Re: The reality of entity

brodix <brodix@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Haines,

I suspect this is the nub of the issue. Scientists are empirically
oriented, as indeed they should be, and so naturally focus on objects
and measurements.

It wouldn't be so bad if they would police their own extrapolations.
Since our world is possessed of conscious beings, how do you exclude
consciousness when proposing hidden dimensions? Ghosts anyone?

Not sure I get your point. Is it that we necessarily make inferences,
but too often do so in an undisciplined manner? If so, that concerns me
as well.

On the other hand, you may be objecting to any acceptance of
unobservables as being real. That is, you don't accept the central point
of scientific realism. Well, there are some who would agree, but it
seems the scientific consensus is shifting toward that view. Good
evidence of that is the text that is often considered the best
introduction to the philosophy of science for classroom use, Richard
Boyd, Philip Gasper and J.D. Trout, eds., _The Philosophy of Science_
(Cambridge 1991). Since the issue is still debated, one can't say that
one position is right and the other wrong, but we adopt one or the other
for reasons we can hopefully justify. I happen to take a realist
position, but I hope I can offer some justification for my doing so. The
critique of "entity" with which this thread started was in fact part of
that effort on my part.

There are many scientific methods. That deductive inferences represents
the only one is an old schoolroom canard. What interests me is that
scientific realism tends to rely on the abductive method (to infer from
outcomes the conditions that had made it possible). Perhaps the best
defense for such an approach is that it (arguably) actually explains
change, while covering law explanations do not (a classic issue in the
philosophy of science).

Does the acceptance of real unobservables open the door to ghosts? Good
question, and one that must be addressed. However, I don't think it
does. The reason is that the unobservable is posited in scientific
realism as being merely a dimension, aspect or property of processes. It
is not a self-contained reality in itself, as I presume ghosts are. A
causal potency, for example, only exists as a property of matter, which
ghosts do not, for they are non-matter almost by definition. I suppose
one could say that causal potency cannot exist without the observable
(empirical), and the observable cannot exist without an unobservable
causal potency or relation (i.e., all things are processes).

Let me just interject here a minor point to avoid confusion. The real
aim is to suggest that all things are causally connected with their
environment and this causal connection is not external to them, but much
a part of their basic nature, so that the basic unit of analysis in
though is the process. Thus the basic conceptual unit is not mentally
closed, but remains open as in Koestler's "holon". However, this
"environment" cannot be presumed to be known and is always imperfectly
known in fact. If everything is connected, things necessarily become
empirically undefinable and vague.

I believe "causal potency" is a reduction, a hypothetical isolation of a
system in thought, so that we might say something about it even though
its nature really depends in part on its environment about which we are
ill-informed. I.e., everything else being the same, here's how the
system would work if it were in isolation. Only with scientific realism,
as opposed to empiricism, it is represented as a process and present is
a driving force for change. If there are any lurkers who are into such
matters, I'd sure appreciate a criticism of this point.

However, any scientific practice is theory-laden, and this theory in
part shapes the reality of the objects we observe and
measure. Usually the implicit theory is left un-inspected, but when
there are "scientific revolutions" or when a science probes an
unknown where the dominant theory is not well established,
philosophical speculation leading to a new theoretical orientation
can really change the whole direction of the science.

Paradigm shift. Phase transition. Punctuated equilibrium. Systemic
failure. Revolution. When they blow theoretical bubbles upon
theoretical bubbles, sometimes they all pop at once.

The structural changes you catalog here (except the first, which doesn't
belong in your list) represent a change in the structure of a system,
and thus a change in an unobservable. What does this have to do with
"theory"? Well, we first need to agree on what the word theory
means. Informally, perhaps it means a) a mental representation of
reality rather than a practice, b) A conjecture or hypothesis rather
than what is proved true, c) the general or abstract principles of a
science, d) a philosophical explanation of phenomena, such as the theory
of relativity.

So by theory do we mean a well-substantiated explanation of the world,
merely a hypothetical explanation or representation, or something that
is real and abstracted from the world? Today, in the sciences anyway, we
reject any reality abstracted from the world (for a long time science
has adopted a materialistic monism), but the other two are fundamentally
different: hic rhoda, hic salta. The first represents theory as real and
explanatory; the second is a representation of the world in thought that
might or might not be explanatory and looks to criteria external to the
object by which to establish its truth (such as in operationalism, etc.).

Only in the second sense of theory (hypotheses) are we in danger of
constructing imaginary castles subject to collapse. It is possible, and
too often happens, that hypotheses are built from hypotheses. In the
former meaning of theory (explanation which entails unobservables), the
theory is always constrained by empirical observation and so can't get
very far out on the fragile limb.

Consider that if time is a consequence of motion and the only
absolute is like absolute zero to temperature, the complete absence
of it, then there is no such thing as a specific defined point in
time.

I don't know that time is simply a consequence of motion (of
change). Of course, we impose a time scale, but the reality of time
is a hotly contested issue. Time itself may be associated with
motion, but to suggest it is a consequence of motion, of that I'm not
at all convinced. A good discussion of the time issue is D.H. Mellor,
_Real Time II_, London, 1998.

I think if you really follow through the consequences of this
proposition, it doe make some sense. As Newton pointed out, "For every
action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." Now apply this to my
observation that to the hands of the clock, it's the face going
counterclockwise.

Yes, but I don't see that you really address my concern. Let me try to
rephrase it. What do we mean by "change"? I suppose it means the
empirical difference between two states of a system in time. For
example, I observe a system at time A, and then again at time B and note
the empirical difference. I decide that despite the observed
differences, that this remains the same system rather than another
because I employ in thought conceptual categories based on empirical
persistence. Therefore, if a system is reduced to its empirical
qualities we find ourselves in a tautological conundrum, for we define
the system by its persistent qualities, and define changing qualities as
a change in the system. But putting that issue aside, what is its
relation with time? Mere change (as opposed to change that entails
entropy) has no direction. Without an appeal to entropy you can't
observe that state A comes before or after state B; you also can't
observe how much time separates those two states.

In fact, can we always infer that time has passed at all? All
observations entail "observational hypotheses" (Lakatos, again), or
frames of reference, and so empirical difference may not be related to
the passage of time. A simplistic example. Suppose I'm on the phone with
someone in another town and we are describing the sunset. The atmosphere
where I live is clear, but cloudy for the person I'm speaking with. We
observe the same system, but his empirical description will differ from
my own. That difference is not the result of time, but the conditions
under which the two observations are made. If I'm in a party of tourists
photographing a redwood tree in California, and doing so at the same
time and from the same vantage point, my companion's photo will differ
from mine if he used a filter on his camera. All observations are
encumbered by theoretical filters.

But let's get back to a simpler scenario. I photograph this tree in May,
and then again in October and observe that the color of the leaves has
changed. I know there is change because on an artificial time line I
know the first photo was taken in May and second in October. That is,
our mental world constructs time, past, present and future, and the
relation of events in that time frame. We attribute change in a given
system to the passage of time, but the standard view today is that time
is not a property of the system, but of an arbitrary frame of reference.

Rather than time being a consequence of motion, it seems the more
conventional view is that time is inferred from the memory or traces
(such as the photo of the tree I took last May) of had once been and is
now past and gone, and of possibilities for a different future. That is,
neither the past or the future actually exist independently of the
present (and even the "present" is not a time), so there can be no
change "in time", but only change. This may be contrary to our useful
assumptions in daily life, but I believe it is required by a scientific
outlook that often must grapple with reality in a way quite different
than what is useful in daily life.

It's not quite my point. What I'm saying is that you cannot freeze
time at an exact point, as that would effectively require a cessation
of motion and if all motion were to stop, reality would effectively
vanish, even to the sub-atomic level, since everything is mostly empty
space occupied by wave particle relationships that function as motion.
So since you can't stop time or motion to measure it, objects do not
have an exact location. It's the fuzziness that ties it all together
and makes it real. Without the fuzziness, there is nothing. When
physics tries to measure "position," it does so by directly impeding
the particle to narrow its location to the smallest degree of
fuzziness and this obviously does change the momentum, but that's not
the central thrust of my argument.

Yes, but it seems a point a bit different than the one you raised
before. If all things are processes, all empirical observations are
fuzzy. The problem comes, I think, when this fuzziness is said to be the
result of time passing during the observation rather than the fact that
what is being observed is a process. The difference is over whether the
fuzziness arises solely from the limitations or uncertainty of the
observational process or whether the object observed is itself actually
fuzzy. This issue is parallel to that of problem of observations that
have statistically distributed outcomes. The old view was that these
statistical outcomes are an artifact of our ignorance. There are
presumably hidden variables of which we are ignorant because our
knowledge of the state of the system can never be absolutely
complete. This was the view of Einstein when he suggested that god does
not place dice. However, the scientific consensus has long been
convinced that Einstein was wrong, and that probabilism is a real
property of all real systems. Radioactive decay is random, not because
we are ignorant of the trigger that caused it for a particular molecule,
but because the decay is inherently a random.

Think of it in terms of how our eyes function. Obviously there is far
more visual information than we can conceivably process and it is
traveling at the speed of light, so our mind breaks it down into
flashes of perception and then ties it together into a narrative. Sort
of like frames of a movie. Like a movie, much gets edited out as well.
Our minds digitize reality. As our minds go from past perceptions to
future ones, these perceptions that are the essence of our self recede
into the past.

But my question is what his has to do with energy. Up to the last
sentence, I'd agree. We process our perceptions, and that obviously
requires the expenditure of energy in the brain, but I don't think that
was your point.

The last sentence looses me. We made a perception in the past, and that
is embedded in memory, which is the mental record or trace of that
perception. The mind can't "go from a past perception" to a subsequent
perception because the past does not exist, only its memory. Did you
mean the mind goes from the memory of a past perception to...? Hopefully
you did.

And then, of course, there are no future perceptions, either, for the
future does not yet exist. Sure, it eventually will exist, but then it's
no longer the future, but a future present ;-). How does the future
exist in the mind? I suppose it exists as a set of the possibilities
inherent in the present. Even science fiction, which makes no claim that
it describes a reality, is a function or extrapolation of the present.

I've always found interesting the attitude toward money in the various
TV series that represent the future. In the original Star Trek the
attitude was that we won't need any money in the future, but from each
according to their abilities and to each according to their needs. As
one series replaced another, increasingly greed comes in and the need
and desire for money. The earlier series was Utopian, but nevertheless a
theoretical construct based on a negation of the existing world; the
late series are an affirmation of the existing world, with a bit of
exaggeration. (Any students lurking out there? This, and its
explanation, would make a nice term paper). But my point here is that
the future is always constructed in terms of the present.

I've no idea what "essence of the self" is, unless you are making a
theological point. And I've no idea how it can recede in the past when
in fact the past does not exist, unless you only mean that the traces of
the past that exist in the present tend to become corrupted in
time. But according to the Second Law, while things do disspate, that's
not because of time, but because the probability of moving toward a
higher entropy state is greater, given that there are more paths to it
than to a lower entropy state (a quaint old explanation, but it
should do here).

Energy is what is conserved. The information it records isn't always
preserved. So energy is what goes from past information to future
information, while the information goes from being future potential to
past circumstance.

You really loose me here. Yes, energy is conserved, although of course
its form is not. While it takes a dissipation in the form of energy to
create and record information, and while it is possible to represent
information in terms of an energy equivalent, surely you are not saying
that the information _is_ energy. The work of my old teacher, Norbert
Weiner, and that of Claude Shannon, et al., showed that thermodynamic
entropy was analogous to information processing, but no one has shown
why.

The words you are reading now, we would agree represent
information. When I assembled them, I was putting the words (hopefully)
into a meaningful relation, and that required a decrease in entropy, a
dissipation of the form of the free energy in my brain to that of
heat. But once on the "paper", the words are in a state of
equilibrium. Unlike the BIOS in your computer, the information does not
require the processing of energy to maintain its far-from-equilibrium
state. Of course, as you read these words to extract their meaning (if
any), you also must put heat into the environment. But between their
creation and their interpretation, the information does not entail any
processing of energy (well, not quite true in the case of computer
communications, but you get the point).

Again, there is no past information, but only information about the
past, which of course is necessarily subject to corruption (Second Law).

Oops. The "traces" of the past that exist in the present are, of
course, not the past, but mere empirical effects.

You are modeling time as a dimension in which the past is somewhere
back there and the future is somewhere up there.

Not at all and quite the opposite. I'm saying the past exists only as
traces (empirical effects) that can exists only in the present. These
traces were created in the past, but really exist only in the
present. There is no time dimension outside our consciousness. There is
no "back there", and there is not really a "now", either, for there's no
absolute time reference frame by which to say the present is now. What
we mean by the present is not a point along a time continuum, but is
defined rather by action (some would say, by experience, but I think
that amounts to the same thing, since no experience is entirely
passive - short of death, the termination of all activity).

If you think of time as a consequence of motion, then reality is like
a rope being woven out of threads pulled from what had been previously
woven, so as the energy is recycled, past information is constantly
being absorbed and incorporated.

I don't think of time as a consequence of motion other than that our
sense of time results from our activity in the world. We know that one
event was earlier or later than another, but that does not create a time
frame of reference except in our consciousness. That is, "motion" is a
word for process or change, but most change occurs beyond our awareness
of it. Such change does not create time; only the change of which we
become aware does that. If motion created time, and since all things are
in motion, then all things would have a time property or dimension, and
this is to what I'm objecting. I believe it runs contrary to the
scientific consensus today, and so your point stands in need of some
justification.

Energy and information are like two sides of a coin, as energy
manifests as form/information and information doesn't exist if it
isn't physically manifested.

To say that two things are mutually convertible does not make them, I
believe, into aspects of one thing. I can purchase a coffee pot,
converting cash into a commodity of equivalent value, but cash and
coffee pot are not the same thing. While one can say that the cash and
coffee pot are simply two different manifestations of value, that does
not mean they cease being different things. Classical political economy
(Adam Smith, for example) sought to define value because it wanted to
create an economic science, and so picked up on the traditional labor
theory of value. Marx continued this approach in a certain sense, but
capitalist political economy dropped it as it ceased being a science to
become a kind of economic engineering. To say that economic value can
used as a measure of both cash and the coffee pot does not reduce cash
and coffee pots to the same thing (all this a big subject I don't want
to explore here).

To say that information has an energy equivalent is not to say that
information is energy. Free energy is energy available for doing work;
information cannot do work. Not all energy expenditure is manifested as
information. The usual dissipation of energy in a system actually
implies less information in that system (information increase in the
system requires that system energy be dissipated into its environment).

think of reality as the intersection order and energy. Both intimately
bound, with the past trying to control the future and the future
constantly breaking down the past.

Well, yes. The cosmologist Lyser made much of this point. But the past
exists only as empirical traces in the present, and empirical traces
can't do work, such as "controlling" the future. Or at least, the way
you put it makes me uncomfortable. A more conventional way would be to
suggest that the empirical aspect of the present, which is the product
of history, constrains future possibilities. The future, which does not
yet exist, obviously can't "break down", for what does not exist cannot
break down. Nor can the past, which no longer exists "control" anything,
for all real action is present action.

By definition, but not completely. We think of the past as
unchangeable, but it is dissipating.

We think of the past as unchangeable for good reason: it does not exist
;-) We cannot change the past, only the future. What changes is not the
past, but the empirical effects of the past that happen to exist in the
present, at which time they become subject to change. In some
hypothetical future time, these empirical effects of the past will seem
to have dissipated because we construct a time frame into which we
inject a succession of system states, and from them we infer a past
dissipation. However, all action (including dissipation) can only
occur in a present.

While I've been addressing the issues you raise from what I hope was a
fairly conventional perspective, I can't help but remind you that I'm
inclined to put the whole affair in stronger terms that are not so
conventional. That is, the "past" _is_ the empirical dimension of the
present; the present is not defined by a moment in time, but by the
interdependency of this empirical dimension and of a causal relation
with the broader world (or more conventionally with causal potency), and
this relation constrains the probability distribution of possible
futures; the "future" is simply the probability distribution of possible
outcomes that exist as well only _in_ the present.

No idea what you mean by energy accumulating elsewhere.

Think in terms of generational change. Growing up is like grass
pushing though the concrete. Then one day you wake up and you're the
concrete and there is this damn grass trying to push you out of the
way. As we grow up, we consume energy and information, but it builds
up and we slow down. Then the next generation is growing up and they
are running around like mad and using lots of energy, but since we are
old and cranky, they react by occupying the mental and physical spaces
we have left or can't fill.

Sorry, I still have a problem following you. Yes, when we grow up we
process energy flow so that we might develop, and this development can
be represented as an information increase. I've no idea what you mean,
however, by saying that the energy we process "builds up", unless you
mean that with maturation we have more free energy. That is, when we
are about twenty, we may be able to do more physical work than before or
after. However, as we mature and get wiser, that also represents an
information increase of a different kind, and this conceivably does not
necessarily diminish.

It may be that you are thinking of a point raised in general systems
theory that systems can "mature" and lock in to ever more narrowly
defined patterns of behavior. This locking in we think of as valleys in
the probability landscape, and once settled into a probable state, it
takes a purturbation to jump the wall to settle into another (putting
aside the issue of tunneling).

However, there is here no necessary reason why the minimal-entropy
probability "valley" implies an end to that structure. Why this rigidity
means death, in my mind at least, clearly requires the introduction of a
further consideration - specifically "contradiction". That is, in a
far-from-equilibrium system that is organic (the whole develops its
parts), the system depends on processing energy to maintain its
structure. Everything else being the same, the system will eventually
dissipate its environment to the point that is less able to decrease its
entropy and so it can no longer sustain the system's improbable
structure. This would usually represent an evolution toward stasis, but
in some (organic) systems, the development of the system also develops
its parts in empirical terms, and so this development opens the
possibility for a new kind of structure that is based on these developed
qualities. Hence we encounter the alteration of evolution and
revolution. But this is not developed (as far as I know) in general
systems theory, and it applies only to specific kinds of situations and
probably only to human history.

Often times revolution is more a function of the old breaking down
than of the new displacing them, because the new are always rising up
and usually it just carries the whole a little bit higher.

Well, yes, one can say that. However, in an evolution/revolution
couplet, are we not distinguishing, say, mere empirical change from
structural change, quantity (change of observables) and quality (change
of unobservables)? It is not clear whether your "the old breaking down"
means mere empirical change, an entropic dissipation, or structural
change. Your reference to "higher" introduces quite another idea, which
is that of progress (depending on just what is meant by higher). The
18th century notion of development in terms of a helix is what you may
be hinting at, but it did not make a distinction of evolution and
revolution, and so is not really the same kind of thing. The development
of geology and embryology and the French Revolution opened up a whole
new perspective on things which we associate with the word "modern"
(although at the metaphysical level, ancient Hebrew and Christian
thought anticipated the idea of evolution/revolution).

Are you saying that your physicist colleagues find it hard to accept
that the present is not a time? Strange; I thought this was kind of
common currency.

Mostly I get ignored. Try arguing that information goes future to
past and it doesn't register nearly as well with those with advanced
training as it does with those who don't. Yes, tomorrow will become
yesterday. Duh!

I must apologize for gong on at such length on a dry matter, but I get
the feeling you are grappling with a novel thought, and are not finding
the words to convey it adequately. To convince your colleagues you are
not some kind of nut case, I suspect you have to approach your points
using a language and concepts with which they are familiar.

Yes, I recommend you give it a try. It's as nice an intro to
statistical mechanics of which I am aware.

Unfortunately I grew up in the horseracing world and since it's a nice
way to live, even if it's not very profitable, I'm still stuck in it
and free time has been in short supply, with an extra project
consuming most of it. Of course racing does prove many interesting
examples of statistics in action.

Understood, but I nevertheless really urge you to take a look at Sklar's
book. This is not because statistical mechanics is such an important
subject (especially if your field of interest is horse racing), but
because it nicely links the micro world of molecular motions to the
macro world in which we live.
--

Haines Brown, KB1GRM



.

Relevant Pages

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