Humanity’s Achilles’ heel

Good and evil are characteristics that imbue almost every aspect of our nature. It’s why it’s the subject of so many narratives, including mythologies and religions, not to mention actual real-world histories. It effectively defines what we are, what we are capable of and what we are destined to be.
 
I’ve discussed evil in one of my earliest posts, and also its recurring motif in fiction. Humanity is unique, at least on this small world we call home, in that we can change it on a biblical scale, both intentionally and unintentionally – climate change being the most obvious and recent example. We are doing this in combination with creating the fastest growing extinction event in the planet’s history, for which most of us are blissfully ignorant.
 
This post is already going off on tangents, but it’s hard to stay on track when there are so many ramifications; because none of these issues are the Achilles’ heel to which the title refers.
 
We have the incurable disease of following leaders who will unleash the worst of humanity onto itself. I wrote a post back in 2015, a year before Trump was elected POTUS, that was very prescient given the events that have occurred since. There are two traits such leaders have that not only define them but paradoxically explain their success.
 
Firstly, they are narcissistic in the extreme, which means that their self-belief is unassailable, no matter what happens. The entire world can collapse around them and somehow they’re untouchable. Secondly, they always come to power in times of division, which they exploit and then escalate to even greater effect. Humans are most irrational in ingroup-outgroup situations, which could be anything from a family dispute to a nationwide political division. Narcissists thrive in this environment, creating a narrative that only resembles the reality inside their head, but which their followers accept unquestioningly.
 
I’ve talked about leadership in other posts, but only fleetingly, and it’s an inherent and necessary quality in almost all endeavours; be it on a sporting field, on an engineering project, in a theatre or in a ‘house’ of government. There is a Confucian saying (so neither Western nor modern): If you want to know the true worth of a person, observe the effects they have on other people’s lives. I’ve long contended that the best leaders are those who bring out the best in the people they lead, which is the opposite of narcissists, who bring out the worst.
 
I’ve argued elsewhere that we are at a crossroads, which will determine the future of humanity for decades, if not centuries ahead. No one can predict what this century will bring, in the same way that no one predicted all the changes that occurred in the last century. My only prediction is that the changes in this century will be even greater and more impactful than the last. And whether that will be for the better or the worse, I don’t believe anyone can say.
 
Do I have an answer? Of course not, but I will make some observations. Virtually my whole working life was spent on engineering projects, which have invariably involved an ingroup-outgroup dynamic. Many people believe that conflict is healthy because it creates competition and by some social-Darwinian effect, the best ideas succeed and are adopted. Well, I’ve seen the exact opposite, and I witness it in our political environment all the time.
 
In reality, what happens is that one side will look for, and find, something negative about every engineering solution to a problem that is proposed. This means that there is continuous stalemate and the project suffers in every way imaginable – morale is depleted, everything is drawn out and we have time and cost overruns, which feed the blame-game to new levels. At worst, the sides end up in legal dispute, where, I should point out, I’ve had considerable experience.
 
On the contrary, when sides work together and collaboratively, people compromise and respect the expertise of their counterparts. What happens is that problems and issues are resolved and the project is ultimately successful. A lot of this depends on the temperament and skills of the project leader. Leadership requires good people skills.
 
Someone once did a study in the United States in the last century (I no longer have the reference) where they looked for the traits of individuals who were eminently successful. And what they found was that it was not education or IQ that was the determining factor, though that helped. No, the single most important factor was the ability to form consensus.
 
If one looks at prolonged conflicts, like we’ve witnessed in Ireland or the Middle East, people involved in talks will tell you that the ‘hardliners’ will never find peace, only the moderates will. So, if there is a lesson to be learned, it’s not to follow leaders who sow and reap division, but those who are inclusive. That means giving up our ingroup-outgroup mentality, which appears impossible. But, until we do, the incurable disease will recur and we will self-destruct by simply following the cult that self-destructive narcissists are so masterfully capable of growing.
 

What we observe and what is reality are distinct in physics

 I’ve been doing this blog for 15 years now, and in that time some of my ideas have changed or evolved, and, in some areas, my knowledge has increased. As I’ve said on Quora a few times, I read a lot of books by people who know a lot more than me, especially in physics.
 
There is a boundary between physics and philosophy, the shoreline of John Wheeler’s metaphorical ‘island of knowledge in the infinite sea of ignorance’. To quote: “As the island grows so does the shoreline of our ignorance.” And I think ignorance is the key word here, because it’s basically speculation, which means some of us are wrong, including me, most likely. As I’ve often said, ‘Only future generations can tell us how ignorant the current generation is’. I can say that with a lot of confidence, just by looking at the history of science.
 
If this blog has a purpose beyond promoting my own pet theories and prejudices, it is to make people think.
 
Recently, I’ve been pre-occupied with determinism and something called superdeterminism, which has become one of those pet prejudices among physicists in the belief that it’s the only conclusion one can draw from combining relativity theory, quantum mechanics, entanglement and Bell’s theorem. Sabine Hossenfelder is one such advocate, who went so far as to predict that one day all other physicists will agree with her. I elaborate on this below.
 
Mark John Fernee (physicist with Qld Uni), with whom I’ve had some correspondence, is one who disagrees with her. I believe that John Bell himself proposed that superdeterminism was possibly the only resolution to the quandaries posed by his theorem. There are two other videos worth watching, one by Elijah Lew-Smith and a 50min one by Brian Greene, who doesn’t discuss superdeterminism. Nevertheless, Greene’s video gives the best and easiest to understand description of Bell’s theorem and its profound implications for reality.
 
So what is super-determinism, and how is it distinct from common or garden determinism? Well, if you watch the two relevant videos, you get two different answers. According to Sabine, there is no difference and it’s not really to do with Bell’s theorem, but with the measurement problem in QM. She argues that it’s best explained by looking at the double-slit experiment. Interestingly, Richard Feynman argued that all the problems associated with QM can be analysed, if not understood, by studying the double-slit experiment.
 
Sabine wrote an academic paper on the ‘measurement problem’, co-authored with Jonte R. Hance from the University of Bristol, which I’ve read and is surprisingly free of equations (not completely) but uses the odd term I’m unfamiliar with. I expect I was given a link by Fernee which I’ve since lost (I really can’t remember), but I still have a copy. One of her points is that as long as we have unsolved problems in QM, there is always room for different philosophical interpretations, and she and Hance discuss the most well-known ones. This is slightly off-topic, but only slightly, because even superdeterminism and its apparent elimination of free will is a philosophical issue.
 
Sabine argues that it’s the measurement that creates superdeterminism in QM, which is why she uses the double-slit experiment to demonstrate it. It’s because the ‘measurement’ ‘collapses’ the wave function and ‘determines’ the outcome, that it must have been ‘deterministic’ all along. It’s just that we don’t know it until a measurement is made. At least, this is my understanding of her argument.
 
The video by Elijah Lew-Smith gives a different explanation, focusing solely on Bell’s theorem. I found that it also required more than one viewing, but he makes a couple of points, which I believe go to the heart of the matter. (Greene’s video gives an easier-to-follow description, despite its length).
 
We can’t talk about an objective reality independent of measurement.
(Which echoes Sabine’s salient point in her video.)
 
And this point: There really are instantaneous interactions; we just can’t access them.
 
This is known as ‘non-locality’, and Brian Greene provides the best exposition I’ve seen, and explains how it’s central to Bell’s theorem and to our understanding of reality.
 
On the other hand, Lew-Smith explains non-locality without placing it at the centre of the discussion.
 
If I can momentarily go back to Sabine’s key argument, I addressed this in a post I wrote a few years back. Basically, I argued that you can only know the path an electron or photon takes retrospectively, after the measurement or observation has been made. Prior to that, QM tells us it’s in a superposition of states and we only have probabilities of where it will land. Curiously, I referenced a video by Sabine in a footnote, where she makes this point in her conclusion:
 
You don’t need to know what happens in the future because the particle goes to all points anyway. Except…  It doesn’t. In reality, it goes to only one point. So maybe the reason we need the measurement postulate is because we don’t take this dependency on the future seriously enough.
 
And to me, that’s what this is all about: the measurement is in the future of the wave function, and the path it takes is in the past. This, of course, is what Freeman Dyson claims: that QM cannot describe the past, only the future.
 
And if you combine this perspective with Lew-Smith’s comment about objective reality NOT being independent of the measurement, then objective reality only exists in the past, while the wave function and all its superpositional states exist in the future.
 
So how does entanglement fit into this? Well, this is the second point I highlighted, which is that ‘there really are instantaneous reactions, which we can’t access’, which is ‘non-locality’. And this, as Schrodinger himself proclaimed, is what distinguishes QM from classical physics. In classical physics, ‘locality’ means there is a relativistic causal connection and in entanglement there is not, which is why Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance’.
 
Bell’s theorem effectively tells us that non-locality is real, supported by experiment many times over, but you can’t use it to transmit information faster-than-light, so relativity is not violated in practical terms. But it does ask questions about simultaneity, which is discussed in Lew-Smith’s video. He demonstrates graphically that different observers will observe a different sequence of measurement, so we have disagreement, even a contradiction about which ‘measurement’ collapsed the wave function. And this is leads to superdeterminism, because, if the outcome is predetermined, then the sequence of measurement doesn’t matter.
 
And this gets to the nub of the issue, because it ‘appears’ that ‘objective reality’ is observer dependent. Relativity theory always gives the result from a specific observer’s point of view and different observers in different frames of reference can epistemically disagree. Is there a frame of reference that is observer independent? I always like to go back to the twin paradox, because I believe it provides an answer. When the twins reunite, they disagree on how much time has passed, yet they agree on where they are in space-time. There is not absolute time, but there is absolute space-time.
 
Did you know we can deduce the velocity that Earth travels relative to absolute space-time, meaning the overall observable Universe? By measuring the Doppler shift of the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation) in all directions, it’s been calculated that we are travelling at 350km/s in the direction of Pisces (ref., Paul Davies, About Time; Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, 1995). They should teach this in schools.
 
Given this context, is it possible that entanglement is a manifestation of objective simultaneity? Not according to Einstein, who argued that: ‘The past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion’; which is based on the ‘fact’ that simultaneity is observer dependent. But Einstein didn’t live to see Bell’s theorem experimentally verified. Richard Muller, a prize-winning physicist and author (also on Quora) was asked what question he’d ask Einstein if he could hypothetically meet him NOW. I haven’t got a direct copy, but essentially Muller said he’d ask Einstein if he now accepted a ‘super-luminal connection’, given experimental confirmation of Bell’s theorem. In other words, entanglement is like an exception to the rule, where relativity strictly doesn’t apply.
 
Sabine with her co-author, Jonte Hance, make a passing comment that the discussion really hasn’t progressed much since Bohr and Einstein a century ago, and I think they have a point.
 
Mark Fernee, whom I keep mentioning on the sidelines, does make a distinction between determinism and superdeterminism, where determinism simply means that everything is causally connected to something, even if it’s not predictable. Chaos being a case-in-point, which he describes thus:
 
Where this determinism breaks down is with chaotic systems, such as three body dynamics. Chaotic systems are so sensitive to the initial parameters that even a slight inaccuracy can result in wildly different predictions. That's why predicting the weather is so difficult.
Overall, complexity limits the ability to predict the future, even in a causal universe.
 
On the other hand, superdeterminism effectively means the end of free will, and, in his own words, ‘free will is a contentious issue, even among physicists’.
 
Fernee provided a link to another document by Sabine, where she created an online forum specifically to deal with less than knowledgeable people about their disillusioned ideas on physics – crackpots and cranks. It occurred to me that I might fall into this category, but it’s for others to judge. I’m constantly reminded of how little I really know, and that I’m only fiddling around the edges, or on the ‘shoreline of ignorance’, as Wheeler described it, where there are many others far more qualified than me.
 
I not-so-recently wrote a post where I challenged a specific scenario often cited by physicists, where two observers hypothetically ‘observe’ contradictory outcomes of an event on a distant astronomical body that is supposedly happening simultaneously with them.
 
As I said before, relativity is an observer-dependent theory, almost by definition, and we know it works just by using the GPS on our smart-phones. There are algorithms that make relativistic corrections to the signals coming from the satellites, otherwise the map on your phone would not match the reality of your actual location.
 
What I challenge is the application of relativity theory to an event that the observer can’t observe, even in principle. In fact, relativity theory rules out a physical observation of a purportedly simultaneous event. So I’m not surprised that we get contradictory results. The accepted view among physicists is that each observer ‘sees’ a different ontology (one in the future and one in the past), whereas I contend that there is an agreed ontology that becomes observable at a later time, when it’s in both observers’ past. (Brian Greene has another video demonstrating the ‘conventional’ view among physicists.)
 
Claudia de Rahm is Professor of Physics at Imperial College London, and earlier this year, she gave a talk titled, What We Don’t Know About Gravity, where she made the revelatory point
that Einstein’s GR (general theory of relativity) predicted its own limitations. Basically, if you apply QM probabilities to extreme curvature spacetime, you get answers over 100%, so nonsense. GR and QM are mathematically incompatible if we try to quantise gravity, though QFT (quantum field theory) ‘works fine on the manifold of spacetime’, according to expert, Viktor T Toth.
 
Given that relativity theory, as it is applied, is intrinsically observer dependent, I question if it can be (reliably) applied to events that have no causal relation to the observer (meaning outside the observer's light cone, both past and future). Which is why I challenge its application to events the observer can't observe (refer 2 paragraphs ago).

 

Addendum: I changed the title so it's more consistent with the contents of the post. The previous title was Ignorance and bliss; philosophy and science. Basically, the reason we have different interpretations of the same phenomenon is because physics can only tell us about what we observe, and what that means for reality is often debatable; superdeterminism being a case in point. Many philosophers and scientists talk about a ‘gap’ between theory and reality, whereas I claim the gap is between the observation and reality, a la Kant.

Ontology and epistemology; the twin pillars of philosophy

 I remember in my introduction to formal philosophy that there were 5 branches: ontology, epistemology, logic, aesthetics and ethics. Logic is arguably subsumed under mathematics, which has a connection with ontology and epistemology through physics, and ethics is part of all our lives, from politics to education to social and work-related relations to how one should individually live. Aesthetics is like an orphan in this company, yet art is imbued in all cultures in so many ways, it is unavoidable.
 
However, if you read about Western philosophy, the focus is often on epistemology and its close relation, if not utter dependence, on ontology. Why dependence? Because you can’t have knowledge of something without inferring its existence, even if the existence is purely abstract.
 
There are so many facets to this, that it’s difficult to know where to start, but I will start with Kant because he argued that we can never know ‘the-thing-in-itself’, only a perception of it, which, in a nutshell, is the difference between ontology and epistemology.
 
We need some definitions, and ontology is dictionary defined as the ‘nature of being’, while epistemology is ‘theory of knowledge’, and with these definitions, one can see straightaway the relationship, and Kant’s distillation of it.
 
Of course, one can also see how science becomes involved, because science, at its core, is an epistemological endeavour. In reading and researching this topic, I’ve come to the conclusion that, though science and philosophy have common origins in Western scholarship, going back to Plato, they’ve gone down different paths.
 
If one looks at the last century, which included the ‘golden age of physics’, in parallel with the dominant philosophical paradigm, heavily influenced, if not initiated, by Wittgenstein, we see that the difference can be definitively understood in terms of language. Wittgenstein effectively redefined epistemology as how we frame the world with language, while science, and physics in particular, frames the world in mathematics. I’ll return to this fundamental distinction later.
 
In my last post, I went to some lengths to argue that a fundamental assumption among scientists is that there is an ‘objective reality’. By this, I mean that they generally don’t believe in ‘idealism’ (like Donald Hoffman) which is the belief that objects don’t exist when you don’t perceive them (Hoffman describes it as the same experience as using virtual-reality goggles). As I’ve pointed out before, this is what we all experience when we dream, which I contend is different to the experience of our collective waking lives. It’s the word, ‘collective’, that is the key to understanding the difference – we share waking experiences in a way that is impossible to corroborate in a dream.
 
However, I’ve been reading a lot of posts on Quora by physicists, Viktor T Toth and Mark John Fernee (both of whom I’ve cited before and both of whom I have a lot of respect for). And they both point out that much of what we call reality is observer dependent, which makes me think of Kant.
 
Fernee, when discussing quantum mechanics (QM) keeps coming back to the ‘measurement problem’ and the role of the observer, and how it’s hard to avoid. He discusses the famous ‘Wigner’s friend’ thought experiment, which is an extension of the famous Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment, which infers you have the cat in 2 superpositional states: dead and alive. Eugne Wigner developed a thought experiment, whereby 2 experimenters could get contradictory results. Its relevance to this topic is that the ontology is completely dependent on the observer. My understanding of the scenario is that it subverts the distinction between QM and classical physics.
 
I’ve made the point before that a photon travelling across the Universe from some place and time closer to its beginning (like the CMBR) is always in the future of whatever it interacts with, like, for example, an ‘observer’ on Earth. The point I’d make is that billions of years of cosmological time have passed, so in another sense, the photon comes from the observer’s past, who became classical a long time ago. For the photon, time is always zero, but it links the past to the present across almost the entire lifetime of the observable universe.
 
Quantum mechanics, more than any other field, demonstrates the difference between ontology and epistemology, and this was discussed in another post by Fernee. Epistemologically, QM is described mathematically, and is so successful that we can ignore what it means ontologically. This has led to diverse interpretations from the multiple worlds interpretation (MWI) to so-called ‘hidden variables’ to the well known ‘Copenhagen interpretation’.
 
Fernee, in particular, discusses MWI, not that he’s an advocate, but because it represents an ontology that no one can actually observe. Both Toth and Fernee point out that the wave function, which arguably lies at the heart of QM is never observed and neither is its ‘decoherence’ (which is the measurement problem by another name), which leads many to contend that it’s a mathematical fiction. I argue that it exists in the future, and that only classical physics is actually observed. QM deals with probabilities, which is purely epistemological. After the ‘observation’, Schrodinger’s equation, which describes the wave function ceases to have any meaning. One is in the future and the observation becomes the past as soon as it happens.
 
I don’t know enough about it, but I think entanglement is the key to its ontology. Fernee points out in another post that entanglement is to do with conservation, whether it be the conservation of momentum or, more usually, the conservation of spin. It leads to what is called non-locality, according to Bell’s Theorem, which means it appears to break with relativistic physics. I say ‘appears’, because it’s well known that it can’t be used to send information faster than light; so, in reality, it doesn’t break relativity. Nevertheless, it led to Einstein’s famous quote about ‘spooky action at a distance’ (which is what non-locality means in layperson’s terms).
 
But entanglement is tied to the wave function decoherence, because that’s when it becomes manifest. It’s crucial to appreciate that entangled particles are described by the same wave function and that’s the inherent connection. It led Schrodinger to claim that entanglement is THE defining feature of QM; in effect, it’s what separates QM from classical physics.
 
I think QM is the best demonstration of Kant’s prescient claim that we can never know the-thing-in-itself, but only our perception of it. QM is a purely epistemological theory – the ontology it describes still eludes us.
 
But relativity theory also suggests that reality is observer dependent. Toth points out that even the number of particles that are detected in some scenarios are dependent on the frame of reference of the observer. This has led at least one physicist (on Quora) to argue that the word ‘particle’ should be banned from all physics text books – there are only fields. (Toth is an expert on QFT, quantum field theory, and argues that particles are a manifestation of QFT.) I won’t elaborate as I don’t really know enough, but what’s relevant to this topic is that time and space are observer dependent in relativity, or appear to be.
 
In a not-so-recent post, I described how different ‘observers’ could hypothetically ‘see’ the same event happening hundreds of years apart, just because they are walking across a street in opposite directions. I use quotation marks, because it’s all postulated mathematically, and, in fact, relativity theory prevents them from observing anything outside their past and future light cones. I actually discussed this with Fernee, and he pointed out that it’s to do with causality. Where there is no causal relation between events, we can’t determine an objective sequence let alone one relevant to a time frame independent of us (like a cosmic time frame). And this is where I personally have an issue, because, even though we can’t observe it or determine it, I argue that there is still an objective reality independently of us.
 
In relativity there is something called true time (τ) which is the time in the frame of reference of the observer. If spacetime is invariant, then it would logically follow that where you have true time you should have an analogous ‘true space’, yet I’ve never come across it. I also think there is a ‘true simultaneity’ but no one else does, so maybe I’m wrong.
 
There is, however, something called the Planck length, and someone asked Toth if this changed relativistically with the Lorenz transformation, like all other ‘rulers’ in relativity physics. He said that a version of relativity was formulated that made the Planck length invariant but it created problems and didn’t agree with experimental data. What I find interesting about this is that Planck’s constant, h, literally determines the size of atoms, and one doesn’t expect atoms to change size relativistically (but maybe they do). The point I’d make is that these changes are observer dependent, and I’d argue that there is a Planck length that is observer independent, which is the case when there is no observer.
 
This has become a longwinded way of explaining how 20th Century science has effectively taken this discussion away from philosophy, but it’s rarely acknowledged by philosophers, who take refuge in Wittgenstein’s conclusion that language effectively determines what we can understand of the world, because we think in a language and that limits what we can conceptualise. And he’s right, until we come up with new concepts requiring new language. Everything I’ve just discussed was completely unknown more than 120 years ago, for which we had no language, let alone concepts.
 
Some years ago, I reviewed a book by Don Cupitt titled, Above Us Only Sky, which was really about religion in a secular world. But, in it, Cupitt repeatedly argued that things only have meaning when they are ‘language-wrapped’ (his term) and I now realise that he was echoing Wittgenstein. However, there is a context in which language is magical, and that is when it creates a world inside your head, called a story.
 
I’ve been reading Bryan Magee’s The Great Philosophers, based on a series of podcasts with various academics in 1987, which started with Plato and ended with Wittgenstein. He discussed Plato with Myles Burnyeat, Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Oxford. Naturally, they discussed Socrates, the famous dialogues and the more famous Republic, but towards the end they turned to the Timaeus, which was a work on ‘mathematical science’, according to Burnyeat, that influenced Aristotle and Ptolemy.
 
It's worth quoting their last exchange verbatim:
 
Magee: For us in the twentieth century there is something peculiarly contemporary about the fact that, in the programme it puts forward for acquiring an understanding of the world, Plato’s philosophy gives a central role to mathematical physics.
 
Burnyeat: Yes. What Plato aspired to do, modern science has actually done. And so there is a sort of innate sympathy between the two which does not hold for Aristotle’s philosophy. (My emphasis)

Addendum: This is a very good exposition on the 'measurement problem' by Sabine Hossenfelder, which also provides a very good synopsis of the wave function (ψ), Schrodinger's equation and the Born rule.