Ultimate question: Why anything at all?

apeiron

My argument here is that when examined closely, the notion of a "field" has long become a notion about a simple potential - ie: a vagueness.

The substrate of being now has properties such as "infinite degrees of freedom", which then get "collapsed" due to the emergence of global constraints.

Precisely. They presume a fundamental unoriented potential, a vagueness, and then the actual world emerges via symmetry breaking.

So this is no longer a "field" concept, because fields are what emerge. But an unlimited potential of infinite dimensions is perhaps a little "field-like" when we try to imagine it. It is an uber-field possibly.

But by definition, a vagueness lacks locality and other definite features. These actual properties of fields have to emerge via development, or symmetry breaking.

bohm2

I think a lot of this hinges on what the wave function means. Given Bell's and now PBR, it seems that our best model of "reality" at least at the microscale can no longer be directly interpretable as a local beable. If one wants to use some dualistic "cut" as in Copenhagen, there are difficulties as Maudlin points out:

And the problem is also nobody seems to know the meaning of this larger space (3N dimensions)where the wave function lives. But it is at clearly at odds with the local classical field as Einstein notes:

Thus, "Einstein notes that in classical field theory all of the beables are local, and local in the strongest sense: the entire physical situation is nothing but the sum of the physical situations in the infinitely small regions of space-time."

apeiron

This is again re-stating the fact that locality is not fundamental and at best an emergent feature of reality. So now we move on to consider what is fundamental, and how things like locality might emerge?

Or should we instead keep going back to try to make locality work?

The conversation keeps returning to a point where you are either presuming "something exists fundamentally" or that "everything is emergent".

What is it, in the face of a good understanding of QM, that maintains a faith in the first option?

Maui

Modern physics - turning physicists into philosophers and (at least some) philosophsers into physicists. I'm lovin' it





I would not say that it's easy to categorize fields as either real or unreal. There are good arguments that they are both(at the same time). Again, classical baggage(concepts) seem to stand in the way of a better understanding.



I applauded you earlier in another thread about introducing ancient thinkers into the discussion with vagueness and potential development(vaguely resembles a wavefunction evolution and 'collapse').

apeiron

Further, if you were reading that Kastner paper on a possibilist transactional interpretation of QM, you will have noted that it too takes an "everything emerges from potential" approach to ontology.

Maui

Our observations - you, me, the beauty of nature, love, the relentless human spirit for understanding how things work...

It's obvious at this point that the inner workings of reality are inaccessible to us, things happen, what the heck(ice-cream still tastes good, cold beer too)

bohm2

I enjoyed reading Kastner's paper but I don't know exactly why but I just don't buy the whole concept of a 'collapse' process. I think any theory that has collapse in it, just seems wrong. I really found the video below (including a double-slit type of experiment) really useful in getting a "picture" of what may be happening. Still, the major problem is the wave can't be that type of guiding wave (e.g. existing in our familiar space-time). But at least, one can get an intuitive sense of how emergence of our familiar space-time may come from this configuration space stuff (whatever it is). Of course, the problem is that a direct mapping from configuration space to the more familiar space-time can't be done in any unique way, as others have argued, because when one tries to do it, the structure of the 3-N space can underwrite more than one set of emergent 3-spaces.The MWI doesn't have a problem with this view because they argue that more than one set of emergent 3-spaces exist at the same time. But I just don't buy MWI, either. But I still like the picture of those silicone drops in the video being our familiar objects in space-time whereas "below" there is some other stuff that defies locality/separability (something unlike the guiding wave depicted in Couder experiments). This is in line with some of Bohm's metaphysics which I'm biased toward.



One paper tries to get a wave to exist in the physical space we are familiar but the model seems really complicated:

The Theory of (Exclusively) Local Beables
http://lanl.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv...909.4553v3.pdf

bohm2

Edit: I thought I'd mention that Bohm (at least in his metaphysics) didn't appear to believe in the "reality" of particles:

Zeno Paradox for Bohmian Trajectories: The Unfolding of the Metatron
http://www.freewebs.com/cvdegosson/ZenoPaper.pdf

ryan7585

Nihilism is so ridiculous to me... Regardless of whether everything is nothing, we all have an objective experience which is affected in definite ways by how we interact. A search for "inherant meaning" will ALWAYS yield fruitless results. But contextual meaning can be found in absolutely everything in the universe. It is our experience of it which gives it meaning

How is this not obvious?

bohm2

Here’s some interesting arguments against the probabilistic argument presented in original post:
Cosmic Confusions: Not Supporting versus Supporting Not
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers...sion_final.pdf

Challenges to Bayesian Confirmation Theory
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers...nges_final.pdf

Zinkernagel summarizes this:
Some trends in the philosophy of physics
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8761/

apeiron

Excellent references for the points made earlier in this thread. Norton skewers Inwagen very nicely.

What Norton calls complete neutrality is of course what Peirce means by vagueness. A realm of pure possibility without any constraints. And so a realm to which the principle of contradiction (ie: of crisp disjunctions) fails to apply.

Bayesian reasoning has to guess at the constraints that might apply to shape pure possibility into some more definite distribution. And where such reasoning goes wrong is when it does not realise this is what it is doing.

It is the same mistake as in trying to apply set theory. Set theory has to presume some global state of constraint to apply to a distribution. Yet vagueness, or neutrality, is something different - it is the truly and profoundly unlimited. There are no constraints by definition. So a larger model of logic is needed to deal with the case - one such as Peircean logic that includes abductive leaps to get things started. And then semiotic constraints where - invoking final cause - it is not local change that is the isssue, but the emergence eventually of limits to change, to the expression of raw possibility.

So Norton provides an argument against all attempts on the "why anything?" question based on conventional probablity approaches - ones that have to already presume constraints on raw possibility. A vagueness doesn't have countable states, not even an infinity of them, as this would already give it something definite, something crisply developed. You have to step back further to a higher level of modelling, one like Peircean semiosis which has that "extra hidden dimension" Norton mentions.

But then of course once armed with the Peircean view, you can start to say something positive about the "why anything?" question.

As I stressed in post #139 - http://www.physicsforums.com/showpos...&postcount=139 - once you take a view of probability spaces as things that develop, rather than simply exist, then the correct foundational dichotomy of vague~crisp comes into sight. Instead of trying to contrast the likelihood of nothing vs something, we are now talking about the likelihood of the vague yielding the definite. And how that then compares with the universe as we observe its developmental history.

apeiron

A few more contemporary references which demonstrate that logical and statistical arguments cannot solve this. A deeper view of causal process is needed.

This takes a Zeno type approach in which time sliced infinitely fine means there is no longer a "first moment" and so a universe can be considered self-causing....
http://evans-experientialism.freeweb...rse_exists.htm

Then this one points out the Zeno-ic flaws in this idea....
http://www.google.co.nz/url?sa=t&rct...icZeMaYiJzUUfg

[link fixed hopefully - google Could the Universe Cause Itself to Exist? William F. Vallicella otherwise]

(And of course, the Planck scale already creates scientific problems for such approaches - time cannot be sliced infinitely thin.)

Then this is a somewhat useful taxonomy of approaches....that of course fails to mention any Peircean or systems thinking
http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/...c13-2_Kuhn.pdf

wuliheron

Logically the entire argument is meaningless. We define something in terms of nothing and vice versa. Its like north and south, up and down, top and bottom. They're just descriptions we use and there are plenty of things we can say don't exist as well as plenty that do. The idea that you can have nothing without having something is an assumption that just doesn't make logical sense. We have both things that exist and don't exist and you can ask why we have both, but then the answer just comes back to because that is how we define them.

Like a little kid laying in bed contemplating infinity we can go round and round with such thoughts all day long and get nowhere. That's the only thing about this entire subject that is demonstrable. That instead of being the "ultimate" question, its just a waste of time.

apeiron

But that has been one of the important questions raised. Is nothingness actually complementary to somethingness? Is it a well-formed concept in the first place?

As has been mentioned often enough, some-things and no-things are both about the counting of things. And an absence of things still leaves the issue of the empty space that is left behind as itself a kind of thing. This was the null set problem - the implication still of a container even when it contains nothing.

And even before that, if we imagine subtracting away the existence of all things, that still leaves their possibility, which again is a kind of thingness. Certainly something more than absolute nothingness.

So I believe you end up having to accept a quite different metaphysical dichotomy of vague~crisp as the most fundamental description of degrees of existence and non-existence. Which has its profound implications as explored by Anaximander and Peirce to name a couple of philosophers.

It is hardly meaningless to demonstrate there are lines of argument that don't wash. And it is hardly meaningless to expose some assumptions that were being thoughtlessly made. And it is hardly meaningless if a question leads you towards subtler concepts.

wuliheron

I'd have to say what is demonstrable trumps concepts any day. I'm aware of things that exist and I'm aware of things that don't exist. I don't have a freight train in my living room, but I do have a couch. To me that's not a question of what is crisp or vague, its a demonstrable fact and the context and content are specific. The more specific I make them, the more demonstrable it becomes, while the less specific the less demonstrable. Its not so much an issue of what is vague or crisp, but what is demonstrable.

Debating concepts that are not demonstrable is the equivalent of reciting nonsense poetry. It might have some psychological or mystical benefit, but it is otherwise demonstrably meaningless. Reasoning begins with what is demonstrable and without that all you've got is something at best self-consistent.

apeiron

But this rather mixes up epistemology and ontology then.

Quite clearly, the modelling relationship is founded on our ideas in interaction with our impressions. Or more formally, as in the scientific method, the interaction between concepts and measurements, qualities and quantities.

And we want both those things to be as crisp as possible, not vague.

So a concept like "god" is not a lot of use because the definition is so murky, the ways to "demonstrate" the value of the idea so unfocused.

But other concepts, such as sofa and freight train, are quite crisply defined.

OK, there is some modern furniture you might look at and question whether it really counts as a sofa. Or you might be in a student flat where the "sofa" is an old matress. So on closer examination, all our concepts in fact are somewhat epistemically vague at the fringes - but we can fix that by adding further information, creating a crisper constraint.

Armed with a formal concept (information on formal cause, and also final cause because a key to sofa is "something a few people can comfortably sit on") you can then measure your world in terms of the concept. You can look around and justify an object as a sofa and not something else with crisp certitude.

So you can see that your argument here is not against vague~crisp as an ontic story at all. You are just again asserting the conventional fact that epistemic modelling is working best when it is least vague - when we have developed the crisp concepts that in turn enable the crisp measurements that allow us make our definite claims.

The "why anything" question is important because it makes us confront our established ideas. We have to get back in behind the shop-front of our conventional epistemology.

There is a real intellectual challenge here of course. How do we have a crisp model of vagueness? That seems a self-defeating project.

But again, there is no actual problem if we keep the distinction between ontology and epistemology clear. We can have a crisp model of something that is actually vague.

You really are sounding like Samuel Johnson, stomping around, kicking stones, and proclaiming "I refute it thus".

But yes, I already agree that concepts need to be demonstrable. However what is it about vagueness that is not demonstrable (once you have found its correct complementary partner, crispness)?

Nothing and something are claimed to be demonstrable states of affairs. Except - as is the subject of this thread - the problem is that what you have to show people is some container that is empty of objects. So this is only about localised absence not global or total nullity.

And likewise, we can point to epistemic vagueness without much trouble, as in the sorites paradox. At what point do a few grains of wheat become a pile, or a lack of hair make a person officially bald?

So there is nothing that you have said which rules out vagueness as a demonstrable concept. You have given no reasons why we cannot define it, and measure the world in those terms.

There is of course a lack of a generally agreed model of vagueness. Which is why this is a metaphysics rather than a science thread.

But to give you an idea of what I have in mind, you can consider the phenomenon of critical opalescence - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_opalescence - that exact point where a gas and liquid are in scalefree balance so that you can't really say (that is demonstrate via measurement) whether you actually have a gas or liquid. The law of the excluded middle no longer applies crisply to this situation.

wuliheron

For me ontology is just an epistemological idea. We make it all up as we go along. Rules evolve, definitions change, etc. What is vague and what is crisp only have meaning in specific contexts and then the meaning changes with use. Classical Chinese doesn't have a verb "to be" and the Navajo language doesn't even have a future tense. The more we try to ontologize our language the less demonstrable it becomes.

Thus the "why anything" question only exists as an extreme expression of our compulsive desire to ontologize everything and to deny the evidence of our senses and awareness. Of what Heraclitus described as the flux and what Taoists sometimes call the novelty of each breath, each moment, each freight train and couch. Lao Tzu expressed it this way:

Home
Accept and you become whole,
Bend and you straighten,
Empty and you fill,
Decay and you renew,
Want and you acquire,
Fulfill and you become confused.
The sage accepts the world
As the world accepts the Way;
He does not display himself, so is clearly seen,
Does not justify himself, so is recognized,
Does not boast, so is credited,
Does not pride himself, so endures,
Does not contend, so none contend against him.
The ancients said, "Accept and you become whole",
Once whole, the world is as your home.

If you ask a Zen master why there is something rather then nothing he might hit you over the head with a stick. Ask him how to discern between vague and crisp and he'll likely hit you again.