Should Quantum Randomness be called Supernatural?

In summary, the discussion revolved around the question of whether it is accurate and meaningful to describe the random behavior of quanta as "supernatural". The origin of the word "supernatural" is "above and beyond the laws of nature", which could potentially apply to the random behavior of quanta. However, the term carries religious, superstitious, and metaphysical connotations that may not be applicable in a purely scientific context. Instead, focusing on the essential qualities and laws of nature may provide a more accurate and objective description. Ultimately, the question of whether the universe itself is supernatural is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
  • #1
wuliheron
2,155
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I've recently been having a discussion with someone about whether it is accurate and meaningful to describe the random behavior of quanta as "supernatural". The origin of the word comes from "supra-natural" meaning above and beyond the laws of nature which certainly fits the description of the random behavior of quanta. In addition quanta exhibit behavior such as teleportation that traditionally has been ascribed to the supernatural. Stripped of its religious, superstitious, and metaphysical connotations it seems supernatural is a more accurate term then merely describing them as "random" and if science is to distinguish what is natural then it must use the same criteria for what is supernatural if it is promote objectivity.

I'm reminded of Aristotle banning infinity from academia with a flimsy argument for how it was impossible in the real world. After a hundred years of quantum randomness it seems pretty clear the issue is not likely to conveniently disappear anytime soon and perhaps dealing with it directly is the only way forward. Who knows, perhaps like paradoxes and infinities we might even find more real world applications for the concept and, in so doing, lesson the strangle hold of archaic ideas and superstitions.
 
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  • #2
wuliheron said:
I've recently been having a discussion with someone about whether it is accurate and meaningful to describe the random behavior of quanta as "supernatural".

The short answer is: No. What would you call "supernatural" anyway? It's against PF rules to debate the validity of theological concepts, but you are not asking about that. From a purely scientific perspective, there is no "supernatural". There are only aspects of nature that we don't understand and perhaps some aspects we cannot understand given our present state of development.
 
  • #3
SW VandeCarr said:
The short answer is: No. What would you call "supernatural" anyway? It's against PF rules to debate the validity of theological concepts, but you are not asking about that. From a purely scientific perspective, there is no "supernatural". There are only aspects of nature that we don't understand and perhaps some aspects we cannot understand given our present state of development.

Certainly the supernatural is associated with theology, but then everything was at one time. In places like the former Soviet Union the supernatural was studied extensively despite the entire country being atheists and agnostics! I am asking a simple and straightforward question that requires no reference to any theology or even metaphysics which, by the way, the idea that science can explain everything is a metaphysical concept.

Dictionary.com:
Supernatural
–adjective
1. of, pertaining to, or being above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal.

World English Dictionary
— adj
1. of or relating to things that cannot be explained according to natural laws

Word Origin & History
"above nature, transcending nature, belonging to a higher realm


American Heritage Dictionary:
Of or relating to existence outside the natural world.
Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces.


Merriam-Webster's:
a : departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature


Webster's New World College Dictionary:
existing or occurring outside the normal experience or knowledge of man; not explainable by the known forces or laws of nature
 
  • #4
wuliheron said:
Certainly the supernatural is associated with theology, but then everything was at one time. In places like the former Soviet Union the supernatural was studied extensively despite the entire country being atheists and agnostics! I am asking a simple and straightforward question that requires no reference to any theology or even metaphysics which, by the way, the idea that science can explain everything is a metaphysical concept.

I acknowledged that your question excluded the theological concept of supernatural and and gave a straightforward answer. I just wanted to make sure that that was understood to viewers. Then I asked how you define the supernatural. You've given some dictionary definitions; the first in particular saying "...pertaining to... beyond what is natural...". Just what is that if you're not operating in a theological context? How do we know that any phenomenon is "beyond natural". There are many questions remaining for science to answer and answers usually beg even more questions. However, what does that have to do with any concept of the "supernatural". That would seem to imply that there is some fixed limit to what an arbitrarily high intelligence can describe or otherwise "know" about nature.
 
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  • #5
SW VandeCarr said:
I acknowledged that your question excluded the theological concept of supernatural. I just wanted to make sure that that was understood to viewers. Then I asked how you define the supernatural. You've given some dictionary definitions; the first in particular saying "...pertaining to... beyond what is natural...". Just what is that if you're not operating in a theological context? How do we know that any phenomenon is "beyond natural". There are many questions remaining for science to answer and answers usually beg even more questions. However, what does that have to do with any concept of the "supernatural". That would seem to imply that there is some fixed limit to what an arbitrarily high intelligence can describe or otherwise "know" about nature.

Is the universe ultimately supernatural? I don't know and, personally, I really don't care. It makes no difference whatsoever in my life and if and when it ever does I'll address the issue then! The question is what is the most objective and complete description of the random behavior of quanta.

Dictionary.com:
Nature
noun
1. the material world, especially as surrounding humankind and existing independently of human activities.

American Heritage Dictionary:
The material world and its phenomena.
The forces and processes that produce and control all the phenomena of the material world: the laws of nature.

Merriam-Webster's:
a : the inherent character or basic constitution of a person or thing : essence

Webster's New World College Dictionary:
the essential character of a thing; quality or qualities that make something what it is; essence

Note that these are all commonly used and not technical definitions, hence the reference to the "material world" which could be construed as a metaphysical statement. However, the other definitions reference the essential qualities or character of things and the laws of nature. My argument is that randomness cannot be defined as a character, quality, or law. It is indeterminate just as division by zero is indeterminate and to therefore claim it is part of nature is a contradiction.
 
  • #6
wuliheron said:
My argument is that randomness cannot be defined as a character, quality, or law. It is indeterminate just as division by zero is indeterminate and to therefore claim it is part of nature is a contradiction.

Well, I haven't seen your argument; only your statement as if it were fact. QM quite effectively models experimental results and has been doing so for almost ninety years; longer if you count the Bohr atom (although the term 'quantum mechanics' wasn't used at that time). QM is based on probability distributions which are effectively deterministic given large numbers of observations. It's true that the state of a particular particle cannot be known until it is observed, but the probability of each possible state can be calculated and these probabilities hold with very high precision. This is more than sufficient for an effective science and technology.

EDIT: Also, it is not known that so called "quantum randomness" is a fact of nature or an artifact of the way such processes are observed.
 
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  • #7
SW VandeCarr said:
Well, I haven't seen your argument; only your statement as if it were fact. QM quite effectively models experimental results and has been doing so for almost ninety years; longer if you count the Bohr atom (although the term 'quantum mechanics' wasn't used at that time). QM is based on probability distributions which are effectively deterministic given large numbers of observations. It's true that the state of a particular particle cannot be known until it is observed, but the probability of each possible state can be calculated and these probabilities hold with very high precision. This is more than sufficient for an effective science and technology.

EDIT: Also, it is not known that so called "quantum randomness" is a fact of nature or an artifact of the way such processes are observed.
Quantum mechanics is not the issue and is, of course, MECHANICS!

Recent experiments have demonstrated that quanta are contextual and that even entanglement is subject to indeterminacy. We can analyze them statistically in specific contexts and make predictions, but that says nothing about the random behavior we observe which remains as big a mystery now as it was a century ago.

Nor have I claimed that quanta don't also display order and natural behavior. Apparently they are both natural and supernatural and, if they are contextual, then which one we observe depends entirely on the context. Whatever the case might be we still need a nomenclature for their random behavior and to call something indeterminate "natural" is a contradiction in terms and suggestive of a metaphysical bias.
 
  • #8
wuliheron said:
Is the universe ultimately supernatural? I don't know and, personally, I really don't care. It makes no difference whatsoever in my life and if and when it ever does I'll address the issue then! The question is what is the most objective and complete description of the random behavior of quanta.

Dictionary.com:
Nature
noun
1. the material world, especially as surrounding humankind and existing independently of human activities.

American Heritage Dictionary:
The material world and its phenomena.
The forces and processes that produce and control all the phenomena of the material world: the laws of nature.

Merriam-Webster's:
a : the inherent character or basic constitution of a person or thing : essence

Webster's New World College Dictionary:
the essential character of a thing; quality or qualities that make something what it is; essence

Note that these are all commonly used and not technical definitions, hence the reference to the "material world" which could be construed as a metaphysical statement. However, the other definitions reference the essential qualities or character of things and the laws of nature. My argument is that randomness cannot be defined as a character, quality, or law. It is indeterminate just as division by zero is indeterminate and to therefore claim it is part of nature is a contradiction.

As I see it the problem with nature is that it compels und perpetuates a belief in the fundamental intelligibility of the workings of the cosmos. An old argument is that this belief is necessary in order to produce testable/observable theory. What is not perceptible, thinkable and traceable as reliably regular can from such a metaphysics only be passed off as something yet to be explained as reliably regular. The concept of Nature has been engineered to be machinic, computable, not as site of the truly original.

The "ideology" of physics (that which is used to mark and defend it's territory to strangers and novices) is by that sleight of hand decision structurally opposed to entertaining the possibility that a real choice can be made in the cosmos. Indeterminacy may from the perspective of the cosmos as nature never be a regular feature of cosmic evolution because that would render impotent the metaphysical imagination that enables talk of nature as if it was truth: the idea of a somehow homogenous and rule-bound cosmos that lends itself in principle to prediction. In principle everything is already there behind the curtain of contemporary ignorance, and it just needs to be rearrange by lawful behavior to compose future states. It's a pretty sad kind of idealist materialism really, rather badly accountable to everyday experience too (time irreversible, persons exist as unique observers with a finite perspective, we feel that we can enact choice uncoerced by sufficient causality).

So as I see it the nature myth divides the cosmos into two portions, the natural realm of in principle predictable process and the non/supernatural realm of only postdictable process (= the event can be introduce true originality). Maybe we could learn to live with some things only being postdictable if we dropped the words? Nature was once a liberating idea that had the positive effect of leading minds towards structured observation of processes in the cosmos, but today nature is mostly used for scientistic headbashing. It never fails to pop up when scientists need rhetorical power when they wish to restrict the kinds of things that may be deemed to be real. I guess I'm trying to say that the myth of nature allows for all kinds of eliminativist manouvers. It's a reality-limiting metaphysics that is often invoked as if it where not a metaphysics at all.

So imo, sure, the cosmos could be called super-natural if one insists on keeping the word. Things happen all the time that physics cannot account for, even things that will arguably remain forever only postdictable, like the what-it-is-like of finite observers. No account of the what-it-is-like-ness of your experience could ever replace your being yourself in a certain moment. I might want to argue though that a metaphysics of physics without nature might make us more comfortable with apprehending events as unique happenings and we might be less inclined to try and reduce the diversity of real beings by rhetorical power. As a culture we might become better at anticipating the unexpected? A question that has always interested me: could physics think an element of the cosmos that comes into existence exactly once in cosmic evolution? Any professionals here that have an opinion?
 
  • #9
cosmographer said:
As I see it the problem with nature is that it compels und perpetuates a belief in the fundamental intelligibility of the workings of the cosmos.

I don't think of that as a problem with nature, but a problem with ideology whether it concern the natural, the supernatural, or both. As Lao Tzu said, "Habits are the end of honesty and compassion, the beginning of confusion". Therefore it is counterproductive to make an ideology of eliminating ideology! My only concern here is to address the specific argument I have presented.
 
  • #10
Calling something supernatural is making the ideological statement that it is "beyond natural law". And so now you have to be able to say what you think takes over at this point (if it is not a god). Otherwise the assertion seems rather contentless.

The rational position appears to be that reality is natural - it is a system with a lawful nature. In some sense it explains itself. It is self-organising according to some general principles.

QM is a problem for naive models of reality which presume locality as an exclusive principle of nature. But that just suggests there are broader principles of nature to be grasped.

What is the real terminological problem here is that you are mixing up the notions of random and indeterminate I believe.

Random means something more particular, more constrained. To have the random (a locally free outcome - or in practice, one that is minimally constrained) you also have to have the determining context, the global framework that underwrites this local free choice.

So a fair coin toss has to be manufactured. The two outcomes of which face it lands on has to be made as equi-probable as possible so no particular determining cause can be measured.

But indeterminate means something else. A state where both context and event are still in a degree of uncertain development. You are just talking about the potential for a development towards something that is crisply more definite.

In QM, reality is indeterminate until the wavefunction is collapsed. It is then the crisply determined fact of the collapse that also makes part of what happened "the random". That is, the bit which so far as the observing context goes was an equipotential - something about which there was no information to constrain the outcome.

So indeterminancy is not supernatural. At least, the idea of development is basic to natural philosophy.

And randomness is only supernatural if you expect to have information about what is defined precisely by a lack of information. To be equiprobable, two alternatives would have to have no measurable differences.

As you say about infinity, it is unreasonable "in reality" to think that these kinds of limit states can actually be achieved (either counting forever or having no measurable differences). And yet we also can use our notions of these limits (infinite, random) to model reality with some effectiveness.
 
  • #11
cosmographer said:
Nature was once a liberating idea that had the positive effect of leading minds towards structured observation of processes in the cosmos, but today nature is mostly used for scientistic headbashing. It never fails to pop up when scientists need rhetorical power when they wish to restrict the kinds of things that may be deemed to be real. I guess I'm trying to say that the myth of nature allows for all kinds of eliminativist manouvers. It's a reality-limiting metaphysics that is often invoked as if it where not a metaphysics at all.

I certainly agree with that. One of the key possibilities being eliminated by "mechanics" of course is that of final cause. (Which is usually taken to mean something supernatural, but which is again currently part of natural philosophy, and even coming back into physics with things like Cramer's retrocausal approach to QM).

And also the role of formal cause is coming back in - as with string theory and other Platonic-flavoured approaches.

So some of the causes that mechanics eliminated from "nature" are creeping back in. Though of course, is subject to much headbashing by the eliminativists :smile:.

cosmographer said:
A question that has always interested me: could physics think an element of the cosmos that comes into existence exactly once in cosmic evolution? Any professionals here that have an opinion?

Surely the essential ingredients of the universe - as in its laws, its constants, its entropic gradient - only arose once? Or do you see these as the initiating conditions/boundary conditions and so are talking about elements resulting from these "once given" conditions?
 
  • #12
apeiron said:
Calling something supernatural is making the ideological statement that it is "beyond natural law". And so now you have to be able to say what you think takes over at this point (if it is not a god). Otherwise the assertion seems rather contentless.

Calling a spade a spade is not ideology. It is a simple pragmatic measure.

apeiron said:
The rational position appears to be that reality is natural - it is a system with a lawful nature. In some sense it explains itself. It is self-organising according to some general principles.

And I'm asserting that it is irrational to insist the irrational be called rational!

apeiron said:
QM is a problem for naive models of reality which presume locality as an exclusive principle of nature. But that just suggests there are broader principles of nature to be grasped.

That is a metaphysical position, and I am concerned here with the empirical evidence.

apeiron said:
What is the real terminological problem here is that you are mixing up the notions of random and indeterminate I believe.

Random means something more particular, more constrained. To have the random (a locally free outcome - or in practice, one that is minimally constrained) you also have to have the determining context, the global framework that underwrites this local free choice.

So a fair coin toss has to be manufactured. The two outcomes of which face it lands on has to be made as equi-probable as possible so no particular determining cause can be measured.

But indeterminate means something else. A state where both context and event are still in a degree of uncertain development. You are just talking about the potential for a development towards something that is crisply more definite.

And you are splitting semantic hairs. In the context of this discussion it is patently obvious that when I say "random" I am referring to "indeterminacy".

apeiron said:
In QM, reality is indeterminate until the wavefunction is collapsed. It is then the crisply determined fact of the collapse that also makes part of what happened "the random". That is, the bit which so far as the observing context goes was an equipotential - something about which there was no information to constrain the outcome.

So indeterminancy is not supernatural. At least, the idea of development is basic to natural philosophy.

This is circular logic. The whole idea of "reality" and the collapse of the wavefunction originate with natural philosophy!

apeiron said:
And randomness is only supernatural if you expect to have information about what is defined precisely by a lack of information. To be equiprobable, two alternatives would have to have no measurable differences.

As you say about infinity, it is unreasonable "in reality" to think that these kinds of limit states can actually be achieved (either counting forever or having no measurable differences). And yet we also can use our notions of these limits (infinite, random) to model reality with some effectiveness.

More references to natural philosophy as if somehow that will clarify the argument. It doesn't. At best it provides more smoke and mirrors to distract from the issue on the table which is the empirical evidence and the contradiction of using one standard to define the natural and another to define the supernatural.
 
  • #13
wuliheron said:
Calling a spade a spade is not ideology. It is a simple pragmatic measure.

Pfft. Supernatural has no context? If you are just about pragmatics, why would you even care if we said random or supernatural? They're both just words. So your response makes no sense.
 
  • #14
apeiron said:
Pfft. Supernatural has no context? If you are just about pragmatics, why would you even care if we said random or supernatural? They're both just words. So your response makes no sense.

LOL, first you split semantic hairs over my use of random rather then indeterminacy and now you assert that they are both just words. It is practical, pragmatic, and even traditional for physics to develop its own terminology that is non-trivial and self-consistent. Yes, the supernatural has its cultural baggage, but that does not mean physicists cannot make it a technical term.

As for using random instead of supernatural should we then insist that physicists stop using the term "natural" in favor of determinate or order? These are silly arguments, red herrings and straw men, as far as I am concerned that have nothing to do with the issue on the table which is whether it is more self-consistent and meaningful to describe indeterminacy as supernatural.
 
  • #15
wuliheron said:
As for using random instead of supernatural should we then insist that physicists stop using the term "natural" in favor of determinate or order? These are silly arguments, red herrings and straw men, as far as I am concerned that have nothing to do with the issue on the table which is whether it is more self-consistent and meaningful to describe indeterminacy as supernatural.

You are not free to use your personal definition of words as a basis for starting a thread in this forum. Under PF rules you must provide a credible source for the use of the word "supernatural" in applying it to quantum indeterminacy. Outside the theological context, the most common synonym for "supernatural" is probably "magic". Are you arguing that quantum indeterminacy is magic?

Anyway, the case is not closed as to whether quantum indeterminacy is fundamental or is an artifact of the methodology of measurement. It is in fact called the measurement problem.

EDIT: Einstein: 'God does not play dice with the universe.' Bohr: 'Stop telling God what to do.'

http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/ae63.htm
 
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  • #16
SW VandeCarr said:
You are not free to use your personal definition of words as a basis for starting a thread in this forum. Under PF rules you must provide a credible source for the use of the word "supernatural" in applying it to quantum indeterminacy. Outside the theological context, the most common synonym for "supernatural" is probably "magic". Are you arguing that quantum indeterminacy is magic?

I am not sure about that. In the old language of nature the natural had a counter-pole called culture. The object deprived of any kind of agency, experience, value or will was contrasted with the subject, the human, the domain of sensuality, ideas and will. So if we stay within the confines of the nature-prison the obvious domain of the supernatural would be that of subjectivity, sensuality and will. What we did instead was to start to believe that everything was in fact nature. So we drove out subjectivity, sensuality and will from the cosmos and even our own bodies. The "hard problem" is like quantum mechanics where we haven't managed to chase out the ghost of subjectivity, sense and will yet.

So yeah, it would be intention, will, subjectivity, sensitivity that would be "natural" inhabitants of the supernatural.
 
  • #17
SW VandeCarr said:
You are not free to use your personal definition of words as a basis for starting a thread in this forum. Under PF rules you must provide a credible source for the use of the word "supernatural" in applying it to quantum indeterminacy. Outside the theological context, the most common synonym for "supernatural" is probably "magic". Are you arguing that quantum indeterminacy is magic?

In any case, the case is not closed as to whether quantum indeterminacy is fundamental or is an artifact of the methodology of measurement. It is in fact called the measurement problem.

EDIT: Einstein: 'God does not play dice with the universe.' Bohr: 'Stop telling God what to do.'

http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/ae63.htm

Thesaurus.com said:
supernatural
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: mysterious, not of this world
Synonyms: abnormal, celestial, concealed, dark, fabulous, fairy, ghostly, heavenly, hidden, impenetrable, invisible, legendary, metaphysical, miraculous, mystic, mythical, mythological, numinous, obscure, occult, paranormal, phantom, phenomenal, preternatural, psychic, rare, secret, spectral, superhuman, superior, supermundane, superordinary, supranatural, transcendental, uncanny, uncomprehensible, unearthly, unfathomable, unintelligible, unknowable, unknown, unnatural, unrevealed, unusual

I don't see magic listed once. If you going to claim magic is probably the most common synonym then I'd like to see some evidence. Since I have provided nothing but a long list of dictionary definitions it would seem that you are the one making up your own definitions of words.

Also, if you read my previous posts I am not making any metaphysical or theoretical claims whatsoever. I am merely debating what is the most complete, accurate, and objective terminology to use for what we observe.
 
  • #18
wuliheron said:
LOL, first you split semantic hairs over my use of random rather then indeterminacy .

In fact I was saying that they are radically different things.

wuliheron said:
..and now you assert that they are both just words.

No, i was pointing out that if it was your belief that they are just words - operational definitions - then why would you care so highly that you start arguments about it?

wuliheron said:
Yes, the supernatural has its cultural baggage, but that does not mean physicists cannot make it a technical term.

Why would it be good practice to ignore cultural baggage? And the primary meaning of supernatural is beyond the laws of physics and observable causes.

wuliheron said:
As for using random instead of supernatural should we then insist that physicists stop using the term "natural" in favor of determinate or order? These are silly arguments, red herrings and straw men, as far as I am concerned that have nothing to do with the issue on the table which is whether it is more self-consistent and meaningful to describe indeterminacy as supernatural.

Why not put it to the vote? :smile:
 
  • #19
It's strange to see that here we are negotiating precisely words and STILL we have the audacity of acting like words were only a technicality. Here we are doing metaphysics in the most direct sense possible and STILL we manage to say that we are not. We moderns are amazing :)

If you don't want to let go of "nature", how about thinking along the lines of what antonyms of natural we have (tellingly none of the online thesauruses list any for nature itself):

abnormal, different, uncommon, unnatural, affected, artificial, pretended, fixed, modified, refined

http://thesaurus.com/browse/natural

And perhaps etymology can fuel the imagination

nature. c.1300, "essential qualities, innate disposition," also "creative power in the material world," from O.Fr. nature, from L. natura "course of things, natural character, the universe," lit. "birth," from natus "born," pp. of nasci "to be born," from PIE *gene- "to give birth, beget" (see genus). Original sense is in human nature. Meaning "inherent, dominating power or impulse" of a person or thing is from late 14c. Nature and nurture have been contrasted since 1874.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nature

I would suggest that the language you're looking for should nuance the perplexing or surprising character of these phenomena. I think of them as uncanny, trickster-like modes of existence. Something that has the capacity to object to your assumptions about it. It has an ontic depth that is withdrawn and active. And as I said, the whole repertoire of sensuality, will and personality is available. People are already talking about the flavors of particles, so talking about memory, sensation and choice won't be so long in the future.
 
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  • #20
cosmographer said:
It's strange to see that here we are negotiating precisely words and STILL we have the audacity of acting like words were only a technicality. Here we are doing metaphysics in the most direct sense possible and STILL we manage to say that we are not. We moderns are amazing :)

Every language has metaphysical assumptions built into it. The Navajo language is rather interesting in that regard with no verb "to be" and no future tense. They actually sainted Einstein for his theory of Relativity despite it being a classical theory. There is simply no way to avoid these kinds of issues and attempting to do so is a waste of time. The best we can do is try to create as complete, accurate, and objective a terminology as possible.

cosmographer said:
If you don't want to let go of "nature", how about thinking along the lines of what antonyms of naturals we have (tellingly none of the online thesauruses list any for nature itself):

abnormal, different, uncommon, unnatural, affected, artificial, pretended, unnatural, artificial, fixed, modified, refined, unnatural

http://thesaurus.com/browse/natural

And perhaps etymolgy can fuel the imagination

nature. c.1300, "essential qualities, innate disposition," also "creative power in the material world," from O.Fr. nature, from L. natura "course of things, natural character, the universe," lit. "birth," from natus "born," pp. of nasci "to be born," from PIE *gene- "to give birth, beget" (see genus). Original sense is in human nature. Meaning "inherent, dominating power or impulse" of a person or thing is from late 14c. Nature and nurture have been contrasted since 1874.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nature

I would suggest that the language you're looking for should nuance the perplexing or surprising character of these phenomena. I think of them as uncanny, trickster-like modes of existence. Something that has the capacity to object to your assumptions about it. It has an ontic depth that is withdrawn and active. And as I said, the whole repertoire of sensuality, will and personality is available. People are already talking about the flavors of particles, so talking about memory, sensation and choice won't be so long in the future.

We already have "indeterminate" to suggest puzzlement, "trickster" implies an entity, and "unnatural" or "abnormal" simply don't fit the bill nearly as completely as supernatural. Quanta teleport, exist in two places simultaneously, etc. and in general display what are historically thought of as supernatural behavior. Not merely abnormal, not merely unnatural, not merely a trick, but something beyond the laws of nature.
 
  • #21
I understand your reasoning for supernatural. If we can agree that natural is a haphazard collecting category for an imagined totality of "laws", then we could imagine "nature" as the result of work of the sciences. It is made only of what could be observed, extracted and formalized from the flux of comic process.

Now if we assume that it is only a matter of epistemological ignorance that we cannot predict quantum behavior we can perhaps describe those phenomena as pre-natural. They are what is yet to be tamed into models that will no longer raise objections. I think that would make more sense to me. It would take serious that "nature" is only a polemical category for that which has been reasonably formatted by the sciences. It would make visible the activity of fact construction.

edit. I am aware that I misspelled cosmic, it's too nice of an error to correct though.
 
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  • #22
cosmographer said:
Now if we assume that it is only a matter of epistemological ignorance that we cannot predict quantum behavior we can perhaps describe those phenomena as pre-natural.

Yes, good call. And the right word already exists...

The preternatural or praeternatural is that which appears outside or beyond (Latin præter) the natural. In contrast to the supernatural, preternatural phenomena are presumed to have rational explanations as yet unknown.

The term is often used to distinguish from the divine (supernatural) while maintaining a distinction from understood nature in a given culture and time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preternatural
 
  • #23
cosmographer said:
I understand your reasoning for supernatural. If we can agree that natural is a haphazard collecting category for an imagined totality of "laws", then we could imagine "nature" as the result of work of the sciences. It is made only of what could be observed, extracted and formalized from the flux of comic process. Now if we assume that it is only a matter of epistemological ignorance that we cannot predict quantum behavior we can perhaps describe those phenomena as pre-natural.

I think that would make more sense to me. It would take serious that "nature" is only a polemical category for that which has been reasonably formatted by the sciences. It would make visible the activity of fact construction.

edit. I am aware that I misspelled cosmic, it's too nice of an error to correct though.


The idea is not that the terminology should make sense to some and not to others, but that it should be as complete, accurate, and objective as possible. It is not objective to assume it is merely our epistemological ignorance in this case anymore then it is unbiased to use natural and not supernatural. If I wanted to ask for a brainstorming session and to poll people on the popularity of possible terminology I would have done so.
 
  • #24
wuliheron said:
The idea is not that the terminology should make sense to some and not to others, but that it should be as complete, accurate, and objective as possible. It is not objective to assume it is merely our epistemological ignorance in this case anymore then it is unbiased to use natural and not supernatural. If I wanted to ask for a brainstorming session and to poll people on the popularity of possible terminology I would have done so.

Fair enough, however objectivity and accuracy don't impose themselves. They need to be made. Supernatural makes good sense to you. Preternatural (cheers for the link apeiron, English is not my first language) makes better sense to me.

I say it describes the movement of science better. Nature is a working-definition type of category. It assumes that everything in it is already formatted according to laws. Preternatural would then be all phenomena we cannot put into the nature bag yet. "If it does stuff that is not lawful, it is not because it does impossible things (because it clearly does them!), but because it does things according to logics we have not been able to formalize". The preternatural is that which is not naturalized yet.

Btw, this is what I wanted to get a with the idea of nature being an oppressive political category. It comes into play whenever one assumes that nature preexists it's naturalization.
 
  • #25
Why are we debating semantics? We know that quantum randomness exists and can't be fully explained. As long as we all understand this, who cares whether someone chooses to label it "supernatural"?
 
  • #26
cosmographer said:
Fair enough, however objectivity and accuracy don't impose themselves. They need to be made. Supernatural makes good sense to you. Preternatural (cheers for the link apeiron, English is not my first language) makes better sense to me.

I say it describes the movement of science better. Nature is a working-definition type of category. It assumes that everything in it is already formatted according to laws. Preternatural would then be all phenomena we cannot put into the nature bag yet. "If it does stuff that is not lawful, it is not because it does impossible things (because it clearly does them!), but because it does things according to logics we have not been able to formalize". The preternatural is that which is not naturalized yet.

Btw, this is what I wanted to get a with the idea of nature being an oppressive political category. It comes into play whenever one assumes that nature preexists it's naturalization.

Objectivity and accuracy are ideals that are fundamental to science. Discussions such as this help to promote them and your insistence on derailing the thread to promote your personal metaphysics is wrong. I don't care if you want to name Indeterminacy after your mother-in-law, it is off topic and unscientific.
 
  • #27
ideasrule said:
Why are we debating semantics? We know that quantum randomness exists and can't be fully explained. As long as we all understand this, who cares whether someone chooses to label it "supernatural"?

Because semantics scaffold the imagination. Different words, different imaginations. At least that is my reason for worrying about the words physicists use. Other than that I pretty much just hopped onto wuliheron's concern for contructing a somehow coherent terminology for uncanny quantum events.
 
  • #28
wuliheron said:
Objectivity and accuracy are ideals that are fundamental to science. Discussions such as this help to promote them and your insistence on derailing the thread to promote your personal metaphysics is wrong. I don't care if you want to name Indeterminacy after your mother-in-law, it is off topic and unscientific.

I'm sorry, but I don't follow you here. Where does good terminology come from in your experience?
 
  • #29
cosmographer said:
I'm sorry, but I don't follow you here. Where does good terminology come from in your experience?

Terminology evolves over time just as all languages evolve over time. Physicists used to speak of action-at-a-distance, and now they talk about forces. What was commonly called uncertainty, is now slowly being replaced with indeterminacy. It is as much an organic process as much as it is a mechanical one and often thrust upon people whether they want it or not. Max Planck had no choice but to call his observations something and, evidently, he chose wisely. Perhaps in part because he had no clue what the possible metaphysics might be.
 
  • #30
I agree that language is historical, gradual and catastrophic. So what I can extract from that statement in relation to the naming-task at hand is 1) that the choice should be wise and 2) perhaps should not be rooted in a metaphysics? Sure I can agree with 1) but I don't see how any human could divorce themselves from doing metaphysics when naming the world is the game. As you indicated, language implicates full-scale ontological imaginaries. There is nothing beyond for us, or for science.

I really don't mean to make things difficult, but I don't see how they could be any easier. You wish to call the not-natural eventing at quantum levels something. Where would you expect the determination to come from that imposes a word that is fitting? Planck was not in a situation different from you or me.
 
  • #31
cosmographer said:
I agree that language is historical, gradual and catastrophic. So what I can extract from that statement in relation to the naming-task at hand is 1) that the choice should be wise and 2) perhaps should not be rooted in a metaphysics? Sure I can agree with 1) but I don't see how any human could divorce themselves from doing metaphysics when naming the world is the game. As you indicated, language implicates full-scale ontological imaginaries. There is nothing beyond for us, or for science.

I really don't mean to make things difficult, but I don't see how they could be any easier. You wish to call the not-natural eventing at quantum levels something. Where would you expect the determination to come from that imposes a word that is fitting? Planck was not in a situation different from you or me.

By simply calling a spade a spade and describing what we observe. When Newton proposed his "force" it was controversial because of the association of the word with magic. However, no one had any better suggestion and eventually its widespread use in the sciences divorced the word somewhat from its superstitious roots. When Planck labeled what he observed as quanta he was again merely describing what he observed as accurately and completely as he could.
 
  • #32
Even calling a spade a spade demands that we have reasons to accept the term spade as properly denoting a spade. Like any word, supernatural does not absolve the task of describing the non-linguistic phenomena it points to, it only marks their domain so to speak, it is an attention director. What reasons do we have to prefer supernatural over preternatural in the case of quantum weirdness? How do they direct attention differently?

Super-natural takes lawfulness as a given and makes unlawfulness the exception. Unruly quantum behavior is beyond law. But what happens when some of these phenomena become explainable by laws? The term supernatural here fails to accommodate the movement of science. Do phenomena then cease to be supernatural and become natural?

Reversing the imaginary is IMO more descriptive of the movement of scientific explanation, the history of scientific discoveries, and especially the very function of the concept of nature as a rhetorical device and not a description of any specific phenomenon (!). There is no content in nature, so to speak, so saying something is beyond it takes an undue solidity of nature for granted.

Preter-natural is not committed to laws as a given before instrument, theories and models appear to extract regularities from the flux of cosmic process. After the proper work is done to stabilize some regularities it is precisely those regularities that will from then on count as natural - as if they had always already been there. Preternatural makes it possible to account for that move, should the quantum phenomena you mention become naturalisable.
 
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  • #33
Put differently supernatural makes one entertain a nondescript, blanket kind of belief in natural existence, while preternatural allows one to stay agnostic until "proof" has been produced. As you seem concerned with people having "superstitions" this way of marking the difference might be more satisfying to you.
 
  • #34
cosmographer said:
Put differently supernatural makes one entertain a nondescript, blanket kind of belief in natural existence, while preternatural allows one to stay agnostic until "proof" has been produced. As you seem concerned with people having "superstitions" this way of marking the difference might be more satisfying to you.

The job of physicists is to describe what they observe as accurately and completely as possible and derive useful theories. Supporting religion, atheism, or agnosticism is not in their job description nor is avoiding religion, atheism, or agnosticism. Those are theological issues and you have already pointed out such discussions are not allowed here!
 
  • #35
wuliheron said:
The job of physicists is to describe what they observe as accurately and completely as possible and derive useful theories. Supporting religion, atheism, or agnosticism is not in their job description nor is avoiding religion, atheism, or agnosticism. Those are theological issues and you have already pointed out such discussions are not allowed here!

It was you that introduced the matter of superstition in one of your posts. In my above post you may substitute "agnostic" with "in a state of belief suspended" if that makes it more palatable to you. The point remains.

As to why preter-natural might be better suited to "describe as accurately and completely as possible" the domain of behavior not at the moment intelligible as lawful, please refer to my previous post. I would appreciate it if you engaged with the actual argument I am trying to develop. After all precise terminology is your professed concern.
 
<h2>1. What is quantum randomness?</h2><p>Quantum randomness refers to the unpredictable behavior of particles at the quantum level. It is a fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics, where particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously and their behavior cannot be precisely determined.</p><h2>2. Is quantum randomness the same as supernatural phenomena?</h2><p>No, quantum randomness is a scientifically observed phenomenon that is governed by the laws of physics. It is not supernatural, as it can be explained and predicted through mathematical equations and experiments.</p><h2>3. Why is there a debate about calling quantum randomness supernatural?</h2><p>Some people argue that the unpredictable nature of quantum randomness goes against our understanding of cause and effect, leading them to believe that it is a supernatural force. However, this is a philosophical debate and not a scientific one.</p><h2>4. Can quantum randomness be explained by natural laws?</h2><p>Yes, quantum randomness is a natural phenomenon that can be explained by the laws of quantum mechanics. While it may seem counterintuitive, it is still a part of the natural world and can be studied and understood through scientific methods.</p><h2>5. How does quantum randomness impact our daily lives?</h2><p>Quantum randomness is not something that directly affects our daily lives in a noticeable way. However, it plays a crucial role in many technologies, such as computer processors and encryption, and is essential for our understanding of the universe at a fundamental level.</p>

1. What is quantum randomness?

Quantum randomness refers to the unpredictable behavior of particles at the quantum level. It is a fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics, where particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously and their behavior cannot be precisely determined.

2. Is quantum randomness the same as supernatural phenomena?

No, quantum randomness is a scientifically observed phenomenon that is governed by the laws of physics. It is not supernatural, as it can be explained and predicted through mathematical equations and experiments.

3. Why is there a debate about calling quantum randomness supernatural?

Some people argue that the unpredictable nature of quantum randomness goes against our understanding of cause and effect, leading them to believe that it is a supernatural force. However, this is a philosophical debate and not a scientific one.

4. Can quantum randomness be explained by natural laws?

Yes, quantum randomness is a natural phenomenon that can be explained by the laws of quantum mechanics. While it may seem counterintuitive, it is still a part of the natural world and can be studied and understood through scientific methods.

5. How does quantum randomness impact our daily lives?

Quantum randomness is not something that directly affects our daily lives in a noticeable way. However, it plays a crucial role in many technologies, such as computer processors and encryption, and is essential for our understanding of the universe at a fundamental level.

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