I’m not math literate, regrettably. English is my forté. I will always acknowledge that, although I still think that meaningful discussions can be had on the philosophy of physics without the maths. After all many who know the maths are philosophically illiterate. (Incidentally I have a bootleg copy of Michel Bitbol’s well-regarded book on Schrödinger’s philosophy of physics in .pdf if you’re interested.)
1 Like
I don’t mind an addition to my library, but let’s not. Thanks anyway.
Hartry Field’s science without numbers might be worth a read. The catch is the relationships are quantitative. Galileo, when he discovered that the distance an object falls goes with the square of the time it’s falling, had made the stupendous discovery that the language of nature is math. Math is the key to knowledge of the cosmos.
Eugene Wigner penned, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Math in the Natural sciences. He was right but he seems to have missed the fact that some equations in physics are rendered unintelligible by infinity.
No, I think the concept of something being “intelligible” means an understanding of what it is or how it functions at the most fundamental level is possible.
But we know there is going to be weather, and we know what causes it. And we know there is going to be human behavior - and can form understandings about what caused it
I suppose I mean the physical universe in which we exist. And technology is broadening the scope of what our senses can detect about it.
We can certainly form theories about what this existence is.
[quote=“John, post:33, topic:3617”]
Yes, we can be mistaken when there are relevant facts we are unaware of. Does that rule out things being intelligible, though?
Not at all. Maybe we can think of intelligibility as a potentiality. We may not have all the correct information yet, but it is possible to uncover it.
Yes, among 8 billion people, you’re going to get different takes on it. For example, animism and strict materialism are opposed to one another
1 Like
If the universe is supposedly so intelligible, why do we need an entire thread debating whether it is intelligible at all? If its intelligibility were truly self-evident, this debate wouldn’t even be necessary.
Clearly, its not that intelligible, since we have to discuss it in the first place.
People constantly debate whether God exists and whether our understanding of reality is correct, whether we are right or wrong. If the universe were truly that intelligible, we would expect far greater agreement on these fundamental questions rather than endless debate even between great minds they don’t hold the same views ever in anything. Clearly, reality is far from being as intelligible as we ought to be.
2 Likes
The root of “intelligible” is “legible”, which means “sufficiently clearly written to be easily read”.
So for the universe to be “intelligible” it must be accurately described linguistically. But the map is not the territory, and language never describes reality perfectly.
Hence, the universe is not (perfectly) intelligible.
1 Like
To OP it was
My argument was coming from that definition
Still, the point stands: the universe is not that intelligible. Language can describe our experience of reality, but it can never fully capture it; words are merely shadows of the reality we experience.
1 Like
Maybe because some of us lack the ability to make things intelligible in a final satisfying sense. There is a fly in the proverbial soup, which is akin to a shadow, void, lack, which tells us the project of trying to understand is always unfinished.
At least when it comes to how absurd/irrational life seems we can understand the many (contingent) reasons why. But it isn’t enough.
1 Like
My take: Schrodinger perhaps found the conclusion (the cat being in superposition of dead and alive) absurd, indicating that it is contradictory to classical intuitions. His intent was perhaps that the conclusion was wrong rather than the intuitions, and in that sense, yes, I think he mishandled things.
On the other hand, he put the system in ‘an iron box’ which is hardly a container from which no information can escape. Any local container that can do this would likely kill the cat unconditionally. So in a practical sense, yes, you can put a macroscopic object in superposition (it’s been done), but not a cat.
What the iron box did was put the cat into an epistemic uncertain state, meaning Schrodinger didn’t know if it was dead or alive, but that’s a very different state than one of superposition.
Remember that this example was put out there in the very early days of QM when Copenhagen was all they had, and it was an epistemic interpretation, not an ontic one. The cat being in superposition is an ontic state, so the interpretation at the time simply said that we know that the cat is in this state, which is different than saying one doesn’t know the state of the cat.
Yes, for the purpose of falsification of what the mathematics implied? Except it backfired since eventually it became the meme demonstrating the weirdness of QM, not falsifying it at all.
Except macroscopic objects very much can. It’s just really hard (but not impossible) to get them to interfere with each other.
or possible
Before observation the cat is dead and alive. When observed it is dead or alive. Statements are made under certain conditions e.g. when I say, it’s a hot day, it means I measured the temperature and found it to be high. If I say, Sam may come to the party, it means there’s a possibility that he might cancel. When I say it’s likely that Sam will come, I mean Pr(Sam will come) > 50%.
Sadly, I’m not so far ahead in math to grok Schrödinger’s equation. All I can muster is that from a classical physics POV (with all its baggage) the state of a particle (let’s take spin) is both spin up and spin down. Observationally the particle is either spin up or down, never both. The Born rule gives us the probabilities of the 2 states.
What’s noteworthy though is that Schrödinger equation itself is perfectly consistent mathematically. It’s not like we get 1 = 0.
Schrödinger’s cat presumably has an opinion, too. Unless it is dead.
Probably wouldn’t want to venture an opinion either way 
Couldn’t Wigner’s friend be a cat? Or is having access to language a necessity for collapsing wave functions?
This is really one of the great themes of our ongoing conversation.
I am very much for recognizing and even emphasizing the helpless finitude of all sense making. On the other hand, I have always felt that phrases like “completely unrelated” almost have to fail to signify.
Except as an emphasis of our finitude as sense-makers and of the terrible reality of future experience. So we pretty much agree.
Being in superposition of dead and alive is different than being both dead and alive. The latter violates law of non contradiction and the former does not.
Not all interpretations accept a state of superposition. Any counterfactual interpretation (DBB say) says the cat is in but one state, dead or alive, measured or not.
That’s the obvious retort of presuming humans are special. Replace the cat with a human. Now either all humans are in superposition or none are. Copenhagen is epistemological, and the human in the box knows stuff not known by the guy outside. An objective collapse theory would not allow significant (where’s the line??) macroscopic superpositions. Something like MWI allows the cat to be both dead and alive in respective worlds, but those worlds will not significantly interfere with each other, so it’s not technically a superposition.
Yes, I suspected as such but I’ll have to work on it a bit more. The cat is both dead and alive though if we don’t peek in because the particle is both decayed and not. The equation says that the particle is decayed and not decayed, does it not?
Measurement seems key to it. Hard to imagine how anything other than a scientist could occupy that role. (Some will say that a measurement can be recorded by a device without any human involvement, but then, a human built the device for that purpose, and furthermore nobody would know if a measurement had been taken unless is was checked by an observer.)
I’ ve said I’m not trained in the mathematics, but the philosophical conundrum can be stated quite plainly without it. The question is, what really is being described by the equations? Is it really a wave, or a particle, or a hybrid — and how could anything possibly be both? And so on.
Sir Roger Penrose, who can be found in any number of online interviews declaring that quantum theory is nonsensical, puts it very plainly:
Discover Magazine: In quantum mechanics an object can exist in many states at once, which sounds crazy. The quantum description of the world seems completely contrary to the world as we experience it.
Sir Roger Penrose: It doesn’t make any sense, and there is a simple reason. You see, the mathematics of quantum mechanics has two parts to it. One is the evolution of a quantum system, which is described extremely precisely and accurately by the Schrödinger equation. That equation tells you this: If you know what the state of the system is now, you can calculate what it will be doing 10 minutes from now. However, there is the second part of quantum mechanics — the thing that happens when you want to make a measurement. Instead of getting a single answer, you use the equation to work out the probabilities of certain outcomes. The results don’t say, “This is what the world is doing.” Instead, they just describe the probability of its doing any one thing. The equation should describe the world in a completely deterministic way, but it doesn’t⁷
Notice the “should” here. Sir Roger is describing what we should expect a scientific measurement to confirm, but which quantum physics does not.
Einstein also put it plainly:
if one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I don’t see at all what physics is supposed to be describing.
The whole controversy hinges on whether and in what sense the objects of physics are said to be, or said not to be, ‘mind-independent’. Because mind-independence is a fundamental tenet of scientific method, is it not? We’re supposed to be observers taking measurements of something that exists just so whether observed or not. Quantum physics showed that the experimental result was inextricably affected by the choice of experimental setup.
The dependence of what is observed upon the choice of experimental arrangement made Einstein unhappy. It conflicts with the view that the universe exists “out there” independent of all acts of observation. In contrast, Bohr stressed that we confront here an inescapable new feature of nature…In struglling to make clear to Einstein the central point as he saw it, Bohr found himself forced to intrroduce the world “phenomenon”. In today’s words, Bohr’s point — and the central point of quantum theory— can be put into a single, simple sentence. “No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed) phenomenon.” ~ John Wheeler Law Without
“From this disconcerting revelation emerged the notorious “observer problem,” the Gordian knot at the heart of quantum mechanics. The mathematics remains impeccable, the predictions astonishingly precise, yet the theory unsettles some of our deepest assumptions about what it means to observe, to know, and to describe.” The Limits of Objectivity.
1 Like
QM differes drastically from classical physics. That’s P’s point here. IMHO this comes later than and may depend on Schrödinger’s equation. @noAxioms states in an earlier post that superposition is not a contradiction. Yet the feline is dead and alive because the particle has/hasn’t decayed. The Schrödinger equation isn’t illogical in any way. We don’t arrive at e.g., as previously stated, 1 = 0. Do we? Non liquet.
I read your Medium article. A physicist summarized QM as a) probabilistic, b) superposition, and c) entanglement. Let’s look at the role of the observer in superposition. The state of a particle is a blend of possible states. If an observation is not made, it stays that way. Once we observe i.e. we make a measurement, the wave-function collapses and we have a definite answer to questions like, is the particle spin up or spin down?, is it here or there?, etc. The double-slit experiment is another situation where measurement has an effect, in this case whether (say) an electron is a wave or a particle. A question that bothers me is, how does the electron respond to the observation or the lack of it?
I’m also intrigued by Schrodinger’s equation, which according to Penrose describes the system from minute to minute in a very classical manner. Upon measurement the wave function collapses to definiteness. I feel there’s a gap here that needs to be bridged 
.
Indeed the classical view of the world is that subject and object are distinct. Does the moon exist when nobody is looking at it? ~ Einstein. This is the question that QM answers with the measurement problem vis-a-vis wave function.
3 Likes
Right on both counts! Those are the million-dollar questions.
2 Likes