I can’t draw an electron. In fact, nobody can really draw any sort of fundamental particle. They don’t look like anything. This might seem like a cop out, or a way to handwave away the fact that we don’t know what they look like, but it’s not. On the scale that fundamental particles exist on, the mechanisms which give rise to the phenomenon we experience as “looking like something” don’t exist. An electron cannot look like anything.
I can understand something and still tell you that it makes no sense. Do you understand that? I can also regurgitate the definition of phase angles that I memorized in 1978, does that mean I understand it?
If you insist that you understand what scientists mean when they call matter wavelike and particlelike, why don’t you try explaining it? That much, I do understand, well enough that I can explain what it means I should observe regarding matter on the particle scale and what I should not, and I will be able to tell if your explanation is correct.
I also can’t explain directionless arrows, because to the best of my understanding, Eliezer isn’t actually talking about directionless arrows at any point. If he is, my understanding of this post is wrong. What he does talk about are arrows, figurative entities which indicate both what direction from the origin something is pointing and how far away from it is is (I’m not even going to try explaining what the origin in this context is and what it means to move away from it, not because I don’t understand it, but because it would take way more time and effort than I’m willing to put in right now to make it comprehensible to you,) but although the arrows point in a specific direction, we can’t tell which direction it is. Imagine an actual, physical arrow affixed to a pole in the ground, and the arrow is pointing either north or south. Imagine also that we have no way of knowing which way is north or south, we have no compass, the sky is overcast, we have no landmarks to orient by, etcetera. We do not know whether the arrow is pointing north or south, but we can still measure how long it is.
This is not a perfect analogy, but if you think of it this way you’ll have a better idea of what Eliezer was talking about if you just think “directionless arrows = nonsense.”
Actually, I already explained wave earlier. “A disturbance thru a medium” is the best definition which can be used consistently. Of course we could refer to the popular definition, from WIKI or whatever. But you asked me my definition. A particle is a discrete “piece” of matter, or in the case of a photon, a discrete ‘amount’ of energy, or quanta.
“A disturbance through a medium” is not what scientists mean when they say that matter has wavelike properties though. It doesn’t matter what “your definition” is, if it’s not what scientists mean when they use the phrase “matter has both wavelike and particlelike properties” to communicate an idea to each other.
In any case, I’ve been suspicious for a while, but at this point I think it’s very likely that you’re deliberately trolling this site. You’re combining a significant level of familiarity with scientific anecdotes with a profound, seemingly willful level of ignorance, and I think you’re faking it.
No, not exactly like that, as I just explained in my last post. However, I have some paradigms that have allowed me to successfully cut through a lot of BS. If I discover they do not apply to mathematical physics, then I won’t waste any more of your or my time, that you can “count” on.
No, you’re not making too much sense for someone who’s profoundly ignorant, you’re making too little sense for someone who knows what you seem to know. It’s possible that you’ve actually gone out of your way to pick up all these words and pass phrases without having any idea what they mean, and that’s exactly what you’re acting like, but I don’t buy it.
I don’t want to continue a discussion with you if I think you’re willfully refusing to understand, but I like this analogy, so I’m going to toss it out and if by some chance you’re not faking and it actually helps, it’ll give us something to work with.
A person who is born blind and grows up that way does not have the neurological faculties to process an image and take information from it the way we do. A blind person may have a concept of “sphere” or “cube,” and know what they will feel if they run their hands over one, but if a person who’d grown up blind were given functional eyes and looked at a sphere, they would not be able to tell you in advance that by running their hands over it they should feel a smooth surface that curves uniformly in on itself. This was an issue which was debated for some time by philosophers, but eventually we developed the medical technology to actually give eyesight to some people who’d grown up without it, and it stopped being just a matter of “logical argument,” and became something we could go out and actually check.
If you were to take a person who’d grown up blind, and try to explain the concept of looking like things to them, it would be incomprehensible to them. Generally, blind people take it for granted that sight is a real phenomenon that they’re missing out on, because civilization around them runs on it in such a way that it wouldn’t make much sense if all the sighted people were just making it up. You could describe the mechanics of sight to a blind person, but they will not be able to conceive of the idea of “getting a picture in your head” the way we do. If a blind person told you “Don’t mess around with math and diagrams (which I can’t see anyway, so fuck you,) just give me an explanation of this whole “picture in your head” thing which you say lets you tell what shape something is without touching it,” no matter how you explained it, you wouldn’t be able to get them to understand sight like we do. It’s not that there’s something wrong with our models of how sight works, the problem is in the brain of the person who’s never developed a capacity to deal with vision.
Similarly, our brains don’t have the capacity to picture what’s going on on the scale of fundamental particles. There’s no reason why they should. Like blind people dealing with sight, we can explain what’s actually going on, but it’s never going to make intuitive sense to us. Can’t visualize a zero dimensional particle? Well, who says fundamental particles have to have size? Who says there can’t be any real thing which doesn’t take up space, so you can pack any number of them together without ever getting a bunch an inch across? Who says that you can’t really tell what shape something is until you run your hands over it?
If a blind person, unable to comprehend sight, decides that sight doesn’t exist, there will be things in the world around them that just don’t make sense to them. Similarly, there are physical theories which we can’t picture, but we can tell that the world around us makes a lot more sense if they’re true than if they’re not.
Your method of argumentation is a little unusual and perhaps a bit off-putting, but I don’t know why all your posts are being systematically downvoted this low. It’s clear from posts like this one that you’re not merely trolling, but I think you’re taking on too much at once. Also, your style is not very LessWrong friendly and you’re posting a lot. Maybe slow it down a bit, get familiar with the lay of the land a bit more.
I, for one, would like to hear a bit more about your misgivings. You’ve said some interesting things so far that have got me thinking.
As he comments, his posts show a clear disagreement with the scientific method. That, not the truth of quantum mechanics, is a basic part of what this community calls rationality.
Later in this sequence, Eliezer asserts that QM represents a failure of science to be as rational as it could be. The example can’t be understood unless one has a fairly good grasp of QM, but the truth of QM is not precisely the point of this particular series of essays.
(As an aside, I’m not completely convinced of the point because I think the example is poor, but that also is unrelated to the truth of quantum mechanics).
Further, explain a zero dimensional particle without math or magic.
Descriptions of anything to do with ‘zero’ contain math, either explicitly or implicitly. Demanding that others explain mathematical things without using math is a highly dubious tactic and I’m not sure what it is supposed to achieve.
My bad, I meant no dimension. 0 is for counting. Numbers can do anything apparently. Words can not. Mathematicians say they understand each other and perhaps they do. Perhaps I just can’t use EY’s magic tool yet?
One can’t really “explain” a particle. I would say, however, that if you cannot show the shape of the particle (how it occupies space), it is somewhat questionable to call it a “particle” in any classical sense that I’m familiar with.
I don’t think anyone disputes that the classical definition of particle and wave don’t really apply in the quantum mechanics level. But QM makes good predictions. If QM talked about the blicket/fand distinction, and said that blicket was sort of like particle, and fand was sort of like wave, would you be more comfortable with it?
Because QM is the only scientific theory that explains observations, including the weird ones. That’s something that needs to be acknowledged. The idea that math can’t be used to describe reality is just a more specific way of saying that we can’t describe reality at all.
I can’t draw an electron. In fact, nobody can really draw any sort of fundamental particle. They don’t look like anything. This might seem like a cop out, or a way to handwave away the fact that we don’t know what they look like, but it’s not. On the scale that fundamental particles exist on, the mechanisms which give rise to the phenomenon we experience as “looking like something” don’t exist. An electron cannot look like anything.
No, it doesn’t.
If you insist that you understand what scientists mean when they call matter wavelike and particlelike, why don’t you try explaining it? That much, I do understand, well enough that I can explain what it means I should observe regarding matter on the particle scale and what I should not, and I will be able to tell if your explanation is correct.
I also can’t explain directionless arrows, because to the best of my understanding, Eliezer isn’t actually talking about directionless arrows at any point. If he is, my understanding of this post is wrong. What he does talk about are arrows, figurative entities which indicate both what direction from the origin something is pointing and how far away from it is is (I’m not even going to try explaining what the origin in this context is and what it means to move away from it, not because I don’t understand it, but because it would take way more time and effort than I’m willing to put in right now to make it comprehensible to you,) but although the arrows point in a specific direction, we can’t tell which direction it is. Imagine an actual, physical arrow affixed to a pole in the ground, and the arrow is pointing either north or south. Imagine also that we have no way of knowing which way is north or south, we have no compass, the sky is overcast, we have no landmarks to orient by, etcetera. We do not know whether the arrow is pointing north or south, but we can still measure how long it is.
This is not a perfect analogy, but if you think of it this way you’ll have a better idea of what Eliezer was talking about if you just think “directionless arrows = nonsense.”
x
“A disturbance through a medium” is not what scientists mean when they say that matter has wavelike properties though. It doesn’t matter what “your definition” is, if it’s not what scientists mean when they use the phrase “matter has both wavelike and particlelike properties” to communicate an idea to each other.
In any case, I’ve been suspicious for a while, but at this point I think it’s very likely that you’re deliberately trolling this site. You’re combining a significant level of familiarity with scientific anecdotes with a profound, seemingly willful level of ignorance, and I think you’re faking it.
Reminds me a bit of this.
No, not exactly like that, as I just explained in my last post. However, I have some paradigms that have allowed me to successfully cut through a lot of BS. If I discover they do not apply to mathematical physics, then I won’t waste any more of your or my time, that you can “count” on.
x
No, you’re not making too much sense for someone who’s profoundly ignorant, you’re making too little sense for someone who knows what you seem to know. It’s possible that you’ve actually gone out of your way to pick up all these words and pass phrases without having any idea what they mean, and that’s exactly what you’re acting like, but I don’t buy it.
I don’t want to continue a discussion with you if I think you’re willfully refusing to understand, but I like this analogy, so I’m going to toss it out and if by some chance you’re not faking and it actually helps, it’ll give us something to work with.
A person who is born blind and grows up that way does not have the neurological faculties to process an image and take information from it the way we do. A blind person may have a concept of “sphere” or “cube,” and know what they will feel if they run their hands over one, but if a person who’d grown up blind were given functional eyes and looked at a sphere, they would not be able to tell you in advance that by running their hands over it they should feel a smooth surface that curves uniformly in on itself. This was an issue which was debated for some time by philosophers, but eventually we developed the medical technology to actually give eyesight to some people who’d grown up without it, and it stopped being just a matter of “logical argument,” and became something we could go out and actually check.
If you were to take a person who’d grown up blind, and try to explain the concept of looking like things to them, it would be incomprehensible to them. Generally, blind people take it for granted that sight is a real phenomenon that they’re missing out on, because civilization around them runs on it in such a way that it wouldn’t make much sense if all the sighted people were just making it up. You could describe the mechanics of sight to a blind person, but they will not be able to conceive of the idea of “getting a picture in your head” the way we do. If a blind person told you “Don’t mess around with math and diagrams (which I can’t see anyway, so fuck you,) just give me an explanation of this whole “picture in your head” thing which you say lets you tell what shape something is without touching it,” no matter how you explained it, you wouldn’t be able to get them to understand sight like we do. It’s not that there’s something wrong with our models of how sight works, the problem is in the brain of the person who’s never developed a capacity to deal with vision.
Similarly, our brains don’t have the capacity to picture what’s going on on the scale of fundamental particles. There’s no reason why they should. Like blind people dealing with sight, we can explain what’s actually going on, but it’s never going to make intuitive sense to us. Can’t visualize a zero dimensional particle? Well, who says fundamental particles have to have size? Who says there can’t be any real thing which doesn’t take up space, so you can pack any number of them together without ever getting a bunch an inch across? Who says that you can’t really tell what shape something is until you run your hands over it?
If a blind person, unable to comprehend sight, decides that sight doesn’t exist, there will be things in the world around them that just don’t make sense to them. Similarly, there are physical theories which we can’t picture, but we can tell that the world around us makes a lot more sense if they’re true than if they’re not.
x
Your method of argumentation is a little unusual and perhaps a bit off-putting, but I don’t know why all your posts are being systematically downvoted this low. It’s clear from posts like this one that you’re not merely trolling, but I think you’re taking on too much at once. Also, your style is not very LessWrong friendly and you’re posting a lot. Maybe slow it down a bit, get familiar with the lay of the land a bit more.
I, for one, would like to hear a bit more about your misgivings. You’ve said some interesting things so far that have got me thinking.
As he comments, his posts show a clear disagreement with the scientific method. That, not the truth of quantum mechanics, is a basic part of what this community calls rationality.
Later in this sequence, Eliezer asserts that QM represents a failure of science to be as rational as it could be. The example can’t be understood unless one has a fairly good grasp of QM, but the truth of QM is not precisely the point of this particular series of essays.
(As an aside, I’m not completely convinced of the point because I think the example is poor, but that also is unrelated to the truth of quantum mechanics).
Descriptions of anything to do with ‘zero’ contain math, either explicitly or implicitly. Demanding that others explain mathematical things without using math is a highly dubious tactic and I’m not sure what it is supposed to achieve.
My bad, I meant no dimension. 0 is for counting. Numbers can do anything apparently. Words can not. Mathematicians say they understand each other and perhaps they do. Perhaps I just can’t use EY’s magic tool yet?
One can’t really “explain” a particle. I would say, however, that if you cannot show the shape of the particle (how it occupies space), it is somewhat questionable to call it a “particle” in any classical sense that I’m familiar with.
I don’t think anyone disputes that the classical definition of particle and wave don’t really apply in the quantum mechanics level. But QM makes good predictions. If QM talked about the blicket/fand distinction, and said that blicket was sort of like particle, and fand was sort of like wave, would you be more comfortable with it?
Because QM is the only scientific theory that explains observations, including the weird ones. That’s something that needs to be acknowledged. The idea that math can’t be used to describe reality is just a more specific way of saying that we can’t describe reality at all.