On May 8, 4:06 pm, "Stathis Papaioannou" <stath....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> On 08/05/07, marc.ged....domain.name.hidden <marc.ged....domain.name.hidden.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Silly spelling error in my last post - I meant 'electrons' of course.
> > Let avoid talk of 'electrons' then, and talk about 'Quantum Wave
> > Functions' then, since surely even Russell must agree that QM fields
> > are fundamental (at least as far as we know). You can't say that QM
> > fields are just human inventions - take away the base level and you
> > have no objective reality left to argue about! ;)
>
> Actually I didn't pick it as a typo - I thought you were talking about
> elections. Elections are complex things, involving candidates, voters,
> timing, standards of empirical verification and many other rules. They also
> involve concepts such as "fairness", "democracy", "deceitfulness" and so on.
> You can't physically grasp an election or draw a circle around it.
> Nevertheless, calling it an election is just a shorthand for a collection of
> matter behaving in a certain way. There is no extra election-substance
> instilled by the universe which makes the difference between an election and
> an otherwise identical non-election, and there is no election-entity
> distinct from the behaviour of matter which we observe and call an election.
>
> --
> Stathis Papaioannou
Well of course I agree with you in this case. 'Election' is a human
construct. That's why it was a horrifyingly unfortunate typo on my
point. The point is that if you try to apply the same reasoning to
everything, you'll end up saying that *everything* is just a human
construct - and throw the scientific method out the window. We don't
'construct' those things in reality which are objective. Our concepts
*make reference* to them. The concepts may be invented, but there has
to be a match between at least *some* of the informational content of
our theories and the informational content of objective theory (or
else the concepts would be useless). Think computers and information
here. Objective reality is information. And our concepts are
information too. So there has to be a partial match between the
information content of useful concepts and objective reality. That's
why we can refer a failure of reductionism from the concepts we
invented which proved useful.
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Received on Tue May 08 2007 - 01:40:58 PDT