'We Create Reality Together'

Philosophy of Science
22

Well, it sounds an awful lot to me like the central core of the Indigenous worldview. In all their primary ways of knowing, “all my relations” tops the list. It’s their philosophy, and their practice.

Here’s a summary of it -

The interconnected relationships with all living things is called the Sacred Circle of Life. First Nations teachings guide us to show respect for all within this Sacred Circle. An intense and deep connectedness with all that surrounds us is a foundational concept of First Nations philosophy. This includes a connection to Mother Earth and all that the Universe contains, including other people (personal relationships, family, neighborhoods, communities, nations), all of the plant beings and four legged brothers and sisters, the finned and flying beings, and ultimately the Great Spirit that animates all.

Probably the first Western natural philosopher to incorporate this concept into a scientific frame was Alexander von Humboldt, who learned it from the Indigenous communities he lived amongst while on his explorations. (early 19th century)

23

That’s part of it, but not all of it. But from a philosophical perspective, what I would call out is that sense of relatedness and participation in the world. It is contrasted with the drift in modern culture and society to the isolated individual ego who’s outlook on life is based on mathematicized abstractions (knowingly or otherwise). And agree, Von Humboldt was a fascinating character, a bit under-appreciated, I feel.

In 1900 Lord Kelvin — a leading public intellectual — remarked that physics was essentially complete, apart from ‘two clouds on the horizon’—one of which was the Michelson–Morley result. Those ‘clouds’ turned out to be relativity (1905) and quantum theory (~1927).

But that is exactly what quantum mechanics calls into question.

If measurement simply revealed a pre-existing value, then the outcome would be independent of how you chose to measure it and there would be no issue. But in quantum experiments, the choice of measurement (the observable, the setup, the basis) helps determine what can be observed at all.

That’s why there’s a “measurement problem”: the theory gives you a spread of possible outcomes (the wavefunction), but it doesn’t clearly explain how a single definite result arises—or what role measurement plays in that transition.

This is why Albert Einstein was always unhappy with quantum theory. Sir Roger Penrose likewise. It is because the theory doesn’t provide an exact description of the objects in question, only a distribution of probabilities as to where they might be found when a measurement is made. This is the infamous ‘collapse of the wave-function’. In that sense, it doesn’t tell you what is ‘out there’ anyway, independently of observation. And if you ask, where was it before it was measured, and is it a wave or a particle - these cannot be determined independently of measurement.

Physicist John Wheeler put it like this:

That’s the nub of the ‘measurement problem’. And yes, it is shocking. When Neils Bohr gave a lecture to the members of the Vienna Circle in the early 1950’s, they all applauded politely, but none of them asked any questions about it, prompting him to say ‘Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.’

24

I’ll take your word for that. But, thinking it could is not quite the same as thinking it does. It still could, couldn’t it? It’s not like physics has finished. Aren’t we in danger of exactly the same hubris thinking we now understand how things really are?

I see. I’m not at all familiar with quantum physics, way outside my comfort zone. What interests me is the tension here between the doubt expressed over the certainty of something like physics, in the same world - often the very same people, in fact - as we talk about misinformation and the problems of a post-truth era.

It sounds ridiculous to me to be saying we must doubt physics, but questioning the New York Times is tantamount to conspiracy theory.

25

I understand that bit (or at least as much lay understanding as I’m ever going to get - thanks for the paper by the way).

But that’s not the observer co-evolving anything. Our choice doesn’t change reality. Reality is such that if looked at one way, it’s one thing, if looked at another way, it’s another.

That’s still a statement about how reality is. And it’s immutable. We can’t make it not so.

If we play a part its entirety incidental.

Shocking, I agree, that we play a part at all. But still unrelated to humanity as we have no choice over that part, nor can we use it in any way, nor does it change anything about the reality we inhabit.

26

But even to say that, you have a referent in mind. You have a sense of objectivity, of the external world, which is vast in space and time, compared to the observer. But the observer provides a fundamental element of that, namely, the framework of space and time within which the objective realm is arrayed. That is the point of the neuroscience references in the article. This is where there’s a convergence between phenomenology and cognitive science that the article describes.

A graphic from the John Wheeler article Law without Law helps visualize the point:

WheelerR
WheelerR431×537 32.8 KB

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One point that I didn’t go along with in the Jo Marchant article I’ve cited was Anil Seth’s claim that ‘cognition is a controlled halucination.’ Even with an enactivist view of cognition I don’t like the word ‘hallucination’ in this context.

And lo and behold Evan Thompson pops up on the IAI website, with an essay saying that reality is NOT a controlled hallucination. From which:

“Reality is a controlled hallucination” is a provocative way of saying that what we perceive as reality is the content of an internally generated model reined in by correcting for error signals. Perception happens when the brain’s “best guesses” are tightly constrained by sensory signals; hallucination happens when the guesses are unconstrained or loosely constrained by sensory signals. In either case, the nature of the internal content (the guesses) is the same; what differs is the strength of the constraints. It’s supposed to follow that there is no difference in kind between the content of perception and the content of hallucination: perception is controlled hallucination, and hallucination is uncontrolled perception.

What the predictive processing theory gets right is that the brain plays an active, creative role in enabling us to engage with the world. This role cannot be captured by a feedforward network with a one-directional flow of activity from outside to inside. Furthermore, when we model the brain as a recurrent network that loops back onto itself like a snake biting its tail, then we cannot distinguish between perception and hallucination from the vantage point of its internal operation.

It doesn’t follow, however, that there is no real difference in kind between perception and hallucination at the level of the whole animal or person geared into the world. On the contrary, perception, like flying or dancing, is inherently relational and world-involving, whereas hallucination is not: hallucination is a kind of sensorimotor misfire that subjectively resembles but does not have the same kind of content as perception. As a general rule, it is illegitimate to read off facts about the whole concrete animal or person from an abstract, simplified model of one of its parts. This not only confuses the map with the territory but also conflates the perceiving agent with its brain. The brain enables perception but the perceiving agent is the whole body. Perception makes the world available to the agent, and the world disclosed to perception provides the standard for determining which subset of experiences may be hallucinatory.

(I’ve found you can register for free on the IAI website without entering payment details which will provide a grace period during which articles can be read for free.)

28

The observation is what provides, not the observer. It’s the act of observation that is said to ‘collapse’ these otherwise probable states. We have no actual choice and so we bring nothing whatsoever to the table except our mechanistic act of observation.

The diagram suggests the tape around the pegs could be arranged otherwise. But it couldn’t, it is arranged in the manner of the macro-scale laws of physics for every single human of earth, and is immutability so.

In the language of the diagram, a ‘fundamental reality’ (which we can’t know) provides the pegs, our observation of it provides the tape, and the result is the letter R - reality.

But we couldn’t not provide the tape, or provide it in any other configuration. It’s not us in the phenomenological sense. It’s us is the physical sense. A brain attached to some eyes. It might as well be a sophisticated camera.

29

I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with your interpretation. I’m not trying to be pedantic or score points, but there’s a fundamental issue here.

The point is that at the sub-atomic level, physical law is no longer fully deterministic in the way you’re suggesting. Consequently, there isn’t a single, observer-independent “way that it is” that is simply revealed by measurement. This is precisely why the interpretation of quantum mechanics remains contested—debates about realism and anti-realism turn on this issue.

Your point about the tape not being able to be arranged otherwise actually highlights the problem. In quantum experiments, the outcome depends on the experimental set-up. Different measurement arrangements can yield different, incompatible results, each of which is empirically correct. So it’s not simply a matter of a fixed reality being passively recorded (see this article).

Wheeler’s analogy makes this clear. There are “iron posts of observation” that anchor our knowledge in empirical findings—but what we call reality is the structure we build between those fixed points, which unites them into a coherent theory - the ‘R’, so to speak.

None of this implies that reality isn’t objective. But it does mean that objectivity isn’t simply given as a set of pre-existing values waiting to be read off. Observations are not raw, self-interpreting data; they are always made within a framework of measurement. In classical physics that framework can be taken for granted, but in quantum physics it becomes unavoidable, because what is observed depends on how the observation is made.

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No I think it’s you who’s doubting physics lol. You said you think classical physics is correct all the time. Physicists today wouldn’t agree with that. They’d agree with me, that that’s false.

Classical physics fails at the very least to describe what’s happening with fundamental particles, and depending on where you draw the line between classical and non classical, it might fail at those use cases that require relatively as well.

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I’m not denying that. I’m saying that to the extent to which is does so, it does so mechanistically. Experiment set up A will always result in measurement X, experiment set up B will always result in measurement Y. These are just more fundamental immutable laws about the way the world is.

Neither depend on how the observer is feeling, or what they think, or whether they support Celtic or Rangers. These are aspects of the observer.

What you’re describing are aspects of the observation, the mechanistic act, not the observer the person. So there’s no route by which phenomenology can get in, and there’s no greater mystery than the normal ‘stuff we don’t know’ - same as there’s a mystery about the deep ocean because there’s a lot of ‘stuff we don’t know’.

Evidence that the observer has an input into reality would be heterodoxy in physics depending on the person doing/experiencing it. We don’t have that, we have absolute uniformity, so nothing about the observer is having any impact.

Or you could, I suppose, say that there is something, but it’s consistent in every human identically. But if you say that, you still don’t escape mechanistic determinism, it’s just that we have some aspect of that within us, an immutable ‘fact’ of physics that we can’t change, just happens to be lodged in our brains somewhere.

Because ultimately, you have to explain the fact that the end result is a shared world of absolutely immutable laws.

32

That would be doubting physicists, not doubting physics.

But notwithstanding, I’m not talking about the theories explaining events because that’s not what the observer-input is describing. I’m talking about the actual events and states of the world.

Are there some physicists who disagree that when you drop an object on earth it will accelerate at 9.8 m/s? Are there physicists who deny the measured relationship between force and acceleration?

Where they differ is in their theories about how these things come to be, not that they are. The co-evolved reality being described here is about the way things are - reality - not the theories about how they came to be thay way.

33

Quantum mechanics doesn’t say that a given setup will always yield a specific outcome—it says it yields a probability distribution of possible outcomes. What is reproducible is the statistics over many trials, not the individual result. And which distribution you get depends on the experimental setup. So it’s not a single pre-existing value being revealed in a fixed way.

Of course it’s not subjective in the sense you imply. But measurement—which is crucial to determining the outcome—is not just a passive readout. The result depends on how the measurement is set up, and quantum theory only fixes the probabilities of outcomes, not a single pre-existing value.

The point is that you can’t eliminate the role of measurement from the theory—but the formalism itself doesn’t tell you what, exactly, counts as a measurement or how it produces a definite outcome.

34

To say classical physics is always correct directly contradicts modern physics. It contradicts quantum physics and relativity. Classical physics is incapable of predicting quantum phenomena, and (if you don’t include relativity as “classical”) incorrectly predicts many things relativity correctly predicts.

“Physics” is a broad term. You said I doubt “physics” for some reason, when all I said was that classical physics is wrong sometimes. Classical physics isn’t a synonym for “physics”.

36

Well, presumably we’d agree that it isn’t the case that we “we will always see things as they really, really, aren’t.” That would be epistemically fatal. But if ~(~R) is true, and ~R is true, that seems problematic.

Ironically, it seems more modest to me to say that we do not know things exhaustively, but neither do we fail to ever “really know them.” If we failed to ever really know anything, it follows that we would lack warrant to claim that everyone else also does so.

Anyhow, I guess a difficulty here is in the underlying metaphysics. If “we create reality together,” do we do so ex nihilo? But from whence the Born Rule, etc? Why would we create reality one way instead of any other, and according to observed “laws” and “rules” if there is nothing prior to our creative observation?

That’s a difficulty I see at least.

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37

I’m here to try again (my previous post was flagged as inappropriate and removed) to present a view that seems to diminish/nullify what seems to be a glorification of subjectivism/mind/consciousness/etc. by misrepresenting genuine/authentic science, by employing the devious tactic of ignotum per ignotius.

This view is that life is insignificant: There’s nothing about the universe that even suggests that it exists for life; life’s a sideshow, an afterthought, an extra in a movie. To imagine that we create reality in the way implied is nonsensical.

That set aside, intersubjectivity is real. Money is actually just colorful paper/plastic but because we all agree that it has economic value, it can be exchanged for real products.

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This calls into question, what exactly is “measurement”. Measurement is to use standards of practise, along with the required tools, to assign a quantitative value to a specified property. The important point, which is commonly overlooked, but brought to the forefront by quantum mechanics, is that it is the act of measurement which establishes that relationship between the specified property, and the quantitative value.

This is contrary to the common naive realist way of thinking, that there is already a value associated with the property prior to measurement, and measurement simply determines this value, or discovers it. So for example the naive realist would look at a glass of water and assume that there is a certain quantity of water in the glass, regardless of whether its been measured. But that is to assume that there is already a relationship between the glass of water and a specific quantitative value, before the water is even measured. In reality, that relationship is caused to come into being through an act of measurement. Measurement determines the specific value, producing a relationship between the value and the thing measured. Therefore the relationship does not exist prior to the act of measurement.

Consider how I described “measurement” above. The outcome of a measurement is dependent on the act of measurement. This is contrary to the naive view that the act of measurement replicates a preexisting relationship between the object to be measured, and a quantitative value.

Now, an act of observation is a descriptive act which involves taking note of what is sensed. And we can divide that descriptive act into two types, qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative is a simple judgement. The litmus turned from pink to blue, for example. The quantitative description on the other hand, is a complex judgement, because it also employs principles of measurement. The solution went for pH 3 to pH 9 requires principles, standards, to relate the colour to the number.

Notice in the example, the qualitative is a single application of standards, to judge the property, colour. The quantitative is a double application of standards, determine the property, then judge the quantity.

So Einstein’s uneasiness was a little misguided if we consider this dual level of observation. Since the qualitative judgement is always required prior to the quantitative judgement, to determine what is to be measured, we can say it is logically prior. So a failure in the qualitative judgement would necessitate a failure in the quantitative judgement, but not vise versa. This means that the issues with the quantitative judgement which Einstein was worried about, do not necessarily reflect back on the qualitative judgement.

The problems of quantum physics are associated with quantitative observations, the measurements of a photons, quanta of energy. However, qualitative observations of light energy note wave activity, rainbows, colours, and interference. The measurement issues do not apply to these qualitative judgements.

So the principal problem is that the quantitative judgements are fundamentally incompatible with the qualitative observations. Energy transmission as a wave cannot be made compatible with the energy transmission of a particle. This is a fundamental principle of physics. Energy moving from A to B as a wave is a completely different type of motion from energy moving from A to B as a body.

That there is a “pre-existing value”, is the naive realist understanding of measurement dismissed above. In reality, the act of measurement produces, or determines the value, which is associated with the thing. The value of a thing does not pre-exist its determination.

And the issues with “set up” are a feature of the quantification standards. We have only devised the means for measuring a specific quantum of light energy, the photon. Until we have the means to actually measure the energy of light as waves directly, there will always be incompatibility between the qualitative observations and the quantitative observations. This is because the two describe fundamentally different, and incompatible means of energy transmission.

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Thank you for correcting me. This is not my area.
But it doesn’t change my point. The statistical tendency is a feature of reality, not of us. We don’t influence it, it is what it is.

Spooky and weird though, I’ll grant you that.

But not co-evolved, or mutually constructed. We’ve played no part at all beyond a neurological recording mechanism. We haven’t input anything of ourselves into the reality these statistics collapse to.

That’s certainly what I’m gathering, but measurement is not a person. It’s a process. A camera could do it.

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I didn’t say anything about it being always correct. I asked you if you doubted it. That’s not the same thing at all.

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You literally said it was always correct.
That’s what “being right so far … [checks notes] … all the time, ever” means

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Well, the reason why I made that comment was the question of the interpretation of the ‘ontology’ of concepts employed in physical theories wasn’t as explored as it has been since the advent of quantum mechanics. Nowadays many physicists accept the idea that a theory that doesn’t give us a picture of reality can still be useful to predictions and applications. And some thinkers emphasize this kind of continuity between classical and quantum physics (the clearest example I have in mind is the philosopher Michel Bitbol but this idea IIRC was also advanced perhaps with less clarity by people like Chris Fuchs and David Mermin and was perhaps first proposed by Niels Bohr).

Historically, epistemic interpretations were proposed to avoid taking literally concepts like quantum superposition, i.e. that physical objects could truly be in two mutually contradictory states at the same time. So, it is rather ironic that those who favor interpretations like QBism would push the idea that now we understand the ‘nature of reality’.

Personally, I endorse these kinds of interpretations of QM.

Of course these views shouldn’t undermine, in my opinion, the confidence that there is an independent and structured reality that is at least partially intelligible by us.

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