The Given of Quantum Theory

Puzzling passage from Heisenberg:

…quantum theory, in the interpretation generally accepted nowadays, by no means considers sense impressions to be the primary given, as positivism does. If anything is to be described as a primary given, then in quantum theory it is the reality that can be described by the concepts of classical physics.

Quantum theory takes the reality described by the concepts of classical physics as given? I guess he is getting at the fact that in QM we are still dealing with concepts like momentum, position, energy, and so on. Strange things happen with these concepts, but they are still treated as analogies of classical concepts rather than new concepts. Fair enough. They aren't given, though. They have been changed to accommodate QM (e.g. the de Broglie wavelength), and they could be further changed if that's what QM or experimental evidence demands. I at least don't regard them as sacred.

The gall!

Heisenberg, in the first essay in this book:

…it is thus a tragic aspect of his life that Einstein, to whom war was hateful, should have been moved by the infamies practiced under Nazism to write a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 urging that the United States vigorously set about the making of atomic bombs, and that the first of these bombs should have killed many thousands of women and children who were just as guiltless as those for whom Einstein was anxious to intercede.

Does Heisenberg really believe that his role in the German atomic bomb project was carried out with no intention to kill civilians?

A house is an event

Amazed that Forster approved of my twelve pages of explaining how Kant makes an erroneous distinction between subjective apprehension and objective appearance. Especially when, shuffling through the gargantuan pile of papers to look for mine, I noticed that most of them were B+s with desultory "nice"s scribbled on them. Especially when he is considered rather an expert on the subject, and I thought my objection so obvious that surely there must be, and he should know of, an equally obvious counter-objection. Instead, much like my analytic philosophy papers, I received a grand total of two objections, neither of which were particularly crucial to my argument. That's being unfair to Forster actually. The comments on my anal. phil. papers consist entirely of "nicely written", etc. Only the first short response received philosophical criticisms.

The crux lies in Kant's analogy with the house. He assumes the house is an unchanging object rather than an event, so he says we can first have the subjective apprehension of the basement before having the subjective apprehension of the roof, or the other way round, and it won't make a difference to the objective appearance of the house. Whereas when we perceive a boat moving downstream, our subjective apprehension of the boat being upstream always precedes that of it being downstream. He takes this as a demonstration that without the intervention of the understanding, the order of our subjective apprehensions need not match the order of objective appearances (as in the house example). Whereas for events, the understanding necessarily intervenes to match the order of subjective apprehensions with the order of objective appearances.

My objection, which, when I finally thought of it, seemed ridiculously obvious, was that the house is an event, in the sense that it is temporal. Perceiving the basement at t1 before perceiving the roof at t2 is different from perceiving the roof at t1 before perceiving the basement at t2, and the order in which these perceptions are arranged in our imagination cannot be altered without changing the object of perception itself. In fact our subjective apprehensions are the so-called objective appearances; Kant only created an artificial divide by imagining erroneously that in perceiving the house we could have our subjective apprehensions arranged in an arbitrary order. We cannot have it so because our subjective apprehensions are objective appearances and so their order necessarily matches that of objective appearances.

That seemed so obvious. Especially when, considering myself as a physicist, I should bloody well know that a house exists in time. Not just know; I suppose everyone knows that, but Kant's assignment of atemporality to the house should have jumped out at my physical intuition. Instead it took me a week of running into dead ends before that idea dawned on me.

Music as part of a Weltanschauung

I admit to being intrigued by Barenboim's suggestion of music as part of an intellectual worldview. Trying to imagine how, contrary to my intuitions, music could be a constituent of rather than an offshoot of such an intellectual worldview. Because that must be what Barenboim is getting at. It is implausible that human creations could serve as the logical/empirical foundations of a worldview. Or at least, of any worldview that can be taken seriously as descriptive of our world. It seems much more plausible that a more firmly grounded worldview gives rise to a particular type of music as its product. That music could then go on to be a potent symbol of the worldview (like Romantic music was for Romanticism), but in no way is the music, I don't think, integral to the correctness, moral or metaphysical, of the worldview itself. In no way does music justify a worldview. Romantic music encapsulates the characteristics of Romanticism, but Romanticism's validity as a worldview is unaffected by the existence of Romantic music.

That's my naive interpretation anyway. I am all too willing to admit that I know next to nothing about Romanticism as an intellectual movement, so I am possibly making a huge blunder.

Perhaps Barenboim isn't considering the validity of worldviews as I am here, in my ceaseless narrow-minded quest for a descriptively true worldview. Perhaps he is just thinking of music's role as an encapsulation of the worldview the way I described it above. But then, as I've said before, it seems that pop music does encapsulate the modern worldview. Even its supposed superificiality. And if he is to discount pop music then we are led to the even more ludicrous notion that it is a problem that Carter and Wagner and Bach do not encapsulate the worldviews of modern humans. Well why the fuck should they?

Barenboimaic bluntness

From here, a quote from Barenboim, apparently given in an FT interview (which I can't find):

I can't stand being in Chicago anymore and hearing the Brahms Violin Concerto in the elevator. Because that shows me that when they come to the concert hall they listen to it in the same way.

I have plenty of sympathy for this, having been to enough concerts where tuneful pieces were lauded over much better played but less tuneful pieces. Brahms as elevator music for the aged is, I think, an adequate description of the attitude towards music of the bulk of the CSO's patrons. Heaven knows I've been tormented by enough pseudo-intellectual conversations. I do wonder, though, if I'd been listening to Brahms as elevator music prior to this winter.

I'd always suspected that there was some contempt for the audience beneath his unexpressive demeanour when taking curtain calls.

Another interesting snippet from the Tribune interview (how I would love to read that cited FT interview):

The problem is that [music] has ceased to be part of the self-understood culture that a human being is supposed to have. The fact remains that a great majority of the intellectuals in this world are totally oblivious to the existence of music. Some of them enjoy the sounds they hear at concerts or when they listen to records at home. But it's not part of their intellectual worldview. This is a worldwide sickness. And I have to say the problem is more acute in America.

I'm not sure that there was any society in which the majority of the population had music as part of their "intellectual worldview". In fact, predictably misanthropically, I suspect that most people in all historical eras had nothing worth calling an "intellectual worldview".

He confuses things more, I think by first saying that music has ceased to be part of the self-understood "culture" that human beings are supposed to have. Culture = intellectual worldview? I dare say culture as conventionally interpreted is something largely non-intellectual. Culture = worldview is more believable, but I think most people do not think about their culture very much, so it wouldn't qualify as intellectual. And if he has culture = intellectual worldview, then it seems that pop music's close identification with pop culture would refute his point. The obvious answer is that he is talking exclusively about classical music, but given his ventures into jazz and other crossover-type stuff (I know he recorded some Brazilian Rhapsody thingy, and also the Tribute to Ellington), I'd thought he'd have a more accommodating view of music.

Supposed instead that he does have such an accommodating view, but thinks that in some way pop music doesn't mesh into the worldviews of modern humans. Inasmuch as we can grant the hoi polloi an intellectual worldview, however, it seems that pop music reflects some of that worldview, directly through the kind of lyrics that are composed, and probably also through the music (I don't know enough pop to be sure about the cultural currency of its music). Or is that just surface culture, not anything that is intellectually processed by its listeners? Endless piping from millions of iPods, none of which actually sinks in.

I also suspect that music is not part of my intellectual worldview either. (Pretentiously, I of course believe that I do have an intellectual worldview of a sort — primarily moral and metaphysical; not aesthetic. Music, of course, is not just aesthetic, but I have yet to figure how it would fit in with my existing moral and metaphysical stances.)

And yes, I also cannot stand it when I hear classical music being played as muzak.

Boltzmann the Darwinist

I read with approval that Boltzmann realised that Darwin's theory meant that our so-called a priori laws of thought are not infallible (contrary to what Kant concludes).

Kant could retreat to noumena and claim that they are infallible insofar as they apply to appearances rather than Dinge an sich, but now we are in the position where they also appear to be fallible, as revealed by psychological experiments.

So we learnt in that arrow of time class that Boltzmann's statistical explanation for the second law of thermodynamics is philosophically unsatisfactory. To the ears of modern scientists (who are for the large part no longer natural philosophers), "philosophically" makes it sound scientifically trivial. Yet I wonder if the statistical explanation of entropy in any way underlies the proof of any of Boltzmann's many stat mech laws. Certainly I should think the famous law of entropy that's engraved on Boltzmann's grave in some way depends upon that explanation. But I was wondering if any of the other laws, such as the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, depend upon it. For these are all proven by experiment, and it would be a strange thing indeed if such an inadequate theory could fit reality so well. Either we're interpreting reality in an incorrect way that happens to coincide with reality, or Boltzmann is right and it is our thinking about his explanation that is wrong. But it does seem ridiculous to have to postulate an improbable past for the universe. Just as ridiculous as having the physical constants of the universe be just right to produce life. Anthropic principle, etc., oh dear…

It goes against my intuitions, but I suspect that Boltzmann is right about this, and that the common-sense objections to the past hypothesis are akin to Einstein's objections to quantum theory. Sometimes the world just doesn't fit your intuitions. Indeed, after quantum mechanics' resounding success, it is rather ridiculous to argue for the truth of hypotheses on the basis of intuitions. Not to mention the countless documented cases in psychology of how misleading intuitions can be. Nonetheless many philosophers continue to use intuition as evidence for their pet theories. I remember Forster using it many times in class.

Now to hit the books and figure out how Boltzmann's statistical interpretation of entropy fits with his other more successful theories. "Now" figuratively speaking, that is.

Musical and suicidal scientists

From this, I learn that Boltzmann was an accomplished amateur musician, and once even took lessons from Bruckner. Picked it up in the hope of finding a kindred spirit (by the same criteria I should read the biography of every suicidal scientist — I’ve done Turing and Boltzmann, and am looking to read Ehrenfest’s next), but turns out Boltzmann was fairly well-adjusted socially, although he was also considered “child-like” in his naivete.

Another snippet concerning musical physicists: James Gleick claims in Chaos that Mitchell Feigenbaum was partly inspired in his scientific philosophy by Mahler’s description of the scherzo of his 2nd Symphony. “The ceaseless motion and incomprehensible bustle of life… Like the motions of dancing figures in a brilliantly lit ballroom into which you look from the dark night outside and from such a distance that the music is inaudible… Life may appear senseless to you.” All this being supposedly related to [physical] phenomena losing their meaning when viewed from greater distances. Gleick writes that Feigenbaum immersed himself in Mahler and Goethe’s Faust while in grad school at MIT, and that he had a “Germanic” collection of music. Feigenbaum seems more isolated from society than Boltzmann was, but apparently he also successfully learnt social interaction from observing other people, and he actually made a special effort to do so after he realised how isolated he had been. So.

So nothing. You’re pathetic.

Why would Wittgenstein even suggest that the fact that we cannot write down all the digits of pi is regarded as a human shortcoming by some mathematicians (PI 208)? Seems barmy that it should be regarded as a shortcoming at all, and I don't see how it relates to the general thread of the argument it appears in. Fine, so "teaching" someone to write pi is fundamentally different from "teaching" someone to write a patterned infinite series. The latter is what Wittgenstein would call teaching that "goes beyond" the given examples. But isn't this obvious? Or is he making the point that in reality teaching patterned series also can only be done through given examples? He is certainly making a point along the lines that one's understanding is one's ability to apply the knowledge to examples — something along Rylean lines of behaviour, rather than some mental essence, as constituting understanding — "Intuition an unnecessary shuffle." (PI 213) (And what's with the double brackets around that latter phrase anyway?)

I'm constantly tempted to just write that Wittgenstein defines understanding by usage, but then he would object to the idea of a definition in the first place.

To a first-time reader of Wittgenstein, he may appear frustratingly indirect and overly metaphorical (certainly not conventional philosophy writing, for sure, and certainly not conventional analytic philosophy-type writing, for all that he revolutionised that subfield of philosophy), but then one tries to state what he says in more explicit language, and fails miserably. For after all he is talking about language, so he has to use something that shows more than says, since we already know (or think we know) what language says.

Kill the pig

At one point in Werner Herzog's Even Dwarfs Started Small, a couple of the inmates kill a pig. Given the general Lord of the Flies-like theme of the movie, I wonder if that was a reference to the "Kill the pig!" refrain in LotF.

The truck going round the yard in circles, driverless and set in motion for no purpose, is another of Herzog's typical metaphors. He fixates on them. Many similar obsessively repetitive scenes in Fata Morgana, most of which I did not understand, but still found riveting in a strange way. Perhaps I'm just easily impressed by the suggestion of profundity. The truck thing obviously suggests the futility and ultimate circularity of civilisation — those who overthrow their supposedly inhumane oppressors deteriorate into barbarism themselves.

The point he is making with the repetitive "tribal" music throughout the movie is obvious too.