I wrote this essay with the help of AI for structure, formatting, and error correction. I give only the first and the last paragraphs here so that the reader can decide if they want to follow the link to the full essay, in the hope that this is sufficient to avoid violation of protocol.
Introduction
What is a particle? The answer, according to modern physics, is far stranger than the tiny billiard balls of classical imagination. We are accustomed to thinking of matter as composed of discrete, persistent objects—electrons, protons, neutrons—that exist independently of our observation. Yet quantum field theory (QFT), the most successful framework in contemporary physics, paints a radically different picture. In this essay, I will explore the QFT framework, where particles are not fundamental objects but excited states of underlying fields that permeate all of space. I will argue that this framework leads inexorably to a relational view of existence: what counts as a ‘particle’ depends upon the observer’s motion, horizons transform the quantum vacuum into a thermal bath, and the very notion of an objective, observer-independent ‘reality’ dissolves. The universe, I will suggest, is not a collection of things but a network of relations.
Conclusion
We are not passive witnesses to an objective ‘reality’ but active participants in its construction. The cosmos we inhabit is not given to us; it is constituted by our relationship to the fields, the horizons, and the other observers with whom we share this vast, entangled domain. In the end, physics teaches us that to exist is to be in relation—and that, perhaps, is the deepest lesson of all.
I’m very glad that you shared this. I wanted to comment on it, but I was hoping I could do it on the forum. I’m going to reread it now and then try to help kick off the conversation.
The bolded part is more in my wheelhouse, though I was impressed by how well you made the physics accessible. I’m curious how you tend to understand the signs that observers trade.
We might say that the universe is constructing itself, to some degree, as it discusses itself. The historical approach to this can be found in Kojeve’s famous lectures on Hegel, for instance. You get difficult passages like this:
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both the Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes.
The observers are of course parts of the universe. I think we largely agree on the thorny issue of consciousness, so I will ask you here about the “significance” or “meaning” — as you understand it — of mathematical models and philosophical attempts to sew these models into a coherent sense of the world. This isn’t a challenge. I’m just curious about how you currently approach this delicate issue.
My take is that — for humans at least — the world is largely but not only the “significance” of signs that “store” and “compress” experience.
Are there some things in the universe that do not interact with much or anything ?
Can you help me understan for example nutrinos ? I think they may be in relation with other things, but do they react or change much ? Don’t know if this is a good example.
If it is a bad example, my question just is, aren’t we in search for many particles, which we cannot find ? Is it because they don’t exist or because they relate and interact beyond our gage, maybe not relating or interacting with us, for example the graviton.
Neither of these black hole types exhibit Hawking radiation. They’re static vacuum solutions, stable over time. For a metric that includes mass loss to Hawking radiation, the best is probably the Vaidya metric, or Vaidya black holes.
This takes me back to my question of whether we are approaching the same territory from different directions. An analogy might be the way that physics, chemistry, and biology are all talking about the same world, but at different levels of complexity. The huge number of “possible worlds” that physics permits has been reduced dramatically at the level of chemistry – so dramatically that a whole new level of explanation explanation emerges because the counterfactuals can be ignored. And similarly when we move from chemistry to biology.
By the time we get to the level of semiotics and semantics we are so far removed from the physical that any connection between them seems nebulous to say the least. Looking at the world through the lens of physics becomes a completely different endeavor to looking at the world through the lens of signs. But it’s the same world. I argue here that there is a progressive process of constraint at work – a kind of ‘pruning’ that might provide a bridge between your approach and my approach.
That makes sense to me. I would add literary criticism or maybe sociology as something that comes “after” biology. As you say in the linked resource, we have a pile of layers.
I think we are approaching from different directions. As I was resolving the cognitive dissonance that hit me when I saw serious issues with representational realism, I realized that we humans each get the shared world through the “lens” of our individual personalities. I tried to pin this down with the phrase “dramaturgical ontology.” It’s not that exciting unless one seriously questions “objective reality.” I was thinking of course about consciousness and measurement. I wasn’t yet clear on “consciousness as presence,” but I finally felt the problem.
A particular human being perceives and interprets a state of affairs, records a measurement. Or testifies as a witness. The “factual” and the “relatively simple” is “controlled” by a very complex object like an entire historically developed personality that relies on an inherited and historically developed sign-system to make sense of ( determine ) the perceptually present situation. Without “consciousness” there is no determinate reality — if one finally questions the magical pre-articulation that is often tacitly presupposed.
I eventually had to give up on “objective reality” and embrace ontological perspectivism to make sense of empirical science. A single, shared world, but only “from point of view.” This “only” applies to what I could make sense of.
This is a tangential issue but an interesting contribution. However, I’m not sure about its relevance to my account. I’ve poked around a bit and found the following. Black holes evaporate over immense timescales. The Vaidya metric is the technically the more accurate description of that evolution, but in the case of Hawking radiation the rate of loss of mass of the black hole is so slow that the spacetime is effectively static for the duration of the particle creation process. Would you disagree?
So I hear you, but I want to point out the tension between the sign “physical” and objects that are classified as “physical.”
I try to express this with “objects are generalized signs.” The “unity” of the object is basically the “unity” of the repeatable sign. The object is “percieved here now.” The word is “spoken here now.” The object is each case is not that single perception. The object is “perceived as” something enduring and only given-in-relation.
The enduring intersubjective object is “ideal”, but not in the sense of mental. Instead the object is “like” a sign. And the sign is of course an object in the world.
Related point : it seems to me that “understanding physics” involves the “coming into vivid significance” of the signs in the discourse of physics. A tact or know-how is developed.
I want to say that knowledge is largely the “significance” of signs for the knowing perceiver. It’s also a know-how for the trading of this kind of sign. And a skill at relating these sign-objects to non-sign-objects. The signs are “used” to build a powerful device, for example. The device is not a sign, but a know-how with physics signs enables its construction.
As Terrence Deacon argues in Incomplete Nature, meaning arises from absences. A word refers to something not physically present; a goal refers to a future state that does not yet exist. Semiotics is the study of how these “absences” (constraints) exert real causal power over matter, guiding physical energy toward specific outcomes (e.g., building a house based on a blueprint, following a recipe, or obeying a traffic signal).
This is great ! Our gift as symbol traders is “time-binding” (Korzybski) or the quasi-presence of the perceptually absent. As you mention and I elaborate, primitive signs are like the predator cry that “is” the predator, but still at a distance where a warning matters.
Have you seen the show Pluribus ? It’s a bit slow, but the first episode is perfect sci-fi. A signal from outer space is recognized as DNA code. Researches put it in mice, and the mice bite humans and the code transforms almost all of the human species into radical hippies. So a low-energy code from far away transforms an entire planet.
Agreed. I was aware when I was building the case that I was over-simplifying. Finding the correct balance is difficult.
I had to smile. It’s a comment that might sound insane to most people, but it hardly needs arguing for from my perspective – consciousness simply IS the ‘being’ of that “determinate reality.”
Cool. I thought you would agree. I just wanted to further emphasize that I have come at our situation from that direction, primarily. Of course I also studied mathematics.
Yes ! I still enjoy it every time that someone gets me ( and I get them ) on this fundamental issue.
I think it sounds insane to some people because they can’t help thinking of consciousness as an internal stuff that is in the world. They think we are talking about idealism — making the “internal picture” absolute. There is no picture ! And it’s not a monism of mindstuff but a genial flexible pluralism of worldstuff.
But if we say the same thing differently, that “consciousness does not exist,” then we face a different misunderstanding. People think we are denying “qualia.” Of course we are denying “qualia” but only to emphasize that objects themselves are qualitative. ( I made a few assumptions about your view here which I invite you to correct if necessary.)
I continue to argue that this is “really just” a careful spelling out of the beliefs that people enact away from theoretical games. They believe that their friends can see and hear them. They believe that their friends can perceive the same objects they perceive, but differently, as a function of physiology and personal history, etc.
They don’t talk to a “mystical smoke” in the brain of their friend. The “consciousness” of their friend is not an object in the world. The friend as organism is in the world, but that doesn’t cut it. They talk to “the entire shared world from the point of view of that friend.” My signs, I trust, are “there in their quality and significance” …“for” my friend. What is this strange for-ness ? It’s primary, however strange and yet familiar.
The reply lies in multiple realizability: the same semantic state (e.g., the belief that “I am hungry”) can be realized by countless different physical configurations (different neural networks, different species, potentially even different substrates). The semantic level constrains not which specific neurons fire, but that the system as a whole must arrive at a particular behavioral outcome—leaving the physical details underdetermined.
This is great too. It touches on what I am trying to point at with the word “ideal.” Trillions of noises all “function” as sayings of the “same” word. The word is a vague ideal “role” that gathers an “ocean of difference” into a unity that is “ideal” or “virtual” or…? I’m always looking for better words.
To me the main thing is to notice the phenomenon itself. I put these marks on the screens of others as an attempt to point. These marks on the screen aren’t containers of “meaning stuff” but they do — in my view — strangely somehow direct the attention of others to this or that feature of the shared world. But only because and when our lives in the world trading signs are “close enough.” I have to “abuse” the “average” use of signs to point at something “impractical.” Bakhtin is great on this. In concrete conversations, we play on the rules, break the rules. Which keeps language evolving.
But I don’t “know” in a strong sense that others will find in the world what I find in it. That’s part of the “ideality” of the thing pointed at. It’s “in-progress” and “being negotiated.”
Your question is more relevant to the subject of this thread than might be suspected. Let me start with a different example. In the early 1900s astronomers noticed that the orbit of Uranus exhibited anomalies, calling into question Newton’s Laws of Motion. In order to save Newton’s Laws, it was postulated that there was another celestial body purturbing the orbit of Uranus, and by looking exactly where Newton’s Laws dictated that body should be, the planet Neptune was discovered.
In the case of the neutrino, the problem was Beta decay. It was discovered that the emitted electron did not have the energy predicted by the law of conservation of energy, nor the spin predicted by the law of conservation of angular momentum. In order to save the conservation laws, it was postulated that there was another particle accompanying the decay that carried away the missing energy and angular momentum. But because it had no charge and very little mass, it would interact so weakly with matter that it had escaped detection. The existence of the neutrino was eventually empirically validated by the Cowan–Reines neutrino experiment.
The relevance of this to the topic of discussion here is that examples like this abound, and are grist to the mill for Hilary Putnam’s “no miracles” argument in support of scientific realism. The relational view of physics (particularly Carlo Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics) attempts to reconcile realism with anti-realism.
“I” is not the name of a person, nor “here” of a place, and “this” is not a name. But they are connected with names. Names are explained by means of them. It is also true that it is characteristic of physics not to use these words.
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What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings; we are not contributing curiosities however, but observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes.
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“Human beings agree in saying that they see, hear, feel, and so on (even though some are blind and some are deaf). So they are their own witnesses that they have consciousness”—But how strange this is! Whom do I really inform, if I say “I have consciousness”? What is the purpose of saying this to myself, and how can another person understand me?—Now, expressions like “I see”, “I hear”, “I am conscious” really have their uses. I tell a doctor “Now I am hearing with this ear again”, or I tell someone who believes I am in a faint “I am conscious again”, and so on.
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Is my having consciousness a fact of experience ?
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But can’t I imagine that the people around me are automata, lack consciousness, even though they behave in the same way as usual? — If I imagine it now — alone in my room — I see people with fixed looks (as in a trance) going about their business—the idea is perhaps a little uncanny. But just try to keep hold of this idea in the midst of your ordinary intercourse with others, in the street, say !
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Say to yourself, for example: “The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism.” And you will either find these words becoming quite meaningless; or you will produce in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or something of the sort.
[I]n my case, it always happens that the idea of one particular experience presents itself to me which therefore is, in a sense, my experience par excellence and this is the reason why, in talking to you now, I will use this experience as my first and foremost example. (As I have said before, this is an entirely personal matter and others would find other examples more striking.) I will describe this experience in order, if possible, to make you recall the same or similar experiences, so that we may have a common ground for our investigation. I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world.
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If I say “I wonder at the existence of the world” I am misusing language. Let me explain this: It has a perfectly good and clear sense to say that I wonder at something being the case, we all understand what it means to say that I wonder at the size of a dog which is bigger than anyone I have ever seen before or at any thing which, in the common sense of the word, is extraordinary. In every such case I wonder at something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case. I wonder at the size of this dog because I could conceive of a dog of another, namely the ordinary size, at which I should not wonder. To say “I wonder at such and such being the case” has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it’s clouded. But that’s not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it’s just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.
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And I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle. Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times?
People tend to think of Heidegger when the “ontological difference” is mentioned, but Wittgenstein nails it here. It is an “abuse of language” or “nonsense” to try to point at the “presence” or “being” of the world as something that is not a thing in that world.
As far as I know, there’s no situation quite like this anywhere else in philosophy. The ontological difference is weird. And yet not “getting it” leads to all kinds of confusion on the issue of “consciousness.” I look for The-world-for-Joe like it’s a thing in The-world-for-me. Absurd !
Plato seems to be making a similar point in Timaeus. He has to use a “bastard discourse” ( “nonsense”) to point at the “chora,” which I take as a synonym for the “quality” that we find “articulated” in terms of ideal unities. Both find themselves at the limit, trying to say something important.
Yes. There’s a “gathering” or “compression” over time. Each generation inherits the compression achieved so far and deepens it, passing it on.
I’m always glad to hear about Wheeler. He sort of sounds like the Hegel of physics. I won’t pretend to have mastered all of Hegel, but these passages speak to me and seem relevant.
The living substance, further, is that being which is truly subject, or, what is the same thing, is truly realised and actual (wirklich) solely in the process of positing itself, or in mediating with its own self its transitions from one state or position to the opposite.
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It is the process of its own becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its beginning; it becomes concrete and actual only by being carried out, and by the end it involves.
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The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only at the end is it what it is in very truth; and just in that consists its nature, which is to be actual, subject, or self-becoming, self-development.
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What has been said may also be expressed by saying that reason is purposive activity.
The smart move by the creator is to make the “brainwashed” humans almost heroic. They act as a single mind, and indeed somehow they share a single mind. The story centers on one of the few humans who happened to be immune to the virus. She’s a great foil because she’s a cranky selfish brat — but one we can find our humanity in.
If you saw Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul, it’s that same team.