Way back in 1781 Immanuel Kant discussed this (without considering quantum implications, obviously) in "Critique of Pure Reason". He coined the term "noumenon" to describe a thing as it is, not as it is perceived.
For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of literally unthinkable thoughts; something that is outside the capacity of human neural architecture in the way that HTML is outside [0] the capacity of RegEx?
I can think of two ways a thought could be unthinkable:
1. It could be uncomputable, since it seems likely to me that we can't think uncomputable thoughts. (Not a rigorous scientific hypothesis, but it seems more likely than not to me.)
2. It could be uncomputable in a human lifetime. I think these already exist today: can anyone really be said to thoroughly understand a proof generated by an exhaustive computational search?
One can play around with the semantics of what we mean by "unthinkable" and "thought," but I think "computable" at least provides one interesting start to an exploration of this concept.
Another possibility is thoughts which just don’t fit into the shape of structure within a human mind.
Can an octopus mind, for a body with eight limbs but no bones, ever be accurately emulated by a human mind?
Are there truths we can only reach with an exocortex (pen and paper included)?
Are there thoughts whose time or space requirements grow exponentially with respect to some measure in a human brain anatomy, but which could be linear in some other anatomy (existing or hypothetical)?
There are, and they begin with a brainfu*k esolang dialect called Hofstadter that represents instructions as different camelCase capitalizations of the name Hofstadter. If neither of these are familiar to you, sorry about your afternoon!
This is actually quite a common theme in Buddhist literature. Apart from the central concept of the nature of mind that is by definition unthinkable (in the same way that the eye can't see itself), there are also specific experiences related to the nature of mind that evade ordinary mind.
A simple example: in his boo The Crystal and the Way of Light, Namkhai Norbu describes one of his meditational experiences where he sees 5 spheres of light in one bigger sphere. In this experience, there is no space between the spheres but this seemed perfectly natural. After he finished the practice session, he sat and tried to draw it and after several attempts realized it's impossible. There are many similar accounts.
Doesn't Kant then go on to explain, in which phenomenal objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition.
(Kantian noumena) of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. The article, as it appears, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal footing with one another.
We should look for signs that we're optimized for efficient computation. Like maybe a minimum temperature or a maximum speed or a rule that position and momentum are only knowable to certain tolerances.
Quantum mechanics might be a bad model, but over the last century it’s become less controversial and more accepted in the scientific community. The last century has produced more scientists and mathematicians than any other century. I can see a few possible situations.
1. Quantum Mechanics is a fairly accurate representation of the world, or at least about as good as we can come up with given our current state of technology.
2. Quantum Mechanics is a fairly inaccurate representation of the world.
2a. Incorrect theories dominating for centuries is a natural consequence of the scientific method and trying to determine the nature of the universe.
2b. Incorrect theories dominating for centuries is a result of an imperfect implementation of the scientific method in our modern society.
2c. The scientific method is incapable of providing humans with a true and accurate understanding of the world.
Or physics is perfectly fine, and so is materialism.
Quantum weirdness, remember, is defined by physics. It's tested by physics. And it's perfectly compatible with materialism. The problem is in people's understanding.
Full disclosure - I'm no subscribing to finish reading the article. But what it sounds like is "if we change our philosophy to match physics, physics is easy". Quantum physics has always made sense. The only issue was that it wasn't intuitive.
I kinda agree with this, one thing I'd add is that what is "intuitive" is what matches our intuition, honed over millions of years to...survive wild animal attacks, throw spears accurately and not fall out of trees.
There isn't really any reason to expect physics to match our intuition, when our intuition isn't built for dealing with the sorts of things modern physics deals with.
It will always be. Science is by definition always incomplete. Once you know how Everything in the Universe works, you already transcended Science and became a God.
I'm saying that it's funny how we're coming back round to something that used to be accepted. That makes materialism the abberation, not idealism.
This is metaphysics, not physics. Physics is a set of models about what should happen in response to specific events (modelling cause and effect); metaphysics is about trying to understand the nature of reality.
Even people coming up with stories about greek gods were "about trying to understand the nature of reality.". That phrase is far too vague to be usefull
sure, but I'm afraid I'm not skilled enough to explain metaphysics in a short form. Perhaps I should just link to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics
Is the "everything is quantum entanglement" theory proposed here really incompatible with materialism? Additionally, is "materialism" perhaps just an overloaded term with no strict definition?
It alters how we think about the fundamental makeup of matter, but it's still a way of describing a material universe that obeys some laws of physics, with no implication of things sometimes associated with non-materialism (dualism, panpsychism, afterlife).
Quantum mechanics already significantly shook up how we thought about matter. Our conception of matter fundamentally being some kind of relation coefficient of information is weird, but still wouldn't be as surprising and paradigm-breaking as, say, some sort of reality where everything is consciousness, a la Donald Hoffman.
It could still be a natural world full of emergent phenomena such as consciousness. Maybe "naturalism" is a term I'd be more philosophically comfortable with for these sorts of discussions.
Materialism in this case just means that we have access to objective reality. Idealism is not necessarily supernatural, but it does claim that we do not have access to objective reality beyond our perception and interpretation.
The definition of "matter" keeps shrinking the closer we look. It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and all we have is essentially our own subjective interpretations of what we perceive.
> It could still be a natural world full of emergent phenomena such as consciousness. Maybe "naturalism" is a term I'd be more philosophically comfortable with for these sorts of discussions.
Naturalism is just the idea that there is no supernatural process at work. I'm not talking about naturalism.
>The definition of "matter" keeps shrinking the closer we look.
True.
>It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and all we have is essentially our own subjective interpretations of what we perceive.
How can we say that with confidence, though? What if we're just still scratching at the surface of fundamental physics? What if in 3,000 years we have much more than our subjective interpretations and do pretty much understand what's going on?
This feels like a little bit like a "God of the gaps" type argument. It's fair to say we likely don't truly understand the fabric of reality, the universe, and matter, but it doesn't necessarily mean we can't or never will.
>Naturalism is just the idea that there is no supernatural process at work. I'm not talking about naturalism.
I think many people interchange "materialism" and "naturalism", even if it may not be correct.
> How can we say that with confidence, though? What if we're just still scratching at the surface of fundamental physics? What if in 3,000 years we have much more than our subjective interpretations and do pretty much understand what's going on?
> This feels like a little bit like a "God of the gaps" type argument. It's fair to say we likely don't truly understand the fabric of reality, the universe, and matter, but it doesn't necessarily mean we can't or never will.
I'm just extrapolating the trend - of course I don't know what end-game physics looks like, but I'm basing my understanding over what's happened so far.
All we have to build our interpretations on are what we know now. That's the reason we no longer believe in supernatural causes - we've figured out better explanations for enough phenomena that we can reasonably assume the rest are explained naturally too. From the models we have so far, we know that the universe is organised bottom-up and our understanding of what we consider "complete objects" like a cat or a solar system are just the emergent phenomena of collections of rules (or are engineered based on those rules in the case of manmade objects). So if objects don't actually exist in the way we perceive them, I'm not sure what credibility is left for materialism if the whole concept of 'object' only exists in my interpretation.
> I think many people interchange "materialism" and "naturalism", even if it may not be correct.
That may well be true, but I had to look 'naturalism' up because I hadn't heard the term before. It's probably the angle from which I've approached metaphysics that's to blame for that though.
That's 100% true, exhibit "ant man". But felt like he was leading to the actual math before paywall. Comes down to a probabilistic existence, and exhibiting characteristics based on other particles being present or not present. All of which makes no sense to human life.
Checkout "hawking radiation" for a real concrete example
People have proposed the idea that consciousness is the building block of the universe and not matter. See Itzhak Bentovs book Stalking The Wild Pendulum.
For usage in popular fiction & fun reading, take a deep dive into the lore of The Elder Scrolls, especially Morrowind-era content. In short, the universe is dreamed up by The Dreamer, and thus by definition is made of consciousness. Interesting consequences ensue as a result, especially for the few bits of consciousness (people) that become "lucid" within the dream.
This was all inspired of course by some parts of Hinduism if I remember correctly.
Check out nonduality. It’s amusing that we insist that consciousness, which we experience firsthand, must be created by matter, which we experience indirectly. The image creating the screen.
I can only see the introduction, but it already shows some confused thinking.
Whether something exists, and whether you call it X only because there are humans who call it X, those are two different things. On a planet without humans, stones exists, but no one is there to call them "stones". So they don't really exist, is that what the article is trying to tell me?
Also, the stones do not exist, because only atoms exist, mwa-ha-ha-ha! Or maybe just someone equivocates "exists" and "is not made of smaller components".
The example with red color, again confuses "this object reflects red light" with "there is an eye that perceives the reflected red light". Also, good point that things can't reflect red light if they are in complete darkness.
Does anything of the above have anything in common with quantum physics?
Would adding quantum physics to this confused thinking make it any more meaningful?
What about Dirac's words ~ there being a fundamental size where any experiment will disturb the subject non negligibly, thus science can never speak causally prior to quantum measurements.
This has little to do with humans. The photon is irreducible yet is our (anyone's) smallest investigative tool.
Would you ever modify the meaning of exits in this context? The planet with rocks could be traveled to by something physical. In QM, the causal relation is broken due to measurement by any physical object we know of, down to fundamental particles.
If there is no physical setup -> it does not exist. Right?
Maybe just not 100% right. That happens to many people.
If we can't observe something directly, because a photon disturbs it, there may be other ways. Like, create the same situation thousand times, always throw one photon at it, make a statistics of how the photon deflects, and try to explain it. Or just find the simplest model that fits the known data, and assume that the parts you cannot observe directly still follow the model... simply because there is no good reason to assume they don't.
If we take the logic of "if I can't verify it by experiment, it does not exist" too far, then Big Bang is also not real, because we can't replicate it in the lab. Actually, we should take quite seriously the idea that the universe was created at this very moment, because we can't create the yesterday in the lab either.
> because we can't create the yesterday in the lab either.
We have access to memories of the past which are physical. Records in the rock strata of Earth's formation, neuronal connections in our brain of Grandma's barbecue and who was in attendance, red-shifted EM signals traveling since a few seconds after the big bang.
The information of these processes and events is never lost. "The present is the key to the past" and such. Even every causal relation since t=0 could be worked back to arbitrary accuracy from t=n for a near-omnipotent civilization. One still following all laws of physics, just very advanced and capable.
QM creates a novel situation imo where nothing, not even near-omnipotence, allows one to probe "pre-measurement". The very act of measuring causes something to occur. Scattering a photon or electron or proton with something is the smallest tool in quantum field theory, probably the most well studied near-fundamental theory in physics. There is no way in principle to ever probe pre-measurement because there is no disturbance-free way to observe. There is no sub-photon. There's nothing besides particles and fields to investigate with. There's no tool to build to improve things. The type of knowing in knowing the superposition of states pre-measumrent is not the same as knowing the past. We can arbitrarily improve tech to investigate the past to arbitrary degrees. The information of the past is out there, physically accessible to some kind of observer. In QM, there is no way to improve that lack of knowledge. It is forever inaccessible to any type of observer.
If this still all exists for you, then what about the past? Why doesn't that exist? What notion of "exists" could you thread that denies the past's existence yet asserts the existence other inaccessibles?
Surely there are kinds of existence in each of these ideas.
(To be clear absolute size isn't the only motivator for QM, just one aspect of it).
What I'm gathering from the introduction of the article is all properties are emergent behaviors that are particular to the observer. In the case of the stone, the atoms in the stone, observe and interact with each other, the atoms themselves come it being because of on the interaction of their subatomic particles.
This is not run-of-the-mill ontological reductionism; this is a rejection of ontological realism, which nearly everyone takes for granted (including you, from the sound of it), but many philosophers do not.
The connection between ontological anti-realism and relational quantum mechanics (Rovelli's brainchild) is pretty straightforward. I think Rovelli is arguing that the quantum measurement problem is only a problem if we assert things ontologically, in terms of what's exactly here and there, rather than an expression of a relation between the measuring device and the system.
This is interesting, does Rovelli lay these ideas out in a book? The idea that quantum mechanics are based in causality but not realism aligns closely with my own metaphysical beliefs based in an interpretation of idealism from a cybernetic (study of nonlinear causality) perspective. It would be interesting to hear his case.
the point is that what we call distinct objects are not inherently distinct - it is us that draw the distinctions. Also, that our labels for things are not labels of identity, but labels of function/purpose - if I point at an object and call it a "chair", what I am saying is that it can be sat on, not that "chair" summarises its inherent characteristics.
The point being that base reality is not accessible to us, only our perceptions and interpretations of reality. We have no way of knowing what the reality is beyond our perceptions.
I have been wondering lately if it is possible that humans may have a quantum signature that they leave behind on everything they touch and that it may be possible to detect that signature. I was imagining a technology that could isolate the signatures and identify the person who hand sewed my shoes, for example.
I see a big red flag whenever a scientific unknown results in scientists questioning the nature of reality. Once upon a time we didn't know how the sun could stay to bright for so long. Some people resorted to the supernatural for explanations. They were wrong (nuclear fusion). Today we cannot understand the movement of particles. Some now question the nature of reality while other debate whether reality even exists without a conscious mind to see it. I take a step back when the scientists resort to the language of philosophers and theologians. Reality is almost certainly more mundane. In decades/centuries to come, when we figure out what is actually happening, those who compared quarks to trees falling in unseen woods might look like the people who saw the hot sun as proof of the supernatural.
When we think that something is weird, it's just us that are looking at it incorrectly. Quantum phenomenon make perfect sense once you accept that everything is just information, including space and time. So objects do exist, but only as collections of information which we then experience internally as "reality"... a little like simulation theory. We are essentially part of a cognitive field.
60 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadFor a while now, I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of literally unthinkable thoughts; something that is outside the capacity of human neural architecture in the way that HTML is outside [0] the capacity of RegEx?
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454
1. It could be uncomputable, since it seems likely to me that we can't think uncomputable thoughts. (Not a rigorous scientific hypothesis, but it seems more likely than not to me.)
2. It could be uncomputable in a human lifetime. I think these already exist today: can anyone really be said to thoroughly understand a proof generated by an exhaustive computational search?
One can play around with the semantics of what we mean by "unthinkable" and "thought," but I think "computable" at least provides one interesting start to an exploration of this concept.
Can an octopus mind, for a body with eight limbs but no bones, ever be accurately emulated by a human mind?
Are there truths we can only reach with an exocortex (pen and paper included)?
Are there thoughts whose time or space requirements grow exponentially with respect to some measure in a human brain anatomy, but which could be linear in some other anatomy (existing or hypothetical)?
A simple example: in his boo The Crystal and the Way of Light, Namkhai Norbu describes one of his meditational experiences where he sees 5 spheres of light in one bigger sphere. In this experience, there is no space between the spheres but this seemed perfectly natural. After he finished the practice session, he sat and tried to draw it and after several attempts realized it's impossible. There are many similar accounts.
(Kantian noumena) of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. The article, as it appears, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal footing with one another.
(joke stolen from SMBC comics)
Materialism was, and continues to be, a mistake.
Or are you suggesting that quantum mechanics is a bad model?
1. Quantum Mechanics is a fairly accurate representation of the world, or at least about as good as we can come up with given our current state of technology.
2. Quantum Mechanics is a fairly inaccurate representation of the world.
Quantum weirdness, remember, is defined by physics. It's tested by physics. And it's perfectly compatible with materialism. The problem is in people's understanding.
Full disclosure - I'm no subscribing to finish reading the article. But what it sounds like is "if we change our philosophy to match physics, physics is easy". Quantum physics has always made sense. The only issue was that it wasn't intuitive.
There isn't really any reason to expect physics to match our intuition, when our intuition isn't built for dealing with the sorts of things modern physics deals with.
This is metaphysics, not physics. Physics is a set of models about what should happen in response to specific events (modelling cause and effect); metaphysics is about trying to understand the nature of reality.
It alters how we think about the fundamental makeup of matter, but it's still a way of describing a material universe that obeys some laws of physics, with no implication of things sometimes associated with non-materialism (dualism, panpsychism, afterlife).
Quantum mechanics already significantly shook up how we thought about matter. Our conception of matter fundamentally being some kind of relation coefficient of information is weird, but still wouldn't be as surprising and paradigm-breaking as, say, some sort of reality where everything is consciousness, a la Donald Hoffman.
It could still be a natural world full of emergent phenomena such as consciousness. Maybe "naturalism" is a term I'd be more philosophically comfortable with for these sorts of discussions.
Materialism in this case just means that we have access to objective reality. Idealism is not necessarily supernatural, but it does claim that we do not have access to objective reality beyond our perception and interpretation.
The definition of "matter" keeps shrinking the closer we look. It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and all we have is essentially our own subjective interpretations of what we perceive.
> It could still be a natural world full of emergent phenomena such as consciousness. Maybe "naturalism" is a term I'd be more philosophically comfortable with for these sorts of discussions.
Naturalism is just the idea that there is no supernatural process at work. I'm not talking about naturalism.
True.
>It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and all we have is essentially our own subjective interpretations of what we perceive.
How can we say that with confidence, though? What if we're just still scratching at the surface of fundamental physics? What if in 3,000 years we have much more than our subjective interpretations and do pretty much understand what's going on?
This feels like a little bit like a "God of the gaps" type argument. It's fair to say we likely don't truly understand the fabric of reality, the universe, and matter, but it doesn't necessarily mean we can't or never will.
>Naturalism is just the idea that there is no supernatural process at work. I'm not talking about naturalism.
I think many people interchange "materialism" and "naturalism", even if it may not be correct.
> This feels like a little bit like a "God of the gaps" type argument. It's fair to say we likely don't truly understand the fabric of reality, the universe, and matter, but it doesn't necessarily mean we can't or never will.
I'm just extrapolating the trend - of course I don't know what end-game physics looks like, but I'm basing my understanding over what's happened so far.
All we have to build our interpretations on are what we know now. That's the reason we no longer believe in supernatural causes - we've figured out better explanations for enough phenomena that we can reasonably assume the rest are explained naturally too. From the models we have so far, we know that the universe is organised bottom-up and our understanding of what we consider "complete objects" like a cat or a solar system are just the emergent phenomena of collections of rules (or are engineered based on those rules in the case of manmade objects). So if objects don't actually exist in the way we perceive them, I'm not sure what credibility is left for materialism if the whole concept of 'object' only exists in my interpretation.
> I think many people interchange "materialism" and "naturalism", even if it may not be correct.
That may well be true, but I had to look 'naturalism' up because I hadn't heard the term before. It's probably the angle from which I've approached metaphysics that's to blame for that though.
I’ve not been particularly impressed with New Scientist ever since they put the EM Drive on the front cover.
Since this is paywalled we can't estimate how off the article is though.
Checkout "hawking radiation" for a real concrete example
Consciousness can't come from material if it doesn't really exist. So is material "created" by Consciousness?
For usage in popular fiction & fun reading, take a deep dive into the lore of The Elder Scrolls, especially Morrowind-era content. In short, the universe is dreamed up by The Dreamer, and thus by definition is made of consciousness. Interesting consequences ensue as a result, especially for the few bits of consciousness (people) that become "lucid" within the dream.
This was all inspired of course by some parts of Hinduism if I remember correctly.
Whether something exists, and whether you call it X only because there are humans who call it X, those are two different things. On a planet without humans, stones exists, but no one is there to call them "stones". So they don't really exist, is that what the article is trying to tell me?
Also, the stones do not exist, because only atoms exist, mwa-ha-ha-ha! Or maybe just someone equivocates "exists" and "is not made of smaller components".
The example with red color, again confuses "this object reflects red light" with "there is an eye that perceives the reflected red light". Also, good point that things can't reflect red light if they are in complete darkness.
Does anything of the above have anything in common with quantum physics?
Would adding quantum physics to this confused thinking make it any more meaningful?
but don't only exist because humans call them atoms?
This has little to do with humans. The photon is irreducible yet is our (anyone's) smallest investigative tool.
Would you ever modify the meaning of exits in this context? The planet with rocks could be traveled to by something physical. In QM, the causal relation is broken due to measurement by any physical object we know of, down to fundamental particles.
If there is no physical setup -> it does not exist. Right?
Or maybe Popper is 100% wrong?
Maybe just not 100% right. That happens to many people.
If we can't observe something directly, because a photon disturbs it, there may be other ways. Like, create the same situation thousand times, always throw one photon at it, make a statistics of how the photon deflects, and try to explain it. Or just find the simplest model that fits the known data, and assume that the parts you cannot observe directly still follow the model... simply because there is no good reason to assume they don't.
If we take the logic of "if I can't verify it by experiment, it does not exist" too far, then Big Bang is also not real, because we can't replicate it in the lab. Actually, we should take quite seriously the idea that the universe was created at this very moment, because we can't create the yesterday in the lab either.
We have access to memories of the past which are physical. Records in the rock strata of Earth's formation, neuronal connections in our brain of Grandma's barbecue and who was in attendance, red-shifted EM signals traveling since a few seconds after the big bang.
The information of these processes and events is never lost. "The present is the key to the past" and such. Even every causal relation since t=0 could be worked back to arbitrary accuracy from t=n for a near-omnipotent civilization. One still following all laws of physics, just very advanced and capable.
QM creates a novel situation imo where nothing, not even near-omnipotence, allows one to probe "pre-measurement". The very act of measuring causes something to occur. Scattering a photon or electron or proton with something is the smallest tool in quantum field theory, probably the most well studied near-fundamental theory in physics. There is no way in principle to ever probe pre-measurement because there is no disturbance-free way to observe. There is no sub-photon. There's nothing besides particles and fields to investigate with. There's no tool to build to improve things. The type of knowing in knowing the superposition of states pre-measumrent is not the same as knowing the past. We can arbitrarily improve tech to investigate the past to arbitrary degrees. The information of the past is out there, physically accessible to some kind of observer. In QM, there is no way to improve that lack of knowledge. It is forever inaccessible to any type of observer.
If this still all exists for you, then what about the past? Why doesn't that exist? What notion of "exists" could you thread that denies the past's existence yet asserts the existence other inaccessibles?
Surely there are kinds of existence in each of these ideas.
(To be clear absolute size isn't the only motivator for QM, just one aspect of it).
The photons we send to the atoms encoding the information about the past also cause disturbances, don't they?
This is not run-of-the-mill ontological reductionism; this is a rejection of ontological realism, which nearly everyone takes for granted (including you, from the sound of it), but many philosophers do not.
The connection between ontological anti-realism and relational quantum mechanics (Rovelli's brainchild) is pretty straightforward. I think Rovelli is arguing that the quantum measurement problem is only a problem if we assert things ontologically, in terms of what's exactly here and there, rather than an expression of a relation between the measuring device and the system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_quantum_mechanics
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-relational/
The point being that base reality is not accessible to us, only our perceptions and interpretations of reality. We have no way of knowing what the reality is beyond our perceptions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989