Such a drama queen.

Which word is giving you trouble?

What do you mean? — StreetlightX

Don't pretend that's a difficult question.

So is there some important difference from pragmatism here?

One other thought. My case has already been tested and demonstrated in the field.

Back in the 1970s, computer scientists hope to build intelligent machines using symbol processing. Recreate the syntax and the semantics would surely follow. We know what a dismal dualistic failure that exercise was.

But these days any realistic approach to machine intelligence - such as forward modelling or Baysesian neural nets - is an attempt to replicate a semiotic modelling relation.

So a particular theory of truth has been tried and tested. We are going with the one that works.

What would it mean to assign to a thing as a property, that it is in between discrete and continuous? — Metaphysician Undercover

Look up fractal geometry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausdorff_dimension

The in-between spectra are now mathematically well defined.

When we assign to a substance, a property according to a category, we cannot say that the substance has contrary properties of that category, though it can at different times. The same substance can be at one time hot and at another time cold, but it cannot be both hot and cold at the same time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh? We say it is cold because it lacks heat, and hot because it lacks chill. So it is about "both things at once" - except it is about that as a broken symmetry or asymmetry. At any particular time or place, we have more of the one in terms of having less of the other.

Again the logic of this just seems really simple.

It seems quite clear to me that you have this backwards. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, I've already said you can turn around and treat vagueness as the ur-category - the limit on contrariety. And that recreates Aristotle's argument for hylomorphic substance, but just recasts it in more suitably developmental or dynamic terms.

The map is language, the territory is the world, and when the former rightly depicts the latter, then they correspond. — Sapientia

You are asserting naive realism and ignoring the subtleties of my actual argument. But never mind.

Interpretation won't determine whether the map rightly or wrongly depicts the territory. — Sapientia

It doesn't need to. In the semiotic model of truth, a habit of interpretance is concerned with establishing a reliable system of signs. So I can look at a thermometer and see that it reads 14 degrees C. That is a measurement which tells me "the truth" of "the weather".

So as I say, it is about the wholeness of a triadic relation. You can't make sense of any one part in isolation.

The usual approaches to truth are dydaic or dualistic. That is why they founder. There is the mind and there is the world. Somehow they seem to connect, but no one can explain the mystery of how.

Semiotics replaces that mind~world dualism with a symbol~world relation. And the sign is what mediates in being Janus faced. It can have a foot in both camps in being both physical and mental, syntactical and semantic.

That's the point about sentences expressing propositions.

One could take the view that p is true even if p is never said (or is even unsayable?). Semantics can be taken to have its own mentalistic, reified, Platonic existence that transcends any actual saying and acting upon a belief. But that kind of dualistic divide offers no way of then reconnecting meaning to the world.

Yet it is just as much a problem to say some physical pattern carries its meaning or interpretation inherently. We can imagine the infinite number of randomly typing monkeys who cannot help but bash out every possible true statement without ever a hint of understanding. So siding with the physicality of the signs cannot help either.

That is why you have to understand what is going on as a complete relation. And a counter-intuitive outcome of that is that efficient mapping is deliberately unrealistic. The system of signs that makes a habit of interpretance most effective is the one that reduces the physical "truth" of the world to the barest play of symbols. A good map is flat and uncluttered with just a few sharp indicative marks. It leaves out everything that can be left out. It is meaningful to the degree that it suppresses information about reality - the degree to which it filters signal from noise.

That is why propositions have the binary form of being true/false. Give the relevant box a tick or a cross.

Naive realism expects the opposite. The map corresponds to the world as indeed a "mapping" - a re-presentation of what actually exists out there.

But maps are a reduction of reality to what is understood as meaningful in terms of certain expectable signs. So truth judgments track measurements, not existence. The less we actually need to concern ourselves with the messy actuality, the "truthier" our conceptions become.

Again that is why binary tick-box propositional logic is so highly valued. It stands as the ultimate limit of this desire to detach from the physics and live in a self-made realm of sign. We are telling the world, just nod yes or no to our question, we can take it from there.

If what we think is right, and we express it as a statement, then it is true - even if nobody knows it to be true. — Sapientia

Yep. The infinite typing monkeys theory of truth. It sounds kind of plausible until you really start to think about it.

A bunch of symbols on a piece of paper don't need an inherent interpretation, so whether they have one or not is beside the point. An inherent interpretation strikes me as an oxymoron, anyway. They just need to be such that if there were an interpretation, then it could be correct or incorrect. — Sapientia

Yes. But in the usual course of things (barring these rogue monkey infinite typing pools), a bunch of symbols only appears in the physical world when there is someone with an intent to state something meaningful.

Again, one could imagine that occasionally a rock face would wear in such a way that some moving poem or grave epitaph might just appear. But really, the infinite unlikelihood of such a physical act is evidence that all such physical manifestations are the product of some mind (or system of interpretance that employs signs).

No, we know that the author meant something with the symbols. That is at least possible, so, as a thought experiment, that's what we're assuming. That being the case, it wouldn't matter whether the meaning, i.e. what the author meant, is known. Nor would it matter whether or how they are interpreted. — Sapientia

What do you mean? The author at least has to "know" what he meant. He would have to understand himself. And it is he who can't in fact transcend what is only a reasonable-seeming structure of belief.

So you are focusing again on transmissible signs - words that get spoken or written. But words are still signs when they are thought.

Ascribing truth doesn't entail truth. — Sapientia

But that is merely to re-assert naive realism. You are claiming there is the claim, and then the proof of the claim, and then beyond that, the claim's truth. You want to put truth out there in the world with all the physics.

That doesn't work, which is why naive realists usually wind up talking Platonically about p being true as if propositions exist as abstract objects.

So again, the pragmatic/semiotic approach to truth instead proceeds by making reasonable hypotheses and then testing them in terms of acts of measurement. We form signs of what to expect if some idea is indeed "true".

And that approach to truth then understands that the ascriptions are essentially self-interested. Propositions are intrinsically an expression of some grounding purpose. And that also means an indifference to "physical reality" gets built in. It is a feature rather than a bug.

Success is always being able to filter signal from noise in terms of selfish interest.

As an Aristotelean you should see how this is the same as Aristotle's own argument for substance as the ur-category - the argument from contrariety.

Categories 4a10

It seems most distinctive of substance that what is numerically one and the same is able to receive contraries. In no other case could one bring forward anything, numerically one, which is able to receive contraries.

For example, a colour which is numerically one and the same will not be black and white, nor will numerically one and the same action be bad and good; and similarly with everything else that is not substance.

A substance, however, numerically one and the same, is able to receive contraries. For example, an individual man—one and the same—becomes pale at one time and dark at another, and hot and cold, and bad and good.

So it is the same metaphysical logic. The difference is that Aristotle was still talking about what sounds like an actuality - substance has primal existence - and I'm talking about a "state" of potential in talking instead of primal vagueness. So my emphasis is on the possibility of developing contrariety as opposed to receiving it.

And remember the classical importance of making the distinction between contradiction and contariety, as represented in the square of opposition for example -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_of_opposition

So I think you are fixed on thinking about categories in terms of contradiction where to get down to primal being, you have to apply contrariety as the deeper principle.

My question to you, is do you respect that there is such a thing as categorical boundaries? — Metaphysician Undercover

What I say is that (metaphysical strength) categories are in fact boundaries. They are limit states. And they come in dialectical pairs. They are the opposing extremes of what could definitely be the case.

So if a metaphysical separation is possible - such as the discrete and the continuous - then the separation "exists" to the degree it is crisp ... or not-vague.

I'm not sure why you are struggling so much with the natural logic of this.

Don't you think that we mostly assume that there is some kind of "truth" which is beyond our interpretations? — Metaphysician Undercover

But that is implicit in acknowledging we are limited to interpretations. So there is always going to be uncertainty about what is left out.

And yet also - at least for pragmatist accounts of truth - it is an important point that we are also only trying to serve our own purposes. We can afford to be indifferent about "the Truth" in some grand ontic totalising sense.

Of course I, like anyone with a deep interest in metaphysics, want the whole story. I make that completeness a purpose. But I also recognise the way inquiry is in fact limited and so that informs my approach too.

Do you think of biography as a type of naturalism? I would have thought it more a literary undertaking. — Wayfarer

Do you get to make the facts up or do you have to report them?

From the perspective of 'the natural sciences', then you have to account for phenomena in terms of causes that naturalism can deal with. But that doesn't make it comprehensive or complete. If I got your total medical history, or a DNA sample, I could find out a lot about you, in one sense - but how much would I know about your biography? Little or nothing, I would say; and that is an exact analogy. — Wayfarer

If that is an exact analogy, then you have only said you would need more empirical facts. You have not yet abandoned naturalism if you feel you need to inquire about my specific social and cultural development too.

but I would go further and say that the process of self-realisation is something other than, and greater than, what current naturalism is able to imagine. — Wayfarer

Talk is cheap. Maslow, as a scientist, did a pretty good job on humanising psychology. If you can go one better, let's hear how.

It might be a scientifically accurate depiction of physical processes, but as a philosophy...? — Wayfarer

Yeah, I was forgetting. Philosophy relies on scientific inaccuracy. :-}

My view is that human beings are in some real sense intrinsic to the Universe. We're not accidental byproducts of a random process, but the means by which the Universe discovers itself. — Wayfarer

I'm not completely against such an idea as you know. But also, I could only truly believe in it to the extent I could at least sketch out some plausible way of quantifying it as a metaphysical hypothesis.

So I would rephrase it in terms of the inexorable growth of semiotic complexity (within entropic limits). And "ascendency" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendency - is an ecological concept, cashed out in actual equations, which for instance gets at the notion of organised power.

But mystical proclamations recast in emprical form seem to loose their allure very quickly for many.

Do you mean that we construct & share a worldview, the fact that it is shared, gives it reliable meaning, it has pragmatic use. — Cavacava

Yeah. But that construction of a worldview (or umwelt in semiotic jargon) is both biological and cultural. So because we have a shared history of neural evolution - the same kind of eyes and ears - we can already rely on some basic level of shared experience or phenomenology. So I am not arguing extreme social constructionism. However when it comes to an intellectually conceived worldview - the product of collective human enquiry - then it is still just that ... the collective view which develops and survives because it somehow works for us all in a generic way.

We have consciousness of an existent object, a tree for example, and we have a claim to knowledge of how it appears & how trees appear is part of our concept of a tree. So two separate claims: a) the thing is(we understand it is separate from us) & b) what that things is (how its concept epistemologically ties into its appearance). — Cavacava

Not sure if this is what you mean, but I am saying there would be two levels of semiosis here. There would be the neuropsychology of perception - the way our brains are already designed to force us to construct the perception of a bound object like "a tree".

The naive view is we see what is there - a tree with colours, movements, shapes. Yet psychology tells us this is an elaborate process of interpretation. A tree won't even be seen if the mind finds it more meaningful to be acting in terms of there being a wood.

And then on top of that we construct our social reality where oak trees are gods, or someone's property, or a thing of natural beauty.

The point is that it is signs all the way down. If we focus on the greenness of some leaf, that is still a psychological sign rather than a physical reality. And when we say the physical reality is some wavelength of light, that is sign heaped upon sign. It is reading numbers off dials and saying, look!, there's your true reality.

I think this is really the point; that Reality is spirit; which cannot be mapped, but which does the mapping and which the maps are expressions of. — John

Yet still, what is "spirit" such that I can understand it to be doing mapping?

If you make it clearer you are talking about final cause in some fashion - the general purpose which acts as an "internal" constraint on mapping - then I could agree with you perhaps. It is a key point of the semiotic view of modelling relations that the autonomous self arises as the generic habit encoding some set of guiding self-interests.

But talking about "spirit" instead suggests a theistic reading. And this is why both Hegel, with his Geist, and Peirce, with his objective idealism, can be confusing because they seem to offer themselves equally to theistic interpretations and physicalist interpretations.

Of course you probably don't think of reality as purposive, intentional or teleological as spirit is thought; you would probably think of it as a virtual chaos or something like that — John

No. I've probably said it hundreds of times that I believe in the natural systems view and so finality is a real cause in the world. That is why the second law of thermodynamics stands out as the Cosmos's most generic constraint.

So I am cool with teleology. But I see it as immanent and naturalistic, not transcendent and theistic.

But when you get down to this level it is a matter of faith, or personal preference, as to how you think about the Real. — John

Or not. My argument is that it is about models that demonstrably work. It is about conceptions expressed clearly enough for evidence to falsify them.

Faith and preference are the weakest possible basis for truth pretty much by definition.

I would argue that culture is biology in that culture only exists because of us, and we are only biology — DanEssex

But what does the actual evidence say on this?

The human infant is born spectacularly helpless and reliant on social care. The brain is a sponge for language learning and enculturation up to the age of 7. Homo sap even evolved the further 10 year stage of adolescence to allow for social fine tuning of the higher cortical pathways.

So in many ways that aren't shared by chimps, gorillas or even moderately recent hominids, Homo sap is biologically set-up for the expectation of language-based cultural regulation.

So "we" are not just biology. The very idea of being a self - the capacity for being introspectively self-conscious - is a social construction of recent evolutionary origin.

I agree that is not part of the standard modern romantic mythology - the popular cultural view that we are souls locked inside skulls. But that is what social psychology tells us. (And yes, I have studied this particular question as a field, so at worst I'm offering an informed opinion here.)

However don't take these comments the wrong way. I thought your OP raises an important issue in an interesting fashion.

To the extent we are "machines", then how should the law apply? We face that with psychopathic killers whose brain scans might reveal a tumour in some critical empathetic and moral reasoning pathway.

Does it make sense to blame and punish the mechanical? But on the other hand, is there any issue in simply disposing of a defective machine?

We actually do have a responsibilty to understand the true nature of being human to justify our notions about justice.

The relation between mind and world is an expression of spirit; so, more primordially, truth is of the spirit. — John

But is that statement true beyond some particular mapping relation?

In talking about "spirit", you are speaking about the topological features on a map you have constructed. You know what "spirit" means to you because you believe you can recognise it in terms of phenomenology. If particular things happen in experience, you can successfully interpret them as an "expression of spirit".

Yet the next step for you and your map has to be to show you can and do actually use it to navigate a terrain in a way that meets some definite purpose.

I would say that "spirit" here sounds too vague in its ontic commitments. It's literal meaning is so ambiguous that it can be taken to mean pretty well anything one likes. It is the equivalent of a message scrawled on wet blotting paper with a fat felt-tip.

There may be some directions lurking in the putative map, but one could never really be sure that one was not merely getting lucky in eventually stumbling towards any actual destination.

So your response demonstrates how truth in terms of "maps of reality" is both model-centric - fundamentally epistemic - and yet also pragmatically comparable.

We can't transcend our epistemic conditions to inspect the world as it actually is. We are stuck with the internal signs we form as part of a modelling relation.

And yet there are objective features to this mapping - or at least features that we can socially share through language and agreement. That is, society is also a "mind" that makes maps.

The objective features would be the familiar ones of "crisp purposes" and "crisp counterfactuality". A map is true in terms of the purpose it is meant to serve (which can be either very general, or highly restricted). And for a map to be truth-apt, it must eliminate vagueness. It must render the world in as binary fashion as possible.

(And again, these are both good mapping qualities which we have plenty of reason to suspect reality itself to possibly lack. So that is how we arrive at the conundrum of how to remove ourselves - the interested mappers - from our view of reality. What does reality look like if reality were to "map itself"?)

So this made me think: why can't I identify as a machine, or a robot? I mean, I am just a biological robot/machine. Why does society get to choose my identity - an identity that apparently means that I have free will and a soul. — DanEssex

But this is the questionable presumption - that you are just a biological machine.

Biology would see it as the other way round. Life arises as a form of machinery imposed on nature - that is, constraints on material freedoms. So yes, there is mechanism involved. But it is not fundamental. It is superimposed in regulatory fashion to restrict dynamical chaos.

So if we jump ahead to humans and societies, we find that individual biopsychology is the new level of "material chaos" that is in need of mechanistic regulation. A functioning human emerges as a result of a suitable period of regulative training. Raising and educating the child, we call it. :)

And as Wuliheron points out, modern society has achieved the kind of complexity where it has systems for turning out virtual automatons. You can be put through the military mincer. You can become another call centre drone. Even being trained as a "creative" is another process of careful social moulding. If you go to fine arts school, there is a way you are meant to turn out.

None of this is a bad thing in itself. It is just the truth of the phenomenon we call life and mind.

Which ought to make you question the specific role that the current crop of cyborg mythologising plays in modern culture (and I'm enjoying Westworld at the moment).

Of what social value is this Romantic questioning of the image of humans as deterministic automata? Why would we concern ourselves, through dramas, with robots that "wake up" with "proper minds"?

So, do you think that humans should have the right to legally be recognised as machines or robots? — DanEssex

In part, that does happen. There is some recognition that crimes may have been committed under orders, or due to "biological hardware" incapacity.

But the main task of society - if it wants to impose its mechanistic regulatory frameworks on our chaotic psychologies - is to convince us all that we have a soul. We are selves. We are moral agents.

So the legal system goes along with that (in modern "civilised" democracies). It wants to foster the belief that we are entirely accountable for our every action and as unlike a machine or robot as it is possible to be.

There is cute irony in all this. We can't be coerced by a system of rules and regulations until we have first learnt how to be a "we" that can function that way.

And as I say, none of this is inherently bad. Humans after all are evolved to be this kind of composite creature - a mix of biology and culture held together by language.

7. You claim I have no interest in Philosophy. For real! — tom

You must admit that you come across as having the one true interpretation of quantum physics when the interpretation issue is famously wide open. And also you fail to respond to specific challenges concerning the ontic commitments that one might reasonably have even under a broad church view of MWI.

A bunch of symbols on a paper is neither true nor false without an interpretation. How many different ways must I spell this out? — Metaphysician Undercover

And don't think I haven't noticed your sly wording, taking advantage of the ambiguity in "without an interpretation". What does that mean? If there being an interpretation means there being a correct way for it to be interpreted, then I don't see why that would actually need a mind there interpreting it. — Sapientia

Truth arises as a property of a relation between mind and world. So MU is in the right here, but needs to take it a step further.

The crucial thing is that minds form maps of the territory for themselves. So truth becomes an interpretation of the map having some definite reliable meaning. Thus a triadic relationship is formed where we deal with the signs of what we think exists, rather than the noumenal things-in-themselves.

So it is right that a bunch of symbols on a paper don't have an inherent interpretation. The interpretation is a habit that has developed. A mind comes to recognise the map as saying something truthful about a territory.

The territory is then understood to "really exist" in the way it has been imagined. The map is presumed to describe it well. It must do because the map can be used reliably to get places we want to go.

But then - if we stop to think about it more carefully - all we really "know" is that these are the signs we interpret in such and such a way. So we can ascribe truth to that habit of interpretation. We can point to the robustness of a relation. But the territory itself stands beyond the map. And we might not really "know" it at all. It is only our particular habit of relation that is ever actually tested, and so has its "truth" demonstrated, by some act of interpretation.

But carry on with the usual useless idealism vs realism debate....

So as I see it particle physicists are trying to discern the probabilistic points in the projection I refer to, unaware of the pre-noumenon, or the reality in which the projection was constructed. — Punshhh

It is hard to make sense of your post. But in a general fashion, physics does make use of this kind of "projection from a higher dimension" thinking. For any dynamical system - like some dancing sea of particles - you can step back to a higher level view that sees it as a now frozen mass of vectors or trajectories.

This is the trick that quantum mechanics relies on in invoking an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. There is room enough in Hilbert space for every alternative history. And reality can then be a projection of that frozen realm. If you look through it, you see the average state, the least action sum, that becomes what is most likely to actually happen.

But the ontological issue is whether the mathematical trick is just a mathematical trick or - as MWI might want it - the higher reality is the true reality, and the projection is merely some kind of localised illusion.

You get exactly the same issue arising in frozen block universe notions of time, based on special relativity. Or now with the AdS/CFT correspondence in string theory (where the 3D quantum play of particles is treated as projection of a gravitational string theory that sits on the holographic boundary of this "reality").

My own view of course is that it is simply a mathematical trick. It is how modelling works. And to get carried away by it is mistaking the map for the territory.

But folk find it weird and seductive to believe our physical existence is some kind of projective illusion. It's been a popular point of view ever since Plato and his shadows on the cave wall.

l say constructed because I consider that the projection is an artificial fabrication conceived in a real world in which multifarious forms or species of projection, even fabrication are discussed, generated, and then individually put into practice on ocassion in a fabricated world, our world. — Punshhh

And here you seem to be trying to introduce some mind behind the scenes and directing the action. So you are really stacking up theism on top of the mathematical Platonism. I'd call that doubling down on everything I would disagree with as a natural philosopher and systems thinker here. :)

Let me get this straight then, you have one mother category "vagueness", and any other category is assumed to exist as a subset of this category. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well yes and no, because vagueness would be the ground state - in being the state "beyond categorisation". And also, in the full semiotic view, categorisation is irreducibly triadic. So there is no ultimate monism - unless you want to talk about the "one thing" of the triadic semiotic relation.

In Peirce's scheme, you have the three categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness that would correspond to my "system" here of vagueness, dichotomisation and hierarchy. That is pure possibility "reacts" against itself and becomes divided towards its crisp polarities. Then having divided, the division can mix over all scales to form a hierarchically structured world.

If say discrete and continuous are the two ultimate ways things could be, then the more definite it becomes that things are categorisable as either discrete or continuous, then also you get all the various in-between states of connectedness, or disconectedness, that go along with that.

I realise that this triadic, three dimensional, approach to categorisation is difficult and unfamiliar. It allows "rotations" through an extra dimension that normal categorisation - based on strict dialectics - fails to see.

So what does that mean? It means you have to remember that the extra dimension is one of development or process that stands orthogonal to the dimension of existence or structure.

So your very words are: "...and any other category is assumed to exist as a subset of this category?". That is you are, for the moment, restricting yourself to a static structural view to the exclusion of the further possible developmental or processual view. And I would reply, yes, vagueness does kind of stand in relation to the crispness of dichotomous categories as "a mother". But then I would want to rotate the view to remind that vagueness is defined itself dichotomously as the dynamical other of crispness. And it is never left behind in the developmental trajectory as development consists of its increasing suppression.

So you are hooked on the need to make some pole of being the ground state - which then stays where it is so a (constructed) movement away from it becomes a possibility. That is how you understand prime matter, for example. You have to start with a concrete stuff that represents efficient cause.

But in my view, vagueness is itself only granted existence in terms of what develops. It is the context of any thing that happens - it is the potential. But then it is only that because something does happen. The results are the context which make vagueness "a thing".

The logic of this would be circular if it weren't in fact hierarchical or triadic. ;)

So the metaphor you want to use here is "the mother and her many possible children". That encodes a forwards in time, unidirectional, efficient causality, with an unrestricted future state. The general begets the particular. The one begets the many.

But that is a truth of a triadic metaphysics seen from just one angle. It is only one cross-section of the whole.

Switching away from the structural/static view to the developmental/dynamical view, we would say the vague begets the dichotomy of the general~particular, or the one~many, the whole~parts. And vagueness is itself - structurally - a subset of the greater relation which is the dichotomy of the vague~crisp. Vagueness is the particular child of that more general parent relationship.

The opposing terms, which describe the limits, hot and cold, big and small, for example, are always within the same category. If we describe two distinct categories with two distinct words, these are not opposing terms of co-dependency or complimentary limits, as you suggest, because those necessarily fall within the same category. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are ignoring the fact that I said the category from which complementary distinctions originate is the third category of vagueness. All categorisation has this triadic (that is, semiotic) organisation in my book ... if not yours.

So we have one category which consists of constraints and freedoms, and another category which consists of vagueness. Have you any principles whereby you establish a relationship between these two categories? — Metaphysician Undercover

I just said that a symmetry breaking must reveal that there was a symmetry to be broken.

And if the breaking produces crisp division, then the originating symmetry must be the "opposite" of that - ie: radical indeterminacy.

So the argument has been supplied.

Incompleteness certainly has something to do with it. We know from quantum uncertainty that not every physical situation is measurable. So good luck with the reality of a simulation that can't reproduce classical level detail.

MWI is such a scam in that regard. It wants you to pay attention to physical situations with the simplest binary branch structure - a particle that might freely be spin up or spin down until someone has looked. How neatly the world divides into two.

Yet most emission interactions are wildly open-ended. When a photon is absorbed at point x in spacetime, then that directly creates the vast number of spacetime locales where the event will never occur. At the very least, there is a light cone sized sphere of places - a vast surface - where the said event counterfactually didn't happen.

So rather than two worlds, the simplest (being far less environmentally constrained) emission event would spawn a truly galactic number of alternative world-lines. It is a good job that MWI now uses decoherence's thermal averaging trick to treat this raging variety as differences that don't really make a difference in the big scheme of things.

But there is a basic dishonesty in claiming both wavefunction realism and then finding ways to ignore its full consequences due to the fact that "the observer don't care" about stuff that can be epistemically averaged away as not mattering.

It doesn't matter if a particular light ray from a distant star is absorbed by your eye, or by an eye on Alpha Centauri. Your eye is going to pick up some kind of thermal event from that distant star as it produces so many of them. And yet if we are to believe MWI, every possible version of the events exists as a real superposition. There is almost infinite branching the whole time, but only a select few of these branches - like spin up vs spin down - are treated as "separable". The rest are allowed to blur into an unmentioned bulk on good old epistemic grounds - the principle of observer indifference.

I of course agree with this epistemic view - in reading it from the other side. It is the point that decoherence is about a blanding away of the quantum uncertainty to leave only classical counterfactuality standing proud. We see a world of sharp black and white because grey gets averaged away. And then ultimately - at the quantum scale - there is a limit to this counterfactuality. That is what we are seeing when we ask non-commutating questions of nature like "where exactly are you/how fast and in what direction are you heading?".

So where MWI claims global irresolvability (no collapse), I instead focus on local remnants of irresolvabilty (so all of existence is the product of a relative state of collapse, it is only absolute collapse that is impossible).

And decoherence is a statistical mechanics add-on that lets you calculate the shrinkage of quantum weirdness to it limiting minimum. Yet MWI wants to read the maths the other way round - as a tool for the endless magnification of "real possibilities in superposition".

....there is a categorical separation between physical things and mathematics. — Metaphysician Undercover

If you want to defend this particular categorical separation, go right ahead.

My point is that you can only do it via some kind of dichotomistic "othering". You will only have a metaphysically strong argument if you can describe the situation in terms of some mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive pairing.

And so it is the kind of separation that in fact encodes a co-dependency. Each needs the other as the negation which underpins its own affirmation. And thus really any categorical separation is merely towards complementary limits. It becomes the disunity of a symmetry breaking which reveals the existence of a unitary symmetry.

So in this case, the maths stands for the eternally abstract. Which in turn means that "physical things" get reduced to the most impermanent notion of materiality - dimensionless fluctuations.

The argument is familiar to you. The proper opposition is not between substances (actual physical things) and (immaterial) ideas, It is between (physically general) potential - prime matter or Apeiron - and (mathematically general) forms.

The categorical separation I actually make - using systems jargon - is between constraints and freedoms. And then that separation in fact gets triadic or hierarchical development. That is how we end up with the hylomorphic "sandwich" of possibility, actuality and necessity.

So in the beginning there is just vagueness - the perfect symmetry of the ultimately indeterminate.

Then this gets broken. Constraints are habits or regularities - historically developed information - that break the raw symmetry and start to organise it.

But then constraints themselves encounter limits. Eventually you end up with the simplest state - like the U1 spin symmetry of electromagnetism. The symmetry of a circle. And where you get crisp symmetry emerging in that fashion, you get the baked-in freedoms of reality. You get the inertial degrees of freedom due to conservation laws as described by Noether's theorem.

Newtonian mechanics are the result of the emergent irreducibility of the freedom to move inertially in terms of translational and rotational symmetries. Relativity arises because Lorentzian symmetry is baked in for boosts or changes in energy scale.

So we have a "mathematical physics" that already tells its own story in terms of a triadic evolution. It all begins with "naked quantum chaos" - a perfectly vague symmetry of unbounded fluctuation. This symmetry is then broken by the emergence of spacetime - a Big Bang universe where dimensionality is reduced to just three global spatial directions, and filled by a cooling/expanding bath of radiation that gives everything an irreversible, symmetry-broken, direction in time.

But then as time develops, further more crisp symmetries, and thus symmetry-breakings, can manifest. The Universe gets cold and large enough for "massive particles" like protons and electrons to condense out of the radiation. We finally start to get the substantial classical things that you want to take for granted. That kind of stuff starts to pop out of the maths too.

So we already know a lot about how our notions of "maths" and "physical things" have an underlying unity, and how a disunity can evolve as further phase transitions due to cooling/expanding. Eventually things get stably broken because a particle like an electron is the mathematically simplest possible speck of matter. And then in the even longer term, all this matter will get swept up into black holes and radiated away to the coldest possible version of nothingness - the black body quantum sizzle of cosmic event horizons.

I mention all this yet again because this is modern metaphysics. It makes MWI seem the most Micky Mouse kind of philosophical contrivances. MWI nicked some of the maths of thermodynamics, but incorporates none of its deep ontology.

If the wavefunction exists as a mathematical conception existing in Hilbert space, then I am compelled to agree with Tegmark's belief that reality is mathematics manifest. I find it hard to think otherwise — Question

Which is all well and good, but then arises the question of "manifested from what"?

Even Platonism demanded its chora so that imperfect reality could be manifested in actually substantial form and not remain confined to a real of ideas.

Werner Heisenberg, stated that a quantum object is "something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality." Heisenberg called this "potentia," a concept originally introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

This is the guts of it. The interpretive hang-ups arise because there is this feeling that physicalist ontology must make a sharp distinction between what is real and what is not real.

With classical physics, all the regular physicalist ontic commitments seem to be upheld and so there is not even an interpretive issue - except for stuff folk don't talk about, like where physical laws reside in the scheme of things, and how they actually affect the world causally.

But with quantum physics, we should have been shocked out of this kind of complacency. Instead we have people still trying to cling on in Bohmian or MW style desperation to something being "real" in a traditional comforting local realist sense.

The way out of this intellectual bind is give up on "physicalist reality", and thus also on the "others" that frame its particular dialectic. As Heisenberg suggests here, we should understand existence in terms of being in the middle of two complementary limits - like reality and possibility. Or classical counterfactuality vs quantum indeterminacy. We are bounded by two extremes and thus exist at neither of them.

And it is this essential "between-ness" which is the fundamental.

That is why I am a fan of decoherence but not MWI. Allying the formalisms of QM and statistical mechanics is a way of describing an in-between "critically poised" state. It allows the evolving history of the Cosmos to be separated from the local histories of its particles by sheer classical scale. Space and time make a real difference.

But then MWI is what you get when you still want to assign fundamental reality to the quantum formalism and pretend that the classical realm is some kind of epiphenomenal illusion.

Again, if you assign fundamental reality to the in-betweeness - the causal story of how things become separated in the first place - then the quantum and the classical become the complementary limits of that evolving process.

And this is the emergent view which physics is working towards with quantum gravity. It is why MWI itself has largely retreated from its more extreme claims about multiverse type realitiies. The Orzel's are more representative than the Tegmarks when it comes to ontological discussions in this field.

So please don't tell me that what I'm talking about is a 'dead issue' when it is directly connected with the OP. — Wayfarer

Where does MWI require the interference to happen between particle histories rather than within particle histories?

I think the original observation I have come up with is that if the interference pattern in the double-slit experiment is not rate-dependent, then it is not time-dependent, as rate is a function of time. This can't be the same for physical waves. Therefore, what is causing the pattern is non-physical. — Wayfarer

But again, quantum mechanics is not claiming the situation to be (classically) physical. That is why it talks about probability waves and not classical waves.

So this is an argument against something not at issue.

And part of the incompleteness of quantum mechanics is that it has to presume a backdrop classical time dimension to do its thing. The wavefunction of a particle is the evolution of its probabilities in time. And then at some point in time there is - the collapse.

So the double slit experiment does depend on a rate in the sense that it depends on an event actually happening the once - a wavefunction collapsing to create a recorded flash on a screen.

The mystery - from the quantum view - is how anything happens even the once with counterfactual definiteness. That is why we get the eternalism of MWI where nothing ever actually collapses and as many worlds as you like get added.

But others believe that QM can make no sense until time is also seen as an emergent feature of a deeper theory. And those are the kind of current approaches that interest me.

She then goes on to outline something called the 'transactional interpretation', which I can't say that I understand. — Wayfarer

Yep. The transactional approach tries to allow for contextual retrocausality. But it is clunky in being still a mechanical paradigm that relies on a classical notion of time and not an emergent one.

Once we get to the cosmic scale, then things turn mathematical. We can start looking for the inescapable truths of symmetry and symmetry breaking. That - as ontic structural realism now realises - becomes the larger context that restricts physical possibility in rather radical fashion.

Yet still, you are not saying what you mean by non-physically real.

I don't particularly defend the term "probability wave" as its sounds overly concrete. And yet also you have to respect that it is only really making an epistemic claim about how quantum probabilities are observed to evolve in a fashion that is best described by the familiar equations of wave mechanics.

So where things get stretched is trying to read some hard realism into the formalism that turns out to work.

And then again, the point of dispute was about the issue of "time dependence".

The formalism describes each quantum event riding its own personal probability wave. So - as usual for any mathematically tractable theory - it builds in an atomism that allows bottom-up construction. As with MWI, you can then entangle individual histories to construct a whole spawning, eternally branching, never collapsing physical mess.

So there is not much disputing that interference is a property of individual wavefunction histories in the formalism. That is the successful presumption of the model.

And yes there is then a deep problem in that we believe that beyond the wavefunction, there must be its physical collapse. That is a view which both accords with common experience of seeing particles hit detector screens at some particular place, and with the highly successful presumptions of classical physical models.

So there are two strong states of belief in tension.

Then what best so far resolves the tension is to question the whole orientation of notions about realism. I appeal to the tradition of organic holism and hierarchical organisation - contextuality.

So it is "mechanics" - either classical or quantum (or statistical) - that is wrong in presuming that reality has locally inherent counterfactuality rather than provisional, contextual, counterfactuality.

That means I take indeterminacy - and its constraint - as the basic complementary ontic dichotomy from which crisp existence evolves as an expression of limit states.

And such an interpretation is consistent with the mathematics as the maths is taken to encode limit states, not atomistic actualities.

As you describe, apokrisis, the particle exists only in the context of the apparatus. — Metaphysician Undercover

But I also generalise the notion of apparatus so that the Cosmos is "an apparatus". It does have a past history that acts as a constraint on quantum indeterminacy.

The result of cosmic evolution - its spreading and cooling - is primarily that it has transitioned from being a relativistically hot bath or radiation to largely a cool dust of massive particles. So you could say we now live in the era of "proper particles" - stably-persistent protons and elections and neutrinos.

The experimental set-up simply reveals the contextuality of all this - because experiments can relax the constraints in ways that systematically demonstrate their existence at the normal, thermally-decohered scale, of our being.

So what I would like to argue is that the 'probability wave' is 'real but not physical'. — Wayfarer

That's fine. So what is it in a "real but non-physical" sense?

I've already explained my own view of that - which tallies broadly with modern information theoretic and condensed matter influenced thinking.

You appear not to understand the implications for contextuality of locality. — tom

You appear not to be able get beyond chanting Deutsch and MWI in monotonous cult-like fashion.

Can things get any more pathetic on a philosophy forum ... probably. — tom

I note that you failed to reply on Orzel's points.

So what is causing the pattern is not physical energy but purely probability. — Wayfarer

There is plenty of "physical energy" represented in the experimental apparatus set up to make the quantum observation. So - given my contextual view of causality - the pattern is produced by a narrowing of the space of quantum possibility so that just this particular set of probabilities, as described by the system's wavefunction, remains.

So you are thinking in conventional bottom-up terms of probability spaces having to be constructed from an ensemble of "paths". And that is indeed pretty mysterious.

But I am pointing out how the apparatus represents a further localised constraint on raw quantum probability. Naked space would still have some (vanishingly remote) possibility of fluctuating in a way to produce a hot particle that has to pass through some pair of slits to get to some absorbing surface. But the apparatus exists as something some experimenter has invested time and energy to build. And so some probability space has been given an enduring physical shape, creating an ensemble of paths, as described by a wavefunction.

So my approach is contextual and top down. It fits with the view that the particle isn't "really there". It is contextual probability in the fashion of a soliton or phonon - the trapped excitations of a field, as described by condensed matter physics.

And remember that the excitations of condensed matter physics, these "topological defects", act like quantum particles. The similarity is not analogous but literal.

So your concern is based on the mystery of how probability spaces might arise out of nothing. My contextual approach instead says that probability spaces arise out of the constraint of everythingness. You get crisply "quantum behaviour" after the vague or indeterminate world has become sufficiently constrained so that what is left is the most irreducible aspect of that indeterminacy.

You eventually get down to the point where observables are no longer commutable. You can no longer ask all the definite questions that realism supposes of an event at once.

So the approach I am taking is holistic. World features only have sharp existence due to some localised context of constraints. Existence does not inhere in atoms or substances. Instead, atoms and substances are the end product of a suppression of flux or unbound possibility.

I'm happy to trade both locality and realism for contextuality. ;)

To say, as you did, 'there is no particle travelling through the apparatus" is to say that there is no object called "the particle" to which the complementarity principle may be applied. — Metaphysician Undercover

It may seem a subtle point, but what I said was there was no (classically-imagined) particle. There was "an evolving wave of probability of detecting a (classically-imagined) particle that reflects the shape of the apparatus".

So I was trying to highlight the irreducible quantum contextuality of the existence of any "particle".

...it shows time is not a factor in the formation of the pattern. Doesn't that strike you as being significant? — Wayfarer

Again, who is saying time is a factor in the sense that multiple events need to accumulate for there to be quantum interference?

One of the well-known problems of the double-slit experiment is that particles fired singly seem to act as though interference is happening. But how can interference occur when there's only one particle? It's one of the notorious difficulties of quantum mechanics. So I'm not saying 'they don't interfere due to superposition'; I'm saying that what appears as 'an interference pattern' isn't really interference at all - where it would be exactly that is if it really were water waves or sound waves. — Wayfarer

But again, this isn't a physical interference of the kind we imagine with classical material waves. It is the analogous "interference" of probability waves. And it is the "interference" of all the possible paths a single particle could take. And it is the "interference" which is both constructive and destructive. So it builds up probability densities as well as knocks them down.

So there is little point trying to apply some simplistic and materialistic understanding of the word "interference" here.

The 'waves', so called, really are probability distributions, not actual 'waves' at all. The equation models both them and material waves, but they're of a different nature to waves in water, because there's no medium. They're not really waves, in the same sense, and for the same reason, that electrons are not really particles. — Wayfarer

Right.

Now the reason I say that is compatible with the Copenhagen Interpretation is that there are many statements along similar lines from them: 'What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning', said Heisenberg. Whereas, Einstein wanted to insist that there were something objectively real and (crucially), 'mind-independent', of which QM was an incomplete description. — Wayfarer

But that's ancient history. Today we know for sure that you have to give up either localism or realism. And probably have to give up both (in some sense).

However your posts here were making some kind of deal out of interference patterns not being rate-dependent. And it is not clear why you think that is relevant to the interpretation issue in any form.

If you have a wave machine making an actual wave of water in the lab, and the wave passes through twin slits, the split wave produces an interference pattern. So it is not an issue that we are talking about individual trials.

But a quantum twin slit experiment results in only a single particle like event at the detector screen. And the interference pattern disappears if the path of the particle is observed. So that's the weirdness that realism would have to explain away, and the weirdness that a CI-style pragmatism simply gives up trying to explain in terms of real world mechanism.

Not being rate dependent is not part of the weirdness. It would instead be weirder still if the particle-event was affected also by every other event both before and after it. How could we even calculate any statistics if we had to take the entire past and future of the Universe into account?