My Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics class (24.111) is making me think of things again, which I learned to give up thinking about. It's this whole issue of taking as postulates that which we observe and then figuring out the mathematics from that.
I mean, this really bothers me and in a lot of ways, instead of sympathizing with the physicist, I've become more hard-lined as a mathematician. I often find myself asking the question "Why are the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of a certain operator the only possibly observed states?" Often the response from my physicist friends is "That's just a question you don't ask in Quantum Mechanics." So that response, really bothers me. The second someone says "You can't ask that question," when apparently the question is well-formed, that is a quick line to raising my ire.
The other response I often get is "That's the way things have to be so that we can accurately model the observed data." This I suppose is what gets at the heart of the difference of the mathematician and the physicist. One views the sense-data as the starting point for inferential reasoning, the other only starts with well-defined things and checks periodically (or doesn't check at all) if it happens to match sense-data. It really is the ultimate clash between the bottom-up versus top-down approach, and which direction you prefer to go ultimately determines which camp you belong to. For me, sense-data stresses me out. It's confusing. You have to average things, because systems are often so complicated and have so many confounding variables, that you have to ignore the non-linearities of pretty much everything before you can actually say something about the "real world." By then, you're not talking about the real world, you're talking about some idealization of the real world which exists in platonic space and by then you should be doing mathematics and just burn the bridge that supposedly connects you to the real world.
Additionally, I'm a philosopher. I was fed skepticism for breakfast ever since I was a child. I'll never forget auditing my Dad's Philosophy 101 class at James Madison University when I was in middle school and first learning about Descartes and his meditations. The rational skepticism and inability to tell sleeping states from waking states fundamentally shook my faith in sense-data. Sure the electrons always split into "spin-up" and "spin-down" states when past through an inhomogeneous magnetic field, but I could just be dreaming and then what? I think always having that uncertainty that I might devote my life to understanding and explaining sense-data and then wake up into a parallel universe, where I find out my entire life was just some strange dream in some strange universe with strange physics, really undermines the feeling of value and worth in taking that path as a profession.
This brings me to the path which I have taken: the top-down approach. With this approach, at the end of the day, you really don't care too much if the structures you've built match what is "out there" because they're your structures and they are intrinsically beautiful,
independent of their relevance to the "outside world."
However you should do what you enjoy the most. If you are actively squirting dopamine and serotonin by thinking about the path of a charged, spinning particle, passing through an inhomogeneous magnetic field, great. More power to you. When you die or wake up into that alternate universe, and find out that everything is different from what you thought it won't matter, because you enjoyed your life, and that is all that matters. So find out what you like and if its not math or physics, its bound to be something else, and if it is washing dishes so that you can spend your evenings partying like a rockstar, that's cool too. If its raising funds to feed hungry babies in Africa, that's also great. As long as your dopamine levels are high and this very moment you are glad to be experience something rather than nothing, you're living the good life. I realize the logic is backwards, but if I could've convinced myself that physics is worth doing, then I would enjoy doing it and would be happy devoting my life to it even it turned out to be a farce. Instead, my skepticism about the meaning of my activities, has led me to take a different path, but I'm enjoying the path and the sights it has to show me are truly breathtaking.
However the things which really bug me is when our beautiful mathematical structures do find their place in the "real world." It makes you wonder if this is the case because our mathematics shapes the way we can think about things, and thus the bias lies in the observer and not the observed, or it could be there is some weird underlying fabric of reality that is mathematical and does reside in some Platonic world of ideas, and our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and tongue are just the biological interface for this digital graphing of mathematics into our minds.
So I'm left with a goal: To master all the mathematics in Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality and see if really does lead me there. The journey will certainly take a while, but I'm up for the ride.
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2 comments:
What a ride! Out to the edge again, what a great place to be!
I whole heartedly agree that having enjoyed ones life is all that matters, and that for you, there must be a feeling of purposefulness or meaningfulness in what you're doing in order to enjoy things, but for others what's required may be different.
Reading this lead me to thinking about this "requisite thing for happiness" as a variable, which could be filled with anything. Usually it is filled by something which has formed and grown inside the person, and it's content is thought to be relatively fixed and beyond our control.
What if this "requisite thing for happiness" is also part of the delusion, but is just rooted deeper in our psychology than other typical Zen "delusion" things like likes and dislikes or opinions.
What if we as points of consciousness can gain enough control so that we can navigate into the subterranean realms of the mind and re-wire the "requisite thing for happiness" to be just being alive, or just perceiving, no matter what the contents or our perception is. We would be happy all the time.
I think it can be done.
Curran! Interesting thoughts indeed!
Yes I believe that the "requisite thing for happiness" can be filed by any arbitrary activity. However, it requires deep programming of a person to change this variable. It is shaped as a very integral part of our person-hood.
Matt and I recently attended a talk by Daniel Goleman, who is the author of "Social Intelligence" and "Emotional Intelligence" among other books. He is very interesting and has received warm welcome and cross-fertlization with the Buddhist community. One of the things he mentioned was a series of recent neuroscience studies done with "olympic level" meditators (Buddhist monks). (A chess player, musician, athlete, buddhist monk, etc is said to be "olympic level" if they have spent at least 10,000 hours training for there particular field) Apparently these people could voluntarily excite neural activity in the pleasure centers of their brain and other sections to 700-800% of their normal output. This is just documented evidence that training of the mind can be viewed as a neurological process and the effects are real. These people have remarkable control over their selves, including this ability to just derive pleasure from the here and now.
Interesting indeed...
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