The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics

[BaalChatzaf]

Given that you've listened to the lectures Ted and that what you're saying fits in with the modus operandi of most Objectivists I assume you're correct.

If Objectivist physicists want to make themselves useful and to demonstrate how great their philosophy is, then they should take up some of the thorny problems in physics and provide solutions. They shouldn't try to tell people how to think when they themselves haven't demonstrated a particular aptitude for creating thinking. I think Harriman's book is only intended or useful for the already convinced.

How many Objectivist physicists do you suppose there are. I only know of two. There are probably some more, but they are not a large percentage of the population of working physicists.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Ellen Stuttle]

Shevirat ha-Kelim (Breaking of the Vessels)

According to Luria, the ten vessels that were originally meant to contain the emanation of God's light were unable to contain that light and were hence either displaced or shattered. [....]

Not much of an engineer, God the Almighty. My father, who was an orthopedic surgeon, used to say that the human backbone was the ultimate disproof of God -- as a supposedly omnipotent being -- since any freshman engineering student ought to be able to come up with a better design. Bungling the whole of creation by using defective vessels I'd say classifies as an even bigger demonstration of ineptness.

Ellen

[sjw]

How many Objectivist physicists do you suppose there are. I only know of two. There are probably some more, but they are not a large percentage of the population of working physicists.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Not sure how we'd know, but ARI seems more interested in creating philosophers than in people who actually do something, which is ironic given that the philosophers aren't themselves allowed to philosophize. You'd think if you had a stunningly true philosophy that you'd want to push for applications just on marketing grounds, for if the masses see how practical something is at producing results they would be falling over themselves for it. Perhaps they are just not that confident in their philosophy, and thus they think it's better to fill the ivory tower with people who merely repeat what Rand already said rather than showing in action what brilliant results flow from it.

Shayne

[Ellen Stuttle]

How many Objectivist physicists do you suppose there are. I only know of two. There are probably some more, but they are not a large percentage of the population of working physicists.

I was wondering about that also. Which two do you mean? Travis Norsen and Lew Little? Or...? (Do you classify Harriman as properly a "physicist"?) There's also Robert Hartford. I don't know if he calls himself an "Objectivist," or just "Objectivism-influenced" (like my husband). Same question with Paul Drake. And with a guy on whose name I'm drawing a blank who used to post sometimes on the old SOLOHQ list. Jeff Perren has a physics background, IIRC, but I think isn't a working physicist. I can't off-hand recall any other names.

Ellen

[sjw]

Would you be willing to describe the theory (if not on-list than off-list) just in case it might provide a productive lead even though wrong? Wrong theories can turn out to be useful as suggesters of better ones.

Ellen

Maybe off-list in a month or so. Yes, the bad theory seems to highlight an important aspect of the problem.

Shayne

[Xray]

xray <edited out unnecessary epithets>

As I already said, my theory is at present blown out of the water, courtesy of a *rational* physicist.

So we can conclude that this physicist was able to falsify your theory and you were unable to refute it. For if you had been been able to refute it, you would have done so.

I'm impressed that you have made this clear statement about your own theory not standing up to scrutiny. This does take courage and imo shows that you do have an explorative mind capable of freeing itself from the shackles of ideology.

At present I, like everyone else including you and DF, have no rational answer for this class of experiments, which distinctly *indicate* that something unexplainable is going on. They indicate spooky action at a distance. I don't accept that that is what is really happening, because that is a completely incoherent description, but all I can say is that by all I know up to this point, which, importantly, isn't everything, it is *as if* spooky action at a distance is real.

You don't accept it because you can't imagine how this would function - action at a distance?

Stone age man probably thought of lightning as spooky too - so maybe it will take millions of years before the descendants of the current homo sapiens sapiens will find out the explanation, and that explanation would probably not be rationally understandable to us current ancestors because our brain is at a stage of Evolution far behind the brain they will have.

Or we may never find out the "why" of it.

Imo the wrinkle in your argumentation is that you reject interpretations of findings in QM because they don't fit your personal idea of "rationality".

Eventually someone will try and succeed, and then you irrationalists will go find some other area where we are not omniscient to gloat about. While we keep pushing mankind forward, you losers just sit and gloat whenever or wherever we happen to fail, all while living off the benefit of such trying. Such is your nature.

I have no idea who you mean by "we", but here's from someone whom by your own premises, you would have to call a "loser": the world-famous physcist Richard Feynman. He devotes some thoughts to that "we" group of yours:

Here are Feynman's words transcribed from your own link to the YouTube interview:

Richard Feynman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeBkMzSLA8w

"There is still a school of thought that cannot believe that the atomic behavior is so much different than large-scale behavior. I think that's a deep prejudice; and it's a prejudice from being so used to large-scale behavior.

And they are always seeking - to find, and waiting (?)[i could not acoustically make out Feynman's exact words, so please correct me] for the day that we we discover that underneath the quantum mechanic, there's some mundane ordinary balls hitting, or particles moving us on.

I thing they're gonna be defeated: I think nature's imagnation is so much greater than man's - she's never gonna let us relax."

So there seems to be a tendency among ideologists to call "philosphically false" certain physical findings or theories and to claim that the physicists who work in that field have a "corrupt philosophy" ...

I don't dispute the apparent findings. Physicists like Bell are certainly not corrupt, he didn't like the findings either and wanted to find a way out of them, a way to reconcile them with reason. Bohr on the other hand was corrupt.

Shayne

Bohr was corrupt? What do you accuse him of?

Edited August 26, 2010 by Xray

[sjw]

xray I fully agree with Feynman. It *is* a deep prejudice to think that there isn't something radically new going on at the quantum scales. But that is far different from saying that we'll never be able to comprehend this radically new thing -- that is your position, not Feynman's. But I suppose my position cannot really be explained to you, for I require that explanations make sense, and you apparently have no concept of what "makes sense" means. So no explanation I give for why I think explanations must make sense will make sense to you.

[kiaer.ts]

xray <edited out unnecessary epithets>

As I already said, my theory is at present blown out of the water, courtesy of a *rational* physicist.

So we can conclude that this physicist was able to falsify your theory and you were unable to refute it. For if you had been been able to refute it, you would have done so.

I'm impressed that you have made this clear statement about your own theory not standing up to scrutiny. This does take courage and imo shows that you do have an explorative mind capable of freeing itself from the shackles of ideology.

At present I, like everyone else including you and DF, have no rational answer for this class of experiments, which distinctly *indicate* that something unexplainable is going on. They indicate spooky action at a distance. I don't accept that that is what is really happening, because that is a completely incoherent description, but all I can say is that by all I know up to this point, which, importantly, isn't everything, it is *as if* spooky action at a distance is real.

You don't accept it because you can't imagine how this would function - action at a distance?

Stone age man probably thought of lightning as spooky too - so maybe it will take millions of years before the descendants of the current homo sapiens sapiens will find out the explanation, and that explanation would probably not be rationally understandable to us current ancestors because our brain is at a stage of Evolution far behind the brain they will have.

Or we may never find out the "why" of it.

Imo the wrinkle in your argumentation is that you reject interpretations of findings in QM because they don't fit your personal idea of "rationality".

Eventually someone will try and succeed, and then you irrationalists will go find some other area where we are not omniscient to gloat about. While we keep pushing mankind forward, you losers just sit and gloat whenever or wherever we happen to fail, all while living off the benefit of such trying. Such is your nature.

I have no idea who you mean by "we", but here's from someone whom by your own premises, you would have to call a "loser": the world-famous physcist Richard Feynman. He devotes some thoughts to that "we" group of yours:

Here are Feynman's words transcribed from your own link to the YouTube interview:

Richard Feynman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeBkMzSLA8w

"There is still a school of thought that cannot believe that the atomic behavior is so much different than large-scale behavior. I think that's a deep prejudice; and it's a prejudice from being so used to large-scale behavior.

And they are always seeking - to find, and waiting (?)[i could not acoustically make out Feynman's exact words, so please correct me] for the day that we we discover that underneath the quantum mechanic, there's some mundane ordinary balls hitting, or particles moving us on.

I thing they're gonna be defeated: I think nature's imagnation is so much greater than man's - she's never gonna let us relax."

So there seems to be a tendency among ideologists to call "philosphically false" certain physical findings or theories and to claim that the physicists who work in that field have a "corrupt philosophy" ...

I don't dispute the apparent findings. Physicists like Bell are certainly not corrupt, he didn't like the findings either and wanted to find a way out of them, a way to reconcile them with reason. Bohr on the other hand was corrupt.

Shayne

Bohr was corrupt? What do you accuse him of?

Looks like that Feynman chap agrees with me:

If one considers, say, a billiard ball as representing a particle, and then tries to imagine a quantum-scale particle as if it were a billiard ball, one is smuggling in all sorts of attributes of billiard balls, such as their having tensile strength, discreet smooth surfaces, the ability to be broken into pieces, their ability to have their position and momentum measured accurately without significant distortion of the results caused by that very measurement, and so forth. But that is quite invalid. We cannot attribute these macro-level attributes to entities at that scale. The same applies for waves. The necessary realization is that the attributes of particle-like and wave-like behavior are radically scale dependent. It amounts to the same sort of mistake to call atoms particles in the macro-sense as it would be to say that atoms have solidity or color in the macro-sense. Any attempt to say that wave/particle duality on the subatomic level is a contradiction is based frozen concepts of wave and particle formed at the macro-scale and then improperly imported into a micro-scale context.

Things on that level simply are what they are.

He must be pretty smart.

[Dragonfly]

The point has nothing to do with whether physicists who make nonsensical metaphysical claims are a "very small minority."

Yes, it is, if you attack physicists in general for weird statements that are only made by a very small minority that is certainly not representative.

We do not ascertain the truth by counting heads. The point is that an expertise in physics is no guarantee that a physicist will reach justified philosophical conclusions. I don't need to consult the majority of physicists in order to identify flawed philosophical reasoning.

You don't have to consult the majority of physicists, but you have to know the subject before you can talk about "flawed philosophical reasoning". You may perhaps know a lot about philosophy and its history, but you're a layman in the field of scientific philosophy.

No, fundamental physical research does have implications for what is commonly considered to be the domain of philosophy.

I never denied this. But if most physicists claim, say, that QM proves metaphysical indeterminism (a claim that other physicists have denied), I am not required to click my heels together, salute, and say, "Sir, yes, Sir!"

Nobody asks you to click your heels, but you should for example first try to find out what exactly is meant by indeterminism in QM, before you start to deny it.

I am not claiming that philosophers anticipated Einstein. But a case can be made that the mistake of many philosophers was their uncritical acceptance of the philosophical conclusions (or assumptions, in some cases) of Newtonian science. We might learn from this lesson.

The lesson we might learn is that it was science that discovered that Newtonian science was flawed. Again, nobody asks that the layman accepts blindly the conclusions of the science of his time, but neither should he pretend to know better or claim that those conclusions are wrong if he doesn't know the field. He may be skeptical, but he should defer his judgment as he doesn't have the required expertise. To give an example: I'm skeptical of the global warming theories that are now so popular, in particular as the political pressure behind those theories and the manipulation of opinion in the media in this matter is so obvious. But that doesn't mean that I'd state that those theories are wrong, as I just don't have the expertise to judge the merits of different climate theories. After all there is enough evidence that the scientists are far from being as unanimous as sometimes is suggested. Therefore my opinion is that I can attack the false propaganda, but not the theories themselves, as I just can't judge them without studying them thoroughly in detail. Cobblers should stick to their lasts.

[Dragonfly]

Nuclear physics, atomic physics, solid state physics, chemistry, they all started to flourish thanks to QM and the Copenhagen interpretation. The computer on which you're working wouldn't exist without the work of those QM theorists, neither would lasers, CD's, DVD's, microelectronics, MRI, NMR, electron microscopes. QM gave the solution to the riddle of superconductivity and superfluidity. [....]

What are you taking "the Copenhagen interpretation" to mean? Aren't there a number of interpretations loosely lumped as "Copenhagen"? Do you simply mean indeterminist? If so, is it your claim that a specifically indeterminist interpretation is required for all those practical results of QM theory? Or do you mean something narrower, for instance, that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is required?

My use of the term Copenhagen interpretation was in fact in reaction to that stupid statement by sjw "Particularly given the rather stunning halt to progress in theoretical physics after the Copenhagen interpretation came on the scene." In general it stands for the "classical" view of QM, and I think that its distinguishing characteristic is the notion of the non-unitary collapse of the wavefunction when a measurement is made. At the time this was a more or less pragmatical solution, as it wasn't clear how the transition from the microscopic quantummechanical domain to the macroscopic classical domain worked. So there were macroscopic measuring instruments and microscopic quantum systems. For practical applications this worked fine, as the enormous successes of the theory have shown. But theoretically it was unsatisfying as it was not clear how the QM description could apply to macroscopic systems, which was also the reason for the famous problem of Schrödinger's cat. Today that problem has been solved, as we now understand the mechanism of decoherence which can explain the classical behavior of macroscopic systems, but that has been a relatively recent development.

[BaalChatzaf]

How many Objectivist physicists do you suppose there are. I only know of two. There are probably some more, but they are not a large percentage of the population of working physicists.

I was wondering about that also. Which two do you mean? Travis Norsen and Lew Little? Or...? (Do you classify Harriman as properly a "physicist"?)

Little and Norsen. And Little has damaged any reputation he might have had by persisting with his totally busted Theory of Elementary Waves. Another physicist, Tom Radcliffe who used to post on HPO many years ago did a thorough job of refuting LittleI's TEW as did Norsen too.

Most active working physicists stay far away from philosophy (it is only when they are passed their working prime that they seem to indulge in philosophy). If you have to put a philosophic label on physicists some would be classified as realists, some as empiricists, some as Platonist (this is more likely to apply to mathematicians than physicists) and some as neo-Kantian or phenominalist. Very few physicists would identify themselves as Objectivists. My favorite living Old Guy Physicists, Avner Shimony, classifies himself as a naturalist. (Avner and I sat together at a graduate class on General Theory of Relativity and had many fine conversations). Avner is the godfather of the experimental checks on Bell's Theorem. He is exceptional in that he has a PhD in both theoretical physics and philosophy.

If you read Feynman's famous three volume set edited by Sands you will catch some rather tart remarks by Feynman aimed at the philosophers.

The best put down of philosophers I have seen was from K. F. Gauss (one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived on this planet) who said of the metaphysicians -- when they are correct they are never original and when they are original they are never correct.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited August 26, 2010 by BaalChatzaf

[sjw]

Cobblers should stick to their lasts.

That's why you and those like you have zero credibility. You don't know what you're doing (we can tell) and the last thing you want is a kind of physics that makes sense. You're part of a little priesthood of experts where no layman shall tread.

The emperor has no clothes. LOL.

Edit: Think of the meaning of his condescension. Most physicists are bought and paid for by government. That's a gun to the cobbler's head asking him to fund what the physicist does. The physicist would starve if not for the theft. And yet he has the gall to tell the cobbler to "stick to his last" when the cobbler begins to wonder what all of his hard-earned money has been used for.

Just completely hilarious. DF you are the anti-Feynmann.

Shayne

Edited August 26, 2010 by sjw

[BaalChatzaf]

Cobblers should stick to their lasts.

That's why you and those like you have zero credibility. You don't know what you're doing (we can tell) and the last thing you want is a kind of physics that makes sense. You're part of a little priesthood of experts where no layman shall tread.

The emperor has no clothes. LOL.

Shayne

The emperor is sufficiently well dressed to create the physics which has produced the engineering which has produced the computer on which you spew your nonsense.

As long as useful gadgets come pouring out the far end of the pipeline primed by the physicists, I will feel good will toward the physicists. The output of useful technology is the other empirical test of physical theories. The first test is, of course, experimental verification of the predictions.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[sjw]

Cobblers should stick to their lasts.

That's why you and those like you have zero credibility. You don't know what you're doing (we can tell) and the last thing you want is a kind of physics that makes sense. You're part of a little priesthood of experts where no layman shall tread.

The emperor has no clothes. LOL.

Shayne

The emperor is sufficiently well dressed to create the physics which has produced the engineering which has produced the computer on which you spew your nonsense.

As long as useful gadgets come pouring out the far end of the pipeline primed by the physicists, I will feel good will toward the physicists. The output of useful technology is the other empirical test of physical theories. The first test is, of course, experimental verification of the predictions.

Ba'al Chatzaf

More lies. I'm an engineer, I know what you are up to, and that would be nothing good of late. You're just pissing away money.

Shayne

[sjw]

I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here, but the fact is, that in our social system, the modern academic survives by thievery. So it is a natural and healthy thing for a reasonable man to distrust or suspect them as a group, particularly the further and more abstract their work is from something that makes sense.

In a healthy society, it would be their duty to generate results that would convince someone to keep paying them. But since they have no such duty now, they 1) don't care to produce research that is meaningful makes sense; 2) don't care to express their research in sensible terms. This is why as a group they should be viewed with suspicion, even though there are going to be individual exceptions, such as Feynman, who by the way did not have DF's contempt for the "cobbler", on the contrary he did his best to express the truth of what was going on, and he did a damn fine job of it.

I suspect that DF and BC are both in favor of government-funded physics.

[Dragonfly]

That's why you and those like you have zero credibility. You don't know what you're doing (we can tell)

Ha ha! Is that a pluralis majestatis? What can you tell? You know nothing!

Edit: Think of the meaning of his condescension.

Who is condescending here? You're continually calling everyone with a different and better-founded opinion "corrupt" and "irrational". You should have a look in the mirror.

Just completely hilarious. DF you are the anti-Feynmann.

First, it is Feynman, not Feynmann. And this is another example of your complete lack of understanding of the matter, as I'm a great admirer of Feynman, as everyone would understand who knows a bit about Feynman's ideas. Oh, perhaps you should read one day what Feynman has written about philosophers and about pompous fools.

[sjw]

First, it is Feynman, not Feynmann. And this is another example of your complete lack of understanding of the matter, as I'm a great admirer of Feynman, as everyone would understand who knows a bit about Feynman's ideas. Oh, perhaps you should read one day what Feynman has written about philosophers and about pompous fools.

Yeah, I'm sure you worship Feynman, just like a Christian worships the Bible, and I'm sure you have your own interpretation of Feynman, just as every religious sect takes their own liberties with it, but unlike you, I'm sure he wasn't contemptuous of the layman, and I'm sure his contempt for philosophers was reserved for your fellow charlatans from the next department over.

Your contempt for the layman and your contempt for rational philosophy go hand in hand -- they are both facets of the same sham. I laugh, but you're the one laughing to the bank, for now, Dr. Stadler (I'm sure you and/or BC must have been called that before by some unusually astute Objectivist.)

Why are you even here? You have absolutely nothing in common with Objectivists.

Shayne

[BaalChatzaf]

Why are you even here? You have absolutely nothing in common with Objectivists.

Shayne

He has as much in common with the big O's as I do. Dragonfly knows his shit (he is a real physicist) and he is also completely logical.

I am just a well informed spectator and I enjoy the game (i.e. physics). My real business is applied mathematics and software engineering (I am know retired).

Ba'al Chatzaf

[George H. Smith]

The point has nothing to do with whether physicists who make nonsensical metaphysical claims are a "very small minority."

Yes, it is, if you attack physicists in general for weird statements that are only made by a very small minority that is certainly not representative.

When have I attacked "physicists in general"?

You seem constitutionally unable to understand the basic point I was making, regardless of how simple and uncontroversial it is and regardless of how many different ways I state it.

Ghs: We do not ascertain the truth by counting heads. The point is that an expertise in physics is no guarantee that a physicist will reach justified philosophical conclusions. I don't need to consult the majority of physicists in order to identify flawed philosophical reasoning.

You don't have to consult the majority of physicists, but you have to know the subject before you can talk about "flawed philosophical reasoning". You may perhaps know a lot about philosophy and its history, but you're a layman in the field of scientific philosophy.

It's called the "philosophy of science," not "scientific philosophy" (there is no such thing), and in this field you are as much of a layman as I am. Nevertheless, I have managed to read many dozens of books on the philosophy of science (many written by physicists and other scientists) over the years. How many have you read?

If you wish to see some of the nutty things that even eminent physicists have said about philosophy, see L. Susan Stebbing, Philosophy and the Physicists. This contains an especially good critique of the metaphysical nonsense espoused by the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington. See also Philipp Frank, Philosophy of Science, The Link Between Science and Philosophy. Frank, Einstein's successor at the German Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague, deals effectively with the supposed metaphysical indeterminism of QM. He also deals with a number of other metaphysical claims about QM, pointing out that QM doesn't have many of the metaphysical implications that are often attributed to it. His understanding of the operational definitions used in physics is the key to much of this.

Frank knew a lot more about physics and the philosophy of science than you ever will, so I prefer to use him as a guide instead of you. Given your reverence for authorities, I trust you will understand.

Ghs

[Ellen Stuttle]

DF, thanks for your reply in post #960 re "the Copenhagen interpretation":

My use of the term Copenhagen interpretation was in fact in reaction to that stupid statement by sjw "Particularly given the rather stunning halt to progress in theoretical physics after the Copenhagen interpretation came on the scene." In general it stands for the "classical" view of QM, and I think that its distinguishing characteristic is the notion of the non-unitary collapse of the wavefunction when a measurement is made. At the time this was a more or less pragmatical solution, as it wasn't clear how the transition from the microscopic quantummechanical domain to the macroscopic classical domain worked. So there were macroscopic measuring instruments and microscopic quantum systems. For practical applications this worked fine, as the enormous successes of the theory have shown. But theoretically it was unsatisfying as it was not clear how the QM description could apply to macroscopic systems, which was also the reason for the famous problem of Schrödinger's cat. Today that problem has been solved, as we now understand the mechanism of decoherence which can explain the classical behavior of macroscopic systems, but that has been a relatively recent development.

A couple further questions.

In post #938, I quoted some material from a book called The Age of Entanglement by Louisa Gilder. Included was the final paragraphs of a paper titled "The Moral Aspect of Quantum Mechanics." This paper, Gilder says, was written by Bell in collaboration with a Stanford professor named Mike Nauenberg, while Bell was still at Stanford in 1964 and after Bell had written his paper on the nonlocality of hidden variables.

Here are some excerpts -- see my post #938 for the full section included by Gilder:

[from a 1964 paper by Bell and Nauenberg]

[...] the usual interpretive axioms of quantum mechanics come into play only when the system interacts with something else, is "observed." For the universe, there is nothing else, and quantum mechanics in its traditional form has simply nothing to say.

[....]

We look forward to a new theory which can refer meaningfully to events in a given system without requiring "observation" by another system. The critical test cases requiring this conclusion are systems containing consciousness and the universe as a whole. [....]

[....] It remains a logical possibility that it is the act of consciousness which is ultimately responsible for the reduction of the wave packet [in other words, "the collapse of the wavefunction" - Gilder's insert]. It is also possible that something like the quantum mechanical state function may continue to play a role, supplemented by variables describing the actual--as distinct from the possible--course of events ("hidden variables") although this approach seems to face severe difficulties in describing separated systems in a sensible way.

[....]

First question: Am I correct in thinking that according to your understanding of current QM theory there's no longer considered to be a need for an "observer" in "collapsing" the wave equation?

Second question: How long is "relatively recent" re "understand[ing] the mechanism of decoherence"?

Ellen

[George H. Smith]

This is a continuation of my last post....

I am not claiming that philosophers anticipated Einstein. But a case can be made that the mistake of many philosophers was their uncritical acceptance of the philosophical conclusions (or assumptions, in some cases) of Newtonian science. We might learn from this lesson.

The lesson we might learn is that it was science that discovered that Newtonian science was flawed. Again, nobody asks that the layman accepts blindly the conclusions of the science of his time, but neither should he pretend to know better or claim that those conclusions are wrong if he doesn't know the field. He may be skeptical, but he should defer his judgment as he doesn't have the required expertise. To give an example: I'm skeptical of the global warming theories that are now so popular, in particular as the political pressure behind those theories and the manipulation of opinion in the media in this matter is so obvious. But that doesn't mean that I'd state that those theories are wrong, as I just don't have the expertise to judge the merits of different climate theories. After all there is enough evidence that the scientists are far from being as unanimous as sometimes is suggested. Therefore my opinion is that I can attack the false propaganda, but not the theories themselves, as I just can't judge them without studying them thoroughly in detail. Cobblers should stick to their lasts.

In Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, Einstein (p. 155) notes that it "is characteristic of Newtonian physics that it has to ascribe independent and real existence to space and time...." He (p. 156) goes on to say: "Time and again since remotest times philosophers have resisted such a presumption." Einstein singles out Descartes for special mention, claiming that "the general theory of relativity confirms Descartes' conception [of space] in a roundabout way." (Augustine's theory of time is another example, one that Philipp Frank discusses.)

In general, I don't have a problem with your account of skepticism. But it holds only in the case of specifically scientific conclusions whose experimental foundation cannot be replicated (for all practical purposes) by laymen. But, for the umpteenth times, scientific expertise counts for nothing -- zero, nada -- when the scientist ventures into philosophy. The physicist is as capable of spewing philosophical nonsense as anyone else, and some have done precisely this.

Ernst Mach, for example, claimed that only sensations are real. There is no reason why this doctrine should be treated any differently because it came from a physicist than if it came from a garden-variety philosopher. A number of early QM theorists were logical positivists, and that approach has been so thoroughly discredited that it rarely comes up any more.

Ghs

[Ellen Stuttle]

Ghs to DF:

Frank knew a lot more about physics and the philosophy of science than you ever will, so I prefer to use him as a guide instead of you. Given your reverence for authorities, I trust you will understand.

Where do you get any sign of "reverence for authorities" from Dragonfly?

Also, are you aware that DF is a physicist and has quite a bit of expertise in the area of QM?

Ellen

[George H. Smith]

Ghs to DF:

Frank knew a lot more about physics and the philosophy of science than you ever will, so I prefer to use him as a guide instead of you. Given your reverence for authorities, I trust you will understand.

Where do you get any sign of "reverence for authorities" from Dragonfly?

Also, are you aware that DF is a physicist and has quite a bit of expertise in the area of QM?

Ellen

Yes, I am aware that DF is a physicist. So what? I am not taking issue with the experimental findings of QM. Rather, I have been stressing the difference between physics and philosophy. DF is something of a dimwit when it comes to this distinction.

As for DF's reverence for scientific authority, have you been reading his posts? I am tired of being lectured to by someone who cannot grasp the most elementary distinction between science and philosophy.

Ghs

[Ellen Stuttle]

Yes, I am aware that DF is a physicist. So what? I am not taking issue with the experimental findings of QM.

Um... I'm not seeing indications that you know what the findings are.

Rather, I have been stressing the difference between physics and philosophy. DF is something of a dimwit when it comes to this distinction.

I think he thinks you're "something of a dimwit" when it comes to understanding the relevance of experimental results for philosophy.

As for DF's reverence for scientific authority, have you been reading his posts?

Since 2004, on NB's weblist of the time.

I am tired of being lectured to by someone who cannot grasp the most elementary distinction between science and philosophy.

I don't see any inability to grasp that, though I do see an influence of logical positivism on DF's views of science and philosophy. He got his degree at the University of Utrecht when -- I think -- Machian influence was strong there. I have some significant disagreements with DF on philosophic issues -- for instance, re the analytic/synthetic "dichotomy" and the "impossibility" of arriving at (conditional) values from facts, and most of all on the necessity of "effective intention" (my term) for the very existence of such an endeavor as science -- but I've never seen signs of his not grasping "the most elementary distinction between science and philosophy" -- instead, of a basic, and often in the history of thought deserved, denigration of philosophy's (for which, read, "metaphysics'") usefulness.

Ellen

[sjw]

Ellen, so far *in this thread*, anything DF has said that was of interest wasn't true, and everything else hasn't been of interest but to reveal his completely unwarranted condescending attitude about philosophy and laymen as such. You of all people shouldn't be letting him get away with a bogus conclusion that all philosophers are clueless because 99/100 are.

If he wanted to be of use here, he could try his hand at explaining, yes, for the layman, why we shouldn't be alarmed by the Aspect (spooky action at a distance) experiments. (Einstein himself was alarmed, Bell was alarmed, and yet DF denigrates a layman for also being alarmed).

Shayne