Archives for posts with tag: Heisenberg

Who burns what?

June 17, 2021 //
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Bonkers, right?

Here’s a more elaborate expression of the same concept:

“Al-Ash’ari (873–935), the founder of the theological school that al-Ghazâlî belonged to, had rejected the existence of “natures” (tabâ’i’ ) and of causal connections among created beings. In a radical attempt to explain God’s omnipotence, he combined several ideas that were developed earlier in Muslim kalâm to what became known as occasionalism. All material things are composed of atoms that have no qualities or attributes but simply make up the shape of the body. The atoms of the bodies are the carrier of “accidents” (singl. ‘arad), which are attributes like weight, density, color, smell, etc. In the cosmology of al-Ash’arî all immaterial things are considered “accidents” that inhere in a “substance” (jawhar). Only the atoms of spatially extended bodies can be substances. A person’s thoughts, for instance, are considered accidents that inhere in the atoms of the person’s brain, while his or her faith is an accident inhering in the atoms of the heart. None of the accidents, however, can subsist from one moment (waqt) to the next. This leads to a cosmology where in each moment God assigns the accidents to bodies in which they inhere. When one moment ends, God creates new accidents. None of the created accidents in the second moment has any causal relation to the ones in the earlier moment. If a body continues to have a certain attribute from one moment to the next, then God creates two identical accidents inhering in that body in each of the two subsequent moments. Movement and development generate when God decides to change the arrangement of the moment before. A ball is moved, for instance, when in the second moment of two the atoms of the ball happen to be created in a certain distance from the first. The distance determines the speed of the movement. The ball thus jumps in leaps over the playing field and the same is true for the players’ limbs and their bodies. This also applies to the atoms of the air if there happen to be some wind. In every moment, God re-arranges all the atoms of this world anew and He creates new accidents—thus creating a new world every moment (Perler/Rudolph 2000, 28–62).”

On the other hand, we currently have our own struggles.

Determinism.
Is it possible to determine the ultimate cause of anything? Forget about ‘everything’… even the ultimate cause for something seems to be far beyond our capabilities…

Freedom.
Is it real?
Or is it only a figment of our own imagination?

Reality.
Is it real?
Or is it created by our own conscience?

No links provided. Do your own googling.

Here’s what science teaches us on this matter.

Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principle’:
It is impossible to simultaneously measure with absolute precision both the position and the velocity of any object.

For many everyday instances, this doesn’t present any problem. For practical purposes, our technological prowess is enough. Philosophically… Heisenberg’s principle is yet another irrefutable indication that we’re very far from ever being able to determine the ultimate cause of anything.

Are we able to live with this uncertainty?

Are we able to go to bed at night without being absolutely sure that the sun will rise tomorrow?
OK, everybody somehow knows – even if nobody wants to accept it, that there’s a slight chance that they will not wake tomorrow… but the Sun?!?

Are we able to live with the notion that what we call ‘natural order’ isn’t fixed?

That a meteorite might come from nowhere and kill all the ‘dinosaurs’?
That a virus might spring up from nowhere and fuck up our lives?

“What we see is the fire touching the cotton and then the cotton being reduced to ashes. We wrongly assume that there is thus a necessary causal relationship between fire burning and the cotton being burned”.

Now please tell me something.
What is the subject here? Cotton being burned or our relationship with what’s going on there?

We see… we assume… He, al Ghazali, tells us that we are wrong to assume that what we see is what is really happening… He is ‘right’ – because…- and we are wrong…

The funny thing being, of course, that al-Ghazali is, partially, right!
Since Heisenberg had postulated his famous principle, we should refrain ourselves from assuming anything…

OK. Let me put it differently then.
What happened to that cotton?
Is it still white? Or had it been “reduced” to ashes?

Who brought the flame close enough to the cotton?
Was this an experiment? In a lab?
Or a tragedy? In a field/storage? By lightning? Or by an arsonist?

Returning to al Ghazali, we need to remember that his world was totally different from ours.

It’s safe to say that their culture was about as sophisticated as ours. Same arts, same subjects discussed in the philosophical circles, same religious ideas…

Civilizationally speaking, we live in a totally different world.
Civilization – the consequence of ‘culture’ being put to practice’ had advanced dramatically in the last 1000 years.

And since our thoughts are heavily influenced by the environment in which we’re doing the thinking…

The fraction of the population who enjoyed ‘food security’ was minuscule compared to today.
The fraction of the population who was pretty much sure they will awake the next morning was minuscule compared to today.
The fraction of the population who felt free – from oppression – was, practically, nonexistent.

Yet the ‘thinkers’ felt the same need for coherence as those thinking today. They felt the same need to know what tomorrow had in store for them.
They, like us, needed an explanation for disease. For war. For tragedy…
And since no pathogens nor dictators were available …

How come ‘no dictators were available’?!?
Who in his right mind would have called, then, the local ruler a ‘dictator’? In his face…
Look at what happened, now, to people doing that in Moscow!
Or even in Washington, DC

That was the role attributed to God. To be the bridge to tomorrow.

It was not the flame which reduced the cotton to ashes. Nor the experimenter/arsonist/dictator. It was ‘God’.
As long as we could accept that – and that God loved us, the future was still bearable.

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If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button.
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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, Chance, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, The kind of world we are building for our children

Deterministic Science as an Oxymoron

March 24, 2019 //
0

“The philosophical doctrine that every state of affairs, including every human event, act, and decision, is the inevitable consequence of antecedent states of affairs.”

“The systematic study of the nature and behaviour of the material and physical universe, based on observation, experiment, and measurement, and the formulation of laws to describe these facts in general terms.“

In these terms, science must be deterministic.
No systematic study of anything might ever be made if not starting from the conviction that a given set of causes will produce the same results, over and over again. No laws attempting to describe any facts in general terms might be formulated unless starting from the same premises.

On the other hand, it was science itself which had taught us that:

“It’s impossible to determine, with absolute precision, both the position and momentum of an electron“

The same ‘uncertainty principle’ can be extended to other pairs of “complementary variables, such as length of time and energy“.

And there are countless other examples of ‘in-determination’ which have been documented by scientists during their search for the ultimate truth.

Any chance of reconciliation?

Well…
To start, I’ll note first that ‘determinism’ is a concept which had started its career in philosophy while ‘science’ has a more ‘complex’ origin. It might have been initiated by Christian theologians trying to ‘guess’ God’s will only they were attempting to fulfill that task by closely watching Nature – which was seen as the very embodiment of God’s intentions.
In this sense, scientific determinism can be understood as the conviction that Nature must make perfect sense – must be completely explainable, simply because God’s creation – which includes Nature, must be perfect.
OK, and since all theologians agree that no human will ever be able/should ever pretend to know God, what’s the problem in accepting that Man – collectively speaking now, will never learn enough to find a complete explanation for everything?

‘And what about the atheists?’

What about them?
Oh, you mean the people who are sure that God doesn’t exist? Who are just as sure that God doesn’t exist as the staunch believers who are perfectly confident that God not only exists but also micro-manages everything? Under the Sun and beyond?
I’ll just leave it there…

On a deeper level, there is no contradiction between ‘determinism’ – philosophically speaking, and scientific thinking. As long as we keep these two ‘apart’, of course…

‘So you are going to accept that science will never ‘know’ everything AND that ‘everything is a consequence of the previous state of affairs’ ‘ ?

Well, again…
The key word here is “inevitable”!
Determinism is ” the philosophical doctrine that every state of affairs, including every human event, act, and decision, is the inevitable consequence of antecedent states of affairs ”
For a philosopher it is very easy to say ‘inevitable’. Even more so for believing philosopher.
For a scientist… how is a scientist going to say that something is ‘inevitable’? ‘Philosophically’ speaking, of course… as in ‘with absolute precision’?!?

Specially since entertaining a truly ‘scientific attitude’ means, above all, to be prepared, at all moment and without any notice, for all your previously held convictions to be contradicted by new evidence…

‘What are you trying to say here?
That everything revolves around the manner in which each of us relates to the meaning of his own interpretation of each concept?
That truth itself is relative?’

‘That man is the measure for everything?’

Yep!
AND that man is also responsible for the consequences his own actions! In front of his own children, before everything else.
For no other reason than it will be his own children who will bear the brunt of his own decisions.

Additional reading:
“Science as Falsification“, Karl R. Popper.
” 800 Scientists say it’s time to abandon “Statistical Significance” “
“Protagoras”
“On the Essence of Truth“, Martin Heidegger
“Suicide now leading cause of death among children aged 10 to 14 in Japan“

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Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, Bounded rationality, Chance, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, effective communication, evolution, In English, man induced fragility, Mindset, Mutual Respect, physics, Psychology, religion, The kind of world we are building for our children, Transparency, Trust

“The Letter and the Spirit”

January 17, 2017 //
0

I was planning a post and going to use this title, but without the quotation marks.

I wasn’t aware of the book that begins with the very same words.

Before starting to write – the original post was meant to be about the relationship between us, people, and the laws that govern our lives – I checked on Google whether somebody else had already used the same title and where they had went from there.

“Since G‑d is the ultimate perfection and is free of all limitations and definitions, it is self-evident that, in the words of the Alter Rebbe, “The fact that He creates universes does not express what G‑d is.” At the same time He is, as Maimonides writes in his Laws of the Fundamentals of Torah, “the one who brings every existence into being; all existences exist only as derivatives of His ultimate existence” and the one upon whom “all existences are utterly dependent.” It is also obvious that just as no creature can comprehend the nature of G‑d’s creation of reality ex nihilo, so too no creature can comprehend the nature of G‑d, even the nature of G‑d as the creator of the world and the source of every existence.

In the words of the great Jewish philosophers: “If I knew Him, I would be Him.”

So, though a person realizes and understands that no thing can create itself, and that one must therefore conclude that the created reality has a source that generates its existence, this is proof only of the existence of the Creator, not an understanding of what He is, even as “Creator.””

Now, after reading Rabbi Schneerson’s (the Lubavitcher Rebbe) words, I cannot stop wondering what drives certain people to pretend that they have fully understood God’s will and therefore their actions/words are not only ‘correct’ but also above any doubt.

Not to mention their insistence that we, the rest of the (not divinely blessed with such a deep understanding) people, must follow their directions or suffer the consequences?
Here on Earth, at ‘their’ hands…

On the other hand, the same principle has been affirmed – time and time again – by various scientists.
For example, by Werner Heisenberg.
“The depth of the uncertainty principle is realized when we ask the question; is our knowledge of reality unlimited? The answer is no, because the uncertainty principle states that there is a built-in uncertainty, indeterminacy, unpredictability to Nature.”

 

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Categories authoritarianism, Choices we make, Frames of mind, Mutual Respect

“Is the universe independent of observation ?”

March 12, 2015 //
0


This question was asked by a friend of mine on Facebook.

The answer depends heavily on which side of the fence you are when considering the problem.

If one looks from the inside of his conscience and is aware of his own limitations – nobody ever had at his disposal all pertinent information about anything and, anyway, nobody is able to use ‘perfectly’ whatever meager information he is able to amass, for various reasons – one realizes that his representation of the universe, his universe that is, is indeed dependent on ‘observation’.
If, instead, one mentally transports himself on the outside of his conscience – assuming that there actually is anything outside his conscience – then the universe becomes somewhat independent of observation. I say ‘somewhat’ because any action performed on something, and ‘observation’ is an action, transforms – no matter how minutely but it does – the object on which that action has been performed.

So my answer would be ‘Both yes and no depending on which side you are when considering the matter‘ but we have to keep in mind that the (relative) independence that becomes apparent when looking from the outside of our individual conscience (?!?, 🙂 ) ‘depends’ heavily on the huge disproportion between each of us and the Universe.

See also: Politics, a dangerous profession, https://nicichiarasa.wordpress.com/2014/07/02/politics-a-dangerous-profession/

“Observer effect”:
psychology: http://www.aqr.org.uk/glossary/observer-effect
physics: http://www.toktalk.net/2007/12/24/what-is-the-observer-effect/
Heisenberg, the Uncertainty Principle, http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08.htm

http://statusmind.com/images/2014/03/Smart-Quotes-35348-statusmind.com.jpg

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology
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