fredrik

I tried to come up with something that might be clear, started to type but I ended up with even more stuff that I realised will probably just raise more confusion, so I skip that. Instead I'll just say that my opinion is that this is deeply complex, and the analysis of this, unavoidable leads straight onto OTHER but related problems. This means that a proper explanation unavoidable gets lenghty, and in part raises more new questions than answers. Also I am still working on the big picture myself. Related things are foundations of probability theory as a basis for induction. This is certainly a start, but there is more to it than just bayesian probability. That other thing is that the entire reasoning taking places, also need representation. This in particular leads to very complicated and apparently unavoidable self-reference problems which is the biggest problem of all. Now, what do you make out of an unavoidalbe self-reference? I think the result results in an evolution. The evolution itself, is the solution to the problem of self-reference I am working on. This relates also to the physical basis of time. As you see, from my point of view at least this is complicated. There is no simple one-liner for this. Many would spot inconsistencies, but the inconsistencies of our own understanding - not of isolated things like koglomorom axioms - but of the reality we apparently see, are forced upon us. Therefore to ignore them, and call it philosophy is not an answer. It's just a declaration that you don't see the questions. This in itself is also somehow part of the game. Now with that disclaimer this is what I think may be simple way of illustrating the reasoning behind my objection to the continuum probability. I, like Jaynes, think of probability theory sort of as the logic of science, or reason. Jaynes point is that if you start out asking philosophical questions about reasoning on incomplete information, he arrives in a totally different way, to the same mathematics as ordinary probability theory. This is itself interesting, and I think it's good stuff, but the picture can be improved. I am looking for a new discrete version of probability theory, where the probability value, normally beeing the continuum between true and false, are instead generated combinatorically by the complexions of the information structure. This will recover the continuum in the n -> infinit limit, but if you do that early on, as a starting point, you loose track of the exact limiting procedures. As everyone knows from math, if you mix expressions and calculations, integrations etc, containing series, and then take it to infinite many complicates take place. You must keep track of what one is doing here. One resuly of this is that you end up with the problem of choosing a prior distribution from, and you have an uncountable set to choose from. This problem will not appear in what I advocate. I think that the abstraction of limits of infinite sequences etc, correspond at best to asymptotically phenomena ni nature. Finite systems observer in finite time, does not easily match here. At least not in the way I think. The potential here is plenty. One of the most absurd think in modern theoretical physics is all this toying around with infinites and then invention of principally arbitrary procedures to remove them. The idea is that the motivation for the arbitrary tricks is that the result is finite. This is baloney to me. This is exactly what I hope to avoid by these questionings. Sorry to be so unclear but it's the closests thing to a simple answer. I just wanted to spin on, on the questions you started in the thread. /Fredrik Yes this is also why I participated in the thread. We can not solve, and perform a full analysis of the philosophy of science in one thread. And also, I don't think anyone on here would be so foolish to claim they have all answers either. I think this is the point here, to acknowledge that it's sound to raise these questions. It's by no means IMHO at least, in contradiction or conflict with scientific progress. On the contrary is it necessary, like also several others said in the thread. /Fredrik

Resha, just woke up. I can at least try to explain later. I would not say it's not a technical objection deeply embedded in math. I'd rather say it's deeply conceptual and philosophical problem and also depending on a personal conjecture of mine. It's related to the problem of induction, but my escape is different than Poppers. Everyone watches nature, sees structural symmetries and patterna, and tries to guess and generalized from it. Rather than to look at structural patterns, I see behavioural patterns. This connects to the behaviour of rational reasoning upon incomplete information. In short the continuum constitutes a microstructure, and this influences reasoning upon incompleteness, in an ambigous way. I see the continuum as a limit of large information. When this doesn't apply strange things happens. I have an idea of how quantum logic is emergent from classical logic, and a key to understnading it, instead of postulating it, is the constraint "finite information" has on the rational reasoning. Rational reasoning isn't the same as deterministic reasoning. It's more about "rational guessing". The problem of howto make sense of this without resorting to hypothetical infinite experiment series, is what I think of as constructive selection and evolution. I think can make sense of that if information is discrete. The continuum doesn't fit in my picture. I'll try ot see if where is a cleared way of explaning later. /Fredrik

Nice to have more join the thread! I too agree that this discussions contains so many parts. My addition to the thread was mainly to support the OP in his thinking that philosophy of science is important, and that many important fundamental questions could easily be classified as such, or tangent to. A comment on this I am totally with you that there is no real problem in defining the real numbers in mathematics. Maybe I was unclear, I don't see this as a pure mathematical problem, if you by mathematics mean consistency of language. It's consistent enough for me on that level, what my objection is about, is the uniqueness and fitness of the language in the current context - physics. If we are looking for some kind of isomorphism between physics and mathematics, then one wonder what the physical basis is for representing to start with a infinite sequence. It takes an infinite amount of information to do so. Even from the pragmatic engineering point of view, you always work with finite precision. A real number in a computer, is represented by say a 32 or 64 bit integer. If we are using these things, to work out constraints of physics, by the kind of reasoning often used in theoretical physics (consistency requires this, symmetry requires that etc) the above things are far more than a technicality to me. I think it's true what is sometimes said in quest for simplicity in physics, that given the right language or representation, things can be beautiful. So maybe the quest for beatiful laws of nature is the quest for the choice of language that allows an "economic" way of expression. ie. simplicity is relative to language. Also, about "finite information", this becomes even more acute when discussing quantum phehomena and the quest for quantum gravity. Here I think the fitness of some of the language used, is questioned. The continuum included here, IMO at least. /Fredrik I can't speak for Dreyer's true view, but to speak for myself, this objection relates to this statement he did "The last step is that we assign properties to microscopic objects that they cannot have." In particular does this apply to the true intrinsic information, system A has about system B. Maybe the continuum is simply too big. I personally think it is, but since I don't have any answers, all I insist on, is to raise the question. The usual measure of intrinsic information, like as various correlation measures, like various entanglement measures, miss one very important point and it's that those MEASURES are sitting in an external context. They are not true intrinsic measures. Compare here with the extrinsic vs intrisic curvatures in geometry. We still do not have a proper intrinsic formulation of information theory and informatoin evolution. This is a problem IMO. /Fredrik

Maybe you would also like E.T Jaynes books "PROBABILITY THEORY: THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE". PROBABILITY THEORY -- THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE He tries to instead of the ordinary more flat axiomatic approach, argue from the concept of degree of plausability and arrive at essentially the ordinary rules of probability. Then he elaborations on applications on bayesian probability and uses it as a rule of reasoning on physics. Ariel Caticha is someone who has is working in this tradition. He even have the idea that GR might be derivable as a consequence of rational reasoning upon incomplete information. In this view the "beauty" is a simple principle of a rational action upon incomplete information, given a set of players implementing that strategy, we get an expectation on total dynamics, if we expect each part to behave rationally in the sense of a subjective bayesian sense. This is partly interesting, but one mistake I think Jaynes does is that early in his book, he makes the abstraction that a degree of plausability is represented by a real number between 0 and 1. I think the real numbers are non-trivial, and really themselves refer to limits. That's the point where he accepts the continuum reasoning. I prefer to ask what spectrum of degree of plausability that is distinguishable. And then I lean towards an abstraction that the entire resolution of plausability dependes on a parameter, which you can associate to the obserevers information capacity, because these degrees can only live in the internal state. This is exactly where the philosophy of mathematics enter the picture as well. How do you construct the continuum in a rational, accessible way by finite procedures. Maybe the true continuum is not contains redunancies that make it less ideal as a starting point? After all, in mathematics too as far as I have always seen it, you first define natural and rational numbers, before you define real ones. There is a logic in it's construction, that may or may not have analogies to physical evolution. I think mathematics partly relate to reality, but that doesn't mean I think of it in realist terms, because I don't think of reality in traditional realist terms. /Fredrik This somehow relates to the idea of reasoning upon incompete information. Since there is no deductive path towards progress, no matter how much Popper would have wante there to be one, some element of chaotic irrational diversity/variation is unavoidable and probably key to progress. This then needs to be tamed by selective mechanisms. The way I think of it, variation naturally appears as a result of the failure to establishe with certainty a rational reasoning. It's the uncertainty in the rational reasoning itself, that provides variation. But the overall rationality (albeit fuzzy) provides stability and self-organisation. If you see it this way, there really doesn't have to be a major conflict with objectivity and subjectivity. Instead objectivity can be thought of as emergent in a community of players ruled by subjective rationality. Their interaction alone, provides selection for objectivity. This is the philosophical basis for how I reason on symmetry in physics as well. Symmetry is a kind of objectivity, and hence I think symmetries are emergent. I have serious doubts in the belief of the concept of fundamental symmetries. If you object to this, and claim that nature is full of symmtries, then add to this the problem of by means of real experiement, extract from experimental data, the symmetry. There is always uncertainty and statistical uncertainty. I think dismissing this as technical problems is mistake. /Fredrik To understand how this possibly can relate to anything related to GR, the idea is that one can consider the "inertia of information", in the sense that statistically or probabilistically, contradicting evidence is weigthed against the prior information, and thus any contradicting information is only slowly deforming the initial information. If all parts of the systems implement this, then one should get a complex dynamics where there are relative limits on how fast certain things can change simply because of the required accumulation of new evidence needed to change a previously established opinon. Also, given that all information are of finite accuracy, ALL prior structures are principle subject to evolution - it's free of a fixed background information. So it's not background independent, because the background is essential, it's just that the background is dynamical, reltative as opposed to fixed universal. This is the idea that has attracted me, to generalize the principle of relativity to not just spacetime events, but to information-events in general. And the spacetime manifold that that context must be defined by current state of the observers "information microstructure". I recently found that a similar, though a more constrained idea of this is also pursure by Olaf Dreyer who labels his idea "internal relativity", and his core ideas are close enough to the above for a starter. The idea is that this reasoning should bring insight on the problem of what is observable, and how that relates to an inside observer - hence then name internal relativity. Some quotes from one of Dreyers paper for a teaser "We claim that the internal point of view has not been taken far enough. If one strictly adheres to it, one finds not only special relativity but also general relativity. This is the central novelty of Internal Relativity." "In our view, matter and geometry have a more dual role. One can not have one without the other. Both emerge from the fundamental theory simultaneously." "Our objection to this setup is that one does not have direct access to the geometry; we use matter to infer lengths and times. We believe it is desirable to have a theory where there is no geometry without matter, instead geometry and matter arise simultaneously." "This problem is called the problem of time. The approach presented here shows this to be an unnecessary complication that arises because of an unphysical idealization that does not take into account that geometry and matter arise together. By neglecting one part, matter, and just focusing on the other part, geometry, one introduces the problem of time. The problem of time is the price one pays for not realizing that pure gravity is an unphysical idealization." -- http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.4350 All these questions ahve strong philosophical dimensions. He is also working on a project called "quantum space II" for which he received an funding from fqxi: Technical Abstract: The research in this proposal is concerned with the foundations of quantum mechanics and with quantum gravity. On the first subject, we argue that three misguided steps in the standard understanding of quantum mechanics prevent us from solving the measurement problem. The first step is the notion of classical objects. We argue that the classical world can be understood as consisting of special quantum mechanical states. The second step is the tension between the deterministic nature of the Schroedinger equation and the observed probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. We show that with our definition of classicality probability is a necessary consequence. The last step is that we assign properties to microscopic objects that they cannot have. We show that these three steps are the problems that make quantum mechanics so puzzling. Taken together our solutions to the three problems constitute a solution to the measurement problem. In quantum gravity we continue the program of internal relativity. We propose to derive geometry from the low-lying excitations of a solidstate system. We show how Newtonian gravity naturally arises in such a system. We furthermore propose to apply the theory to the early universe and show that we can reproduce the observed spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation. " -- http://www.fqxi.org/large-grants/awa...ls/2008/dreyer This is yet another guy working in this what I think is modern spirit, that also happesn to be very philosophical. If you read the arguments it's very much philosophical arguments, but it's hard to deny that they are good. /Fredrik

I definitely see your point. Some of the later posts in this thread seems to contain some sort of idea that science and philosophy are somehow in contradiction - which naturally feeds tension as in philosphy vs science, like we are talking about science vs magic. But such a contradictory view wasn't at all what I had in mind. I don't see the contradiction at all. And if I understand Resha, it wasn't what he was talking about either. I assumed were not talking about philosophy in general, but rather philosophy of science in this thread. I haven't ever seen any sensible person suggest that philosophy of science and science itself are in contradiction. On the contrary do they historically have common roots and foundations - a quest for knowledge and acquisition of knowledge, and what knowledge IS. A particular CHOICE of philosophy of science, say Poppers, is a particular choice of rational method to acquire true knowledge. Poppers pain was the notion of induction, which he couldn't stand, he thought he could turn the inductive process to an deductive one. IMO he didn't succeed very well, but that's a different discussion. Another common misconception is that philosophers invariably are conservative realists, that fail to make sense out of quantum weirdness etc. I often see the ones refusing to face philosophical questions as far more conservative, and avoiding difficult questions. The label them philosophy is an escape. IMHO at least, a modern true philosopher of science aren't suggesting that science is crap, the questioning of science and the scientific process is made in a constructive way to improve the effiency of progress by insight into things like hypothesis generation (which Popper did not do). No sensible philosopher would suggest trash science and go back to armchair contemplations. The idea as I see it, is to _evolve_ science and it's method. In this respect those who refuse to ponder this possibility are the true conservatists. /Fredrik

Yes it sure does Smolins book is not at all a book on a theory or philosophy of science, it is rather a book containing some of the history of modern physics, and some of the problems of the apparently stalled progress. But it still contains strong philosophical angles. I personally feel that his pointing out how people in group work, is nothing new, it's more of a statement of observation. And what I think he wants with his book, is to provoce a change of attitude among those who has power to hire or not hire young students. He argues in this direction by pointing out how the scientific society has worked. To see, that progress takes more than mastery of technical tools. During normal science the technical tools is enough to make progress, then when there is need for paradigm shift (Kuhn indeed) the technicians might be stumped, and a creative mind is needed to guide them. So we need both the overview/diversity and specialisation. And not always does the technical geniouses and creative geniouses come in the same package. It seems that you have already a decent background in philsophy of science, and in that case I think the book contains nothing new. Still it might be an interesting read since it comes not from a philosopher but from a physicist. I think the point you raised in your first post

I for one acknowledge the importance of philosophical questions in science, and in particular the foundations and developments of science (as opposed to applied science). Which gets even more important these days, in the search for theories of everything. Then I think, more than ever does any sane persons ask, what is science and what is the process whereby science proceeds? I remember that the one physics teacher that has made the biggest impression in the past, also had a Phd in philosophy. He had an apparently wider perspective than some of the more narrowed down teachers. He understood the entire picture, starting from the appearance of a question in the students brain. You could ask a fuzzy question, and he nailed it right on, while others would respond with the the question was unclear. He had an impressive perception about things. In particular did he understand that a significant part of many problems are asking the right questions, therefor if you reflexively reject fuzzy questions, you are missing almost the whole point. Still I doubt philosophy is much of a formal merit in physics. While pure mathematics has become more of a formal merit. I think this connects to several points Lee Smoling raises in the trouble with physics in the last chapter. He distinguishes between different types of personalities, and argues that all of them are important in the collective scientific process. But due to the de facto dynamics in the scientific society, strange things happens. There has been a trend of a "mathematical toying approach" to physics, rather than, asking deep and fundamental (almost a little philosophical) questions like many of the old school scientists did. The later generates have for some reasons purified and maintained the technical approaches. This might have resulted in a loss of perspective. One way to gain perspective is to take a pause and ask, what I am doing, what are the important questions, and why. And what is the most rational procedure to look for the answers? Are we on the right track? Those leaders who fail to acquire a wide perspective risk leading their followers out into a desert. This relates the question of valuing philosophical questioning of the scientific process that the OT asked. I think it is not very much so atm, but maybe it's changing. Resha, did you read smolins the trouble with physics? It's not a philosophy book, but it talks about the sociology and group phenomena in scientific communities that leads to narrowing approaches, rather than encouraging perspective. His main critics is towards string theory, who has consumed research resources out of proportion to it's potential, and he elaborates why this happened. It's not because string theorists are irrational, he argues that it is because it's the way the scientific community currently works. /Fredrik I personally think that there is actually a good overlap between the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of physics, because historically there has been synergies development of language and the development of what you can express. I think connections to this also is present in the philosophy of science. If you ask what is science, one need to face also what is knowledge, and how is knowledge acquired. Some revolution in this direction is implicity in quantum theory, which focuses on the so called measurement perspective. Then we have come to mathematicall explore the constraints suggested by the representation of measurements themselves, in the sense that, what does representation theory tells us about what is possible to represent at all? The traditional reasoning after emergence of quantum theory is that this language and formalism is measurement theory somehow puts constraints on what you can say. Ie. by studying the "constraints of language" (ie mathematics), you can infer to a certain extent what is speakable (physics). Ie. the properties of representation and language are used to CONSTRAIN by consistency, what how any consistent model may look. However, one must not forget that these constraints, are still of conjectural nature only, because it's really a "theory of language" we are using to constrain what's spekable. The consistency refers to a theory of language, whos questioning will take us deeper. This leads us somehow into the philosophy of mathematics as well. The formalised measurement theory and theory of representations, that is the core of the mathematical formulation of quantum theory is not proven. Therefore there might be a danger to extrapolate these constraints from a conjectured unique language on what we can say and learn about nature. Questions like this, IMO usually fall under the domain of philosophy of physics, mathematics and science. But they are nevertheless IMHO at least of deep importance. I don't share the realist view of mathematics though. But I think also the very reference to human mind is incomplete. By a similar token that the language of physics, constrains the physics itself, the representation of theory constraints theory itself. But theory can also be seen as a evolved state of knowledge, and if you connect knowledge to information and measurements in modern physics, one is lead to question the very notion of physical law. A realist view of mathematics, and a realist view of physical law seems to me closely related. But what if this is not so? Again this is philosophical questions, does that mean a scientists must not ask them? I think it's the other way around, I think the question must be faced straight. It is risky to think that questions we don't understand are not important. /Fredrik

I am also reading this book after Martin brought my attention to it. Thanks! They way I see these books, is not just "popularizations". The most interesting part is to learn how knowledgable people reason about these things, and their guesses about the future. I think many technical research papers, are not only technical, but also "polished" to the point that they present a result, and not so much the logic that has guided them to the result. I think understanding physics is not just about polished results, it's also about methodology (and in this case, particularly the methodology of a theorist; ie how to you come up not just "a testable WAG-hypothesis", but a good hypothesis that allows us to make progress and not get stuck in infinite downwards loop killing crappy generated hypothesis?) Perhaps once we can understand the logic that has guided us from the past to the current, we can better guide ourselves from the present ot the future. I haven't read smolings twp yet. I read 3 roads which I enjoyed. But twp is probably next on my list after wilczek's book I'm reading now. /Fredrik

Thanks. Maybe I'll get a telescope one sometime when I'm bored and try it. Sounds fun I have experimented little before by taking pictures of cells in a microscope from the eyepiece and it works fine too (whithout having a dedicatd computer microscope), the limit was the lensing of my simple microscope though. The camera resolution was more than sufficient, and then I even had a simple camera. I can imagine that a telescope + camera in mounts could be alot of fun. But does it move that fast? I noticed that you used 0.5s exposure in one of those pics (I could see if you look into the file). If you use a few seconds does it really blur that much due to moon-motion? or is it rather atmoshperic-motion effects? I never tried this myself so I don't know I am just curious /Fredrik

Nice pics! I'm curious how the pics look in colour with a longer exposure? or do you use only the b/w mode on the camera? You must be able to get spectacular glow-pictures unless it gets blurry? I don't have such teleobjective so I never tried to shoot the moon. /Fredrik

I was recently notified elsewhere by an ongoing essay contest on the topic: the nature of time, arranged by FQXi community. See all the essays at http://fqxi.org/community/forum/category/10 Some very famous people has written essays for this competition, including Carol Rovelli. All the essays are intended as easy reading and I think they are all at most 10 pages each. Click on each title and you can download the essay as a pdf and read! The topic of those essays are right in line with the topic of this thread. /Fredrik

My primary interest has never been cosmology, but I want to claim that these reasonings nevertheless touches in an interesting way other foundations of physics and that some of the foundational things of cosmology, do show analogous to other problems of foundational physics, such as QM and observer physics. So in a deeper sense these reasoning in these papers may extend beyond cosmology. In some ways I see the "creation of the universe" to have similarities to the "creation of observers". In particular if you have the view that physical interactions is best described as relational interactions, and where physical interactions can bee seen as communication between sub-systems/observers, and that they basically learn about each other, and respond to this information; meaning the local actions are based on the local image of the environment. This might suggest that the physical meaning of bohrs old expression is deeper than the original intention. And intuitive understandings of one thing, might help the other too. My two favourite sections in that article is "The big bang is no longer a physical beginning or a mathematical singularity, but it does put a practical limitation on our knowledge. Whatever survives cannot provide a complete view of what came before. Frustrating as this may be, it might be a conceptual blessing. In physical systems as in daily life, disorder tends to increase. This principle, known as the second law of thermodynamics, is an argument against an eternal universe. If order has been decreasing for an infinite span of time, the universe should by now be so disorganized that structures we see in galaxies as well as on Earth would be all but impossible. The right amount of cosmic forgetfulness may come to the rescue by presenting the young, growing universe with a clean slate irrespective of all the mess that may have built up before." Rather than pick on details that they admitt thesemlves (like the omitt matter etc) I think there are some nice grains in there that can guide us in the quest for incorporating matter. So the problem of the origin of the universe, has similarities with the origin of observers, in the sense that there observers typically also have finite lifespans, and there are many of them that are furthermore interacting to varying extent. Similarly could one imagine the galaxy as one obervers (with internal structure), but what is the largest possible obeserver relative to us? /Fredrik

If I may participate, I couldn't help reflect on this... These reflections reminds me of the relational nature of information, and perhaps we can draw a parallell here between some epistemological limit and a complexity bound regarding relations - could the complexity of an observer somehow defined the "resolution of the image" of the world around him, that lives in him? I think such a thought is plausible but as far as I know there is not yet a completely satisfactory model for this, and it's something I'm still thinking of myself. One complication though is that even though it's plausible to picture an epistemological limit (due to the complexity of the reference (ie "the observer")), the observer is also subject to change and in particular the complexity of the reference can grow! (like a memory system can grow). So part of the equations here we must not only describe the world relative to a reference of bounded complexity, it must also describe the state of changes of both the image of the world(universe) and the reference. I have always made an association here to gravity. Gravity could perhaps be interpreted as the attraction of complexity, and the logic of gravity would be the logic of this strengthening of images. Clearly a more complex/massive reference, plausibly provides a more confident "image of the world" than does a volatile one. I think these question on epistemological limits will be understood better when we understand the evolution of informationsystems better. Information systems as in, where "matter" is the manifestation of information in general, and the state of matter makes up the state of information. There is a lot of philosophical stuff here though, mixed in with foundational questions of mathematics and it's relation to physics, which is why I think so little progress has been made on this. It's difficult to analyze without falling into the trash bin, so it might be safer to leave this for others. I think these are extremely interesting things, but that are too rarely discussed. /Fredrik

I suppose the words why and how are a bit of a problem to start with. It's often repeated that science describe what we know about nature ~ how. But not "why" nature is the way it is. That sounds somewhat reasonable but one can still find a meaning of the why question in science I think. From the scientific point of view, if the how describes our best knowledge or "guess" about nature, one interpretation of why would be - WHY do we have this opinion? ie. How have we concluded from experience and history this standpoint? This is to probe the logic of the scientific method. A very trivial meaning of how, in order to avoid uncertain propositions is to consider the extreme case of only describing the past. We only know how nature behaves AFTER we have witnessed it. But then, the whole utility of science, as opposed to history, is to use our experience and from that form an expectation of future expectations. The utility is then that we can chose our actions, as per expectations, to our advantage. In that sense why could we a hypotetical connection between two factual events. Or the idea that the current state, predicts the future state (wether deterministically or probabilistically). Then this causation could be thought of as the scientific version of "why". Why is the ground wet? The ground is wet because it was raining one hour ago. To ignore the why would be to say that, we know for sure the ground is wet, and indeed it was raining one hour ago but any possible connection is not of interest. But it seems that nature of this problem suggests that there is never a confident why. We can not with certainty infere a causal relation from the past. All we can do is guess, or in Poppers world: come up with the hypothesis that raining wets the ground, and try to falsify it. I see one of the utility of sciece is in these key questions This is the state of matters today, what will happen tomorrow? This is our experimental setup, what will the outcome be when we fire the experiment? That can be interpreted as implicitly asking "whys" as in how a particular initial state are expected to evolve into a posterior state. The why is the causal relation. It does not have to be error free or deductive to be of utility. In a way scientific theories are the whys. If we again ask why as in "why this why" that IMO is to question the scientific method - can we trust the method that has lead us to this why? This leads to discuss philosophy of science. OTOH, if we consider that the scientific model is reall nothing but a "theory or method of learning" one can certainly try to improve it. There has been philosophers that has apparently been annoyed by the lack of certainty and tried to find ways to evade it. But I think that we must not let the imperfections blind us and prevent us from making progress. To try to gain knowledge of nature is IMO not a deductive process, it is a risky game. As I see it, science as opposed to occuly of religious framworks aims to optimize the game to the extent possible. Natural science isn't mathematics and we don't prove things. We don't prove laws. And even the laws should constantly be challanged. /Fredrik

I might agree with this. The question is what your suggested action is? To me the utility of logic and reason is by no means contradicted by it's incompleteness or lack of perfection - on the contrary do I think that our awareness of the incompleteness may even improve our development. The point of "reasoning" to me isn't perfection, it's progress. If we had perfection, the reasoning would appear almost redundant to me. I wonder what you have in mind? Are you thinking of axiomatic formulation of certain scientific theories, or the scientific method? In any case, I agree there is room for improvement here. But I think the development of knowledge certainly go hand in hand with the development of language. Look at mathematics and physics, that sometimes seems to have a symbiotic relationsship. With the right language saying what you want may be far easier. Odd argument. Is this supposed in your favour? Your "critics" of science, makes me wonder what you suggest instead. Some of your question might fit within philosophical and foundational reflections of science and it's methods, but the outcome of such discussions should be a constructive improvement and not just a plain rejection. The question of what is evidence, and what is sufficient evidence is old questions of philosophy of science. I think asking them is good, if done in a constructive spirit. Like ajb said, I don't think a serious scientifically minded person is favoured of beeing dogmatic. Anyway, the scientific method as I personally see it, is no more static than the knowledge it produces. Anyone seriously applying a method for some utility, should be interesting in improving the former too. A constructive questioning of the scientific method IMO, is one which reasons and suggest improvements. I couldn't tell if you have some serious suggestions in mind, or if you rather favour some "religious style" road? /Fredrik

I think occasional reflections on what are doing, and wether it's the best way are sound. I don't see why a someone scientifically inclined should be ashamed to be caught doing mental masturbation, I think we all do it, the difference is that some live in denial Yes, that's what I told the teacher in computer science - my linear search method works just fine! it's just a little slower than the others I don't think it's nonsense. While we don't need to overdo anything and suggest that everyone replaces 50% of their physics course with philosophy courses. The point is more I think to acknowledge that an openminded attitude is I think healthy and useful. Philosophy in science can be just something as simple as self-reflections and questioning of our current direction. /Fredrik Agreed. /Fredrik

I should say I didn't mean to start a discussion on the philosophy of science per see here I mainly wanted to respond to the original topic questioning the relevance of philosophy to science. I think it is relevant. My example was to suggest that to think that the philosophy of science is irrelevant to a scientists is almost silly. But of course a physicists might choose care less about say the philosophy of art, in the same way a physicist care about the mathematical model of physics, but not necessarily the mathematical models of finance. Yet from the point of view of a pure mathematician, he might be unable to distinguish between the two. He doesn't care wether it's physics of finance, he cares about the formal system of pure mathmatics. If you think I in any way tries to suggest that empirical testing is bad I might have been unclear. To me personally, it's the one an only source of information. Experience/interactions/experiments is the communication channel though which knowledge/opinion/information takes form. I don't question that. What is less clear though, is what conclusion to induce from emprical observations? One can imagine that each observational evidence is a "fact", but I think to think of science as "collecting or recording facts" is a serious mistake what misses many points. One easy thing to see is that it is not possible to store all information, empirical observations needs to be processed/interpreted and compiled into some sort of memory strucuture. Often I think a decision has to be made here, howto structure the data, and what parts of the data to dismiss when memory is full. I think it's this self-organisation that is the interesting part. And even if we could store all data, the question still remains howto predict tomorrow from yesterday? It's not hard to see that there is many ways to do that. Somehow the basis is that in the data, there is patterns or possibly laws observed, that are conserved, and thus allows us to induce predictions for tomorrow. But there may be many POSSIBLE competing patterns in a limited part of history, and which one is likely to be conserved? /Fredrik To add another point here and if I may suggest a distinction between a scientist and and application engineer, where a scientist is one who has built the tools used by the engineer. > to think that the philosophy of science is irrelevant to a scientists is almost silly. OTOH, I think an engineer using physical theories might afford to care less about philosophy of physics - it's somehow not his problem. Similarly, one can imagine that a scientist is someone who is using the tool/method we call the scientific method, and that if he wants, to a certain extent can simply accept a choice of such a method, and work on. But his behaviour then rests upon a choice. So who made the tool the scientific method? I guess it can be said to be philosophers of science, which I like to see as a possible "science of science". If a certain method of research leads to skewed results, or inefficient progress (slow learning) the scientist of science should improve the methodology. /Fredrik In conclusion this is the perspecive I personally see the history of science. Matters of belief and opinion and perhaps random speculation, has evolves into slightly better notions of knowledge and rational methods. But I would for myself not even think the thought that the current state of the scientific method is perfected. In particular when we are reaching very subtle stuff, like unification of forces and the quest for the holy grail of physics, I think our very method and state of understanding of science and knowledge itself is put to test. /Fredrik

I for one, have no problems whatsoever with combining science, philosophy, mathematics and physics. On the contrary to I think that many real problems, can benefit from an multiangle analysis. As far as I know, historically many of these things linked, and there is no contradiction. Possibly. Take science itself. Which many who think of philosophy as fruitless mental masturbation probably hold high. What is science? I'd have hard to take seriously, a "scienctist" who refuses to reflect over what science is. Yes this just the type of question asked in the philosophy of science. I think according to most people, modern science, typically refers to the search for knowledge of nature (if we consider here for simplicity the natural sciences - connecting to natural philosophy), as per the scientific method. So what is the scientific method? It's somehow supposedly a rational and systematic methodology to search for knowledge. Ok, what is knowledge? This has been extensively discussed in the history of philosophy, and is btw still today discussed - compare to the QM debated and "what is "information". An obvious problem, is how to distinguish opinion from knowledge. And how do we konw that a given procedure of questioning, leads to knowledge and not opinion. Or do we? There is also the famous problem of induction in philosophy, which asks how to infer knowledge from observations. It asks wether inductive reasoning is "valid". This is a very relevant problem to the foundation of natural science. Science ideally should infer from limited experience and observations, that laws of nature. But how on earth is this process secured from ambiougity and how is effiency secured? As we know, there is so called deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Deduction takes place by starting from premises, axioms and the liek and the by means of an argument generates a conclusion. If the premises are true, so is the conclusion. This is the type of logic taking place in orginary deductive logic, mathematics and the like. And also in application of theories which have been given axiomatic structure. Induction however, is when it is not possible to make and valid conclusions. Inductive reasoning is risky, it is a kind of guessing. Or reasoning under uncertainty. From experiment and observations, we can induce "probable" patters and laws of the universe. Probably one of the founders of the solution to this, that is closest to the current view of the scientific method is I think Karl Popper. Popper didn't like the induction, he wanted to solve this problem in a deductive manner. So he invented his poppian scientific method building on hypothesis testing by falsification. IE. We can never by deduction prove something, but poppian thinks that we can by deduction disprove theories. We make a hypothesis, that is put to test. So the truth of the current theories are not deduced, but instead the absence of they beeing falsified by deduction is indirect support. Of course this IS a kind of indirect induction. Which is a critic thta people have fired onto popper. Also popper leaves open the rationality of hypothesis choice. How do you choose new hypothesis for testing? Well IMO it's induction. So popper has not been able to stay away from induction. These are philosophical question of science, and IMO Poppers papers are most certainly not the last paper on the scientific method. I see some of the questions in modernt physics as probably related to the scientific method of popper. My point is that the favour of deductive logic over induction is somewhat deceptive. Deductive logic works from axioms. By how are new axioms induced?? Most probably not by deduction right? This leaves the question of deductive strategies, one of the ambigous choice of hypothesis or axioms. The question of effiency is not address in the current scientific method as I see it. This is also related IMO to the question of modern physics, say smolings questioning of string theory is science. I'm not saying it's not (I think thread at least) by indeed the question is motivated, and I think the question is if our current poppian model is good enough? I am in doubt. /Fredrik

It's a common fallacy in interpreting statistics. Se for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation For example, someone collects statistics on a particular type of cancer patients and finds say that smokers are over-represented in that group. Ie. we have a correlation between smokers and cancer. this can be thought to be a fact. But can you conclude hat smoking causes cancer? (Now that may be true for othre reasons, but the above logic is not a deduction.) The same can be applied to other cases where the absurdity becomes more clear. Support that in the group of cancer patients it is found that they watch far more TV than others, or knit more often. One can by the same logic then suggest that watching TV or knitting causes cancer. Sometimes funny things appear in the media which are extracting causal connections from statistics. And by choosing the survey, you can produce statistical data that with the same fallacy support just about anything. The correlation is a statistical fact (although still subject to statistical uncertainty due to sampling issues), but the cause can not be deduced from the data. At best, one can induce to various relative degrees of belief of "probable causal connection". If he inductive nature of the reasoning is admitted, it all comes out as more honest, and the reasoner is fully aware of that he is not making deductiosn - he is guessing. But that's is often The emphasis in my post was not questions like, "given a causal law then ...(insert question)". My emphasis that I personally find interesting, is how knowledge of a causal law is acquired, in particular in the light of the difficulty of making deductive conclusions from observations and statistics. This is also connected to old philosophical questions of - howto go from observation to law - Howto count/rate evidence. - howto combine evidence - howto rate the confidence in "induced/acquired opinon" Originally, in the early days of science, or pre-science, alot was a matter of opinon, and probable opinon was those of authorities. Eventually it was found that this is pretty ambigous, and unsatisfactory. So people started to question these things. It gave birth to many philosophical questions, and also probability theory. Very long time ago, one could not for example unambigously computer odds of games. Alot of it was probably based instead of experience "playing with dices", rather than analytical reasoning of the mathematics of gaming. Out of this questions regarding the philosophy of the scientific method also comes. Because science is somehow the idea of inferreing from experience and experiment, laws of nature. How is this done without running into fallacies like the above? /Fredrik I suspect this is going more philosophical, but not less interesting. I'm not sure if someone would want to move this to philosophy. I can't say for sure I understand you exactly, but to reflect anyway. My view of the causation concept (the view I feel makse sense to reality) is not of deductive type, but of the inductive type. And deduction could be seen as a limit case of induction. About realism inspired deterministic induction I can't comment. It makes no sense to me, but prehaps others can comment. I'm tempted to say that a fundmental causation is time evolution. This is basically the problem of trying to induce the "future" from the present and possible part of history, which is somehow the ultimate goal of science. In this view, the assymmetry between cause and effect is related to the arrow of time. The degree of certainty to which we can distinguish cause and effect is the degree of certainty which we can distinguish the arrow of time. From a the view of statistical induction of causal law, one can imagine that in the case of very little evidence the uncertatiny in the inductions are very uncertain, and in the extreme case almost random in which cause it's effectively impossible to induce the causallaw. Interesting question. I wonder how you define the relabeling. Somehow the use of the word label implicity suggest that it lacks physical significance. They are merely symbols. So is the "probabilistically" induced causal law, invariant under relabelling of events or evidence? Is that something what you ask? A very interesting question not so easy to answer and I think it depends on wether we consider a non-physical relabelling (like change or coordinate system) or if you consider a physical relabelling where the labelling is considered to originate from a physical process. In the former case I think it's trivially invariant, in the latter case I think the question is still unclear. I think we need so supplement the physical meaning of the labels in the first place. If they have no physical meaning, then perhaps we should reformualte the question in terms of what has physical meaning. In my very personal thinking, the induction of causal law are not uniqe. It's observer dependent. But, OTOH I see the slight disagreement in this law, the very basis for interactions. This recoveres the consistenty. The subjectivty of "induced causal law", predicts interactions, that is due to this subjectivity. So maybe one possible suggestive answer to your question is that - except for the trivial meaning of labels - is that the eventual "invariance of causal law" during another indexing/labeling of evidence, is to be identified with interactions between the two index systems. Edit: One might however try to construct a limited special theory where invariance is guaranteed by construction, and so to speak consider only the group of indexing systems (observers) who does leave the causal law invariant. But does this set exhaust are actual observers? To extend the group of obsevers, is then as per my suggested reasoning, equivalent by introducing further interactions. /Fredrik

This could be made a deep philosophical question and maybe I missed your point but... A cause is like a condition, that together with an "implication law" imples an effect. We may have a set of conditions A. We may have a set of conditions B. And a law that says that if A holds is true then we can conclude that B holds. A causes B (if A is a sufficient cause) But the interesting philosophical question is from the epistemological perspecitve is how we come to conclude that the law itself holds? If the law is given, then the causation is a plain deduction. If we associate the progression of events (time) with the causation, then we have a sequence of deductions, where the "past, together with the laws of physics, causes the future". This is a bit like a deterministic philosophy, still leaving the big epistemological question on howto infere the deterministic structure without using induction (which should have no place in a deterministic world) But IMHO from the point of a sound scientific method laws are discovered or inferred from experience/experiment (how else does it happen?). So the interesting part here isn't the deductive case of causation, but the inductive case where the question arises what causes the law of causation in the first place? We all know the drill that correlation does not imply causation. But from the point of inductive reasoning based on experience, what is a sound logic of discovering the causal laws? There might not be a sharp line between inductive logic, in the sense that a correlation implies causation to "a certain degree of certainty", and the common sense metod of the scientific discovery. This inductive reasoning is much more in line with an indeterministic worldview. I think these questions are interesting but goes beyond relativity itself. Relativity does not explain these things. The just supposedly constrains the effect of any cause to the future light cone, that constrains the causal structure. But there are question on "what is causality" that is not satisfactory answered by relativity. So what Relavitiy does is to somehow suggest a structure on the boundaries of causation. Still leaving the deeper meaning of causation in the context of science unresolved. /Fredrik An inductive version of causation instead of an implication, A implies B, one could say that A imples B, with a certain "probability", also conditional on the very reasoning beeing done. This suggest that A can be likely to cause B, and yet later we find that A might not cause B, but then this gets consequences for our degree of confidence in the very reasoning. The motivation for the fuzzy reasoning could for example be that, it's the best guess we can come up with. It's somehow the subjectively judged best guess we can produce given our massive ignorance and incompetence. /Fredrik

If this makes no sense forget it, but it's what I think might be a easier way for you to picture this, considering your interests. I think perhaps you are making this more difficult than it is. QM is weird, but perhaps it's the math and the terminology here that makes these points appear weirder than necessary... Swansont wrote I think what it should say is that asking about the nature of nature, is a process, and more specifically a process composed of information exchange and self-organisation between it's parts. Where the parts can sort of be seen as abstract observers, observing it's environment. So instead of looking for the nature of nature as some small absolute blocks, it could be (but presumably noone knows for sure yet!) that nature is nothing but relational processes. So if you are to survive and grow in that environment, it does seem reasonable that you can not fire random questions, it seems more plausible that patterns will self-organized and the logic of this may follow a self-constructing logic. Maybe the nature of nature is "questions" and information exchange. And perhaps certain questions construct and stabilise, and this is what we see as matter? I figure an atom, must be cleverly constructed to be stable. And the logic of it's stability may be the clue to understand QM and its' logic. /Fredrik

I'm not sure how you plan to take this further but what do you think about these papers, that are remotely similar to what sounds like your associations. "Are We Cruising a Hypothesis Space?" C.C Rodriguez -- http://arxiv.org/abs/physics?papernum=9808009 "...1. The appearance of time is a consequence of uncertainty. 2. Space is infinite dimensional and only on the average appears as four dimensional. 3. Spin is a property of space and not of a particle so that all truly fundamental particles must have spin..." "The Information Geometry of Space and Time" Ariel Caticha -- http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0508108 "Is the geometry of space a macroscopic manifestation of an underlying microscopic statistical structure? Is geometrodynamics - the theory of gravity - derivable from general principles of inductive inference? Tentative answers are suggested by a model of geometrodynamics based on the statistical concepts of entropy, information geometry, and entropic dynamics. The model shows remarkable similarities with the 3+1 formulation of general relativity..." /Fredrik

I have it but only read sections of if. The book has a lot of words in it, and not that much math. While he tries to talk about some advanced things, he uses alot of plain english and less math. I don't know you, but I think you could read it, and if there are some details that appear strange, there is still a large part of the book that is easy reading. It's over 1000 pages and nothing stops you from reading only certain chapters. Wether you like his style of reasoning or writing though, is a matter of personal taste. /Fredrik

Yes, agreed. I didn't mean to suggest that QM is an exception, just to point out that progress of science (or life for what matter) doesn't work like deductive processes, as a statement about the nature of theories. I for sure agree that the behaviour of nature are not emergent by formal proof or axiomatisations, but the reason I said QM isn't prooved is that I generally disagree on calling scientific progress "deductions" (like mathematical proofs deduce things). My suggested focus on the questions foodchain asked is exactly the process of formulating new questions, and thereby increasing our knowledge. I think of this as a inductive process, where "scientific conclusions" are more like educated guesses based on experience, rather than deductions where the premises are experience. So I agree that QM is induced/suggested (on good grounds indeed) from empirical observations, but not _deduced_ which is stronger. It may seem like nitpicking but I think from the conceptual view there is a important difference. Once that view is accepted, my focus goes to the emergent logic of inductive reasoning (ie educated guessing), where the step to probability distrubutions are not far, like when Jaynes calls probability theory: the logic of science. So to understnad QM, perhaps what we need to understand is the scientific process, which I also think is very parallell to physical processes. That was my point point. /Fredrik

I think I walked a different path than you. Originally I had little interest in biology, mainly because I considered it an application of chemistry, and later the history repeated itself and I realised that the interesting parts in chemistry are the laws, which is really reducible to the laws of physics. But then I realized that there is fundamental wrong with using such statistical approaches to explain everything. Ie that the observational level is explained in terms of statistics of a higher resolutional microstructure. It is easy to explain something by averaging out degrees of freedom, but that is not how life works! Life doesn't reduce information, life creates new information. It's really the other way that is more interesting. That lead me to recover interest in biology and complex systems. So my idea of understanding the world is not to find the smallest possible componetns and then apply statistics on that to "explain" my observations. Rather there is an element of guessing, that is critical to life as I see it. Life is a game, and all I need to know is what my strategy of playing is, and how this strategy is revised. The way I can understand your questions is to first try to see what it really means that You are asking these questions, and if you are looking for a "possible answer", or if you are trying to find "alll possible answers" and rate them? I think zurek's ideas are interesting but they along can not solve the problem as I see. He sometimes argues that the environment selects local systems. While this from his perspective is correct I think - the question is wrong. The one asking the question is the local observer looking out into the unkonwn - not the giant environment as an observer zooming into an atom in his rear. Or rather I think we need both perspectives! I think particle physics vs cosmology requies two different logics, because normal statistics works different in the large scale. In a particle experiment, environment as an observer really does seem plausible. But turn that around and consider the small system beeing the experimentalist asking a question about his own environment, now that's a challange, because then the construction of the questions themselves are severly constrained! What I'm trying to see is how these two views can be united. The plain decoherence doesn't do this. So I think a large emphasis should be put on the notion of questions. Who is firing the question? We firing a question down deen into an atom, from a fairly controlled environment is one thing, but we firing a question into an object in space, both us and the object, embedded in far less controlled environment is a different thing. /Fredrik