Political Theory

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

shackleford — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 17:37:12 GMT

AJ:
Indeed, and the problem with modern physics is that it only pretends to answer the how.

That's true. It's extremely intellectually disingenuous of the scientific community. However, as with other things, there's always an agenda behind it, with the attendant propaganda.

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

AJ — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:51:33 GMT

Indeed, and the problem with modern physics is that it only pretends to answer the how.

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

shackleford — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 18:31:49 GMT

Science can never answer the why, only the how.

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

AJ — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 12:18:43 GMT

For LaFreniere's theory I always imagined a giant block of latex in which the waves propagate.

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

gokuju — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:42:11 GMT

Although of course the issue with LaFreniere's hypothesis is that assuming matter is "made of" waves begs a central question.

We need to hypothesize an object (shape) contoured by space (no shape, nothing) in order to explain anything.

LaFreniere is stuck without any objects to begin with; what are his "waves" contoured by? Do they extend "infinitely"?

Gaede assumes a single closed-loop thread. I think this accounts for much, but I still have some issues with it. E.g. mechanisms of 'touch', formation of surfaces, then of atoms, etc. Perhaps I can't quite visualize what he means yet but I think it needs elucidation anyway.

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

AJ — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:12:35 GMT

Clayton:
In my spare time, I'm working on a widly speculative theory based on digital physics. The idea of digital physics is this. A computer can compute any function. So, the problem of "modeling" the universe can be thought of as searching for the right computer with the right program on it that, when executed, causes all the state information of this actual Universe to be computed.

Digital physics? If the universe is digital, surely something like this is going on.

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

AJ — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:05:12 GMT

Clayton:
Newton's and Einstein's theories of gravity do not involve conceptually more basic entities that serve as the "causal agents" of gravitation and that is what we mean when we say that they do not "explain" gravity. Rather, they organize the phenomena of gravity into mathematically elegant form. We have not advanced as far as we might like from the Ptolemaic view of the planets: they are at this and this and then this position at this and this and then this time and here is the very mathematically elegant equation which computes the relationship between them.

That's really it exactly. Ptolemaic "explanations" are not something the mind can grasp and grapple with to shake out new, deeper theories. This is everywhere in physics, though: what causes a magnet to attract another? "Lines of force." No, that's just a elegant description of what happens in the region around the magnet. Whatever happened to HOW?

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

Clayton — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 19:08:16 GMT

I think there is something to be said about relying too much on our intuition based on our experiences of the molar world to guide us here.

I agree, intuition is a feeble guide, at best. But my objection is based more on the idea of a "balance of evidence in similar cases" not intuition. Sound waves are not "intuitive", but they are real and they propagate over the medium, air. And so on for any other kind of wave besides the waves of elementary particles.

I agree with Bohr's allowed uses of "particle" and "wave" because that is what any elementary concept in physics really is, just a label for a concept that is accessible to my brain that is, overall, a "good fit" to the physical phenomena.

And note that I do not mean that it is not possible that the universe is, at root, some gigantic wave equation, such as Schodinger's.

In my spare time, I'm working on a widly speculative theory based on digital physics. The idea of digital physics is this. A computer can compute any function. So, the problem of "modeling" the universe can be thought of as searching for the right computer with the right program on it that, when executed, causes all the state information of this actual Universe to be computed. OK, fair enough.

However, most DP theories strike me as horribly obtuse. For example, the Cellular Automata model is very popular and people think maybe they can construct a 3-dimensional or even 2-dimensional (?) lattice of cellular-automata and then think of the universe as being "made out of" a gigantic cellular automata lattice and all macroscopic phenomena as "arising" from this lattice. It's not completely far-fetched when you realize that physics still has a lot of "room at the bottom" since our ability to resolve the physical world is about 20 or so orders of magnitude from the Planck length. In any case, I still don't like the idea of assuming this a priori spatial structure from the outset. Yes, my brain perceives the Universe in three dimensions but why should space necessarily originate as a fundamentally 3-dimensional phenomenon? Why is the number three so special??

So, I asked myself how would you build a continuous computer, a wave computer? Quantum computation is a field that exists and is real and comes very close to answering this question. In fact, Seth Lloyd wrote a book called "Programming the Universe" about QC and he asserts that "the Universe is indistinguishable from a Quantum Computer."

I don't understand the mathematics of quantum computation and I suspect, in any case, that the mathematics of quantum systems are unintentionally obfuscatory. So, I'm working on my own purely mathematical approach and my current idea is to use the complex exponential function as the basis for a new numbering system (like the decimal numbering system) that treats complex values as properly basic entities which can be computed and operated on like any other. In other words, rather than a+bi, I would like to just have z, where z is encoded in such a way that both the a and the b can be recovered from it in the same way that the 3 and 0.14159... can be separately recovered from the decimal encoding of the real number pi.

If I ever succeed (not a high probability of this... :P), it will be possible to construct a "wave computer" from the complex numbers though I haven't worked out how.

Clayton -

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

Clayton — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:44:58 GMT

@AJ: I agree. Now, I acknowledge that there is a bit of arbitrariness here... when we say that the laws of electromagnetism "explain" it, what we really mean is that if we invoke these concepts of "electric current" "mangetic field" "capacitive reactance" "inductive reactance" and so on, we can explain the phenomena in terms of these conceptually "more basic" entities.

Newton's and Einstein's theories of gravity do not involve conceptually more basic entities that serve as the "causal agents" of gravitation and that is what we mean when we say that they do not "explain" gravity. Rather, they organize the phenomena of gravity into mathematically elegant form. We have not advanced as far as we might like from the Ptolemaic view of the planets: they are at this and this and then this position at this and this and then this time and here is the very mathematically elegant equation which computes the relationship between them.

Clayton -

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

AJ — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:44:20 GMT

This further illustrates the main point: descriptions are not explanations. This space-time formalism has the appearance of an explanation, but it is merely a fancy way of summarizing a bunch of observations. What happened to the question of what underlies those observations?

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

thelion — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 05:37:23 GMT

What seems to be mostly being discussed in this thread is well know to physicists. No-one actually imagine space is a thing independent of other things.

Idea that space does not exist and philosophy of general relativity (all motion and time are just coordinate invented by us and relative and there are no preferred coordinates) were stated by Leibniz and then Boskovich, and very well re-stated by Julius Mayer and then by Ernst Mach.

Physicists such as Einstein and Robert Dicke called it simply Mach's Principle whenever they made use of it.

Actually, because of Mach's Principle, we may talk entirely of curvature of empty space-time without contradiction.

It just formulism to talk about non-local relations more easily: space is merely set of all relations of things between themselves, therefore when we talk about nothing except empty space-time, or deform it, we are using a continuous formalism to discuss in fact changes in relations of things, since space is just another way of talking about relations.

Hence things like spinors or 2-spinor formulisms (e.g., Roger Penrose & Wolfgang Rindler) using abstract tensor notation such as twistors: by talking exclusively about space, we actually discover relations between things once we decode our formalism back into discussing things.

We can talk about particles interacting with particles without any coordinates at all, or what is same thing, about empty space-time, since that is merely defined in terms of overall configuration of particles.

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

vive la insurrection — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 23:25:18 GMT

I think it might be important to note that Menger too did not see such a fractious divide in the methods of the sciences

I haven't really got very far into this, but it is something that I have been paying more and more attention to with regards to the social sciences. I haven't read much of Mengers articles on method, but they may be key. It seems like focusing on the similarites and differences of Menger and Mises and what is meant by "empiricism" (I think Barry Smith and Peter Boetteke/ Leeson get a bit into this). Either way, it seems to be a crucial question that I do not think can be stressed enough.

The social sciences as we know it really know little of what Menger and Max Weber were trying to say - the Anglo American tradition just simply doesn't know about it, it was never really that hot of an issue over here.

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

abskebabs — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:15:49 GMT

As I think it relates somewhat to the theme of this thread, I think it might be important to note that Menger too did not see such a fractious divide in the methods of the sciences, hence why he considered himself to simply be applying what he referred to as the "empirical method" (given the book is a translation, I understand I should be a little weary of the risks of reading too much into certain connotations). He also notes the dangers of carrying naturalistic analogies from other branches of knowledge in an automative fashion to where they do not belong, and interestingly cites Francis Bacon in his support (otherwise panned by many, including Rothbard as a naive empiricist).

All this he stated quite clearly in the preface to his Principles.

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

abskebabs — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:06:48 GMT

I think I'm out of my depth here... All I can say is that from an a priori point-of-view there is a good argument that if we see a wave, there's "something" that's waving because in every other case where we observe a wave, there is a medium.

That is a common objection of Quantum Mechanics that probably dates as at least as far as Schrodinger developed his wavefunction formulation of quantum mechanics, the nonrelativstic version of which makes up the staple of undergraduate teaching in the subject today. I think there is something to be said about relying too much on our intuition based on our experiences of the molar world to guide us here. What Quantum Mechanics teaches, under the Bohr interpretation (which I began to sympathise with more, the further I studied the subject), is that really the terms "particle" and "wave" do not necessarily describe reality, but depending on the conditions which we have constrained, what we mean by these 2 terms suffices to describe reality approximately so well, that we may drop our caveats against their unambiguous use. One good, pretty simple illustration of how the convergence occurs can be seen by showing the correspondence principle with regard to a quantum harmonic oscillator.

The other danger w.r.t emphasis of intuition, is to be clear, that the type of "waves" implied by state vectors (by taking the modulus of them) of quantum phenomena are not waves in the classical sense, describing the actual latitudinal/longitudinal movement, and whose only interpretation arises from taking the modulus square over certain regions with varying degrees of freedom to interpret a probabillity distribution for the phenomena described taking certain parmeter values upon measurement. The simples example of this could be seen with distribution produced from an identically repeated experiment using a particle with a known and derived state vector or its modulus (wavefunction) passing through a single slit before "striking" a screen.

Re: A Priori Physics and Economics

AJ — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:29:38 GMT

unlapped_dog:
I can show you a movie of my statement of the facts for how something happened, and I don't think you have to assume anything about cause/effect to watch and understand. For example, say I find that my TV remote has been chewed up. I suspect the dog and imagine him chewing the remote. If that qualifies as "explanation," then I'd argue that you'd have to break explanation down into two categories: how and why. A movie without causality is an explanation of how something happened, a movie presented with the cause/effect assumptions is an explanation of why something happened. I can communicate "the dog chewed the remote" all by itself, but if I want to go deeper I can try to answer why questions (why did the dog chew the remote? why do canine teeth cause remote plastic to deform?).

I'd say those are just deeper questions to be answered by a later theory at a deeper level of analysis. If we merely want to know how the remote got chewed up, which is after all a practical question, we don't necessarily care about those other questions. Or if we do, it'd only make sense to resolve the initial question first - the question of whether it was the dog or not.

When you break down causality to its core components, it really is just "seeing movies." Experientially, all we know is that Sensation A follows Sensation B in a significant number of cases. But that's usually a little too deep to be useful for physics. For the purposes of physics, causality means how something mechanically happened - that is, seeing movies.

Any mechanical oddities that we might one day encounter, such as portals like in the game Portal, would require us to fall back on the deeper "Sensation A follows Sensation B" notion of causality, because we can no longer use the familiar mechanical machinery we were evolved and raised to understand. I have never yet seen any need for this, however. No "portals" have ever been found.

unlapped_dog:
Exactly. If the universe is so bizarre and outside of our ability to understand rationally, then we just have to give up and admit that we can't understand it. It is beyond our ability to comprehend and we are relegated to just making predictions about what we will observe. No amount of irrational physical interpretations can save us fom our ignorance of the how and the why. But given the amount of regularity that we are surrounded with, there is good reason to believe that there are rational, mechanistic possible explanations for what we observe.

unlapped_dog:
As to the precise difference between theory and explanation, I pretty much use them interchangeably, but I suppose you could say a theory is the stage of the method where explanation is presented, whereas an explanation is an account of how/why something happened. What is really required for a specific explanation is a series of assumptions in the hypothesis that set the stage for the theorist's account of events.

I might lean toward dropping all the baggage of "science," "scientific method," "theory," etc. and just state what we are doing directly: observing, positing objects and possible mechanical interactions of those objects that would produce the observations, and then deciding which such objects and mechanical interactions seem most plausible. We could define "science" or "physics" as just the bold, or as all the underlined. Or we could call it something else if people object to the terminology.