I know you recanted this earlier, but let’s look at it without judgement.
We have an argument, that an autistic savant can really only seem to excel or find novel approaches in the technicalities of art. Whether or not philosophy is subjective is moot, as all these disciplines have abstract or subjective sides.
It’s been my philosophy (heh), that art and science, or the creative and the technical are really two sides of the same coin. There’s skill, practice, fluency and experience that’s the essence of technique. There’s intuition, idiosyncrasies, ideation, and heightened comprehension that goes along with the artistic / abstract.
If an autistic savant can be show to really only excel in the technicalities of art and abstract science, in even mind-blowing and novel ways, then there could be something to the idea that for the price of such savantism, they’re almost blind to the tapping into the other pool of intuition, abstraction, ideation and the ability to experience and comprehend a vast perspective.
There is plenty of technicalities in the logic of philosophy. So, the argument would say we’d see an equal number of savants found in the logical aspect of philosophy.
Now, are there any examples of autistic savants showing new, original perspectives on any philosophical landscape? But, would this now blind them to building up strong rational arguments, to support their insights?
Yes, my intention is that an inference based on observation is indeed an observation. This is basic quantum mechanics (see: measurement problem), ie decoherence of the wave function due to correlations with the environment. Such correlations with the environment are of course nothing other than that which allow inferences (ie: observation) about physical reality at some prior time t.
Yes.
I am working within the standard framework of quantum mechanics. Observation is some measurement of a physical system, ie a reduction of its wave function to some subset of its eigenvalues. I don’t mean to invoke quantum mechanics in an obfuscatory way – I don’t even think invoking it is necessary – but I figure I should be precise and specific here in the definition in order to reduce later confusion.
Nope. Science is fine. This is a question of philosophy, because there are not necessarily any physical consequences to the moon being “not rock” when unobserved. In fact, in quantum mechanics, one can argue that the moon is a great many things that are “not rock”, that its constituents’ behavior is so loose as to follow every possible trajectory (see: Feynman’s path integral formulation of QM) in between measurements. This gets into the popular question of interpretations of QM, which are philosophical. The point is that we have some algorithm (see: QM) for determining what the moon is whenever it is observed/measured, but there is no clear answer to what it is when not measured. It may be in some superposition, it may be cheese for a while, it may be anything, so long as our algorithm gives accurate predictions for what happens when a measurement is made.
You’ve lost me. Nothing about the measurement problem says anything obvious about whether inferences based on observations are themselves observations or not. You’re going to have to help me out here.
Regarding whether we can do science without assuming that the moon unobserved is still rocky–we have no reason to think that our predictions will continue to work unless we posit some causally stable properties which continue to be in effect both when the moon is observed and when it’s not. (Call these causally stable properties whatever you like.) If there are no such causally stable properties, then there is no basis for making predictions. We can do our math, and marvel when it comes out right, but we’ve got no reason whatsoever to think it will continue to work. Since we have no reason to think it will continue to work, we have no rational motivation to engage in the practice. So–if we want to be rational, I guess–we can’t do it.
It certainly does. The measurement problem is the question of how a quantum superposition is reduced (“collapsed”) so that what we know about a system (ie what is observed or measured), is, instead of a superposition of possibilities, a definite state at some time t. This reduction occurs almost instantaneously for macroscopic systems (ie they are observed to behave classically) because correlations with the environment cause such states to collapse (this is called decoherence). In other words, the correlations with the environment, ie exactly that which allow you to make inferences about the physical state of the system (ie measure it or observe it or pin its state down or “collapse” the state, however you want to call it), are that which collapse the wave function of the system. The measurement problem says pretty much exactly that inferences based on observations are themselves observations. In fact, this should be obvious, given the fact that any observation is ultimately an act of inference. In what sense do you think that an observation is not an act of inference, in what sense is your definition distinct from inference?
There is nothing stopping you from having a theory that says “whenever the state is observed, it is measured to have properties that are consistent with such and such a framework that correctly predicts causally stable properties, but whenever the state is not observed, it is blue cheese.” The reason nothing is stopping you from positing such a theory is that it is non-scientific. As I have repeatedly said, such a proposition is unprovable and philosophical in nature.
I understood very little of what you said, and hope that someone who knows the physics can evaluate it.
But to answer your question, I haven’t implied that observation is not an act of inference. That “inferences from observations are not observations” does not imply that “observations are not inferences.”
In fact I think that observations necessarily involve inference. But observations are a special kind of inference made under particular types of circumstances. Meanwhile, many inferences made from observations are not, themselves, examples o that special kind of inference made under particular types of circumstances. Hence, they are not observations.
I take note of the color of my wall–That’s observation.
I conclude my wife has painted my wall while I was away–that’s an inference from the observation, and it is not an observation. Do you disagree?
There is something stopping me–my ability to reason practically about the world. If I believed the moon was blue cheese when no one was looking, I’d have exactly the same strength of reasons to believe it’s everything else as well. So, if I really did believe this, I’d be forced to conclude the world is fundamentally unpredictable. So I’d stop making predictions. So I’d stop being able to do anything at all–and so eo ipso I’d stop being able to do science.
It’s actually kind of insulting to call it “philosophical”! What must you think of philosophers?!
If you observe the color of your wall at time t1 and at time t2, and the color at the two times is different, then indeed the observation of the color at time t2 is an observation. So yes, I certainly disagree. Between times t1 and t2, the wall is in a superposition of possibilities, and it is only upon your observing the color at time t2 that you “pin down” the state of the wall. I’m sorry if you aren’t a physicist – I don’t mean to insult you – but this is indeed straightforward quantum mechanics, with the proviso that the wall is a macroscopic state and that in reality its decoherence time is very small, so there are certainly times between t1 and t2 that the wall has been “observed by the environment” ie there are traces everywhere in the environment of evidence that might lead one to infer that the color of the wall has changed.
Also, I want to say that I think that your definition of observation and its relation to inference is rather confused. For example when you take note of the color of the wall and call that an observation, that is in fact the result of a very long chain of inference. Photons bounce off the wall, wavelengths are selectively absorbed, and your eye records the distribution of photon frequencies coming from the wall some time later, and you make a judgement about the state of the wall at an earlier time, based on these photons having ricocheed off of it, and your judgement and assumptions about what happened to the photons as they travelled on their journey. It’s really no different from the kind of inference you describe regarding your wife painting the wall while you are away.
Correct. I don’t agree either with the proposition. But that doesn’t make it provably false. People have plenty of philosophical disagreements about things of which there are no strength of reason to believe in (see: religion).
No you wouldn’t. I have gone over this point directly in my preceding comments. This is a philosophical question, not a scientific one, and it in no way has to interfere with the predictability of the physical world.
My definition of ‘philosophical’ is pretty normal here in this context: an opinion on existence, knowledge, reality, etc, that which has no testable physical consequences. Ie if you have two competing physical theories (see Interpretations of QM for numerous mainstream examples) where there are no testable physical consequences to distinguish them, then the difference in your assessment of the competing theories is philosophical in nature. The hypothesis under scrutiny here (that the moon is made of cheese, but only when it is not observed (ie only when there is no possible evidence for it having been made of cheese)) is a philosophical one, without physical consequences whatsoever.
Sorry, I just realized I misunderstood your question. No, the act of inference is not in and of itself necessarily an observation. Could you try explaining again why what I have said is implying that? Evidence for the moon not being made of cheese at some time, say t, in the past, is based on some observation, independent of the act of inference. In fact, evidence for the moon not being made of cheese at all sorts of time in the past is just about everywhere – it is correlated into the environment through zillions of photons bouncing off the moon. Those photons hit other things and are in various ways incorporated into the environment. These incorporations can be called ‘correlations’ because they are effectively an ‘observation’ in that the information is available for an inference to be made. Now, what I have said is simply that in between two time t1 and t2, if there is no such information available, ie no way an inference can be made about the state of the moon between times t1 and t2, then there is no physical evidence whatsoever that the moon is not made of cheese when not observed.
Anyway, under what circumstances could there be no “information available for an inference to be made” about a system? From what you said in your post, it appears to me that any entities within causal distance of each other (within each others’ light cones) are, by virtue of that distance, observing each other. What you’re saying, then, just amounts to the claim that we can’t have any idea what’s going on beyond our light cone. I wouldn’t object to that.
Not sure why you think I disagree–I have very clearly and explicitly stated in my previous post that observations are a type of inference.
Before, in this very post, you acknowledged that they are different. Here you’re saying they’re no different.
The difference is–one (the conclusion about the wife) is an inference based on an observation. The other (the conclusion about the color) is an inference based on things other than observations.
It’s actually kind of insulting to call this “philosophical”! What must you think of philosophers?!
This was just a misunderstanding on my part of what you meant by that phrase, and what it was referring to.
Being in anothers’ light cone does not in and of itself mean that an inference can be made about another system. There has to be information exchange, an interaction between the two systems…
ETA: Again, the definition I described above of the term philosophical can be taken however you like, but it is indeed the standard use of the term in this context.
I have this idea that anything within something’s light cone has some effect on it, however miniscule it might be, but I’m not sure where the idea came from.
What would be a physically possible scenario in which there is no information being exchanged between two systems whatsoever?
Any system whose wave function is multiple-valued for some time delta_t. Basically anything that behaves quantum mechanically. For example the standard double-slit experiment. In this case one system is a photon, and the other system is the environment. If the photon does not interact with the environment between when it was produced and when it hit the screen, then there is no information available about which slit the photon when through. This is done all the time in physics labs. If there is no information exchanged between the photon and the environment, then quantum mechanical interference is observed. If there is information exchanged, then no interference is observed.
Anyway, regardless of my previous question, I’m inclined to insist that unless we believe there is a stable causal pattern present “behind our backs” when things (like that photon) are unobserved, then we have no reason to make predictions at all. The predictions we make we can interpret in no way other than as simple luck.
The photon remains “lightlike” even when unobserved–though “lightlike” (just like “made of rock”) turns out to have a much more complicated and strange meaning than we would have thought prior to QM.
Well, you are getting a bit ahead of our current understanding, because we don’t have a quantum theory of gravity. As far as anybody can tell experimentally, there is no gravitational interaction that has a measurable effect on our ability to locate a photon in space. According to quantum mechanics, if there was, then it would destroy the interference that is observed in the double slit experiment.
And that is a valid philosophical viewpoint. One that I happen to agree with. But again, that is not proof that the moon is not cheese when unobserved. The moon could very well be cheese when unobserved.
I don’t follow you here.
I want to try to impress upon you the fact that one thing quantum mechanics has taught us is that the realist picture you seem to advocate in your paragraph above is difficult to maintain. The fact is that as far as we can tell, the world is not so stable or well-defined between observations. This doesn’t prevent us from producing algorithms that allow us to make predictions and test things experimentally. But the truth is, there may not be anything “behind our backs” that would make sense to you. Read about the measurement problem in quantum mechanics more, things like Bells inequality:
The theorem has great importance for physics and the philosophy of science, as it implies that quantum physics must necessarily violate either the principle of locality or counterfactual definiteness.
Most physicists take the view that the violation is of counterfactual definiteness, ie that there is no definiteness of the results of measurements that have not been performed (i.e. the ability to assume the existence of objects, and properties of objects, even when they have not been measured).
Look, when I piped up about the unobserved moon, I didn’t understand you to be talking about the technical QM sense of “observation.” I thought, rather, you were making some kind of purely “philosophical” (in the sense you outlined) argument from the premise that unsensed things are unknowable. That’s a false premise, and so it would have been a bad argument.
Turns out that you weren’t making that argument after all. So my apologies for having misunderstood you lo so many posts ago.
Anyway, I am aware of the things you’ve mentioned in your previous post. Regarding that stuff, I’m just giving an argument similar to the one I made (in my view correctly) in my Astronomy class as an undergrad. The professor was arguing that Time doesn’t exist. I argued that of course it exists–there’s definitely a phenomenon systematically underlying our apparent experience of time–but it may be, in itself, radically different from what we might have said based on our own individual experience. What it’s “really like” may be explicable only as a collective endeavor (i.e. of scientists) or may be fundamentally inexplicable. But to say it doesn’t exist is unnecessary and misleading at best.
Similarly, of course the photon exists when it’s unobserved. What it’s like may be radically different than our conceptions of an observed photon. What it’s like may be absolutely immeasurable. But if it literally disappears when it stops interacting–if the thing we observed no longer exists at that point–and reappears when it starts interacting again, then there’s no explanation for the observations we do make. The success of our calculations of the probabilities involved is inexplicable. We’re simply lucky. And if we’re simply lucky, we may as well give up making predictions altogether.
There’s something “photony” out there even when it’s not interacting with anything. “Photony” here just means “being such as to give rise to photon-appropriate observations,” just as “rocky” means “being such as to give rise to rock-appropriate observations.”
I only bring up the technical QM sense of “observation” in order to give a clear definition of “observation” that we can refer to in this thread. You asked, after all, what definition of “observation” I was using, and in order to be as clear as possible, I went with the technical definition of what physically scientists understand to be an “observation” in real life. Take this, if you want to, as merely an example of how my line of reasoning is correct. I maintain that my first post mentioning the moon is correct. Here is the relevant quote from that post:
*Proposition: The moon is made of cheese, except when you look at it or try to measure its properties
Reasoning: Anything
No reasoning can prove or disprove the proposition. It is an unprovable and unfalsifiable assertion.*
I stand by the above statement.
Sure, and I agree with you. So let’s agree there’s something “photony” out there between two observations. That doesn’t disprove that in between observations, the photon may morph into a totally unobservable moon made of cheese, and then morphs back the moment the next measurement is made. Such activity wouldn’t necessarily prevent the photon form “remembering” what it was doing before and so continuing to behave ordinarily the next time we measure it. It is a valid philosophical position that the photon behaves this way, because it is impossible to disprove. It is an unprovable assertion. It may seem silly to you, and indeed, many philosophical arguments seem silly to me. I don’t believe in God, for example. The idea that God does not exist is an unprovable assertion. Philosophically I reject God. But God is certainly not disprovable. So it goes, no differently, with this whole moon example.
Yes, what you’re saying in that post is correct. I’ll have to review the thread to recall where I originally disagreed with you. That wasn’t it.
Yes, this is correct. Like I said, when I piped up, I thought you were arguing from a premise that unsensed things are unknowable. But the present QM stuff doesn’t rely on that false premise.
A valid philosophical position is (among other things) one with plausible premises, arrived at by good reasoning, concerning a matter of import.
That I take as tacit, though also it should be understood that a valid philosophical position may have implausible premises as well. I would rather say that a philosophical position is valid if it has at least one plausible premise. One can put forward all sorts of implausible premises for a philosophical position, but the position itself should be analyzed independent of the person promoting it.