- #1
ConradDJ
Gold Member
- 319
- 1
It’s now taken for granted among physicists that whatever the fundamental structure of physics may turn out to be, it's nothing at all like what we experience. Both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are thought to describe a universe that's so radically different from the world we deal with in everyday life that it may never be possible for us to understand it in any intuitive way.
But there are good reasons for thinking the opposite may be true – that is, the reason it’s so hard to grasp what QM and Relativity are telling us is that the world they describe is the world we experience – the world from the standpoint of “the observer”. The problem is that we still haven’t learned to conceptualize the world the way we actually see it.
When we look at the world around us, our brains automatically interpret it in terms of real objects that last through time and move in space – basically the same way Classical physics pictures the universe, the same way philosophers have imagined it since ancient times. But at a deeper level the world we actually experience is not a world of objects laid out in space and time, but a world of physical interaction, centered on our own point of view in this ongoing present moment.
Note that I am not talking about our subjective experience of the world, but about the nature of the physical world itself, from an observer's point of view. Nor do I want to deny the reality of objects moving in objective space and time, with properties independent of the observer. We know perfectly well that this Classical description of the world is extremely accurate – within limits. But we also know that it breaks down at the fundamental level addressed in Relativity and QM – the reality of objects “in themselves” is not absolute.
Now obviously the point of science is to get beyond the subjective viewpoints of individuals and develop an accurate description of the world we all live in together. We’ve taken for granted that this means an “objective” description in which the observer disappears from the theory altogether.
An alternative would be to describe the world as a system of interaction and communication between individual viewpoints. Not only the viewpoints of human beings, of course! Again, what we’re talking about isn’t something going on in our heads, but the actual physical environment “out there” in which we and everything else participate, interactively.
And again – it’s certainly no coincidence that the information we get from this environment can be so well interpreted in Classical terms – that it makes so much sense to see it in terms of bodies with objective properties, moving in space according to very precise mathematical laws. But we should know better now than to take this picture for granted. We should be trying to understand how and why a system of interacting viewpoints might evolve to support something that looks so much like an “objective reality” of made entities with observer-independent properties.
The main difficulty with this is that the philosophical tradition gives us almost no help in conceptualizing a world that’s neither “objective” in the Classical sense nor in any way “subjective”. Heidegger’s early (unfinished) work Being and Time was an explicit attempt to develop an ontology of relationships – but he made no progress after that, and none of his so-called followers even seemed to grasp the idea. In physics, Carlo Rovelli’s “Relational QM” seems very close to this approach, but it operates at a purely technical level, and his work on Quantum Gravity doesn’t address the role of the observer at all. So the work of conceptualizing the physical world that we (or anything else) actually experiences is still barely begun.
But there are good reasons for thinking the opposite may be true – that is, the reason it’s so hard to grasp what QM and Relativity are telling us is that the world they describe is the world we experience – the world from the standpoint of “the observer”. The problem is that we still haven’t learned to conceptualize the world the way we actually see it.
When we look at the world around us, our brains automatically interpret it in terms of real objects that last through time and move in space – basically the same way Classical physics pictures the universe, the same way philosophers have imagined it since ancient times. But at a deeper level the world we actually experience is not a world of objects laid out in space and time, but a world of physical interaction, centered on our own point of view in this ongoing present moment.
Note that I am not talking about our subjective experience of the world, but about the nature of the physical world itself, from an observer's point of view. Nor do I want to deny the reality of objects moving in objective space and time, with properties independent of the observer. We know perfectly well that this Classical description of the world is extremely accurate – within limits. But we also know that it breaks down at the fundamental level addressed in Relativity and QM – the reality of objects “in themselves” is not absolute.
Now obviously the point of science is to get beyond the subjective viewpoints of individuals and develop an accurate description of the world we all live in together. We’ve taken for granted that this means an “objective” description in which the observer disappears from the theory altogether.
An alternative would be to describe the world as a system of interaction and communication between individual viewpoints. Not only the viewpoints of human beings, of course! Again, what we’re talking about isn’t something going on in our heads, but the actual physical environment “out there” in which we and everything else participate, interactively.
And again – it’s certainly no coincidence that the information we get from this environment can be so well interpreted in Classical terms – that it makes so much sense to see it in terms of bodies with objective properties, moving in space according to very precise mathematical laws. But we should know better now than to take this picture for granted. We should be trying to understand how and why a system of interacting viewpoints might evolve to support something that looks so much like an “objective reality” of made entities with observer-independent properties.
The main difficulty with this is that the philosophical tradition gives us almost no help in conceptualizing a world that’s neither “objective” in the Classical sense nor in any way “subjective”. Heidegger’s early (unfinished) work Being and Time was an explicit attempt to develop an ontology of relationships – but he made no progress after that, and none of his so-called followers even seemed to grasp the idea. In physics, Carlo Rovelli’s “Relational QM” seems very close to this approach, but it operates at a purely technical level, and his work on Quantum Gravity doesn’t address the role of the observer at all. So the work of conceptualizing the physical world that we (or anything else) actually experiences is still barely begun.