Does is matter if reality is knowable?

The philosophical position that reason is impotent and reality unknowable leads nowhere. I would invite anyone who stated such a position to walk off the edge of a cliff since he doesn't really "know" if gravity will cause him to plunge to his death.

But it troubles me when someone like Leonard Peikoff rejects "avant-garde" physics. What if reason and science does in fact lead to the conclusion that reality is in some ultimate sense unknowable? For example, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that there are in fact certain things that can never be known.

That doesn't bother me at all, and I don't know why Objectivism should dogmatically insist that reality is knowable. It seems to me that probability, experience and reason are an adequate substitute for absolute knowledge. For example, the Newtonian model is -- as I understand it -- ultimately not "true." However, Newtonian physics is good enough for most purposes and for those purposes it doesn't matter if it is true or not.

Is there such a thing as "avant-garde" physics that Objectivists should reject?

Post 1

Saturday, December 25, 2004 - 4:22pm

Jared Laskin wrote: For example, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that there are in fact certain things that can never be known.

(I need to edit in a Zeroeth Law here... Of course reality is knowable. You could not have posted the question to SOLO otherwise.)

Not exactly. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle points out that you cannot know both the position and velocity of an electron at the same moment because any mode of perception at that level is gross enough to change the one or the other.

At the macroscopic level, we know this principle works because we cannot send an anthropologist into a village to see how they "really" act. Eddie Murphy -- a comedian I generally dislike intensely -- had a pretty good skit on SNL. He said that White people act differently when Black people are around and to prove it, he dressed up like a White guy. The stewardess serving free drinks on the city bus was even better than the banker who handed him a briefcase full of cash. At some level, you just don't know...
... and it does not bother me, either. I still make plans and carry them out. I also agree with you that some Objectivists seem haunted by the need for certainty.

I worked two jobs for industrial firms whose products operated at the micrometer level: millionth of a meter. This was for the automotive industry. We were only making cars. Even so, statistical methods were important because at those levels, measurement itself distorted the measuring tools. We did not throw up our hands in hopelessness because we were condemned to an unknowable universe. We just accepted the limits of our knowledge. Mathematical models delivered other tools for knowing how these would behave. The fact that the cars ran as designed pretty much validated the work we did.

As for Newtonian physics, it works just fine. The mathematical expressions and the empirical measurements are the weft and warp of the fabric of reality. You cannot separate one from the other. ("Phlogiston" chemistry and "impetus" physics could not achieve that; and neither of them supported the other.)

And while we are talking about avant-garde physics, there was the time, sitting in a classroom lecture on static electricity when I saw the door to Galt's motor open up.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 12/25, 4:24pm)

Post 2

Sunday, December 26, 2004 - 8:43am

I agree with Michael here. Because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle when we observe something we can never know at a given moment the direction/velocity a particular particle may be in space. (i.e. use an electron microscope to shoot a highly energetic electron at something to observe the results will change the object we are looking at)

Michael said "As for Newtonian physics, it works just fine. The mathematical expressions and the empirical measurements are the weft and warp of the fabric of reality."

To be a little more clear, we do have a more precise way of understanding the physical universe with Einstein's General Relativity. However it is VERY complex. The key to the matter is again Occam's Razor. The simplest solution (context is relevant) is Newtonian physics because it is simpler, more efficient and in most cases provides enough accuracy to predict a solution to the problem we need to solve.

So we can know reality to a certain (yet very useful) degree. What really matters is what we need to accomplish in reality and how accurate we need to be to predict results.

Regards,

Jeremy

Post 3

Sunday, December 26, 2004 - 5:15pm

Hi Jared,

The 'avante-garde' physics that Peikoff might be rejecting is the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, as popularized by Niels Bohr. Bohr argued that the wave function of an unobserved object is a sort of mixture of both wave and particle until the experimenter chooses what to observe in a given experiment.

This interpretation violates at least two O'ist tenets: (1) That incompatible qualities (i.e., contradictions) cannot coexist. Particles and waves have incompatible properties, and thus, according to O'ism, they cannot exist. (2) That existence precedes consciousness. The proposition that an experimenter chooses the nature of an object either rests on the primacy of consciousness or on the co-primacy of both existence and consciousness.

I think another problem (from an O'ist perspective) with this paradigm is that it seems to reject binary logic in favor of statistical logic. In O'ism (and traditional Aristotelian logic), either a thing exists, or it doesn't. There is no other possibility. In the Copenhagen interpretation, things are said to exist in degrees, e.g., something can 35% exist (that might be too crude a formulation, but it should nonetheless) hit the point I'm trying to make.

The Copenhagen interpretation remains among the dominant interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Jordan

Post 4

Sunday, December 26, 2004 - 9:37pm

I'm handicapped by not being versed in physics, and I appreciate Jordan's explanation, which allows me to put my question more bluntly, i.e., what if Bohr is actually correct?

The discussion on this board led me to do a little searching and I found an interesting article by Martin Gardner on the topic (taking the position that "realism is not a dirty word")

http://spinspace.com/sfai/reality.html

Post 5

Monday, December 27, 2004 - 7:42am

Hi Jared,

what if Bohr is actually correct?

My guess is that O'ists will never accept that Bohr is correct, for in doing so, they will cease to be O'ists (as explained in my last post). I think O'ists are first Rationalists before they are Pragmatists, if I may. So for an O'ist, I think it doesn't matter whether Bohr's view works better if that view contains contradictions.

As for Gardner's bit, it would help if he'd address the bizarre experiments that led to Bohr's view. They are not intuitive. Until Gardner addresses those experiments and makes up a better story to explain their results (and other have), rather than simply saying "no you're wrong," he's really just blowing in the wind.

Jordan

Post 6

Monday, December 27, 2004 - 6:47am

Jared, Jordan:

I think quantum mechanics would only pose a problem for Objectivism if the rules change arbitrarily over time. Say one day you wake up and an electron exhibited only particle behavior and the next day it exhibited only wave behavior. The Objectivist metaphysics is grounded in Identity, not Causality. Jordan's formulation is unfortunate. In most cases physicists don't say an electron 35% exists. They say it exists as a quantum mechanical wave function and the position and momentum cannot be specified exactly until the wave function collapses, in which case we know the position exactly, but we know nothing about its momentum.

There are cases in subatomic physics where you have a collision between subatomic particles where energy is created and any number of combinations of particles could reform as long as certain conservation laws are obeyed. I would say this is a property of the energy created that is statistical, but I fail to see where this poses a problem for Objectivism.Also, there are cases where virtual particles (a particle and antiparticle) spontaneously appear out of spacetime. I would say this is a statistical property of spacetime and as long as the probability of these events remains constant under the same circumstances and conservation laws are obeyed globally, there is no problem.

I think the greatest problem caused by quantum mechanics in the Objectivist philosophy is for agent causation (i.e. Aristotelian entity action causality). However, remember the premise we accept when we call something an entity. We assume divisibility from the spacetime surrounding it. Agent causation is the most effective bookkeeping technique for keeping track of causality, but it too has its boundary conditions.

One last comment. It is unfortunate that there is so much misunderstanding around quantum mechanics. It is not a property of the fact that we "interact with the experiment" and it is not a "measurement problem". The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics has been proven experimentally in all kinds of experiments and many semiconductor and electronic devices are based on it. Also, the first motivation for Bohr discovering it in the first place was the atom was fundamentally unstable in a Maxwellian universe (the electrons would slowly emit energy until they collapsed into the atom's nucleus). I have included the simplest example I can think of, conceptually, below verifying the Copenhagen interpretation.

In nuclear fusion research, there is a method of catalyzing the fusion of two hydrogen nuclei called muon catalyzed fusion. The muon is a negatively charged elementary particle with a mass that is 207 times heavier than an electron. In order to catalyze the fusion a chemical bond is created between two hydrogen nuclei using a muon. Since the muon is so much heavier than an ordinary electron, the two hydrogen nuclei are brought much closer together than with an electron. The strong nuclear force then binds the two hydrogen nuclei together.

But here�s where it gets interesting! If the two hydrogen nuclei were really point particles with a definite position and momentum, they would not fuse. They would be too far apart for the strong nuclear force to act. In actuality, what happens is that the quantum mechanical wave functions of the two hydrogen nuclei overlap and at the two extreme ends and come close enough to fuse.

Post 7

Monday, December 27, 2004 - 10:07am