12 ideas
16062 | A necessary relation between fact-levels seems to be a further irreducible fact [Lynch/Glasgow] |
Full Idea: It seems unavoidable that the facts about logically necessary relations between levels of facts are themselves logically distinct further facts, irreducible to the microphysical facts. | |
From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C) | |
A reaction: I'm beginning to think that rejecting every theory of reality that is proposed by carefully exposing some infinite regress hidden in it is a rather lazy way to do philosophy. Almost as bad as rejecting anything if it can't be defined. |
16061 | If some facts 'logically supervene' on some others, they just redescribe them, adding nothing [Lynch/Glasgow] |
Full Idea: Logical supervenience, restricted to individuals, seems to imply strong reduction. It is said that where the B-facts logically supervene on the A-facts, the B-facts simply re-describe what the A-facts describe, and the B-facts come along 'for free'. | |
From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C) | |
A reaction: This seems to be taking 'logically' to mean 'analytically'. Presumably an entailment is logically supervenient on its premisses, and may therefore be very revealing, even if some people think such things are analytic. |
16060 | Nonreductive materialism says upper 'levels' depend on lower, but don't 'reduce' [Lynch/Glasgow] |
Full Idea: The root intuition behind nonreductive materialism is that reality is composed of ontologically distinct layers or levels. …The upper levels depend on the physical without reducing to it. | |
From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], B) | |
A reaction: A nice clear statement of a view which I take to be false. This relationship is the sort of thing that drives people fishing for an account of it to use the word 'supervenience', which just says two things seem to hang out together. Fluffy materialism. |
16064 | The hallmark of physicalism is that each causal power has a base causal power under it [Lynch/Glasgow] |
Full Idea: Jessica Wilson (1999) says what makes physicalist accounts different from emergentism etc. is that each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is numerically identical with a causal power associated with its base property. | |
From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], n 11) | |
A reaction: Hence the key thought in so-called (serious, rather than self-evident) 'emergentism' is so-called 'downward causation', which I take to be an idle daydream. |
3061 | Anaxarchus said that he was not even sure that he knew nothing [Anaxarchus, by Diog. Laertius] |
Full Idea: Anaxarchus said that he was not even sure that he knew nothing. | |
From: report of Anaxarchus (fragments/reports [c.340 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 09.10.1 |
24162 | Planck introduced the idea that energy can be quantized [Baggott] |
Full Idea: By deriving his radiation law, Planck had inadvertently introduced the idea that energy itself could be 'quantized'. | |
From: Jim Baggott (The Quantum Story: 40 moments [2011], 01) | |
A reaction: He earlier assumed energy is continuously variable. I presume this means that the older idea of energy is now subsumed into the concept of fields, which are quantized into particles. The powers of nature are found in the fields. |
21731 | Fields can be 'scalar', or 'vector', or 'tensor', or 'spinor' [Baggott] |
Full Idea: Fields can be 'scalar', with no particular direction (pointing, but not pushing or pulling); or 'vector', with a direction (like magnetism, or Newtonian gravity); or 'tensor' (needing further parameters); or 'spinor' (depending on spin orientation). | |
From: Jim Baggott (Farewell to Reality: fairytale physics [2013], 2 'Quantum') | |
A reaction: [compressed] So the question is, why do they differ? What is it in the nature of each field the result in a distinctive directional feature? |
21730 | A 'field' is a property with a magnitude, distributed across all of space and time [Baggott] |
Full Idea: A 'field' is defined in terms of the magnitude of some physical property distributed over every point in time and space. | |
From: Jim Baggott (Farewell to Reality: fairytale physics [2013], 2 'Quantum') | |
A reaction: If it involves a 'property', normal usage entails that there is some entity which possesses the property. So what's the entity? Eh? Eh? You don't know! Disappointed... |
24163 | Free electrons have clouds of virtual particles, arising from field interaction [Baggott] |
Full Idea: A free electron doesn't simply persist as a point particle travelling along a predetermined, classical path; it is surrounded by a swarm of virtual particles arsising from self-interactions with its own magnetic field. | |
From: Jim Baggott (The Quantum Story: 40 moments [2011], 19) | |
A reaction: It seems to me important for amateurs and mere philosophers to hang on to this idea of virtual particles, because they undermine any attempt to impose a macro picture on sub-atomic events. |
24161 | Thermodynamics sees nature as a continuous flow of energy, as radiation and as substance [Baggott] |
Full Idea: Thermodynamics reinforced a vision of nature as one of harmonious flow. Energy, which could be neither created nor destroyed, flowed continuously between radiation and material substance, in themselves unbroken continua. | |
From: Jim Baggott (The Quantum Story: 40 moments [2011], 01) | |
A reaction: Interestingly, Einstein's Special Relativity e = mc2 seems to endorse this view, by equation energy and mass. I've always wanted to know what energy is, but no one seems to know. |
21732 | The current standard model requires 61 particles [Baggott] |
Full Idea: The current model requires 61 particles: three generations of two leptons and two flavours of quark, in three different colours (making 24); the anti-particles of all of these (48); 12 force particles (photon, W1, Z0, 8 gluons), and a Higgs boson. | |
From: Jim Baggott (Farewell to Reality: fairytale physics [2013], 6 n) |
24160 | Particle measurements don't seem to reflect their reality [Baggott] |
Full Idea: It seems that we can no longer assume that the particle properties we measure necessarily reflect or represent the properties of the particles as they really are. | |
From: Jim Baggott (The Quantum Story: 40 moments [2011], Pref) | |
A reaction: [He cites a 2006 experiment] This gives an interesting response to the Copenhagen Interpretation - that observers appear to be creating the reality they observe, because they only have 'observations', with no reality to correspond to them. I like it. |