Re: Why physicists should pay attention to the mind
- From: Ralph Hartley <hartley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 28 May 2005 09:11:59 +0000 (UTC)
I don't have time to reply to your whole post right now (and it would be
off topic). In this post I will restrict my comments to one point,
relating to the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
rof@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Second, I want to set the stage by caricaturing a "debate" in
> philosophy, namely the debate between ontologists and epistemologists.
> In physics, there is a corresponding debate between people
> who call themselves realists and those who don't.
>
> Ontologist: I'm examining the things that exist. Really really exist.
> Like the world. That really really exists. It's really real.
>
> Epistemologist: We need to pay attention to the way in which we
> acquire knowledge, and to the status of that knowledge.
...
> 2. The vast majority of physicists are ontologists.
I don't think so.
The reason physicists don't like to talk about interpretations of
quantum mechanics is that they are epistemologists.
Physicists, almost universally, are committed to a *particular* way of
acquiring knowledge. Build theories, test with experiment, repeat, try
the simple ones first. Some might even claim that's the *only* way to
acquire knowledge, but even if it isn't, it's their way.
> Anyone
> who calls himself a realist is an ontologist, and most
> physicists are realists. Physicists who are realists
> consider themselves opposed to those stupid people who
> think the world isn't real.
Most physicists are indeed realists in the sense of believing in a real
physical world (in day to day life, who doesn't?), but when it comes to
what aspects and properties of the world are "real", epistemology comes
first. (so much so that I couldn't even think, much less write, "real"
without scare quotes)
Two theories that agree on all possible experiments are said to be
physically equivalent. If you ask a physicist which theory is really
true, she's likely to answer, "they are equivalent," and consider the
matter closed.
The different interpretations of quantum mechanics are equivalent in
this sense. Because they are theories that disagree about what is real,
an ontologist would consider them very different from one another, but
physicists are such extreme epistemologists that they refuse to
acknowledge the validity of any question that cannot be answered by an
experimental test.
If someone *insists* on getting an answer to a question like, "is the
wave function really really real?" that's when angels and pinheads get
mentioned. This may be seriously unfair as a characterization of
philosophy, but it does express the extent to which the question is not
a question about physics.
Building theories and testing them with experiment is what physicists
do, and questions that can (in principle) be answered by that process
are what physics is about.
There are some theories that people call "interpretations" that do make
different predictions than QM. Those are really different theories, not
interpretations at all. They amount to saying, "My interpretation of
quantum mechanics is that QM is wrong." Most physicists doubt those
theories are correct (they have their own problems), but concede that
they *are* right or wrong.
Ralph Hartley
.
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