"Wrong" :  Part II

The reader may well ask, ‘So where is the “measurement problem.”’  Where indeed?  Where is the problem?  All these atoms and waves and particles seem to be getting along quite well.  A cosmic groove, Mr. Watts might have said, in the now dated Californiaez, of his time.

It seems that when the radiation wave first hits, (too judgmental? interacts?), with an electron, it changes to a particle and it turns out that this, change, is the “measurement problem.”    The wave moves out from the body in the center and it interacts with an atom in the chamber.   The alpha particle (the radiation particle)  will “probably” be here, some where, inside this irradiating wave;  it is a “statistical probability” that it will appear some where. But where?   This is the “measurement problem.” 

Dr. Heisenberg would want you to know that this wave is not technically a “probability wave.”  He says:

“Among the remaining opponents of what is sometimes called the “orthodox” interpretation of quantum theory, Schrodinger has taken an exceptional position inasmuch as he would ascribe the “objective reality” not to the particles but to the waves and is not prepared to interpret the waves as “probability waves only.”  In his paper entitled “Are There Quantum Jumps?” he attempts to deny the existence of quantum jumps altogether ( one may question the suitability of the term “quantum jump” at this place and could replace it by the less provocative term “discontinuity”).  Now, Schrodinger’s work first of all contains some misunderstanding of the usual interpretation.  He overlooks the fact that only the waves in configuration space (or the “transformation matrices”) are probability waves in the usual interpretation, while the three-dimensional matter waves or radiation waves are not.  The latter have just as much and just as little “reality” as the particles;  they have no direct connection with probability waves but have a continuous density of energy and momentum, like an electromagnetic field in Maxwell’s theory.  . . . But . . . (Schrodinger) . . . can not remove the element of discontinuity that is found everywhere in atomic physics; any scintillation screen or Geiger counter demonstrates this element at once.  In the usual interpretation of quantum theory it (discontinuity) is contained in the transition from the possible to the actual.”(143)

To understand exactly how this relates to the other experiments, you will have to take our courses.  In the other experiments there are actual measurements that are taken.  Some complete measurements, with complete information being obtained, some with only partial information. (If the measurement taken was such that the wave actually was entangled, the wave function collapses.)

But Dr. Barbour wants us to see that the complete “problem” exists in this one experiment.  And thus the “measurement problem” takes place when the irradiating wave interacts with the first electron on the first atom, and then the second, and so on.  These events are a kind of measurement of position.  I am here.  Now I am over hear.  Imagine yourself above the cloud chamber looking down at the irradiating body in the center of the chamber.  The problem is this: as the wave goes out and interacts with an atom at say eleven o’clock on the dial, how does the wave at say, for example, 6 o’clock know that the interaction is taking place at the 11 position, and so on? 

As each wave irradiates out from the body, it interacts with only one atom, then a new wave starts.  This is called the “collapse of the wave function.”  The wave is all around the clock then, in a blink of an eye, it settles in on just one place, one atom. Why? How?  In the two slit experiments the electron or photon or now recently, whole clusters of atoms, up to 70 at a time in experiments, seem to travel through both slits, in a kind of cloud or haze, unless, a measurement is taken, then the wave function collapses and it settles for just one or the other slit.  In the ERP paradox the spin is indeterminate until one is measured then the other, far far away, has the corresponding spin.  How did it know what the other one’s spin was measured at?  How did it know we measured it here, not there?  These are similar, analogous, problems.

But in the cloud chamber it is the same situation.  Here it is not a question of our “measurement apparatus.”  The wave function settles on a particular place, electron.  Puff it is gone. The encounter, the ionization of the electron, is a kind of measurement. Here it is.  Then the wave moves on out away from the center, now only as a cone or a fraction of its former size.  Next over here, the second interaction.  Then upon this second encounter we can see the course of the particle from the first encounter to the second encounter and see that it is always at those same angles.  Why?

Dr. Barbour comments, “As Heisenberg put it in a famous remark, the track is created solely by the fact that we observe the particle.” (286)  I confess that I do not fully follow Dr. Heisenberg.  From the irradiating body to the first interaction, nothing, (except for the wave), then there is a track of bubbles, from the irradiating body to the encounter at 11 o’clock on the dial.  The track of bubbles left by the alpha radiation particle.  Then the wave continues out to the second encounter, now limited to a narrow cone shaped wave, covering for example, only from say 10 to 12 o’clock, no track of bubbles, just the movement of the invisible (now much reduced) wave.  Then at say 10 o’clock the second atom is encountered, the electron is ionized, and then the second leg of the particle’s journey from the location of the first encounter to this new location, the second encounter, another track of bubbles marks the path of the alpha particle’s path from the first encounter to the second.

Then the third movement of the wave across the dial from say 9:30 to 10:30 on the dial; the third encounter, the third leg of the particle’s journey,  etc..

The particle might be anywhere in the narrowing wave.  The radiation proceeds both as a wave and a particle.  The latter disclosed only because of the cloud chamber, as bubbles are left behind as a result of the wave's encounter with an atom and then the movement of the alpha particle.  As a result of its entanglement with the atom, the wave collapses and settles in on just one atom, the particle shoots out leaving behind the bubbles. 

To the extent I do follow I understand Dr. Heisenberg’s point that the particle’s path is made because we “observe” it, the situation is similar to our science: 

For example, housing availability is a “social issue” in the San Francisco Bay area only because we make it an issue.  Of all the facts of our world we select out the questions of government interference in the housing industry.  The shortfall in the supply.  The distortion of the market economy of mutual assent caused by the forced coercion of the government and its threats of legally sanctioned force.  The imposition of the remorseless power of the state, in all aspects of ownership, zoning, finance, building codes, etc..  If it were not for our selection, our observation, there would be no social issue.  We make it.  Just as packing lots of atoms around an irradiating body and setting up a camera we created the bubble tracks, “the track is created solely by the fact that we observe the particle.”

So where is your fabled objectivity now, dear reader?  I think you can agree that I have been fair.  I selected for scrutiny your hardest of hard sciences.  If we are not to find objectivity here then where else shall we look? 

Dr. Teller is struggling with Physics, mightily, at many levels, and you and I are struggling with it at . . . well alright, you and I are not struggling with it. . . it is a complicated and difficult subject and we stay out of it.  Fine it is a free country.  But please do not tell me that it is objective.  Dr. Teller has some understanding, (had some), and you and I have some,  subjective interpretation, a subjective understanding of the questions:  all of it limited, contingent, speculative.  (I understand that this rather overstates our situation, but lets dummy up.  Nod your head gravely,  ‘Yes, Dr. Teller, sir, I’m following you, lead the way, sir.  We are with you.’)  But please do not tell me that it is an objective fact.

And all the world, the universe, is just like this.  There is human knowledge up to a point,  then the wall of ignorance.  You imagine an objective knowledge because you have not yourself attempted to push back our limits.  In every direction that we should look, whether up into the heavens, and space beyond, out over the sea or under it, high and low, in politics, or even into our lover’s eyes, there is always this limiting factor, an incomplete, limited, contingent opinion, guess, possible speculation, --- we are idiots!  Of course, Alan Watts would wince.  ‘Why so glum?’ 

Your understanding, such as it is, is what it is, he would say.  Every moment is fully disclosed, as it is disclosed, to the extent it is disclosed.  Incomplete?  Perhaps.  No, certainly.  Let a breath of air fill your lungs.  You do not have to do anything.  Stop grasping.  Let go.  See?  No, harm, no foul.  Life is going on just as it has for billions of years.   The universe does not need your searching judgments, or interpretations.  Make them fine.  Know that you are making them.  They are not objective features of the world.  They are yours, bubbles of thought.       

Einstein then Wolfram many others say that what we see is the result of some non local hidden variables. What could this mean?  “Non local” explains how the wave at 6 o’clock knows what happened at 11 o’clock.  The wave went out in all directions but settled for just one atom at one location,  and the rest of the wave knew it.  How?  This is the “discontinuity” also that Heisenberg mentioned.

Discontinuous in that the wave went from being all around the clock to being in just one place, the alpha particle that interacts with the atom.   “Hidden,” means we do not see the connection.  We do not see how the rest of the wave knew about the interaction.  How does the particle know to come out and leave behind its track?  There is no obvious sign of a connection in this universe.  That is not in the three dimensions of our universe.

“Finally,” says Heisenberg, “the criticism which Einstein, Laue and others have expressed in several papers concentrates on the question whether the Copenhagen interpretation permits a unique, objective description of the physical facts.  Their essential arguments may be stated in the following terms:  The mathematical scheme of quantum theory seems to be a perfectly adequate description of the statistics of atomic phenomena.  But even if its statements about the probability of atomic events are completely correct, this interpretation does not describe what actually happens independently of or between the observations.  But something must happen, this we cannot doubt; this something need not be described in terms of electrons or waves or light quanta, but unless it is described somehow the task of physics is not completed.  It cannot be admitted that it refers to the act of observation only.”(144)

Heisenberg replies to Einstein’s criticism by saying, “It is easily seen that what this criticism demands is again the old materialistic ontology. . . .the ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct “actuality” of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range.  This extrapolation is impossible, however.”(145) 

What would it mean to describe these interactions in terms other than quanta?  In a three dimensional universe one dimension appears as a line; without breadth or width, a string?  Two dimensions appear as a plane; with out depth.  At least three dimensions are required for a point, or an object?  It seems for a hundred years we have been trying to explain the experimental results of an 11 dimensional universe, using only our three dimensional universe. 

Though I have not read this, I doubt that our three dimensions actually are part of the 11 dimensions that have been proposed by the mathematicians.  These three may simply fall out from, or unfold from, the interactions of the others.  The three cardinal dimensions we take to be so profound and universal may be an irrelevancy, a mere chance phenomenon, that result by accident from the others.  At one time we thought our planet the center of the universe.  Now it appears that our whole universe may be simply the interplay of another more basic set of relations. 

Dr. Wolfram says in A New Kind of Science that he has confidence that a genius will come along and explain how these dimensions interrelate and goes on to say he thinks that it will be a fairly straight forward geometry, which will cause us to slap our foreheads and say, ‘Yes, of course, it’s obvious.’

Well, maybe, some of us will.

“But I consider it very encouraging that some of the most basic quantum phenomena seem to be connected to properties like causal invariance and the network structure of space that already arose in our discussion of quite different fundamental issues in physics.

“And all of this support my strong belief that in the end it will turn out that every detail of our universe does indeed follow rules that can be represented by a very simple program --- and that everything we see will ultimately emerge just from running this program.”(545)

For me it seems fantastic.  Where would you even start?  The irradiating body’s wave, is that two dimensions?  The atom, which as we know has at least three dimensions. (At least three to make an object. (A very small object. (An electron?)))   

So then the wave becomes entangled in a web of other dimensions, the atom,  and becomes itself a particle as it ionizes the electron.  In a sense the wave collapses into the particle.  Right.  These 5 dimensions are somehow in communication with one another at least upon contact, (possibly before also), and this is how it is communicated to the rest of the wave, ‘forget about it, we are doing it at 11 o’clock.’  Right here.  Right? 

This is the non local part of the theory we were talking about.  No real “communication” is required because though to us, looking through the three dimensional lens of our universe, it looks like 11 o’clock and 6 o’clock and 3 o’clock, etc. are all separated one from the other around the irradiating body, in some way not yet explained, all these positions around the clock are part of a single dimension, (or two, or. . . ) , that we can not see. In this universe these are separate places, however looking at them from one of these 11 dimensions they are a single place.  Even the great distances in the EPR experiment are of no  consequence as in this example, because of these other dimensions, their positions, though separate in our universe are the same place in one of these dimensions, when viewed from these other dimensions. 

Even if we did know what these 11 dimensions are, we would still have, in our three dimensional universe, the wave particle duality, the uncertainty principle, etc. as these are features not of “reality,” but of reality in our three dimensional universe.  In three dimensions the wave dimensions, (probability or what ever they are), resolve themselves into a particle, (at least three dimensions),  after the wave has been entangled. 

This is what it turns out is the “measurement problem.”

The measurement, like the atoms in the cloud chamber, entangle, the wave dimensions, with the atoms of the measurement instrument itself, which is made up of (at least three of these dimensions, certainly many), and this is why the electrons and photons and even the as many as 70 or so atoms resolve themselves into one slit or the other when measured; because they have been entangled.

All of these separate things, irradiating waves, electrons, photons, 70 atoms, the spinning quarks, 11 o’clock and 6 o’clock,  separate things, separate places, are bound together in as yet unexplained dimensions that infuse our universe.  A recent study proposed a shape of nine sides to describe the universe.  The soccer ball theory.  In the theory there are no actual sides to the universe, rather each of those sides being a dimension that flows through the whole of the universal. Each face irradiating to all others, each quanta space being a nine sided hologram.  A web of interrelated dimensions.

What we take to be objects and places inside this universe are in fact projections of these nine dimensions that form a network out of which unfolds our three dimensional world. 

Counselor:  I thought you just said there were 11 dimensions?

Ups, looks like I left two dimensions on the work bench.  Well, I did not claim to be the genius who would explain all. . . wait a minute.  Time, that could be one couldn’t it?

Counselor:  But you said time didn’t exist.

Well I changed my mind now it does.

Counselor:  So that’s 10 dimensions.  You are one short.

Oh, my dear, but don’t you know . . .

Counselor: Please don’t say it.

The eleventh dimension is  . . . Looove.

Or what ever. 

This is not just theory.  We have attempted to separate quarks.  We have applied more and more energy, and the further apart the quarks are pulled apart, the stronger becomes the strength by which they hold  together. Mark that.  Where does the increasing energy come from?  Normally when we separate two things the force that connects them becomes weaker.      

There are many examples of real actual data suggesting that an invisible web transfuses our three dimensions.  For example, our sun warps time space, as we mentioned at the out set.  The reader has heard of this (theory?) before? However, how does nothing get warped?  Folding, compacting empty space?  How?  Only if that space is explained as a web of  “causal invariance and the network structure of space” and has some substance or reality, beyond what we can presently see, can it be warped by the mass of the sun.  And yet faced with these results from over a hundred years of experimental results, some physicists still insist that they are only facing a “measurement problem.”  Why?

Because their psychology requires them to hold to their three dimensional world,  all evidence to the contrary.  They, like the average man on the street, believe in an objective world, about which they know things.  They are here and not there.  This is important to them.

Let’s be clear, I also agree, that I am here not over there.  The time is 6:37 not some other time, etc.. At the scale and energy levels of our Earth, there are definite places, and things, and a definite time.  The statistical probabilities are so large that they are dependable. It is just that all of this unfolds from an 11 dimensional manifold in which everything is in a  space-time relation in which everything has happened and not yet happened.  The Schrodinger time independent equation  describes a universe that has the characteristic of a crystal that appears frozen in time.

So many physicists have told me this, that I now believe it to be true:  the philosopher’s previously postulated “present moment,” as a universal constant, does not exist.  Depending on our relative motion and our relative distance the ordered quality of time turns out to be contingent.

Faced with such a situation is it any wonder that the experimental physicists cling to their “measurement problem.”  Their psychology is to cling to what little they know:  Their experimental apparatus.  For beyond this, there is a roaring universe with out separate things, but rather a gigantic whole, without any definite place, at least not in the three dimensional sense, and now, without time, no past present or future as an objective continuous  feature.  Can you blame them?

Further consider this:  They ask me, half baked scholar that I am, ‘why don’t you go back to talking about the Gods on Mount Olympus? For all the good you have contributed.  What are your 11 manifold timeless dimensions?  At least when you were speculating on the Gods there was some poetry, some drama.  What is this, speculation, philosophy?’

It must be admitted they have a point.  I do not know how you would even begin trying to describe much less experimentally prove these 11 dimensions.

However, before we get into a debate with the physicists let us recall our real interest. 

Genetics does not face nearly the obstacles that Physics faces.  Every day brings greater clarity.  Every experiment adds to our knowledge and exhausts an area of study.  There is steady progress.  You should not base your expectations or your estimates of the pace of progress in Genetics on your experience with Physics.

Secondly, and more generally, we have seen the limits of “objectivity.”  It turns out that even our hardest of hard sciences is the result of subjective psychology.  In the context of advances in Physics to speak of “objectivity” as a final and absolute universal is beside the point.  What objectively can you say about an 11 manifold dimensional universe from inside your insignificant merely accidental and contingent universe?  What does 3 dimensional objectivity mean in an 11 dimensional universe?

Of course, you can say perfectly plausible things about your three dimensional world, as long as your statements are true in the lower case meaning of the word.  Not True but merely contingently true for this universe.  This was Heisenberg’s point.  In atomic scales our test results  are true for the experiment that was conducted.

“Wrong”:  Part III

“Bohr maintained, as a general principle of interpretation in physics, that theoretical concepts, including assertions of the reality of entities or of their properties, cannot be used unambiguously without careful reference to the experimental arrangement in which the concepts are applied.  . . . Bohr wrote:  ‘Without entering into metaphysical speculations, I may perhaps add that an analysis of the very concept of explanation would, naturally, begin and end with a renunciation as to explaining our own conscious activity.’  The theme of renunciation and submission to the unavoidable limitations of the human condition is recurrent in Bohr’s writings, and places him, more perhaps than he realized himself, in a philosophical tradition of renunciation of excessive claims to human knowledge, including Hume and Kant.  The latter systematically maintained that human beings have no knowledge of ‘things in themselves’,, but only of the objects of experience.”(394) The New Physics, Shimony, Conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics. 

As for the psychology of how we face this universe, we should consider Alan Watts’ question to Max Weber:  “Why so glum?”  However these 11 dimensions interact, they create this 3 dimensional world. What ever may be the Truth about time it flows as it does, (at least for us, in our perception).  Is this a disenchanted world?  Really?  Invisible dimensions course through us connecting separate places, time ebbs and flows, and reverses.  If this be a disenchanted world save the dragons.

So far most readers will imagine that the discussion about the objective and subjective is a two way conversation, pitting the “prickly people,” such as our experimental physicists, against the “touchy feely,” types who emphasize the subjective and contingent.  However, Iris Murdoch, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, has it as a four way conversation. 

First there is the groups of American Objectivists, the Ann Radians, John Dewey’s American Pragmatist, the Instrumentalist,  the Scientific Positivists.  Their's is the philosophy of the practical business man and the economist.  This philosophy is the everyman’s philosophy.  However, it is not really an academic philosophy, as it has no ontological basis.  All they can say about their values when challenged, is to stupidly claim that their values are objective.

Ontological sounds academic but really you can see the problem that results from not having a serious basis on which to stand.  This is why conservatives do not have much influence on their society.  They do not know how to justify their contentions, if the objective Truth of their contentions, should be disputed. They melt away into Libertarianism, and let everyone do his or her “own thing.”   For example, speech codes are supplied by the left.  But it used to be conservatives who believed in a code of conduct.  In the arts, politics, religion, education, media, cultural morals, the left is ascendant, imperially so, and the conservatives in sheepish flocks try to stay away from the dogs. 

Conservatives think there is a “standard” but when challenged they lack the confidence upon which to argue for their values, because they have no ontological basis, no foundation, and this is because the have gone through life shrugging off all questions with claims of objectivity, and leave it at that.  (Pause for a moment and think about Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, the king of talk radio, Laura Ingraham, many others.)

The left is actively pursuing its goals while the American right, which claims to have an agenda, when it comes right down to carrying out their program, does not know on what to base their arguments.  This is why they continue to give huge sums to their universities and other foundations and charities even though they know they have been taken over by the left.  They know the mass media has been taken over by the left, but do not dare advocate censorship, even if carried out my “associations,” because when confronted they do not know how to justify their arguments.

To say in the simple minded way of the average everyman that it is good because it is “objectively” good, practical, or functional, etc. is to say nothing at all.  Objectivity is hot air.  It answers nothing. 

What most take to be the other half of the two way discussion, the philosophy department here at New Ruskin College, is not correct.  The practical everyman is not really even talking with the philosophers, his conversation is with the Marxist, who are sitting opposite him in this four way conversation.

For the Marxist also agree that there is an objective reality, that can be known.  And for the longest time they had the moral courage to impose their views on a large part of the world.  American university professors still do.  However, Marx  has no more ontological basis for his philosophy than does the American everyman.

Both Marx and American Pragmatism are enamored of Science.  Marx wrote in the Nineteenth Century and his philosophy is in complete accord with Nineteenth Century Scientific views of objective reality, in his case applied to economic political social questions.  He called it “Scientific Socialism.”  The American everyman found it difficult to argue with the Marxists and large numbers in the West thought Socialism was the way of the future.

The three larges steel plants in the world were built in the USSR, fascist Germany, and the USA.  All agreed that scientific management and economies of scale dictated such large facilities.  Some eighty years later we see that this wasn’t so scientific.  Smaller plants are more responsive to changing market conditions, and these market concerns are more important than economies of scale, i.e. it has been demonstrated in a kind of gigantic experiment that the subjective demand of the consumers, the free market, is more important than the objective economies of scale.   

At its core, Marxist Philosophy was a philosophy of Pragmatism.   It fails because it is not possible to determine what is pragmatic by any system of reason, because there is no ontological basis.  This is not just theory.  There is literally no way to determine the objective best way to do anything. “Best way” is a trick or loaded phrase.  Best for whom?  Best judged by whom?  These are subjective questions.

It always comes down to this in Physics or Economics:  a person making a decision.  Gorbachov used to confuse his subordinates by listening attentively to their reports on, for example, the ten year plan for the light machine industry, and then say, ‘Thank you comrade for that fine report.  Now tell me,  . . . what do you really think?’  And this is just the problem with Marxism and American Pragmatism.  It postulates a rational animal that can objectively determine the best way.

That animal has not yet been invented.  In this three dimensional universe he probably can not be invented.  In the 1920s Ludwig Von Mises was explaining to anyone who would listen that Marxism could not possibly work because economic calculation was impossible.  Why it is impossible is still largely misunderstood.  It is not because Marxists did not have a medium of exchange.  They had Rubles. Their  Rubles were backed by gold. 

The problem resulted because of the fundamental dishonesty of human beings.  They will say anything, but tell me how they spend their money?  Every day the market economy asks, “Tell me comrade, what do you really think?”  And out side the communist world, consider Japan, where company men, clerks, make decisions on the economy not based on their own personal calculations but based on their corporate ethic, or their belief of what their fellow employees think the corporate ethic should be.  How much of the stagnation of the economy is due to this false belief in an objective best way;  because the people making the decisions do not have anything invested in the outcome?     Or, perhaps I am being too harsh?

Counselor:  You?  Too harsh?  Never. That is why people read you:  your exciting honesty.

(She is really earning her money today.)  Thank you Yvonne.

Counselor:  You are welcome.   

Ironically the American economy works well even though most Americans do not know why.  Back when Western Philosophy was still propounding the objective Truth the classical economists, in the Enlightenment, thought that the value of a thing was determined by its essence, by something inside the thing. Because of the work of Ricardo, and Smith, and Mill, etc. we know that value results from the subjective opinions of the consumers, how they value it, not the objective thing itself.

Marx drew heavily on Hegel, as do the American University professors that conservatives often misidentify as Marxists.  They are in fact Phenomenologist and they make up the fourth place at the table, they sit opposite us, here at New Ruskin College.

Iris Murdoch describes the Phenomenologists as “secretly holding hands under the table with the Marxists” because they both rely on Hegel.  They both are fundamentally dishonest.  The Marxist claim, and agree with their counterparts, the American Pragmatist everyman, that there is an objective Truth,  but they dispute that anyone but the Marxist, who with his superior understanding of the objective development of “Historical Materialism” can know the Truth about our objective world.

Similarly the Phenomenologists also seemingly agree with us here at New Ruskin College, they too admit to the subjective nature of reality, but they like their Marxist colleagues think that their subjective understanding is superior to ours or that of the American everyman.  In other words of this four way conversation, two participants, the Phenomenologists and the Marxists, pretend to agree with us but secretly they hold us in contempt.  Their views are, they believe, superior because of their greater mental athleticism.  Their secret . . . ?   What?  They will not disclose it.  They are holding hands under the table.

Iris Murdoch describes the ontological basis for Marxism and Phenomenology:

"The Phenomenology (written by Hegel)  is a tale of developing aspiring mind moving from the apparent to the real, and may be read as logic, or science, or an allegory of the nature of thought , or human history, or the intellectual or spiritual pilgrimage of an individual person.   It can be used in many ways (as it was by Marx).  Hegel must count himself a platonic thinker, and his image of progress must remind us of Plato’s Cave.  However Hegel’s omnivorous dialectic is unlike Plato’s dialectic.  Hegel’s Reason proceeds by a continuous  discarding of possibilities; doubt, ambiguities, alternatives, ramblings of any kind are officially not permitted and cannot be left ‘lying about.  Seen in this way, the process seems not an increasingly widening, increasingly well-lighted all-embracing prospect, but rather an entry into some dark narrowing almost mechanical confinement.  (Allegory of a Marxist state.)  What is contingent, sui generis, incompatible, mysterious, has been ground up by the machine;  but great things, love, religion, happiness, even art (of which Hegel has many interesting things to say) demand, not logic, but freedom.  Plato is not systematic in the Hegelian sense.  (After all he was inventing the whole of western philosophy.)  His dialectic is the open-ended to-and-fro, sometimes inconclusive, movement of serious argument, wherein his art gives life to opposing positions.  He tells us when he is using a myth (metaphor).  He changes his mind, he expresses doubt. His Forms are separate and distant.  In Hegel’s account things may be distant but nothing is separate, and in spite of the contrasts of changes of consciousness, often so stirring and interesting, offered by the these and antitheses, the inevitable process itself is what is real, the end is contained in the way, there is a continuum to the Absolute.”(227)

 Yes, the Absolute, Truth that can be known, objectively? Allegory of a Marxist state, indeed. 

But because the everyman imagines himself in a two way dialog, instead of this four way conversation, he misunderstands the arguments.  Because he lacks an ontological basis for his position, he can not justify his position, except with the intellectually lazy appeal to “it’s objective.”

Let us examine the American Pragmatist, conservative, positivist, and consider how we here at New Ruskin College can help him in this battle. . . . . (to be continued) . . . .   

Barbour, Julian, The End of Time, 1999, Oxford University Press, New York, New York 

Davies, Paul (editor), The New Physics, Third Edition, 2000, copyright 1989, Cambridge University Press, New York, New York

Greene, Brian, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 2004, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, New York

Heisenberg, Werner,  Physics and Philosophy,  1999, copyright 1958, Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York

Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 1992, Allen Lane, 1993 Viking Penguin,  New York, New York

Smolin, Lee, Quantum Gravity, 2001, Basic Books, New York, New York

Wolfram, Stephen, A New Kind of Science, 2002, Wolfram Media, Inc., Champaign, Il

 http://superstringtheory.com/links/index.html

Wrong:  Part IV

‘What happens if the conservatives find out the truth?’

This is the question the late Dr. Allen Bloom of the University of Chicago asked in his book, The Closing of the American Mind:  How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987). His question, really it was more a warning, was addressed to his fellow academics, the leftists, Phenomenologists, Structuralists, Poststructuralists, Marxists, various cultural relativists of the many “schools of complaint” (see Dr. Harold Bloom), the feminists, gays, the whole left wing crowd, that had taken over the universities. 

‘What if the conservatives stop arguing with you about their claims of objective “Truth,” and start using your own arguments against you; what if they start justifying their own positions by referencing, your ‘moral relativism,’ your ‘contingent’ “Truth,” all of it, the whole edifice of “relativism” that you have built up?’ he asked.  For example, what if the conservatives too start talking about the U. S. Constitution as a “living document,” to justify their reinterpretation of Constitutional Law?     

Being a closeted homosexual Jewish liberal academic this could only result in some kind of Nazism he worried.  Nearly everyone thinks of Dr. Alan Bloom as a conservative decrying cultural relativism, but he was in fact a liberal.  He does complain about the moral leveling caused by ‘value neutral’ judgments;  treating all cultures as the same in the name of openness.  However, he does not dispute with his fellow academics at the ontological level.  He does not claim that his Great Books are objectively superior.   Unlike the conservative everyman he knows that he must argue for his position, defend his interpretation, he acknowledges that it is not self evident, i.e. objective.    

(Ironically he was castigated for being an ultra conservative because he challenged the leftist who control our universities not withstanding the fact that he was himself a liberal Democrat.  Camille Paglia, describes what she finds to be, “The main problem with "The Closing of the American Mind" was that it seemed caught in a time warp: By 1987, yet another generation had risen up (the melancholy, anxiously ironic latch-key kids scarred by parental divorce (whom Allen Bloom describes as “nice”) and craving the consoling Big Tit of P.C.; thus Bloom's quarrel with the 1960s didn't feel completely up to date. Nevertheless, his complex book will certainly endure in American letters as the soberly reasoned protest of an intellectual dissenter who was treated with outrageous disrespect by the liberal lemmings of academe.” (From Slate))

Iris Murdoch in her, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, is attempting to return from the subjective “existentialism” of her youth, to a moral system that escapes the black hole of isolated individual subjectivism which Dr. Bloom also has described.  Both Bloom and Murdoch agree on the Continental origins of this relativistic ontology, and the central role of Hegel in creating moral relativism.  In Hegel, the “Truth” emerges from the process as a whole, any individual statement, the thesis and the antithesis, are only means to that end.  The thesis can be a deliberate lie.  What difference?  This is why Iris Murdoch says the Phenomenologists and the Marxists are “secretly holding hands under the table.”  Both use their philosophy to justify their lies for the greater good. 

This is the aspect of the leftist academic relativism that most enrages the conservatives.  This is why conservatives stupidly insist on an objective standard.  What they are being called on to understand here is that there are two steps in the analysis. Bloom and Murdoch both go so far as to agree with the leftists on the first step, “Truth” is contingent on our act of perception and cognition.  Given this limitation on the human condition, how shall we proceed?      

Unlike the simple minded everyman conservative, who disputes the subjective nature of  truth and demands objectivity, intellectual honesty requires us to accept the contingent limits on human understanding: relativism.  Dr. Allen Bloom worries that the conservatives will simply join in with the Phenomenologists and Marxists,  the dishonesty of the left, matching them lie for lie.  Iris Murdoch does not agree with the simpleminded everyman’s conservatism of objectivity;  however, she is a pathfinder, flying solo into the night of moral relativism. We follow her trail of parachuted flares marking our way through the darkness.

For the way is in no way certain.  What is Truth?

In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Iris Murdoch asks, what could be more objective than the ontological proof of the existence of God?  Not only is there a God, but what if his existence can be proven by rational argument?  But how can there be a rational argument for God if we agree with the first step and accept the limits of our subjective understanding?  If we forsake objectivity must we forsake God?

She is concerned to bring a moral purpose to our subjective interpretations.  Her arguments are meant to show all the ways that morality, and our daily subjective awareness of  morality, infuse every moment of our consciousness.  Even when you make excuses for your misconduct, you are acknowledging the existence of the implicit standard.  When you tell a lie and excuse yourself with the explanation that you are engaged in a larger dialectical process from which the “Truth” will emerge, you are Murdoch says still acknowledging that you do know, by your very excuse, that you are lying.  Proof of God.

When Ludwig von Mises first came to the United States he was surprised by the apologetic attitude of his American colleagues about the sorrowful state of American education.  So few completed High School let alone went on to College.  How shameful they thought compared to the continent with its intellectual giants, (like Hegel).

In Human Action he tries to explain to his American friends why they are mistaken and have completely misjudged the situation.  He starts by explaining that after about 8^th grade all most all education is instruction in ideology.  Mark that conservatives.

Here is your first test.  What is Ludwig von Mises talking about?  Why does he call it ideology?  Try to focus.  If we lived in an “objective” world then High School and College education would be instruction in objective disciplines about which all reasonable persons would agree for all time.  However, if we use the term ideology, then we are saying that this higher education is not about objective subjects but is rather about subjective interpretation.

If Ludwig von Mises is right then the conservative, everyman, American positivist, objectivist, pragmatist is wrong.

Do you follow?  Am I going to fast for you?

Counselor:  No, I think we are keeping up with you.

Good.  After learning to do sums, and division, basic reading and writing, etc., about 8^th grade, Ludwig von Mises is saying the students have learned enough.  Let them go an get jobs, we do not have very much more for them, at least not on a purely objective basis.  Everything they need to know to earn a living, to be contributing members  to the economy, for most jobs, has been given them.

Most everything else is ideology.

Most readers will want to move on.  They feel they have read these words and understand the point.  But there are profound implications for every other discussion of society and politics, philosophy and the meaning of life, which I doubt more than but a few readers have yet grasped.

First note that Ludwig von Mises is not disputing the philosophical positions that Bloom and Murdoch would argue.  Unlike the conservative everyman objectivists, he agrees with Bloom and Murdoch.  He kneels at the alter of cultural relativism, the contingent subjective nature of moral judgments.  Not only does Ludwig von Mises not argue the point it is exactly his point that the children will be better off the less ideology they get; at least from the state. 

Precisely because it is ideology the state should be kept out of it.  Note the contradiction.  The typical everyman conservative, just because he thinks that there is an objective “the Truth,”  he thinks that there is no big problem in having that “Truth” taught at public schools controlled by the state.  Why not if it is objective?

If the everyman conservative really knew the truth about his “the Truth” he would know how impossible the idea of a public education; at least one controlled and directed by the state.  So here I submit my first proof of thesis:  the reason for the failure of conservatives to enact vouchers in education for the last 50 years is because in their hearts and souls they do not see why vouchers are so important.

For example during Bush 41’s Administration conservatives hit upon the idea of performance based testing  of student accomplishments to make sure the tax payers were getting their money’s worth.  However, if the proposed tests tested only the student’s I. Q. the conservatives thought this unfair, for they reasoned what if a student worked harder to master a subject but did so with an I. Q. lower than his less disciplined peers?  Would that be fair?  They wanted to test what the students learned not just test their academic ability (i.e., I. Q.).  Or what if some districts had more students with high I. Q.s than others, would that be fair?  No, they resolved to test performance.

(Murray and Herrnstein describe this as the fallacy of the off setting abilities argument.  For there is no reason to assume that students with high I. Q.s are less disciplined than their less fortunate peers.  (In fact the reverse is true.)  Further all exams of academic ability are predictors of students future academic attainment only to the extent that they measure I. Q., i.e. to the extent they correlate to I. Q. examinations. 

(This is contrary to what is accepted instruction in our universities where the liberal establishment conceals the findings of I. Q. research because of an age old prejudice against genetics.  Note that though I. Q. research is real, it is not objective.  Much evidence supports the I. Q. research, but you must have the subjective willingness to accept the evidence. It is not objective because the liberal academics will it to be not objective.  (Also note that so called objective testing is objective only in the sense that the subjective decisions are made before the exam is given.  The questions are chosen, the answers selected, etc., these are subjective choices,  so the evaluation is limited to checking which possible answer has been selected.)))

These Bush 41 conservatives, being the gullible simple minded sort who believe in objective “Truth” proceeded to go to the universities and ask that they develop objective standards for American History, Literature, Math, all the disciplines.  Then for the next few years we were treated to the laughable spectacle of conservatives, veins bulging, cheeks turning first red then purple, as one Marxist, Phenomenologist, Structuralist, etc. college professor, packed on one academic committee after another, mocked their idea that there is an objective standard for American History, etc., etc.

And throughout the entire farce the conservatives never showed the slightest awareness that they were being mocked by the academic establishment.  Indeed it developed that the simple minded radio talk show hosts began joining in with the radical academics in ridiculing “outcome based standards,” for reasons which never were clear.  What emerged  was a dialectic of the radical academic liars, and the simple minded conservatives:  but was there Truth?  

First the conservatives would have had to themselves decided the truth of American History.  But instead they relied on the left wing university professors.  Why?  Because they believe in an objective truth.  For which they were well mocked.   Conservatives, there is no alternative to asserting your view.   If you are waiting for assent from the professorate you wait for ever.  

Conservatives lack the ability to carryout their program because at the most fundamental level, at the ontological level, they do not really understand their situation.  And Dr. Allen Bloom is in no ways in a hurry to explain the situation to them, for he is in fact fearful that conservatives will discover the contingent nature of truth, and then our democracy will beset with not just the left acting out of a solipsism of  moral relativism but now, oh dear, the right too?

Iris Murdoch would very much like conservatives to see the contingent nature of their world and act on it, and hopes liberals, everyone, will see the moral nature of the task before us as we interpret our world.  She would have all undertake the enterprise as a moral duty.  She would not allow you to merely slough it off unthinkingly, claiming it objective.  She wants us to take responsibility for our interpretations.

Ludwig von Mises, is not advocating that education stop at the 8^th grade, he frankly does not think it much matters one way or the other.  He is amused that his new friends in America are so turned around that they do not clearly understand the ideological nature of their world.  They have lived in isolation on their large new continent, their New World, and have enjoyed a veritable capitalist’s garden of Eden.   So, that is their good fortune!  And with this good fortune there comes this innocence, this misunderstanding, what of it?  Is it not typical of hay seeds, and colonists, to feel inferior to the mother country?     

That they send their children off to the universities, to be filled with a lot of propaganda by the leftist professors, does not change his science of Economics at all.  Provincials have always aped the city folk’s fashions.    Ultimately ideology must give way to Economics.  But, again note, he is not disputing with Bloom or Murdoch at the ontological level, for here all three agree, they recognize the contingent nature of our understanding, it is not objective.

But because the everyman conservative does not appreciate this point, which Ludwig von Mises cedes without dispute, every other area we might examine is confused.  For not only does the everyman not see the necessity of vouchers in education, but every other policy question is misperceived.  If we discuss education or abortion, the interpretation of law and legal documents, economic calculations of risk and rates of return, foreign policy and war, every question, is muddled because at the most basic ontological level the conservative everyman fails to understand his relationship to the world:  How he creates his world with his judgments.

And even though we have now spent several paragraphs reviewing the subject the typical everyman conservative is no further along in understanding his misapprehension, than he was at the outset.  For this confusion has been years in the making.  The reader may have been educated by Marxists who in fact have deliberately inculcated this mistaken view of an objective world in the reader, the better to control and manipulate.  Their teaching is that there is an objective world and they with there superior knowledge of Historical Materialism know it.  Whereas the reader is a victim of class prejudice and suffers from a “false consciousness.” 

And again this is the point where the Marxists and the Phenomenologists are seen by Iris Murdoch to be “secretly holding hands under the table.”  For it is just this point they both agree on.  They both agree that the reader is misinformed, class bound, suffering unconscious prejudices,  (race, religion, etc.), where as they correctly perceive the situation in which we find ourselves.  And how many conservatives have taken this teaching to heart?

Often I have seen conservative Senators justify some Bill or other by pointing out the Senator Kennedy or other notorious liberal also supports the proposal;  as if that were proof.  They subjectively know that they do not spend much time thinking about the suffering of their fellow men but they assume that because people like Senator Kennedy talk so much about human suffering that they must be exemplars of moral  vision.  (So complete has been the inculcation of their since of moral inferiority that they seem never to have considered the possibility that Senator Kennedy spends no more time ruminating on the condition of mankind than they do:  Senator Kennedy just talks about it more than they do.)

When we here at New Ruskin College tell conservatives that their “Truths” are only their subjective judgments we do not, as do the Phenomenologists and Marxists, seek to undermine your confidence, rather we do so to explain how important your assertions and convictions are.  Unlike, Dr. Bloom, we shout Bravo!  With Murdoch we want you to see that your thinking is a moral act.  God can be found in your thoughts and judgments. 

Even when you miss the mark, your knowledge of missing the mark is, Iris Murdoch would have you know, evidence of the existence of God.  (Alan Watts notes that in Hebrew, the word sin, means missing the mark.)  This subtle awareness may not be as dramatic as a burning bush, but perhaps in waiting and searching for such objective signs you have been missing what has been before you all the time. 

The proof of God has been here in all these small things all along  that you have been so quick to pass over. Bang! You see?  The proof has always been here in your thoughts.  You just haven’t been focused on the right place.  You have been looking outside yourself.  God is not keeping all of this in His mind so that you might have the comfort of an objective universe without the bother of morally creating your interpretation as you perceive, rather, you are safekeeping the world for Him in your thoughts.

Ludwig von Mises may have confidence that the everyman will eventually work his way through the problem, but in fact, if you never come to a better understanding about your relationship to the world, that would be acceptable also.  For Ludwig von Mises’ Catalytic Science, (Economics--- or Entrepreneurial Capitalism), is not dependent on any one persons understanding.  In the grand scheme of things it is a big cold universe that does not give up its sustenance easily and which regards the reader’s understanding of it with indifference.

Iris Murdoch, has gone before us, into this dark forbidding universe, and see, she has lit our path.  Alan Watts would want us to see at the outset that this “forbidding” nature of the universe is a subjective attribution which we project onto the universe.  Ludwig von Mises would again have no quarrel in ceding this point of clarification.  It matters not to him if the coal miners go into the mines with foreboding or enthusiasm, or significantly at what price, as long as they go and remove the coal from the earth clinched veins, and sell it at a price the consumers are willing to pay.  He is contemptuous of the ideology of his colleagues in the other departments.

When asked if he followed the developments in Physics, and if he found it significant that the physicists were possibly confronting a similar ontological limitation on their ability to explain their science that also confronts the social sciences including Economics, he replies in Human Action, that it is of no interest to him.

If it should turn out that Physics never is able to present an ontological basis for explaining the wave particle duality, of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle he says it will in know way be of interest to Economics.  For even if it should turn out the Physics and Economics are both tautologies he will think no less of Physics nor will he think better of Economics.  (He takes no pleasure in the difficulty being faced by the physicists in explaining their “discontinuity” or “quantum jumps.”)

For he says he has never regarded the fact that at the ontological level Economics is a tautology with embarrassment. He points out the geometry also is a tautology.  (Whether Euclidian or one of the other types of geometries that have been invented? Or discovered?) 

At the ontological level statements in geometry are true, only because “true” has been previously defined.  They are “true” only because one has accepted as true the theorems, i.e. a tautology, a self referencing system of thought. Note Euclidian truths (truths for flat geometry) are not true in, for example, positively curved geometry. And negatively curved geometry does not produce “objective” truths in the other two, etc.  Each system is contingently true, contingent on what assumptions one projects, e. g., flat space or variously curved space, etc.

Not withstanding this limitation, Ludwig von Mises, avers that geometry is still very useful.  One can make all sorts of useful calculations that can have practical benefits in this world even if they are not ontologically “True” always in every place --- unless one first accepts the postulates and theorems.  So too for his science of Economics he argues: It may not be objectively true at the ontological level, (again unless one accepts its postulates and theorems), but once again, as with geometry, one can make very useful calculations and estimates that are applicable in the practical world, all be they contingent.       

The fact that these different geometries are “relativistic” or that there is no “absolute standard” or that they are not “objectively True” in that one must first accept that they are contingent on certain assumptions, one has had to first agree to certain rules, and principles, yet, still, they are immensely practical, or useful.

For the conservative everyman there is still resistance for though a pragmatist, it is not enough that his ideas be merely useful and practical, he wants them made immortal, permanent, objectively true for the ages, he craves the absolute.

This craving has a biological basis.  It is encoded in our genes.  It is present in all mammalian  animals of the type: social predators.   ( To be continued . . . )

Conservative seminar

Part V

Editor’s Notes:  11-19-04

Because time is running out many parts of the site will have to remain incomplete.  The next part was to cover how we organize knowledge and how this organization is governed by our genes.  Here are some notes:

Dr. Edward O. Wilson has explained this hierarchical need, this demand for an absolute absolute, highest almighty, top of the top, as a function of our genes.  Social predators survived to pass on their genes by organizing themselves into hunter organizations, with a leader, a leadership group.  Organizations are in our genes.

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