wider epistemology, they might deny the possibility of certain knowledge of the external world, but they probably still want certain institutions and certain types of people to have designed and built the airplane they're boarding.
Call that the 'applied' philosophy of science, perhaps. Its standards are not very rigorous, but rigorous philosophy of science is difficult and technical and Feyerabend makes my head hurt so we work with a simpler stripped-down version In Real Life, and it really is an evolving standard that keeps up (somewhat) with advances in scientific knowledge, and it does possess massive importance insofar as we want justify who we should legitimately defer to in politically charged issues. Climate change, evolution, you know.
Then there's the actual philosophy of science, where we poke at scientists in the way a political philosopher regards politicians. It's a different world. Here Popper is widely disrespected instead, for starters. But what's wrong with compartmentalization? Everyone does it.
There's a tension in that there are now organized forces trying to formally advocate change in the former (c.f. Dawkins et al) instead of letting it bump along gently and they're not really talking to philosophers and get rather annoyed when the latter do what must seem like irrelevant nitpicking.
Now scientists have generally enjoyed a certain amount of deference from philosophers of science when it comes to their pet philosophical standards of verification. It's not actually plausible that falsification is a rigorous test but it is a test that scientists are willing to uphold nonetheless and philosophers are prepared to remain largely silent about - see, for example, the OPERA neutrinos. Philosophers did not rebuke physicists in the popular press for engaging in utterly non-rigorous standards of Truth when physicists said that we could confirm or deny the FTL phenomena via additional experiments, reproduction, etc.
The Krauss (and Dawkins etc.) issues with philosophers has arisen because hard scientists want to expand their territory onto fields traditionally associated with philosophy - theology, in particular - and they expect the same level of deference and they're not getting it, unsurprisingly. This is not about the higher nature of Truth and Knowledge, this is politics - a group of hard scientists want to claim authority from assorted religious and conservative groups, and modern philosophers - who have never been respected amongst the latter at all - are now defending them and the former find this absolutely infuriating.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I'm sorry, this might be off topic, but isn't an electron cloud just the thing that means "There are electrons here, but we're not capable of determining their exact location at anytime" or am I remembering my science wrong?
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.
J is simply being a bit pedantic about the term "identical." It is impossible for discrete entities to "really" be identical, since they differ and are distinguishable by the property of location (if they were not, they would literally be the same entity and there would not be two of them)
i think J's larger point is simply that saying "probability cloud" doesn't eliminate the property of location from an electron
the probability field is simply a location defined by a region, rather than by a point; the fact that we can refer to "an electron" means it has a location, fuzzy or otherwise.
Yup. The electrons in the battery in my closet are in different locations than the electrons in the battery in my kitchen.
Or, if you like, the electrons in the probability clouds in my batteries.
How can you be sure? If the region is enlarged to your entire house, how can you definitively state whether the electrons in one room are different than those in another? Or what if you shrunk the scale to a single fork - how can you be sure that the electrons on one tine are different from another?
At that point you're not arguing about where an electron's located, but the definition of "location."
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.
unfortunately you cannot rely on this to give electrons identity; you're still thinking classically. The rough analogy of QM would be that the state of electrons being in your closet battery and being in your kitchen battery are in fact the one and the same indistinguishable state. The cat is not alive or dead, it is in the superposed state of both.
i think J's larger point is simply that saying "probability cloud" doesn't eliminate the property of location from an electron
the probability field is simply a location defined by a region, rather than by a point; the fact that we can refer to "an electron" means it has a location, fuzzy or otherwise.
Yup. The electrons in the battery in my closet are in different locations than the electrons in the battery in my kitchen.
Or, if you like, the electrons in the probability clouds in my batteries.
How can you be sure? If the region is enlarged to your entire house, how can you definitively state whether the electrons in one room are different than those in another? Or what if you shrunk the scale to a single fork - how can you be sure that the electrons on one tine are different from another?
At that point you're not arguing about where an electron's located, but the definition of "location."
I don't believe you can just "enlarge the region" and render the distinction between electrons ambiguous; otherwise it would sort of mess with the periodic table and other important things.
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.
unfortunately you cannot rely on this to give electrons identity; you're still thinking classically. The rough analogy of QM would be that the state of electrons being in your closet battery and being in your kitchen battery are in fact the one and the same indistinguishable state. The cat is not alive or dead, it is in the superposed state of both.
i believe schrodinger's cat is a reductio to show that, since a cat is never both alive and dead, schrodinger thought the notion of superposed states was a matter of incomplete information?
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.
unfortunately you cannot rely on this to give electrons identity; you're still thinking classically. The rough analogy of QM would be that the state of electrons being in your closet battery and being in your kitchen battery are in fact the one and the same indistinguishable state. The cat is not alive or dead, it is in the superposed state of both.
i believe schrodinger's cat is a reductio to show that, since a cat is never both alive and dead, schrodinger thought the notion of superposed states was a matter of incomplete information?
Schrödinger intended it that way, yes. It turns out that answering it in a way that is consistent with existing superposition phenomena is difficult. Bell's Theorem makes incomplete information rather hard to sustain.
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.
unfortunately you cannot rely on this to give electrons identity; you're still thinking classically. The rough analogy of QM would be that the state of electrons being in your closet battery and being in your kitchen battery are in fact the one and the same indistinguishable state. The cat is not alive or dead, it is in the superposed state of both.
So electrons don't have locations, not even inside of electron clouds? Is the electron in his closet also in his kitchen, and vice versa?
"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
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
the argument would be that the electron probability cloud spreads to everywhere the electron would have been capable of reaching since its "appearance", whatever that means in this case
it is only meaningful to speak of the likelihood of it being places, rather than a formal location per se
that doesnt mean that you cant say "location is the area in which you have a 99.9% chance of finding the damn thing"
The second quantization procedure relies crucially on the particles being identical. We would not have been able to construct a quantum field theory from a distinguishable many-particle system, because there would have been no way of separating and indexing the degrees of freedom.
Many physicists prefer to take the converse interpretation, which is that quantum field theory explains what identical particles are. In ordinary quantum mechanics, there is not much theoretical motivation for using symmetric (bosonic) or antisymmetric (fermionic) states, and the need for such states is simply regarded as an empirical fact. From the point of view of quantum field theory, particles are identical if and only if they are excitations of the same underlying quantum field. Thus, the question "why are all electrons identical?" arises from mistakenly regarding individual electrons as fundamental objects, when in fact it is only the electron field that is fundamental.
Yudkowsky takes a somewhat harder line of "what that exists, is the entanglement" but neither are hospitable to particle identity.
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.
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.
"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
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.
unfortunately you cannot rely on this to give electrons identity; you're still thinking classically. The rough analogy of QM would be that the state of electrons being in your closet battery and being in your kitchen battery are in fact the one and the same indistinguishable state. The cat is not alive or dead, it is in the superposed state of both.
So electrons don't have locations, not even inside of electron clouds? Is the electron in his closet also in his kitchen, and vice versa?
They don't have locations, they have location-momentum, so to speak. Some kind of duality holds regardless of what interpretation you attach to it, otherwise you could not achieve the double-slit experiment.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
actually thats a good point, for those looking for an explanation for why the location thing is a bit tedious:
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.
unfortunately you cannot rely on this to give electrons identity; you're still thinking classically. The rough analogy of QM would be that the state of electrons being in your closet battery and being in your kitchen battery are in fact the one and the same indistinguishable state. The cat is not alive or dead, it is in the superposed state of both.
So electrons don't have locations, not even inside of electron clouds? Is the electron in his closet also in his kitchen, and vice versa?
They don't have locations, they have location-momentum, so to speak. Some kind of duality holds regardless of what interpretation you attach to it, otherwise you could not achieve the double-slit experiment.
So they have a location-momentum, then. Do all electrons have the same location momentum?
"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
As a political matter, I suspect high physics is going to keep pointing out that they invented the nuclear goddamn bomb for the next couple of centuries, I'm afraid. As far as concrete accomplishments of abstract theory go, that one is pretty hard to beat.
Have you had a chance to read 'The Open Mind' by J. Robert Oppenheimer? Published in 1955, it is a collection of lectures Oppenheimer gave about physics and the relation of physics to society / culture. Of note is his lecture from November 25, 1947, entitled 'Physics in the Contemporary World'.
Even in the good ways of contemporary physics, we are reluctantly made aware of our dependence on things which lie outside our science. The experience of the war, for those who were called upon to serve the survival of their civilization through the Resistance, and for those who contributed more remotely, if far more decisively, by the development of new instruments and weapons of war, has left us with a legacy of concern.
This is the paragraph in which he shifts from the neat things physics can find, to the concern over the neat things physics found, and how they were used.
Nowhere is this troubled sense of responsibility more acute, and surely nowhere has it been more prolix, than among those who participated in the development of atomic energy for military purposes. I should think that most historians would agree that other technical developments, notably radar, played a more decisive part in determining the outcome of this last war. But I doubt whether that participation would have of itself created the deep trouble and moral concern which so many of us who were physicists have felt, have voiced, and have tried to get over feeling. it is not hard to understand why this should be. The physics which played the decisive part in the development of the atomic bomb came straight out of war laboratories and our journals.
Question: How many physics students do you think are required to read that passage? And, don't worry, it gets better.
Despite the vision and the far-seeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists felt a peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. nor can we forget that these weapons, as they were in fact used, dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
Ok, yeah, Oppenheimer was sad because his creation was used to kill hundreds of thousands of people by means of two bombs. But what does this have to do with the relation between physics and philosophy?
Even less would it be right to interpret the question of what there is in the ways of science that may be of general value to mankind in terms of the creation of an elite. The study of physics, and i think my colleagues in the other sciences will let me speak for them too, does not make philosopher-kings. It has not, until now, made kings. it almost never makes fit philosophers--so rarely that they must be counted as exceptions. If the professional pursuit of science makes good scientists, if it makes men with a certain serenity in their lives, who yield perhaps a little more slowly than others to the natural corruptions of their time, it is doing a great deal, and all that we may rightly ask of it. For if Plato believed that in the study of geometry, a man might prepare himself for wisdom and responsibility in the world of men, it was precisely because he thought so hopefully that the understanding of men could be patterned after the understanding of geometry. If we believe that today, it is in a much more recondite sense, and a much more cautious one.
"Science almost never makes fit philosophers."
But what did Oppenheimer think of philosophers? Surely he dismissed them as numbskulls whose work had little or not value, right? He wouldn't praise philosophers, would he?
Let's read the final paragraph of his lecture together, shall we?
I have had to leave this essential question unanswered: I am not at all proud of that. In lieu of apology perhaps I may tell a story of another lecturer, speaking at Harvard, a few miles from here, two decades ago. Bertrand Russell had given a talk on the then new quantum mechanics, of whose wonders he was most appreciative. He spoke hard and earnestly in the New Lecture Hall. And when he was done, Professor Whitehead, who presided, thanked him for his efforts, and not least for "Leaving the vast darkness of the subject unobscured.
Yup.
One more block quote from his December 26, 1954 lecture entitled 'Prospects in the Arts and Sciences', included simply because I find it astonishing that a physicist of Oppenheimer's quality and accomplishment would have written it:
This cannot be an easy life. We shall have a rugged time of it to keep our minds open and to keep them deep, to keep our sense of beauty and our ability to make it, and our occasional ability to see it in places remote and strange and unfamiliar; we shall have a rugged time of it, all of us, in keeping these gardens in our villages, in keeping open the manifold, intricate, casual paths, to keep these flourishing in the great, open, windy world; but this, as I see it, is the condition of man; and in this condition we can help, because we can love, one another.
Upon the lawns of Washington the physicists assemble,
From all the land are men at hand, their wisdom to exchange.
A great man stands to speak, and with applause the rafters tremble.
'My friends,' says he, 'You all can see that physics now must change. Now in my lab we had our plans, but these we'll now expand,
Research right now is useless, we have come to understand.
We now propose constructing at an ancient Army base,
The best electronuclear machine at any pace. --Oh
'It will cost a billion dollars, then billion volts 'twill give,
It will take five thousand scholars sever years to make it live.
All the generals approve it, all the money's now in hand,
And to help advance our program, teaching students now we've banned.
We have chartered transportation, we'll provide a weekly dance,
Our motto's integration, there is nothing left to chance.
This machine is just a model for a bigger one, of course,
That's the future road for physics, as I hope you'll all endorse.'
And as the halls with cheers resound and praises fill the air,
One single man remains aloof and silent in his chair.
And when the room is quiet and the crowd has ceased to cheer,
He rises up and thunders forth an answer loud and clear:
'It seems that I'm a failure, just a piddling dilettante,
Within six months a mere ten thousand bucks is all I've spent,
With love and string and sealing wax was physics kept alive,
Let not the wealth of Midas hide the goal for which we strive. --Oh
'Take away your billion dollars, take away your tainted gold,
You can keep your damn ten billion volts, my soul will not be sold.
Take away your army generals; their kiss is death, I'm sure.
Everything I build is mine, and every volt I make is pure.
Take away your integration; let us learn and let us teach,
Oh, beware this epidemic Berkeleyitis, I beseech.
Oh, dammit! Engineering isn't physics, is that plain?
Take, oh take, your billion dollars, let's be physicists again.'
1956, ten years later: a sequel
Within the halls of NSF the panelists assemble.
From all the land the experts band their wisdom to exchange.
A great man stands to speak and with applause the rafters tremble.
'My friends,' says he, 'we all can see that budgets now must change.
By toil and sweat the Soviets have reached ten billion volts.
Shall we downtrodden physicists submit? No, no -- revolt!
It never shall be said that we let others lead the way.
We'll band together all out finest brains and save the day.
'Give us back our billion dollars, better add ten billion more.
If your budget looks unbalanced, just remember this is war.
Never mind the Army's shrieking, never mind the Navy's pain,
Never mind the Air Force projects disappearing down the drain.
In coordinates barycentric, every BeV means lots of cash,
There will be no cheap solutions, -- neither straight nor synoclash.
If we outbuild the Russians, it will be because we spend.
Give, oh give those billion dollars, let them flow without an end.
Let us say that the attitude of science has changed over time and leave it at that.
But to snark, if science does not make good popular moral philosophy, frankly neither does philosophy.
How can you be sure? If the region is enlarged to your entire house, how can you definitively state whether the electrons in one room are different than those in another?
Surely the electron cloud studied in a lab is located in the lab in which it is studied.
Surely the particles accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider are in the Large Hadron Collider.
Surely the electrons in this battery are in this battery.
Is your contention that physicists routinely study particles that are not, in fact, there?
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.
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.
unfortunately you cannot rely on this to give electrons identity; you're still thinking classically. The rough analogy of QM would be that the state of electrons being in your closet battery and being in your kitchen battery are in fact the one and the same indistinguishable state. The cat is not alive or dead, it is in the superposed state of both.
So electrons don't have locations, not even inside of electron clouds? Is the electron in his closet also in his kitchen, and vice versa?
They don't have locations, they have location-momentum, so to speak. Some kind of duality holds regardless of what interpretation you attach to it, otherwise you could not achieve the double-slit experiment.
So they have a location-momentum, then. Do all electrons have the same location momentum?
Mmm. This is a little difficult to answer. I'll let someone else do it:
If amplitudes were just probabilities, they couldn't cancel out when flows collided. If configurations were just states of knowledge, you could reorganize them however you liked.
But the configurations are nailed in place, indivisible and unmergeable without changing the laws of physics.
And part of what is nailed, is the way that configurations treat multiple particles. A configuration says, "A photon here, a photon there", not "This photon here, that photon there". "This photon here, that photon there" does not have a different identity from "That photon here, this photon there."
The result—we'll talk more about this in future posts, but it's visible already in today's experiment—is that you can't factorize the physics of our universe to be about particles with individual identities.
Part of the reason why humans have trouble coming to grips with perfectly normal quantum physics, is that humans bizarrely keep trying to factor reality into a sum of individually real billiard balls.
It should be emphasised, first of all, that quantal particles are indistinguishable in a much stronger sense than classical particles. It is not just that two or more electrons, say, possess all intrinsic properties in common but that — on the standard understanding — no measurement whatsoever could in principle determine which one is which. If the non-intrinsic, state-dependent properties are identified with all the monadic or relational properties which can be expressed in terms of physical magnitudes associated with self-adjoint operators that can be defined for the particles, then it can be shown that two bosons or two fermions in a joint symmetric or anti-symmetric state respectively have the same monadic properties and the same relational properties one to another (French and Redhead 1988; see also Butterfield 1993). This has immediate implications for Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles which, expressed crudely, insists that two things which are indiscernible, must be, in fact, identical.
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.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
It's a silly question. Philosophy is not about discovering new particles, it's about the nature of science.
Yes. So: what has knowing more about the nature of science, contributed to advances in science (acknowledging that this is not its main purpose - just the purpose a lot of people care about)? Popper made its mark on how scientists think about themselves but nothing else has.
It's explicitly not it's purpose. Science advances science. No philosopher would consider themselves a Popperian falsficationist, with good reason, nowadays but that doesn't mean we advanced physics. It's not the point, let the scientists do the science.
Economics has done nothing to advance physics either, does that make it useless?
Irrelevant of whether that is its conscious purpose, I am asking you to suggest whether it has contributed anything - non-purposefully, perhaps. Certainly there seems to be a common desire to lay claim to some of the accomplishments of the hard sciences, e.g.:
And if philosophy serves to enhance thought, then it has done a great deal for science. (Duh.)
This matters because amongst philosophers of science Popper is (as you correctly say) widely disrespected, whilst amongst scientists Popper is widely held as a gold standard, and this has been the case for decades, and the divergence has always been a conflict in the making. Of which the "Team Philosophy" vs "Team Physics" attitude a la the OP was inevitable.
Ah ok I think I misunderstood your intention.
I think it's rather hard to really draw a line between a philosophical idea and an advancement of science because to me the advances in philosophy have always seemed rather general and societal. Changing attitudes towards science and such. A reading of history shows us that scientific advances are rarely considered immediately a good thing for example, the battle of relevance is not fought in laboratories but in the public, political sphere.
Okay, having skimmed the six pages of this thread and a bit about the Krauss dust-up. This remark seems relevant:
First, I think that Lawrence’s book makes a lot more sense when viewed as part of the ongoing atheism vs. theism popular debate, rather than as a careful philosophical investigation into a longstanding problem. Note that the afterword was written by Richard Dawkins, and Lawrence had originally asked Christopher Hitchens, before he became too ill — both of whom, while very smart people, are neither cosmologists nor philosophers. If your real goal is to refute claims that a Creator is a necessary (or even useful) part of a complete cosmological scheme, then the above points about “creation from nothing” are really quite on point. And that point is that the physical universe can perfectly well be self-contained; it doesn’t need anything or anyone from outside to get it started, even if it had a “beginning.” That doesn’t come close to addressing Leibniz’s classic question, but there’s little doubt that it’s a remarkable feature of modern physics with interesting implications for fundamental cosmology.
Casually speaking, there's a loose 'philosophy of science' that people do seem to adhere to, in a vague revealed-preference sort of way, that may not be philosophically rigorous but constitutes a plausible explanation for observed behavior nonetheless. Even for people whose profession it is to consider the place of scientific knowledge in wider epistemology, they might deny the possibility of certain knowledge of the external world, but they probably still want certain institutions and certain types of people to have designed and built the airplane they're boarding.
Call that the 'applied' philosophy of science, perhaps. Its standards are not very rigorous, but rigorous philosophy of science is difficult and technical and Feyerabend makes my head hurt so we work with a simpler stripped-down version In Real Life, and it really is an evolving standard that keeps up (somewhat) with advances in scientific knowledge, and it does possess massive importance insofar as we want justify who we should legitimately defer to in politically charged issues. Climate change, evolution, you know.
Then there's the actual philosophy of science, where we poke at scientists in the way a political philosopher regards politicians. It's a different world. Here Popper is widely disrespected instead, for starters. But what's wrong with compartmentalization? Everyone does it.
There's a tension in that there are now organized forces trying to formally advocate change in the former (c.f. Dawkins et al) instead of letting it bump along gently and they're not really talking to philosophers and get rather annoyed when the latter do what must seem like irrelevant nitpicking.
Now scientists have generally enjoyed a certain amount of deference from philosophers of science when it comes to their pet philosophical standards of verification. It's not actually plausible that falsification is a rigorous test but it is a test that scientists are willing to uphold nonetheless and philosophers are prepared to remain largely silent about - see, for example, the OPERA neutrinos. Philosophers did not rebuke physicists in the popular press for engaging in utterly non-rigorous standards of Truth when physicists said that we could confirm or deny the FTL phenomena via additional experiments, reproduction, etc.
The Krauss (and Dawkins etc.) issues with philosophers has arisen because hard scientists want to expand their territory onto fields traditionally associated with philosophy - theology, in particular - and they expect the same level of deference and they're not getting it, unsurprisingly. This is not about the higher nature of Truth and Knowledge, this is politics - a group of hard scientists want to claim authority from assorted religious and conservative groups, and modern philosophers - who have never been respected amongst the latter at all - are now defending them and the former find this absolutely infuriating.
I think the issue is that the philosophers who are critiquing Krauss and others don't see themselves as defending anyone. Indeed, most of the responses I've read don't actually seem to disagree that God isn't needed. When asked they'll provide you with a list of philosophical objections to God and gods and whatnot.
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.
Well said, sir.
Well, one correct definition of "function" would require a designer. An electron does not in fact fulfill that requirement. The definition I assume you are using is also correct, and does apply to an electron.
Given the different interpretations possible depending on the definition of the word "function" and the fact that you, _j_, did not make it clear which one you were using when first invoking it, it seems goosey to call the people you confused, due to your own sloppiness, as sloppy.
The second quantization procedure relies crucially on the particles being identical. We would not have been able to construct a quantum field theory from a distinguishable many-particle system, because there would have been no way of separating and indexing the degrees of freedom.
Many physicists prefer to take the converse interpretation, which is that quantum field theory explains what identical particles are. In ordinary quantum mechanics, there is not much theoretical motivation for using symmetric (bosonic) or antisymmetric (fermionic) states, and the need for such states is simply regarded as an empirical fact. From the point of view of quantum field theory, particles are identical if and only if they are excitations of the same underlying quantum field. Thus, the question "why are all electrons identical?" arises from mistakenly regarding individual electrons as fundamental objects, when in fact it is only the electron field that is fundamental.
Yudkowsky takes a somewhat harder line of "what that exists, is the entanglement" but neither are hospitable to particle identity.
I'll just reiterate that, while Yudkowsky is correct in his presentation of the idea, he editorializes quite a bit. His characterization of the many worlds interpretation as The One True Reality is...not actually justifiable.
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.
unfortunately you cannot rely on this to give electrons identity; you're still thinking classically. The rough analogy of QM would be that the state of electrons being in your closet battery and being in your kitchen battery are in fact the one and the same indistinguishable state. The cat is not alive or dead, it is in the superposed state of both.
So electrons don't have locations, not even inside of electron clouds? Is the electron in his closet also in his kitchen, and vice versa?
They don't have locations, they have location-momentum, so to speak. Some kind of duality holds regardless of what interpretation you attach to it, otherwise you could not achieve the double-slit experiment.
So they have a location-momentum, then. Do all electrons have the same location momentum?
There's a difference between an electron having a location-momentum, and an electron being describable by a function which gives you the ability to accurately predict its location-momentum.
You can solve for the expected interference pattern in a double-slit experiment by appealing to the wavefunction description. You can also appeal to the path-integral description, where the electron literally traverses every path in the space of all possible paths to reach the screen, to reproduce the same interference pattern.
The point is, for electrons to have different location-momentum, they have to have a location-momentum in the first place. And a location-momentum is not something you can "know" unless you actually measure the electron--it is literally unspecifiable until measurement.
But if you can't even, in principle, know with 100% certainty that you've measured the "same" electron twice (although you can get "functionally close" to 100%, but never exactly 100%), it doesn't really matter that different electrons could have different location-momenta.
So, to precisely answer your question, you can perform measurements that yield different position-momenta of what you think are different electrons, but you can never be 100% certain you measured different electrons.
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?
I think the issue is that the philosophers who are critiquing Krauss and others don't see themselves as defending anyone. Indeed, most of the responses I've read don't actually seem to disagree that God isn't needed. When asked they'll provide you with a list of philosophical objections to God and gods and whatnot.
Which is nonetheless about as welcome as a guy turning up at evolution debates to talk about Dawkins vs. Gould on the vehicles of selection. One might be making fundamental and deep points but still be a useful idiot for malevolent parties who are much more interested in saying that Evolution Is Not A Scientific Consensus, and it doesn't really matter how earnestly you sputter that you're as diehard a believer in evolution after the fact, you were still a useful idiot.
e: and, in fact, Gould did infamously contribute toward this problem by being careless in his rhetoric, e.g. "The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers no support for gradual change. All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt." has haunted the debate since 1977. It was not his fault. He had, I think, no moral obligation to be circumspect. Nonetheless, portraying punctuated equilibrium as overturning all of evolution was massively convenient for people who just wanted to overturn all of evolution.
Well, one correct definition of "function" would require a designer.
Nope. "Purpose" requires a purposer. "Designed" requires a designer. "Intended" requires an intender.
"Function" simply indicates that the thing does something, has a habit of action. We can speak of the function of a liver simply by observing what a liver does.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: Alternatively: There's already a perfectly good framework for discussing it: Quantum Field Theory. Translating advanced mathematics into words is still difficult without already grasping the advanced mathematics.
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.
Blame a century plus of classical physics. And, well, we do live in a world where classical physics seems to mostly true, albeit not fundamentally true.
Posts
the probability field is simply a location defined by a region, rather than by a point; the fact that we can refer to "an electron" means it has a location, fuzzy or otherwise.
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.
I'm pretty sure _J_ is talking about function in the sense of "what does it do?". And unless you're saying that electrons don't actually do anything it strikes me that "Electrons don't have a "function"" is actually some empty sophistry.
All electrons behave exactly the same way. But that does not mean that they're all actually the same thing.
Yup. The electrons in the battery in my closet are in different locations than the electrons in the battery in my kitchen.
Or, if you like, the electrons in the probability clouds in my batteries.
Yup. Just like Nintendo 3DSsses.
Irrelevant of whether that is its conscious purpose, I am asking you to suggest whether it has contributed anything - non-purposefully, perhaps. Certainly there seems to be a common desire to lay claim to some of the accomplishments of the hard sciences, e.g.:
This matters because amongst philosophers of science Popper is (as you correctly say) widely disrespected, whilst amongst scientists Popper is widely held as a gold standard, and this has been the case for decades, and the divergence has always been a conflict in the making. Of which the "Team Philosophy" vs "Team Physics" attitude a la the OP was inevitable.
Earlier:
Now scientists have generally enjoyed a certain amount of deference from philosophers of science when it comes to their pet philosophical standards of verification. It's not actually plausible that falsification is a rigorous test but it is a test that scientists are willing to uphold nonetheless and philosophers are prepared to remain largely silent about - see, for example, the OPERA neutrinos. Philosophers did not rebuke physicists in the popular press for engaging in utterly non-rigorous standards of Truth when physicists said that we could confirm or deny the FTL phenomena via additional experiments, reproduction, etc.
The Krauss (and Dawkins etc.) issues with philosophers has arisen because hard scientists want to expand their territory onto fields traditionally associated with philosophy - theology, in particular - and they expect the same level of deference and they're not getting it, unsurprisingly. This is not about the higher nature of Truth and Knowledge, this is politics - a group of hard scientists want to claim authority from assorted religious and conservative groups, and modern philosophers - who have never been respected amongst the latter at all - are now defending them and the former find this absolutely infuriating.
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.
How can you be sure? If the region is enlarged to your entire house, how can you definitively state whether the electrons in one room are different than those in another? Or what if you shrunk the scale to a single fork - how can you be sure that the electrons on one tine are different from another?
At that point you're not arguing about where an electron's located, but the definition of "location."
unfortunately you cannot rely on this to give electrons identity; you're still thinking classically. The rough analogy of QM would be that the state of electrons being in your closet battery and being in your kitchen battery are in fact the one and the same indistinguishable state. The cat is not alive or dead, it is in the superposed state of both.
I don't believe you can just "enlarge the region" and render the distinction between electrons ambiguous; otherwise it would sort of mess with the periodic table and other important things.
We can distinguish between electrons.
i believe schrodinger's cat is a reductio to show that, since a cat is never both alive and dead, schrodinger thought the notion of superposed states was a matter of incomplete information?
Schrödinger intended it that way, yes. It turns out that answering it in a way that is consistent with existing superposition phenomena is difficult. Bell's Theorem makes incomplete information rather hard to sustain.
So electrons don't have locations, not even inside of electron clouds? Is the electron in his closet also in his kitchen, and vice versa?
"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
it is only meaningful to speak of the likelihood of it being places, rather than a formal location per se
that doesnt mean that you cant say "location is the area in which you have a 99.9% chance of finding the damn thing"
Yudkowsky takes a somewhat harder line of "what that exists, is the entanglement" but neither are hospitable to particle identity.
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.
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.
"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 have locations, they have location-momentum, so to speak. Some kind of duality holds regardless of what interpretation you attach to it, otherwise you could not achieve the double-slit experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
So they have a location-momentum, then. Do all electrons have the same location momentum?
"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
Have you had a chance to read 'The Open Mind' by J. Robert Oppenheimer? Published in 1955, it is a collection of lectures Oppenheimer gave about physics and the relation of physics to society / culture. Of note is his lecture from November 25, 1947, entitled 'Physics in the Contemporary World'.
This is the paragraph in which he shifts from the neat things physics can find, to the concern over the neat things physics found, and how they were used.
Question: How many physics students do you think are required to read that passage? And, don't worry, it gets better.
Ok, yeah, Oppenheimer was sad because his creation was used to kill hundreds of thousands of people by means of two bombs. But what does this have to do with the relation between physics and philosophy?
"Science almost never makes fit philosophers."
But what did Oppenheimer think of philosophers? Surely he dismissed them as numbskulls whose work had little or not value, right? He wouldn't praise philosophers, would he?
Let's read the final paragraph of his lecture together, shall we?
Yup.
One more block quote from his December 26, 1954 lecture entitled 'Prospects in the Arts and Sciences', included simply because I find it astonishing that a physicist of Oppenheimer's quality and accomplishment would have written it:
Let us say that the attitude of science has changed over time and leave it at that.
But to snark, if science does not make good popular moral philosophy, frankly neither does philosophy.
Surely the electron cloud studied in a lab is located in the lab in which it is studied.
Surely the particles accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider are in the Large Hadron Collider.
Surely the electrons in this battery are in this battery.
Is your contention that physicists routinely study particles that are not, in fact, there?
Well said, sir.
Mmm. This is a little difficult to answer. I'll let someone else do it:
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.
I think it's rather hard to really draw a line between a philosophical idea and an advancement of science because to me the advances in philosophy have always seemed rather general and societal. Changing attitudes towards science and such. A reading of history shows us that scientific advances are rarely considered immediately a good thing for example, the battle of relevance is not fought in laboratories but in the public, political sphere.
I think the issue is that the philosophers who are critiquing Krauss and others don't see themselves as defending anyone. Indeed, most of the responses I've read don't actually seem to disagree that God isn't needed. When asked they'll provide you with a list of philosophical objections to God and gods and whatnot.
Well, one correct definition of "function" would require a designer. An electron does not in fact fulfill that requirement. The definition I assume you are using is also correct, and does apply to an electron.
Given the different interpretations possible depending on the definition of the word "function" and the fact that you, _j_, did not make it clear which one you were using when first invoking it, it seems goosey to call the people you confused, due to your own sloppiness, as sloppy.
I'll just reiterate that, while Yudkowsky is correct in his presentation of the idea, he editorializes quite a bit. His characterization of the many worlds interpretation as The One True Reality is...not actually justifiable.
But that's neither here nor there.
There's a difference between an electron having a location-momentum, and an electron being describable by a function which gives you the ability to accurately predict its location-momentum.
You can solve for the expected interference pattern in a double-slit experiment by appealing to the wavefunction description. You can also appeal to the path-integral description, where the electron literally traverses every path in the space of all possible paths to reach the screen, to reproduce the same interference pattern.
The point is, for electrons to have different location-momentum, they have to have a location-momentum in the first place. And a location-momentum is not something you can "know" unless you actually measure the electron--it is literally unspecifiable until measurement.
But if you can't even, in principle, know with 100% certainty that you've measured the "same" electron twice (although you can get "functionally close" to 100%, but never exactly 100%), it doesn't really matter that different electrons could have different location-momenta.
So, to precisely answer your question, you can perform measurements that yield different position-momenta of what you think are different electrons, but you can never be 100% certain you measured different electrons.
if not, what does it mean to say "electrons"? what does it mean to distinguish different atoms with different numbers of electrons?
Which is nonetheless about as welcome as a guy turning up at evolution debates to talk about Dawkins vs. Gould on the vehicles of selection. One might be making fundamental and deep points but still be a useful idiot for malevolent parties who are much more interested in saying that Evolution Is Not A Scientific Consensus, and it doesn't really matter how earnestly you sputter that you're as diehard a believer in evolution after the fact, you were still a useful idiot.
e: and, in fact, Gould did infamously contribute toward this problem by being careless in his rhetoric, e.g. "The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers no support for gradual change. All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt." has haunted the debate since 1977. It was not his fault. He had, I think, no moral obligation to be circumspect. Nonetheless, portraying punctuated equilibrium as overturning all of evolution was massively convenient for people who just wanted to overturn all of evolution.
Nope. "Purpose" requires a purposer. "Designed" requires a designer. "Intended" requires an intender.
"Function" simply indicates that the thing does something, has a habit of action. We can speak of the function of a liver simply by observing what a liver does.
Don't try to out pedant me.
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.
Edit: Alternatively: There's already a perfectly good framework for discussing it: Quantum Field Theory. Translating advanced mathematics into words is still difficult without already grasping the advanced mathematics.
Blame a century plus of classical physics. And, well, we do live in a world where classical physics seems to mostly true, albeit not fundamentally true.