quantum mechanics: Kastner\'s brilliant blog (Introduction)

by rekastner , Saturday, July 20, 2013, 19:46 (4145 days ago) @ dhw
edited by unknown, Saturday, July 20, 2013, 19:52

The problem is that requiring agreement on a definition of 'knowledge' will land us in a thicket of quibbling about the definition, which (especially in view of the entire ongoing field of epistemology) is quite likely impenetrable. It depends on issues of meaning and truth that are entire industries in themselves.-You propose a possible definition: "knowledge is information the truth of which is recognized by general consensus among those aware of it"
But that's heavily dependent on other terms whose definitions are elusive: 'information'; 'truth' ... and it also contains a social criterion. So it leads to us to a regress in which we must define these terms as well as the social conditions required for 'general consensus' ... and it rules out possible valid knowledge that isn't dependent on a social consensus. Moreover, if you want to demand 'verifiability' of knowledge, you are basically returning to positivism of the mid-20th century, which has been largely discredited.-Rather than start 'top-down' by attempting to define what could well be undefinable, in order to affirm or deny whether knowledge of a certain kind is possible, why don't we adopt a pragmatic approach in which well-corroborated theories can be taken as yielding (at least provisional) knowledge? That's the basic mission and intent of science and its accompanying philosophical analysis and interpretation. Call that a 'leap of faith' if you want to, but in my view, as long as the science or philosophy practitioner is approaching his/her exploration with an open mind, and willing to abandon a given claim if it comes into serious conflict with either evidence or logic, it seems to me the best possible option for seeking knowledge about the world.-Regarding Kant: yes, he asserted that knowledge of noumena is impossible. That's basically because he defined noumena as unknowable. But he also asserted that Euclidean spacetime is an a priori 'category of experience' ... which has been shown to be false. So we need not take everything Kant said as necessarily correct. He also could not provide an account of our alleged interaction with 'noumena' that would result in the phenomena that we can know. In fact the transactional picture provides just such as account, if quantum entities (as offer waves) are elements of the noumenal realm. This is what I deal with in Chapter 7 of my book (this chapter is available on my site).-Concerning the alleged 'multiverse' ... if this is a reference to the Everett interpretation, that's an approach that tries to address the measurement problem by denying that collapse ever occurs. In my view it is just wrong, and I give specific arguments in my book for why I think this is so. So the fact that QM has been 'used that way' doesn't mean that one must grant reality to the putative implications of that particular interpretational approach. I'm not the only one who rejects Everettian approaches. A. Kent has a lengthy paper on how they fail to accomplish what they claim to (ref in my book). -Re the fictional teapot orbiting the sun: there is also absolutely no evidence or logical argument in favor of its existence either. However there is a well-corroborated theory (QM), with accompanying experimental evidence, concerning the entities described by QM. So again I don't think it's valid to suggest that there's a slippery slope problem in taking a very specific, well-corroborated theory (QM) as having real physical referents even if we can't observe them directly.-Re the lecture: I'm sorry you had trouble with this. It sounds like a browser glitch. If you contact me directly via email (rekastner[at]hotmail.com), I can send you the file and you can download it to your computer. Hopefully that will eliminate the looping problem.-Re the voice: Thanks for the compliment. :) I am also a singer, so if you like music, check out my daughter Janet's Maryland Palestrina Choir selection on youtube (I'm a member of the choir): http://www.youtube.com/user/MDPalestrinaChoir