I often use non-standard language to describe concepts, and I’ve had a couple of people over the last couple of years call me on it. There seemed to be a sentiment that I was confusing things, or being sneaky in some way, by not sticking to the standard nomenclature. A short post about why I occasionally do this might be beneficial.
There are basically three reasons.
The first is sometimes I just don’t know what the standard terminology is. This is most likely to happen in the heat of a discussion on the blog or on social media, where the topic has veered somewhere I haven’t done much if any research. A closely related reason is sometimes I know something about the regular terminology, but still can’t be sure what I’m saying fits well with it, so rather than possibly say something wrong, it gets put in terms I’m more confident about.
But that blends into the second reason. Sometimes I do know the standard labels, but the common usage is vague or ambiguous. For example, the words “emotion” and “affect” get a lot of varied meanings in cognitive studies. Some people use “emotion” to refer to the conscious feeling and “affect” the underlying impulses. Others flip that. And there are other variations. It’s a definitional morass. It leads to a lot of pointless debates where people are talking past each other. So phrases like “conscious feelings” and “automatic impulses” or “reflexes” can seem more clear when discussing these concepts.
The third reason is that people have a tendency to form into ideological camps based on labels, something Julia Galef discusses in her book The Scout Mindset. If someone says they’re an atheist, agnostic, theist, physicalist, idealist, functionalist, panpsychist, illusionist, moral realist, antirealist, Copenhagenist, Everettian, etc., these are typically statements beyond their ontological conclusions. They often signal membership in a certain camp. As both Galef and Neil deGrasse Tyson point out, this causes people to project everything they know, or think they know, about that camp onto that person.
Describing a position that is similar to one of those camps, but without the explicit label, can (sometimes) avoid sending that signal. I’ve noted many times that “physicalist” is a decent summary of my views, but I often prefer to just say I expect reality to operate by rules we can try to discover. There may be other baggage people lump in with “physicalism” that I don’t buy and have no interest in defending.
Another benefit, and this applies to both the second and third reasons above, is sometimes describing something in an alternate way can get people to think about the concept again, about what it really means, or at least a possible meaning. So if I say that it’s plausible that the structure of quantum theory is the whole story, even if we can’t test all its implications, that can have a very different reaction than saying the many-worlds interpretation is plausible, even though I see them as basically the same statement.
It’s probably this last point which gives the impression that talking like this is something subversive. And, well, that’s because it is. But it seems like a harmless type of subversion, one that’s really more about trying to get past a knee-jerk reaction. A worldview we have to protect is one that probably needs scrutiny.
So if you see me describe something in an alternate fashion, one of these is typically what’s going on.
What do you think? Is using non-standard language sneaky and wrong? Should I even say anything in the case of the first reason? Or is this a valid strategy and there’s a standard word to describe it that I’ve overlooked?
SelfAwarePatterns 
Re “Is using non-standard language sneaky and wrong?” Hell, no. It is removing verbal crutches from those using them, such as Jesus being the “Savior.” Savior from what? Savior from himself, of course, but we just stop at “he will save you.”
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“Verbal crutch” is a good way of putting it. There are phrases we repeat so much that we’ve long stopped thinking about what it’s supposed to refer to, particularly if it’s something we were sold on early in life.
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Yeah, I think it would help if more people used more precise language when discussing details. When I talk about consciousness, I want to talk about “information”, and “goals”, and “representation”, but I definitely have to break down what I mean when I use those terms.
*
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That’s the thing. People debate the meaning of those terms, like any others. But it does seem like they’re less protean than a lot of other words people use around consciousness. And sometimes the only way to get more precise is to provide multiple alternate descriptions, another benefit I could have mentioned.
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Standard language, by definition, is not a source of confusion. If a word has a standard meaning, everybody uses it the same way, more or less. For most applications, this rough-and-ready usage is adequate. For example, everybody knows that “consciousness” is what you lose when you’re knocked unconscious.
Hardly anybody knows what “functionalism” or “phenomenology” is, because hardly anybody outside specialized circles uses such words. They are what we call “jargon.” “Affect” as a noun is an example of jargon, and so is “consciousness” when adopted by a specialized community of philosophers. What these words mean to a given specialist depends on their experience and sophistication within the community. The more you hang around the community, the better you get at using the word. But there may be sub-communities that use the word in slightly different ways, and they can get into arguments about which community is using the word the “right” way, and you can be caught in the middle.
Practical advice (as a retired technical writer, I speak with deep knowledge): If you don’t know the “standard terminology,” you just have to try using it and let the community correct you until you get it right; that is, until they stop using it in ways that you don’t quite understand, and stop expressing either saintly patience or exasperation when you try to use it yourself. Telling them what you think they mean in ordinary terms is a helpful way through this process. If there is no agreed usage, this will come out, and your efforts may actually produce a clarification among those not powerfully committed to their own opinions.
Having mastered the jargon of a community, you can save everyone time and trouble by using it when addressing that community. Outside a specialized community, the general advice in technical writing circles is to avoid jargon, because no one will know what you’re talking about. At the cost of a few sentences, if you’re good with words, you can usually get the idea across in plainer terms—assuming you understand it yourself.
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By the way, I don’t think you’re using “physicalism” correctly. The Google consensus is that it denotes the view that “everything is physical.” For the rules of reality to be discoverable requires only that reality follows discoverable rules. It says nothing about whether that reality is “physical” in the usual sense of the word; although the idea that reality is a physical thing, or field, or collection of entities, or whatever that follows said discoverable rules, is certainly defensible.
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While I’m picking nits, the “hidden variables” and “many-worlds” interpretations are both compatible with the claim that the structure of quantum theory is the whole story, but neither captures such a view as succinctly as the “shut-up-and-calculate” model.
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A lot of what you say may be true, in a mature field with relatively stable concepts. I work in IT, where there are a lot of those stable concepts. Once you have a handle on something like RAM, CPU, or loop, you have a decent grasp of how it’s used in the community. But there’s a great deal that is less nailed down, often because the terms started as marketing slogans. So something like a “data lake” or “Agile” gets used in a lot of loose ways that may not accord with any strict definitions.
And as you note, there can be sub-communities who use the words in different ways. They may be fairly clearly delineated, such as astronomers using “metal” for any element heavier than helium as compared to the chemistry meaning. But as I noted in the post, not all fields have settled into a consensus on key terms. And philosophy itself seems to exist in a permanent state of not having those consensuses. https://selfawarepatterns.com/2021/11/07/what-philosophers-believe-2020-edition/
If we want to be clear, it seems like we have to take that reality into account.
On physicalism as everything being physical, I agree that’s the standard meaning. But how would you define “physical”?
I think hidden variable theories, by definition, say that the structure of standard quantum theory isn’t the whole story; that’s what the additional hidden variables are about. And I see “shut up and calculate” as arguing against even trying to find a coherent picture; just use the recipe and move on. That may be fine for engineers who just want to use quantum theory, although many quantum computing theorists will tell you it’s easier to conceptualize their concepts with wave function realism.
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However I might define “physical,” I wouldn’t equate it with “acting according to discoverable rules,” because the latter embraces other possibilities. For example, by watching four people play bridge, a non-player could probably discover the rules, but framing them in terms of cause and effect would be of another order, since a lot of what is going on is hidden from the observer (the memory and reasoning skills of the players); and framing them in terms of physical cause and effect, in the usual sense of physics and chemistry, would be of another order yet. It may be a technical point, but if the conflation brings other baggage into your discussions I shouldn’t be surprised.
Speaking of “hidden from the observer,” what the hidden variables theory and the many-worlds theory have in common is the idea of something intrinsically unknowable to us, because for one reason or another it’s non-local (not in a space-time frame accessible to our observation). The Copenhagen interpretation is the same; nature is unknowable because the act of observation interferes. (Whether it forces a local frame upon what is observed is an interesting question, and of course all of this is just my idle musings on math I couldn’t hope to understand.)
In short, they all say that the structure of standard quantum theory “isn’t the whole story,” unless I misunderstand what you mean by that. Many-worlds is not exempt because it, too, posits aspects of reality to which we have no experiential access. The “shut-up-and-calculate” attitude anticipates this basic problem, and addresses it with extreme economy.
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The thing about the word “physical” is its meaning tends to expand over time as we discover new things that can be understood with natural laws. Prior to Einstein, no one probably thought of space and time as something other than the background upon which everything plays out, but now we know matter warps spacetime and spacetime guides matter, and so it’s become part of physics. Energy plays a much larger role in physics than Thomas Hobbes probably had in mind. In my mind, focusing on discoverable rules is more resilient than focusing on our current conception of the physical. But as I said in the post, “physicalist” is only a rough approximation of my views.
When talking about quantum theory, I think we have to make a distinction between the rules themselves, the structure of the theory, and the results of those rules being played out. A hidden variable theory essentially says there are hidden rules. Many-worlds doesn’t say that. It says that the rules of quantum physics is it. It’s just that many of the consequences of those rules playing out are inaccessible for us.
But that isn’t unusual in science. Scientists can say a good deal about what happens in the core of stars, or in the early universe, or other places we can never visit, by taking the rules we’ve learned through observation, and extrapolating to figure out their consequences in places we can’t observe. The other worlds fall into that category.
Of course, it’s always possible we’ll later learn about new rules that change those extrapolations. (Maybe the hidden variable people are right.) But speculating about new rules when we don’t have observations motivating it is just guessing. History shows the chances that we have more to learn are very high. But it also shows the chances that any of our guesses about what we specifically will learn are very low.
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If you understand “physics” as “philosophy so successful it turns into science,” then I suppose you’re a physicalist in the long run, even if future science abandons key tenets of what we currently call “physicalism.” But if you remain open to philosophical possibilities not generally contemplated by current versions of physicalism, you’re bound to confuse philosophers in other camps, who may reasonably assume you’re espousing a current, well-understood philosophy of nature with which they disagree. I think what you are espousing is perhaps “proto-physicalism” or (oh, why not?) “metaphysicalism.”
The many-worlds theory, as I understand, holds that a wavefunction is solved, not by a collapse into a single solution, but in a way that produces every possible solution at once, only one of which is experienced by us. This stops short of the need for a collapse, for which Schrodinger’s work offers no explanation. It says in effect, “We don’t understand how or why this would collapse into one actual physical result, so we’ll proceed on the assumption that all solutions terminate in an actual physical result, with a lot of the physical results happening in other physical universes.” But this is not a known fact stemming from the equation. How could it be? The equation offers no empirical evidence for other physical universes. It merely gives mute testimony that possible results are spread out probabilistically until a question is forced, and then you get one result. No more than that is known. It’s as if we were to wait for a chess player’s move, knowing that they could do anything, but probably will do this or that. We don’t understand what causes the player to decide, but we have no reason to relieve them of the burden of decision by supposing that they also made every other possible move on other actual chessboards. Multi-worlds is a theory meant to fill a gap in our mathematical understanding represented by the collapse; but the collapse is our only real, if inexplicable, observable. By way of explanation, multi-worlds proposes a plethora of hidden things, many more than the hidden-variable theory.
What happens in the cores of stars is observable in principle. What happened in the early universe is becoming increasingly observable. What happens in quantum mechanics is not observable in principle, for one reason or another, which makes it different in kind.
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What would you see proto-physicalism / metaphysicalism open to that straight physicalism wouldn’t be? I’ve long assumed that “physicalism” was a good approximation of my views, but if someone can show the daylight between the positions, I might have to reconsider that stance.
“But this is not a known fact stemming from the equation. How could it be?”
John von Neumann pointed out that there’s actually nothing in the equations that signal a wave function collapse. The collapse is something of an ad-hoc postulate bolted onto the theory. Erwin Schrödinger himself demonstrated the (in his view) perverse implications of his equation with his famous cat thought experiment. The only difference between Schrödinger’s cat and many-worlds is that Hugh Everett saw no reason to stop at the cat. His point was that the world looks exactly as it should for us if there is no collapse. Everett didn’t call his theory “many-worlds”. He called it “the universal wavefunction”, since that’s what you get without the collapse. It’s just quantum mechanics followed to the bitter end.
(Doesn’t mean it’s right. Just that it’s plausible until someone finds a data motivated reason to add new rules to the theory that prevent it.)
On observations in principle, you remined me of this passage from Brian Greene.
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Philosophy has lots of things on the table: illusionism, functionalism, panpsychism, object-oriented ontology, spread-mind theory, you name it. Not all of these are compatible with physicalism as we currently understand it. If we are open to all of them, we are open to radical redefinitions of reality.
Functionalism is generally filed under modern physicalism, so if you are a functionalist it makes perfect sense that you are a physicalist. If you’re open to whatever philosophy eventually turns into future science, and you call that future understanding “physicalism,” whatever shape it may take, then your physicalism may end up at odds with your functionalism. To the extent that you fully expect functionalism to emerge as future science, but disavow a strong commitment to current physicalism, you might be called a “crypto-physicalist.”
There are different interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. One interpretation predicts that a court would find abortion to be a legal procedure, and another, that a court would find it unconstitutional. Interpreting other juridical law, some might predict that Donald Trump ends up in jail, others that he won’t. Similarly, the many-worlds interpretation predicts one experimental result, and the Copenhagen interpretation predicts another. Different interpretations can lead to different predictions, and I don’t see a problem with this way of talking. Of course, once the experimental result is in, one or the other interpretation would be vindicated. But I notice that Greene’s experiment requires quantum interference between “macroscopically distinct situations.” By the time a situation has become macroscopic, any quantum effects have decohered, I think by definition, and according to the Century Dictionary “no interference between states of the system can be observed.” To call making such an observation “extraordinarily formidable” seems like an understatement. But I may be missing Greene’s point, and of course the actual math is beyond me.
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I like to think I’d follow the evidence. In that sense, it’s worth noting that to me, “functionalism” and “physicalism” (in the sense described above) are just summary labels for a collection of conclusions I’ve reached, not ideologies I’m loyal to. Any of those conclusions are subject to revision on new reliable evidence. I would eventually want to drop any of them if they failed to work, or if something better came along.
One of the problems with talking about things that are observable in principle, is it’s never clear what might be observable at some point in the future. August Comte infamously said that we’d probably never know the composition of the stars, a few decades before Gustav Kirchhoff figured out how to tell with spectral lines. Einstein and his collaborators in the EPR paper were criticized for metaphysical navel gazing, but twenty years later John Stuart Bell figured out how to test their predictions. And many astronomers rejected Copernicanism in the 1500s because no one could measure the parallax of any stars; it would be 1832 before anyone did.
So in terms of measuring post-decoherence interference, who knows what future physicists may be able to do? It’s also worth noting that experimental physicists every year are able to hold larger and larger quantum systems in superposition. If Everett is right, they’ll never hit a ceiling. Of course, if they do detect an actual collapse, the other worlds are falsified.
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I wonder about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, or Godel’s incompleteness theorem. These things present the idea that something is undecidable as more than accidental. It’s not a case of ingenuity in observing something extremely difficult to observe, but nevertheless technically observable, if only we can figure out a clever enough technology. These things suggest something unobservable by their very nature or their very logic. Universes other than this one belong to this category, along with hidden variables. For epistemology, non-locality is serious business; to know what is hidden, we would have to exceed the speed of light. In quantum mechanics, we would have to take measurements without measuring. In logic, we would have to identify the set not contained within a set.
In science fiction, things like faster-than-light travel and time travel happen all the time. Perhaps some day the constraint on escaping locality will be overcome, but it will require a new and revolutionary physics..
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Both the uncertainty principle and incompleteness theorem are interesting. The uncertainty principle makes sense when you consider that we’re talking about a constraint on the concurrent effects a wave like system can have on its environment. And the incompleteness theorem has long struck me as acknowledging that no system can fully model itself. Any such model could only be done by a larger more complex system, but then the new larger system couldn’t model its larger self, ad infinitum. It does seem like that has implications for the idea of a perfect simulation of the universe, something the Nick Bostroms of the world seem to overlook.
Science fiction rarely deals with just how strange it would be to travel faster than light. Or that it would inevitably be time travel.
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One way to get around a lot of the “non-standard language” problems you mention is to (a) use “kinda” and “sorta” and/or (b) throw other terms in. E.g. “I basically mean emotion, but kinda focusing on motivational attraction or repulsion, less on subjective feeling” will let people know, hey, Mike is talking about something that lies near the intersection {emotion, attraction-repulsion axis} but not necessarily near subjectivity and feels.
But sometimes an even better approach is to coin new jargon, multiple times over. This only works when you are going in depth. And it’s only necessary when existing words carry multiple associations including some you want to embrace and others you want to avoid. But damn, this can really work wonders, and I’d hold out Douglas Kutach’s book Causation and its Basis in Fundamental Physics as a model. He’s not out to define “causation” in a way that perfectly matches the pre-theoretical concept that people have for that word. That would be a fool’s errand. Instead, he wants to point to relations – which he gives jargon names to – that actually obtain in the world, and can do the most important jobs that people care about doing with “causality”. (You can get many of the main themes of the book online in Kutach’s paper The Asymmetry of Influence.)
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The problem I see with the first strategy is if you’re addressing both concepts, you end up with words like “emotion” used multiple times in the same post or comment with different meanings. The opportunities for confusion skyrocket. Now the reader has to keep track of which use you mean at each point. It seems more clear to just use distinct words. Although I guess you could use hyphenated phrases like “Ledoux-emotions” vs “Damasio-emotions”.
Inventing new jargon can have its uses. At least you’re not using words that could be conflated with other meanings, if you’re careful. The problem is it adds a lot of new terms to the language which can seem near synonymous for people not read into the specific meanings. I’ve also read papers where people throw out a whole bunch of new terms, then expect you to follow as they’re utilized. Reading those papers is no fun.
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I believe that excelling in alternate descriptions is a skill. A coveted one. Pop on an analogy, or equivalent terminology and you’ve helped someone understand something they previously didn’t. Keep it up.
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Thanks. You too!
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I was thinking as I read this that in maths and logic we can define what ever initial assumptions we like, then we argue with complete mathematical or logical rigour, using symbols, to a conclusion. Then if we want to apply that to the real world we have to separately show how that mapping works and that any approximations don’t invalidate the result. An argument in words may start with somewhat ambiguous definitions, then argues as though it was already working with real things towards conclusions in such a loose way that it is little more than fun speculation using a metaphor. Or to put it another way, as soon as you use words to describe reality, you are already wrong.
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That reminds me of something I read years ago from a physicist. Apparently physicists consider every theory to have two parts. The mathematical model. And baggage. Baggage being the part that has to be explained with language. I’m sure the reason is just as you describe. It’s in the language that things get messy. And it’s definitely the language mapping that prevents a philosophical deductive argument from having anything like the reliability of a mathematical proof.
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There is one more reason to use non-standard language. It happens very rarely, mostly with people who work in a really new field or at the intersection of many areas where there is no standard terminology. In this case, you must propose a new wording or meaning for some existing terms. That is really hard. The most frustrating part is to predict which version will be less likely to be less boring, less extravagant, or too innovative for readers.
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Good point. Along those lines, it can be interesting to read papers from early in field or sub-field, before the terminology has been established. I remember Alan Turing referring to computer capacities in his 1950 paper, and I wasn’t sure what he meant, because the contemporary way of referring to memory hadn’t been established yet. It’s also interesting to read early philosophical functionalist or illusionist papers. It takes some interpretation to match up what they’re saying with the contemporary terms. Even early quantum theory papers are (more) confusing because the terminology hadn’t settled yet.
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Thanks for this thoughtful and provocative post. As a community college English teacher, I find this issue to be one of the central challenges of my job: it’s a non-trivial task in education to help socialize people into the “discourse community” of the field they are trying to enter. Learning the language of chemistry (or social psychology or art history or whatever) is one of the clearest ways for a person to “gain admission to the club” of chemists or social psychologists or art historians. Helping new students understand that discourse communities exist, and that they serve to both exclude some people and include others, gives students some idea of what they are in for on their mystical journey towards a college degree. But I think it’s equally important to note that people (especially content experts) cultivate some empathy for people who might not be part of the discourse community but who nonetheless have something thoughtful to say about the issue at hand.
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Thanks! Well said. Your comment reminds me why I’m not a giant fan of books that just teach concepts in simple English but never tie back to the standard terminology. Yes, explain things in a simple straightforward way, but give the reader enough that they’ll be able to move on to more advanced material, and, as you say, be able to join the community in some capacity.
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I’ll certainly join general agreement here that alternate terminology can be quite helpful. And indeed, I seem to rely on this more than most do. Sometimes this is given uncertainty about what’s standard for my meaning in a given community (Mike’s first mentioned reason). Often however it’s because I realize how variable specific interpretations for a given term happen to be, though intend for my meaning to be understood nonetheless (Mike’s second mentioned reason). Mike’s third mentioned reason is a good one too. I’d rather not be falsely put in a camp that doesn’t quite reflect my position itself.
Here’s a general example of something that I believe. I’m as extreme a “naturalist” as they come. But what do I effectively mean by this? Fortunately the “material” idea seems to be going out of favor given the standard association with mere “substance”. And even though “physicalism” could potentially address my position if defined appropriately, the term itself doesn’t reference what I need it to as explicitly as I’d like. Thus I instead like to heavily employ the term “causality”. I believe that I reside under a vast system that is perfectly determined by means of cause/effect dynamics. Any deviation to such an ontologically fixed reality could thus be referred to as “magical”, “supernatural”, or simply a void in causality, all of which violate my own metaphysical stance. Furthermore if there are any other systems of causality that never interact with mine, then it may be useful to say that these systems are not real to each other, and even if each are ultimately real in themselves. And if two otherwise independent causal system only ever interact momentarily just slightly, I’d say that they’re ultimately just one causal system given that interaction. Otherwise their interaction could be referred to as the magical sort of thing that I don’t happen to believe in. (And indeed, two otherwise separate systems coming together momentarily seems causally dubious to me, though I’m speaking of extreme theoreticals here to help convey what my position happens to be.)
So what’s my stance on quantum mechanics? Actually it’s pretty simple. Either QM displays perfectly determined causal function in the end, or QM displays magic. I don’t know of an alternative. Furthermore I don’t like saying that there are “hidden variables” here, since my position holds that there be no variance in the end. Instead I like saying that we don’t grasp what’s happening. How could that be disputed? Furthermore to me it makes no causal sense to posit quantum superposition, tunneling, and entanglement, by means of an endless number of similar “worlds” that split off from our otherwise contained realm of existence, then with each of them presumably doing the same for infinite regress. Causality mandates that a “world” shouldn’t simply emerge from nothing as a convenient explanation for measurements that we fail to explain.
I’ll also say that when we’re trying to explain what we believe (as I’ve just now been attempting for example), I think we should feel some obligation to mention any extreme implications of our positions rather than hope that they go unnoticed. Here we get into Einstein’s advocacy for thought experiments that test the bounds of what a given proposal happens to be. Sometimes popular advocates for a given position hide or ignore any extreme implications of their position, or perhaps don’t even grasp them. For example I once asked Keith Frankish to assess my thumb pain thought experiment, though I think it was very much in his interests to ignore that request. Thus he remains better able to indoctrinate people to his cause without them quite grasping what they’re signing up for. https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2023/04/there-are-no-chairs-says-illusionist.html?showComment=1682407320051#c8531945064707591093
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Eric,
I’m kind of curious what your thoughts are on incomplete theories. For example, Newton in his theory didn’t know what gravity was, so he just bracketed that and still worked up a highly predictive model of its effects. And Darwin had no mechanism for heredity in his theory of natural selection. His theory became more popular once biologists were able to synthesize it with genetics, although Mendel didn’t know what a “gene” fundamentally was, aside from being the unit of heredity.
None of these people were able to provide a fully causal account, yet we generally don’t consider them to have been peddling magic. Or does it matter how the theory is presented? For example, both Newton and Darwin were honest about what they couldn’t explain. That’s in comparison to Bohr and Heisenberg, who insisted that they’d found the final answer. (A dubious claim for any scientific theory.) If Bohr and Heisenberg had just said, “Look, we don’t know what happening here, but here’s a partial answer with a framework for at least predicting the probability of outcomes,” would you be less inclined to use the “magic” label?
On mentioning extreme applications, I think for a strict adherence to your causality principle, one extreme implication is the many worlds interpretation. It’s the only view of quantum mechanics that is fully causally determined. The next closest might be pilot wave, but it requires non-local effects, which I think require additional explanation. You can say, “We just don’t know,” but if you’re trying to find an actual explanation that is fully causal, and doesn’t require additional hidden variables, that’s the only one available. Doesn’t mean it’s right, since we might make discoveries later to make one of the others (like pilot wave) more complete. But seems like something to consider.
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I’m perfectly happy with incomplete theories Mike. As in the case of gravity, that seems to be our only option when things get basic. As I understand it, Einstein didn’t complete Newton’s theory but merely added a great improvement. Similarly quantum mechanics improves upon classical mechanics. Furthermore I fully acknowledge that if McFadden’s consciousness proposal becomes empirically validated well enough for general acceptance, it still wouldn’t be a complete theory. Why is it that certain EM fields exist as as such? There’d still be an associated “hard problem”, if you will. Maybe “an Einstein” would subsequently help out in this regard, or maybe not. Regardless I think its high time that these sorry fields eject all sorts of ideas that seem quite magical to me. I’m growing increasingly pessimistic that progress in other ways will be sufficient.
I didn’t realize that Bohr and Heisenberg insisted that they had a final answer. If so then that’s pretty bad. What I really hate however is when popular accounts (or even from working physicists) trash the legacy if Einstein this way. Instead I’d like it acknowledged that his opinion was causally quite responsible.
Maybe I don’t grasp certain fine details of the many worlds proposal. Tell me this. Does it posit that when an electron ends up doing one thing in our world though we had reason to believe that it might have done something else, that there will thus exist an otherwise separate realm of existence where everything is the same as it is here, except that the electron will do what it failed to do here? Because if that’s what they believe, then yes I am able to challenge that notion in terms of causality. What’s the causal explanation for the creation of an entire realm of existence that exists exactly like ours, though with the associated electron doing something different? And if that is what they posit quantum mechanics to reflect, what about the problem of infinite regress? Wouldn’t each of those otherwise separate realms then create realms of their own, and then again, and so on? Infinity may be easy for us to conceptualize, though it’s ridiculous in terms of causality.
I wouldn’t say I’m looking for perfect models of what exists. I’d say I’m looking for better models than what we have today. Furthermore part of this should be to help illustrate that various bad models, are bad models.
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It wasn’t just Bohr and Heisenberg. Most of the quantum physics community reportedly closed ranks in the 1930s and insisted that quantum theory was complete. There was nothing left to figure out. Einstein and Schrödinger were among the lonely voices insisting that there were unresolved issues. It’s what led to the EPR paper and Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment.
Even as late as the 1950s, David Bohm was ridiculed for addressing foundational issues. And Hugh Everett’s thesis would have ruined his academic career, if he had cared about having one. Even later John Stuart Bell had to warn any graduate students that wanted to work with him that they were putting their careers at risk.
It’s loosened up in recent decades. But even today, a lot of physics students are reportedly warned not to delve into quantum foundations until they’ve got tenure somewhere.
“What’s the causal explanation for the creation of an entire realm of existence that exists exactly like ours, though with the associated electron doing something different?”
There is no creation under the theory. We can think of it as the world splitting, in which the energy gets divided between each of the outcomes. Or we can view it as a huge number of already existing worlds that differentiate from each other depending on the causal effects of each state of the electron. Each view is a valid way of talking about the same ontology, the evolution of a universal wave function.
All the many worlds theory is, is that quantum effects don’t stop at the microscopic level, but scale up to macroscopic levels. The idea is we don’t perceive it because the entire macroscopic environment is in a superposition of many states, and we just happen to be in one of the versions of that environment.
(Relational quantum mechanics also posits a fully quantum universe with a single world (ostensibly), but it retains an indeterministic aspect. Only many-worlds is deterministic with local dynamics. At least unless Sabine Hossenfelder is right about some version of superdeterminism, but that’s back to adding hidden variables, and I’m dubious that what she describes isn’t a form of retrocausality.)
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I don’t know Mike, the whole thing sounds fishy to me. It reminds me of the sort of explanations that they provide in eastern themed carnival tents, or even trendy wellness retreats. Complexity is the hallmark of pseudo science.
There is no creation under the theory. We can think of it as the world splitting, in which the energy gets divided between each of the outcomes.
I can see how positing “creation” would be a red flag in the physics community. But thinking of it as “energy divided between each of the outcomes”? To me that sounds like similar trouble. Wouldn’t our world thus be missing energy given such sharing? And aren’t these suppose to be separate worlds that have their own stars and all the rest? If these worlds do function like ours, wouldn’t QM mandate that they have their own “many worlds”, and so further extension would lead to the infinite regress of worlds?
Or we can view it as a huge number of already existing worlds that differentiate from each other depending on the causal effects of each state of the electron.
In a causal sense I don’t understand how it could be an option for us to view this either as worlds that split off, or already existing worlds. But given the “already existing worlds” option, I guess each time an electron (or anything else) “zigs” rather than “zags” in a quantum sense, there would be an associated world where the other also happens. But once again, wouldn’t each of these worlds display quantum mechanics and so require their own “many worlds” to thus lead to infinite regress?
Since you’ve presented these as two different ways of thinking about this however, perhaps the whole thing is just a metaphor? Does the many worlds proposal actually not posit the existence of any other worlds? If so then I guess their point would be that our world functions as if there were many worlds. (Or at least until we ask too many questions about the existence of those supposed other worlds.) Metaphors can certainly help us grasp explanations, though I’ve never known them to actually exist as explanations. For example, I like to think of electrical wiring in terms of water pipes. Here voltage associates with water pressure and amperage associates with the flow associated with water pipe diameter. But here water pipes are just a crutch for understanding something else, which is to say electrical wiring itself. If “many worlds” is just a metaphor for an explanation, then what’s the actual explanation? From this metaphor perspective, “many worlds” would seem to reduced back to nothing more than “shut up and calculate”.
All the many worlds theory is, is that quantum effects don’t stop at the microscopic level, but scale up to macroscopic levels.
I thought it was generally understood that quantum effects scale up to macroscopic levels. Theoretically my whole body functions both as particle and wave, though the math says it’s merely unlikely that my whole body will ever display quantum superposition and such. I thought it was generally understood that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle still applies, and even though my body is too massive and hot for any practical observations of quantum effects.
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Eric,
Both science and pseudoscience can seem complex. The difference is that scientific complexity becomes clearer the more you study it. Studying pseudoscience typically just reveals obfuscation. You can’t tell from a superficial impression. You have to do the work. (Or trust an expert.) It’s why the public is so susceptible to misinformation on things like climate change, vaccines, and economics.
Note, my answers here are based on my current understanding. It’s always possible I might be wrong on some of this. For more authoritative answers (under the splitting view): https://www.hedweb.com/everett/everett.htm
“Wouldn’t our world thus be missing energy given such sharing?”
No because under the split accounting, everything is renormalized to the new energy level. So if an outcome had a 50% chance of occurring, when the split happens, 50% of the energy goes into the worlds where that outcome occurred. That applies to everything in that branch, lab monitoring equipment, people, buildings, planets, stars, etc. Under the gradual split view, any interaction that might enable you to notice the discrepancy promulgates the split, so you never get a chance to compare the energy levels.
“In a causal sense I don’t understand how it could be an option for us to view this either as worlds that split off, or already existing worlds.”
It’s different ways of accounting for the same dynamics. Consider all the countries in Europe. Countries and their borders are a human convention. (For that matter, so is “Europe”.) Prior to WWII, the borders were pretty different. Germany was divided during the cold war, and reunified afterward. Were they always one country artificially separated? Or did they split and later recombine? There’s no strict fact of the matter. It depends on how you define “country” and how you’re trying to understand the dynamics.
“”But once again, wouldn’t each of these worlds display quantum mechanics and so require their own “many worlds” to thus lead to infinite regress?”
Under the theory, there are a very large number of worlds. The theory is silent on whether it’s infinite, or just a very large number. (At least e^10^122 according to some kind of entropy calculation Sean Carroll made.) It can be finite but still large enough that we won’t run out of splits / diverges before the heat death of the universe. So in the splitting account, there is going to be room for it to be split further for a very long time. In the pre-existing worlds account, there will be worlds similar enough to have coherent interference between them in an isolated quantum system for a very long time.
“If “many worlds” is just a metaphor for an explanation, then what’s the actual explanation?”
In Everett’s original thesis, he didn’t use words like “worlds”, “universes”, or anything along those lines. He just talked about the universal wave function. Most simply, you can see a “world” as the part of the universal wave function we can currently perceive. Although that simple statement still leaves room for the different accounts. For the splitting vs pre-existing world accounts, it depends on whether you regard a zillion identical worlds as one world that splits, or as a zillion worlds that diverge or differentiate from each other. Again, no fact of the matter.
“I thought it was generally understood that quantum effects scale up to macroscopic levels.”
Bohr saw the rules changing once macroscopic systems were involved. Of course, he never clarified what he meant by “macroscopic”. Since decoherence theory in the 1970s, a lot more physicists talk in terms like you describe, but while decoherence addresses why quantum interference effects disappear, it doesn’t address what happens to the outcomes we don’t observe. That’s what the “interpretations” address.
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On the thing about the energy being shared, maybe, though I can’t that say I’m understanding the argument itself. I guess if Sabine Hossenfelder explicitly is okay with such an account then I’d trust her.
On the splitting account versus already existing account being just two ways of talking about the same thing, I think there’s good reason to disagree. If there were two of me then this should be inherently different than if there were one of me that splits off into two of me. Why? Because in the first situation there is no split, and the second situation there is a split. I see no way around there being a fact of the matter that these situations are causally different. I’d say there are lots of ideas that address something more than human convention based nominal existence.
On the topic of infinite regress, I actually wasn’t referring to quantum fluctuations as infinite and thus that “many” worlds might better be classified as “infinite” worlds. Though the “many” term here may be humorously modest, I do agree that we needn’t perceive an infinity in that regard. The infinity that I’m referring to instead depends upon an explanation that posits even a single other world. So let’s say that quantum mechanics requires there to be an entire world that’s exactly like ours, except for a single quantum difference. That would imply that this other world would also function by means of QM and so the need for a third generation world as well. Then the third generation should require a fourth, and the fourth a fifth, and so on for infinite regress. To me this infinity is a huge red flag.
Apparently you’re saying that “many worlds” is not posited as a mere metaphor for something else. So I take it that Everette didn’t quite grasp that implications of his universal wave function idea also meant “many worlds”. This sort of thing actually happens quite a lot. People often posit things without quite realizing the full implications of what they posit. For example when people postulate/fabricate some sort of consciousness formula, panpsychism often result. Thus today lots of people now actually refer to themselves as “panpsychists” given adherence to various fabricated consciousness formulas. “Computationalism” surely had no idea that their proposal mandates that if paper with the right markings on it were properly converted into more paper with the right markings on it, then something here would experience what they do when their thumbs get whacked. Indeed, I think “many worlds” could have been marketed as a strong argument against Everette’s proposal rather than a funky argument for it. In any case, apparently all of this is to be expected in areas where scientists continue to struggle.
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Not sure what you mean by energy being shared, but Hossenfelder is not an Everettian. She did a video a while back explaining why. Although after watching it several times and going over the transcript, I was never able to understand what her actual issue was. Her own preferred approach is superdeterministic hidden variable theories with a vague hint of a retrocausality she doesn’t want to call “retrocausality”.
On splitting vs divergence, let’s consider two scenarios. Scenario 1 is Single-Eric composed of X amount of energy. He performs a quantum experiment with two 50% probable outcomes. The result splits him into two Erics, one seeing the first result and the other seeing the second. Scenario 2 is a zillion identical Erics, all in the same time and place and with the same history up to that point, and each composed of X / zillion amounts of energy. The zillion Erics perform the same quantum experiment. Half of them see the first result and the other half see the second. The point is that in wave function terms, these two scenarios are the same scenario, just described in two different ways.
On the infinite regress, I did address that question. Let me put it another way, sticking to the splitting account. A world has a certain “thickness” (the energy level mentioned above). I think what you’re concerned about is that the constant splitting makes every resulting world thinner and thinner. There’s no issue here with the math. It will accommodate infinite splitting. But if there is a minimum energy level in nature, leading to some finite number of splitting, it can still be a very large number, enough to take us to the heat death of the universe. (Indeed, reaching heat death might be equivalent to reaching the lowest energy levels, the lowest “thickness”.)
Everett grasped all the implications. We know because he discussed them with people after the paper was published. But he stayed away from them as much as possible in the paper, mostly on the advice of his graduate advisor, John Wheeler, who wanted to keep it as grounded as possible to sell it to Bohr. Of course Bohr didn’t buy it. (The implications were obvious to anyone who understood the theory.) One of the people Everett discussed the implications with was a guy named Bryce DeWitt. DeWitt was skeptical, but kept studying it. He was the one who years later published articles about it under the name “Many Worlds”. It’s possible we wouldn’t even know about the theory if he hadn’t.
You seem to be seeing many-worlds as a reductio ad absurdum against Everett’s theory. The problem is that science is full of such reductio ad absurdum arguments that ultimately were wrong. Einstein saw entanglement as one against quantum theory. People just won Nobel prizes for demonstrating the reality of entanglement. These kinds of arguments are sterile, because reality has repeatedly shown itself to be absurd, at least by the standards of pre-scientific human intuitions.
Scientific theories should be accepted or rejected on whether they fit the data. Everett’s core theory does, with fewer assumptions than other accounts since it’s just quantum theory followed to the bitter end. The worlds are untestable, and so should be irrelevant in that assessment. Doesn’t mean the theory’s right, but we don’t have grounds to dismiss it.
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Word choice, when blogging, can be tricky. You’re writing for a mixed audience: people who are already well-informed about the topic and also people who have stumbled upon your blog and are reading about this stuff for the first time.
As an example, on my own blog I generally avoid the word “spacecraft.” For some people, the word spacecraft apparently implies that there’s a crew aboard. So instead, unless the spacecraft actually does have a crew aboard, I almost exclusively say space probe. It’s still accurate, for readers who know what I’m talking about, but for new readers who may not know much about space exploration, it spares them some potential confusion.
I feel like for your blog, the language of cognitive science has so much more nuance and subtly than the language of space exploration. I don’t envy you having to balance the needs of all the different subgroups within your audience.
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Good point, both generally and about the word “spacecraft”. Now you have me wondering if I used it anywhere for an uncrewed probe.
It’s always a judgment call on how much of a post to spend on terminology. There’s value in teaching it to people, but it can make for very dense reading. And most of them have no interest in learning to read scientific papers. I usually put a warning at the top if the post is going to delve too far into the weeds for most casual readers.
With cognitive science, it’s not just nuance, but often outright disagreement on what key terms mean. And in many cases, refusal to even acknowledge that there are any alternate understandings of the terms. I find the IAU amusing for its definition of “planet”, but there are times when I wish the cognitive fields had something like it.
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The I.A.U. does good work. I rarely hear any complaints about them, except for that one time.
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I don’t think using non-standard language is sneaky or wrong, especially not when you’re being more explicit and detailed than the standard language would have you be. I tend to avoid -ism and -ist words if I have a reason to think what I’m saying will get lumped into a particular camp I don’t wish to be a card-carrying member of. Also, I’m often not sure I know the full implications of the -ism words, so there’s another reason to avoid them.
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Sounds like we’re on similar pages. One thing I’ve learned when someone else uses alternate language, is not to say, “That’s Xism,” since that’s exactly what they were trying to avoid. Although I might ask “Is that Xism?” or how their view is distinct from that label.
The other thing I’ve been caught by a couple of times recently is someone using words in a generic fashion that just happen to be the same as an -ism or theory label. In both cases, there were multiple exchanges before I realized they weren’t referring to the specific academic concept, but a more general one. Language makes things pretty hard at times.
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I know what you mean by generic vs. technical. So many words are like that!
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