> Of course, one of the most successful aspects of science has been to describe the world in a sense that is true without relying on appearances. For example, Descartes very successfully describes the moon illusion (why it appears larger closer to the horizon) in his book on optics. As science progressed, it continued to correct for more and more illusions that were not limited to the realm of the visual. Thus Laplace corrected illusions of a mathematical nature, such as the commonly held belief that if a coin had landed heads many times in a row it will have a greater probability to land tails. Einstein was part if this tradition, taking it to a new level.
Very interesting quote, and I think in a sense that even hard sciences like physics are not only a study of the "external world", but also the "internal world" that our mind creates to represent it. So much of the conversation around quantum mechanics isn't really about the math or science, which really isn't that complicated, but around how it can be that what is _really_ happening is so different from what we perceive to be happening in our minds.
I think every break through in theoretical physics is sort of inextricably tied with a breakthrough in the study of consciousness. You have to understand both how the world works and also how the mind translates that to conscious experience of the world to really have something that most people will see as an explanation.
An understanding of light, for example, is not just an explanation of the math underlying electromagnetic waves, but also how the eye perceives those waves and translates that into vision.
Science is about explaining the data, and "the data" includes our perceptions of the world. In fact, that is all that we have direct access to. So... our perceptions of the world include a constant stream of overwhelming evidence that the world is classical, a 3-D space inhabited by objects that exist in particular places at particular times. So when evidence comes along that this isn't actually true, it can cause some pretty severe cognitive dissonance, and at best it demands an explanation of why the world appears classical even though it isn't. That has nothing to do with science being "about the internal world as well as the external world." Science is about explaining the data. The (hypothetical) existence of internal and external worlds is part of one possible explanation.
> So... our perceptions of the world include a constant stream of overwhelming evidence that the world is classical, a 3-D space inhabited by objects that exist in particular places at particular times. So when evidence comes along that this isn't actually true, it can cause some pretty severe cognitive dissonance, and at best it demands an explanation of why the world appears classical even though it isn't.
It would be extremely difficult for anybody to accept the evidence provided by quantum mechanics without some additional explanation for how our mind constructs a "classical" reality to go along with it. Modern physics happened along with a materialistic explanation of the origin of mind to go along with it, I don't think either could have advanced without the other.
> It would be extremely difficult for anybody to accept the evidence provided by quantum mechanics without some additional explanation for how our mind constructs a "classical" reality to go along with it.
No, that's not true. For a very long time an explanation of how classical reality emerges from quantum mechanics was lacking, and the prevailing view was essentially "a miracle happens" (a.k.a. the wave function "collapses", whatever that might actually mean). Quantum mechanics was accepted as an explanation nonetheless simply because it explained the data better than any available alternative, and it still does.
well said. It might seem like semantics but I think getting people to think of science using the way you defined it would resolve a lot of these debates (plus many other other fashionably nonsensical ideas)
Thanks. Just to give credit where it's due, this characterization of the scientific method as being about seeking explanations of data is not my idea, it's due to Karl Popper. The best accessible exposition of Popper's position IMHO is by David Deutsch in The Fabric of Reality, chapter 7. Well worth a read.
Whilst it definitely helps being able to understand it I don't think it's a prerequisite, you only have to look to what we know of the quantum world to see that.
Very interesting quote, and I think in a sense that even hard sciences like physics are not only a study of the "external world", but also the "internal world" that our mind creates to represent it. So much of the conversation around quantum mechanics isn't really about the math or science, which really isn't that complicated, but around how it can be that what is _really_ happening is so different from what we perceive to be happening in our minds.
I think every break through in theoretical physics is sort of inextricably tied with a breakthrough in the study of consciousness. You have to understand both how the world works and also how the mind translates that to conscious experience of the world to really have something that most people will see as an explanation.
An understanding of light, for example, is not just an explanation of the math underlying electromagnetic waves, but also how the eye perceives those waves and translates that into vision.