Re: To what do the laws of physics apply?

From: Mike Helland (mobydikc_at_gmail.com)
Date: 01/08/05 

Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 22:06:45 +0000 (UTC)

Boris Borcic wrote:
> Mike Helland wrote :
> > Let's start with two simple postulates:
> >
> > 1. There is the subjective reality of our conscious experience and the
> > objective reality external to our minds.
>
> Maybe I am just fooled by my inferior mastery of English, but your first
> statement is an oxymoron because of the singular "experience". We
> wouldn't find any sense to contrasting "subjective" and "objective"
> experience, such as appears to be your intention, if we were all sharing
> a single and same conscious experience.

Right, this would be more accurate:

1. There is the subjective reality of your conscious experience and the
objective reality external to your mind.

> AFAIK, the notion of an "objective reality" may be nothing more that the
> wish for a viewpoint guaranteed stable and universal - a wish that
> reflects repeated trauma of having had to revise understandings one
> first believed comprehensive and definitive. Naming such a viewpoint
> "external to our minds", I tend to understand as an allusion to the
> legitimacy of a due process that would allow adepts to force its
> adoption onto others, while escaping accusation of prejudice.

I agree with. It is my personal opinion that the objective world should
be regarded as hypothetical, and "not real", which helps me avoid that
scenario.

> > 2. The principles, theories, and laws of physics apply only to the
> > world of our observations, the subjective reality.
>
> One could as well say that the law of physics apply to the design of
> procedures that physicists and engineers use to make accurate
> predictions and reliable machines. I surmise that the purpose of
> reliable engineering is the organic ancestor of that of reliable
> physical predictions, and that laws of physics wouldn't exist but for

> these purposes.

That's an interesting observation.

I know of two promiment metaphysical systems, that which originated
with Newton, and that of his contemporary Leibniz. Newton, of course,
is famous for his role in the law of physics, and Leibniz for his role
in egineering.

> > After all, if we create our theories keeping in mind what we observe,
> > and we test our theories by finding out how accurately they predict
> > what we observe, what possible reason do we have to think that our
> > theories are of any significance to what is beyond our observations?
>
> What possible reason do we have to think that what is beyond our
> observations has any relevance ?

That is a good question.

What if someone were to say "I think I can solve some difficult
problems in physics, if I may make the following conjecture about what
is beyond our observations ..." and this was followed by a very good
reason?

A good reason such as the one given by Leibniz. In his view, causality
did not exist in our observations. Causality existed in a deeper realm,
one that he said had a different kind of matter than what we observe
that is "laden with the past and pregnant with the future."

I think what he's essentially saying is that if we understand the laws
of physics (QM and GR) to only apply to our observations, we may
conjecture that what is beyond our observations may be determinate and
absolute, as long as the observations it produces are in accordance
with the laws of physics, indeterminate and relative.

> It is true that much of the progress of physics during the past century
> took the form of getting closer to the phenomena by renouncing to
> features of the "intuited promised" land. But what you describe, I see
> 100% in line with expectations natural to 19th century physicists.

Not at all. What I'm describing is 100% in line with the expectations
of 18th century philospohers.

However, Newton's assumptions reigned over their more complex
assumptions, and still has to this day, even though relativity and
quantum mecahnics are screaming out for the more sophisticated
framework suggested by Leibniz and Spinoza and others.

> IMO, the idea of an objective universal view predates science, and the
> painters of the renaissance were first to pioneer your field by
> establishing the law of perspective of localized viewpoints. Since it is
> defensible to argue that most of modern math and physics is a
> continuation of their work, this raises the question of
> whether/how/why/when did the subsequent evolution of science depart from
> what you propose.

As I said, I think Newton was the departure. But I also think this was
only because he took short cuts to getting the results he needed to
show people he was right, so it wasn't necessarily a bad thing since we
are only now approaching the technology required to do it without the
shortcuts.

The shortcut is that his laws of physics operated on what we observe.
This might not sound like a big problem, but consider that in the 20th
century physics started placing much more emphasis on the observer. In
spite of that we never really moved away from the assumption that the
laws of physics operate on what we observe. As far as I know there is
no research for laws of physics that apply only to the superset of what
we observe with a modeled observer, so we are modeling what we observe
indirectly. Then physics would deal with the observer not only
conceptually, but now for the first time, formally.