71 years ago Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagor{sorry if the name is not correct this is an immediate transfer from my language to english}met each other in order to pose questions as well as their opinions about nature of reality(the main question was whether reality exists without human brains observing and understanding it)and they also expressed their opinions about individual and universal brains as well as their opinions of causality and randomness
Einstein agreed to the pythagorean axiom that truth is independent of human beings
He thought that humans can understand not only things that they interact with, but things that do not have an immediate interaction with him f.ex we can understand the existence of an apple on a table in a room without being in the room
Tagor on the other hand says that if there exists a truth absolute irrevelant to humanity then in every case this truth is absolute not real for us
He believes in a relativistic world whose reality for us is totally bounded with our consiousness
In the previous examle he doesn’t question the existence of the apple for a notion such as the ‘universal mind’ but this existence has a ‘meaning’ and therefore is real only when is 'captured’or else understood by a consious mind
Sorry, but I don’t see the point ? Planets have been discovered thanks to their gravitationnal influence on others (see Neptune, for example), some have been seen, other not, but we can infer they are here. The being of things don’t depend on our perception.
If Tagor means that the things we don’t know have no meaning - for us, I guess it’s obvious, and thus not very interesting. I really don’t see the point ?
Marc you speak about
‘Planets have been discovered thanks to their gravitationnal influence’
so they have interacted with us, or else we know after we made calculations that something causes a gravitational force.Alas,we cannot say that they are planets we can only say that from our knowledge so far we expect them to be planets,but this is not the point
I think that i made a mistake because i didn’t mentioned an other view of reality that quantum physics is based on{until now}
This is called the positivistic view and it says that the nature of reality is totally epistimological and anything we understand about real world is based in our knowledge and this world doesn’t exist in the same form if we don’t observe it
As bohr said:physics is interested about what we can say about nature not how it is
So here are their three clear opinions
1]Einstein believing that nature exists objectionally whether we are here observing it or not
2]Bohr believing that the objectional existence of the world doesn’t have a meaning without human mind
3]Tagor believing that nature can be perseptible only with the terms of our mind interpretations based on what we think that we ‘collect’ from environment So for tagor the mind and conciousness are essential for understanding (even not objectionally the nature)and that although nature could exist objectionally we can only perceive it with our way
So einstein fought about finding a philosophy of natural principles that would lead him to reality of our universe
quantum physisists do not concern about the physical interpretation of their theories They are happy to see that the theoretical results are not
in contradiction with their experiment because they don’t believe that we can understand the true nature of the world
Finally Tagor believes that the contradiction between free impulse(that nature has on its smallest part) and the guiding will that acts on it ,is the way that the things can be seen in an order. In other words i think that he believes in a ‘god’ who continuously puts his 'hand’and makes order out of chaos
Of course… The dinosaurs never existed, as men didn’t exist at that time. Their bones are just random rearrangement of atoms, as everybody knows… I think that kind of stupid thought come from a narrow vision : Someone who study only quantum mechanics can have a biased opinion on several questions… I think it’s obvious in that case.
I still don’t really see the point of Tagor… Necessarly, “nature can be perseptible only with the terms of our mind interpretations”… But there’s a link between perception and reality : wavelength and colour, for example (well, you can be daltonian, or something, but let’s forget the exceptions). I can’t see how Tabor’s point of view is incompatible with Einstein’s ?
The solipsists and existentialists rejoiced at certain aspects of quantumn physics. They throw around quantumn physics terms like confetti, because they believe that somehow this new branch of physics supercedes and invalidates all the old branches. Finally! We don’t need to play by the rules anymore! Energy can be created and destroyed, something can be here and not here, A is no longer A!
Waitaminute . . . The universe still acts according to all the old rules, especially on macroscopic scales.
I think the principal problem with quantumn physics being used by solipsists is that they claim that things only exist when you look at them. This isn’t what is claimed by the theory. (First of all “observation” in quantumn physics is the act of impacting a particle with another particle, not the act of having something come to concious attention.)
The theory (or what I know of it, correct me any particle physicists) states that you can’t gain any information about the position and momentum of a particle without impacting it with another particle, which then carries the information to the detector. The problem is that you don’t know the exact momentum and position of your detector particle either. The result is that there is an upper bound on the precision of your measurement of the particles involved.
Because your knowledge of the position/momentum state of a particle is imprecise, you can’t predict exactly where it is or where it will go in a newtonian fashion. The best you can manage is a probability field, where the particle might be and where it might be going. The wave gradually gets more and more indistinct. If you want to get more information on where the particle is, you shoot another detector particle at it. This gives you info about where it actually was and actually was going (to a limited degree of accuracy). (while altering position and momentum again, screwing up your ability to predict furhter). This “collapses” the probability field to a small region once again, from where it again begins expanding as the particle travels.
There’s nothing magical about wave collapse. You don’t “cause” the particle to be where it is by bouncing an observation particle off of it. You just find out where in the probability field the particle actually was.
Firstly i didn’t say that i agree with one person or another
My point of view is towards this of Einstein but there are trully people who are in favour of Bohrs opinion
I should make things clearer at first i totally agree with this
‘that you can’t gain any information about the position and momentum of a particle without impacting it with another particle, which then carries the information to the detector’
moreover the act of impact changes one and for all the state of the particle that we observe
So if you see lets just say that reality was in a state A (this is reality without our interference) now if we make the experiment we inevitably change it without knowing how because we only observe the final state B which arises not continously from A due to our act of observation
So some say that the reality of B(after the interference)is different of that of A They don’t imply that if we say a hypothetical not interfering but always observing ‘god’ cannot understand continously the movement of particle’ but we as human beings everytime we experiment and observe change the reality once for all
Roughly speaking ‘Unperformed experiments have no results’
and the act of understanding reality changes its state
I agree that many solipsists try to abuse Qp and this frase was enough to arise questions about my post
‘Bohr believing that the objectional existence of the world doesn’t have a meaning without human mind’
but i think that i made clear what i wanted to say
Now as for marc tagor doesn’t completely disagree with Einstein
but in a point Einstein states that reality can be understood by men
while Tagor believes that by any way reality is filtered by our brains and Einstein doesn’t believe in a ‘god’ who continously interferes with nature while Tagor is open to it
Concerning Tagor and Einstein, first I’d say that the position of God is, for me, beyond this philosophical discussion… if you have arguments, I am interested : I just don’t see what they can be ?
Concerning the fact that
I’d say that I am OK with both… Obviously, we filter reality with our brain - colours are reconstructions, for example - but it’s not without a real link with objective reality. To speak roughly : I do believe that tennis ball are actually round and that Newton’s law corresponds - at a first approximation - to gravity, this weird stuff that glue us on the ground. I still don’t see the necessity of an oppposition between the two viewpoint… I can see how one is more concerned with the subject, and the other with the “external reality”… but that’s all, for me.
I used the word god with ’ ’ in order not to focus on many other properties of an idea such as God
To be more precise Tagor as i said believed in the so-called universal mind(which has some of God’s properties but isn’t the same)this universal mind is something abstract(Tagor as i know wasn’t a scientist after all)and is 'composed’by common things of all beings that have conciousness So reality for him can be understood by this universal mind but we as individuals perceive a ‘part’ of it
you say
‘we filter reality with our brain - colours are reconstructions, for example - but it’s not without a real link with objective reality.’
Tagor agrees with it , a link for him does exist but is not a comlete one
f.ex this thought in it’s border is the reason that distinguises a person with schizophrenia and a ‘normal’ one
The first person ‘sees’ things that the humankind cannot see and the link here is ‘broken’
An other examle is that any experiment must be viewed in the same way by the whole community in order to be ‘correct’
So Einstein believed in individual and totally real conception of things While Tagor believed that anyone of us has some ‘problems’ in his conception that only ‘universal mind’ can eliminate them
( rather a comparison between eastern and western culture from the past)
I would say that the two views above are not necessarily at odds with each other. The difference is in emphasis or subject of study: I would say Einstein’s refers to the Platonist view of ontology (nature of being), while Tagor speaks of “what it is to know”, hence the nature of knowledge. There is a way to reconcile the two. I believe you’ll find some discussions done here (ILP search) about it [Kant, Descartes, Wittgenstein, et al.]
ever heard of STEPHEN HAWKING just because he’s disabled doesn’t mean he steel isn’t a genius plus the dude isn’t from america so he is definatly more right the einstein was.to think the dude is still around in his old age 0_0
that even suprises me.