Niels Bohr’s maxim that the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth [is a] profound truth [from which] the profound truth follows that the opposite of a profound truth is not a profound truth at all.
I would remark that truth is conserved, but profundity isn’t. If you have two meaningful statements—that is, two statements with truth conditions, so that reality can be either like or unlike the statement - and they are opposites, then at most one of them can be true. On the other hand, things that invoke deep-sounding words can often be negated, and sound equally profound at the end of it.
In other words, Bohr’s maxim seems so blatantly awful that I am mostly minded to chalk it up as another case of, “I wish famous quantum physicists knew even a little bit about epistemology-with-math”.
I don’t really know what “profound” means here, but I usually take Bohr’s maxim as a way of pointing out that when I encounter two statements, both of which seem true (e.g., they seem to support verified predictions about observations), which seem like opposites of one another, I have discovered a fault line in my thinking… either a case where I’m switching back and forth between two different and incompatible techniques for mapping English-language statements to predictions about observations, or a case for which my understanding of what it means for statements to be opposites is inadequate, or something else along those lines.
Mapping epistemological fault lines may not be profound, but I find it a useful thing to attend to. At the very least, I find it useful to be very careful about reasoning casually in proximity to them.
I seem to recall E.T. Jaynes pointing out some obscure passages by Bohr which (according to him) showed that he wasn’t that clueless about epistemology, but only about which kind of language to use to talk about it, so that everyone else misunderstood him. (I’ll post the ref if I find it. EDIT:here it is¹.)
For example, if this maxim actually means what TheOtherDave says it means, then it is a very good thought expressed in a very bad way.
Disclaimer: I think the disproof of Bell’s theorem in the linked article is wrong.
two statements with truth conditions, so that reality can be either like or unlike the statement—and they are opposites, then at most one of them can be true.
Hmm, why is that? This seems incontrovertible, but I can’t think of an explanation, or even a hypothesis.
-- The narrator in On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality, by Scott Aaronson
I would remark that truth is conserved, but profundity isn’t. If you have two meaningful statements—that is, two statements with truth conditions, so that reality can be either like or unlike the statement - and they are opposites, then at most one of them can be true. On the other hand, things that invoke deep-sounding words can often be negated, and sound equally profound at the end of it.
In other words, Bohr’s maxim seems so blatantly awful that I am mostly minded to chalk it up as another case of, “I wish famous quantum physicists knew even a little bit about epistemology-with-math”.
I don’t really know what “profound” means here, but I usually take Bohr’s maxim as a way of pointing out that when I encounter two statements, both of which seem true (e.g., they seem to support verified predictions about observations), which seem like opposites of one another, I have discovered a fault line in my thinking… either a case where I’m switching back and forth between two different and incompatible techniques for mapping English-language statements to predictions about observations, or a case for which my understanding of what it means for statements to be opposites is inadequate, or something else along those lines.
Mapping epistemological fault lines may not be profound, but I find it a useful thing to attend to. At the very least, I find it useful to be very careful about reasoning casually in proximity to them.
I seem to recall E.T. Jaynes pointing out some obscure passages by Bohr which (according to him) showed that he wasn’t that clueless about epistemology, but only about which kind of language to use to talk about it, so that everyone else misunderstood him. (I’ll post the ref if I find it. EDIT: here it is¹.)
For example, if this maxim actually means what TheOtherDave says it means, then it is a very good thought expressed in a very bad way.
Disclaimer: I think the disproof of Bell’s theorem in the linked article is wrong.
Hmm, why is that? This seems incontrovertible, but I can’t think of an explanation, or even a hypothesis.
Because they have non-overlapping truth conditions. Either reality is inside one set of possible worlds, inside the other set, or in neither set.
Let’s try it on itself… What’s the negative of “often”? “Sometimes”?
Yep, still sounds equally profound. Probably not the type of self-consistency you were striving for, though.
Reminds me of this.