Misconceptions About Quantum Mechanics

There’s an interesting post over at Dailykos today on misconceptions about quantum mechanics, pseudo-science, and confusions about the role played by human activity in quantum phenomena. From the post:

This is the one quantum-mechanical property that’s relevant to this discussion, which is that in quantum mechanics, things can exist in several states at once. (called a superposition) Objects don’t have definite locations; rather they’re ’smeared out’ over space. The lighter they are, and the faster they move, the more ’smeared out’ they can be. (those who’ve read about QM before know I’m referring to the famous Uncertainty Principle)

But if a measurement is carried out on the object, it will have a certain value. Which is part of the ‘weirdness’. QM cannot predict what value will be measured, but it can predict the probability of all the possible measurement results. It can predict the average of a large number of measurements. For instance, the electron of a hydrogen atom is most likely to be 53 picometers away from the nucleus. But a single measurement could give any result from zero to infinity.

Heavier, bigger, things on the other hand, get less and less ’smeared out’, and you end up with the ‘classical’ situation, where things assume definite values for their location and speed and other things.

Chopra (and many, many others) misinterprets what ‘measurement’ means here, assuming that it has something to do with human activity, drawing not only the erroneous conclusion that human (or sentient) perception is what’s meant by ‘measurement’, but indeed that things don’t even exist if they’re not being ‘measured’. Stating: “In fact, everything you are looking at right now depends upon you to exist.”

This is a basic misconception which has been debunked repeatedly (no doubt several times a week on physics newsgroups and message boards). Quantum mechanical measurements have nothing to do with ‘measurement’ per se, and especially not with human activity. It’s also at the basis of the Schrödinger’s cat ‘paradox’, as well as many of the early confusion about quantum mechanics.

In short, it’s a process known as decoherence. It’s not fully understood yet (although a lot of progress has been made since the early days and early confusion of QM). Decoherence is the process whereby quantum systems go from a superposition of different states to a single, definite state, through interactions with their environment. It’s ‘locked’ into this state because there’s an increase in entropy (disorder) associated with that change, making it irreversible (2nd law). It’s not fully understood yet, but it certainly doesn’t resemble the Berkleyian idea Chopra seems to have adopted.

A number of these claims have been advanced in the realism/anti-realism debates, as well as some of the debates between object-oriented ontologists and other speculative realists, so the post is worth a read. The author’s understanding seems to support something like object-oriented ontology in my view.

 

UPDATED: Harman’s New Diagrams

Oh man, I’m a sucker for diagrams of any sort. Here’s a sample from Graham’s next book:

It’s extremely cruel to provide a sample of an alluring and enigmatic diagram without providing a commentary on what it does or how it works.

UPDATE: Harman provides a brief commentary on how he’s thinking about his diagrams here. I’ll have to think through this more, but my initial impression is that this is really exciting stuff. I confess that his theory of vicarious causation and his analysis of the four-fold are the aspects of his ontology that have left me most scratching my head. Just the first of the ten diagrams and the brief gloss on it already shed a lot of light on the latter (for me anyway) and are highly suggestive with respect to the former. In the post Harman writes:

The danger with diagrammatic systems of this sort, when new, is that you’re always within a few inches of looking like a goof or a crank cooking up homebrewed philosophical systems in the basements and attics of the internet. What you have to do to avoid that impression is keep on reminding the reader of the absolutely compelling considerations that lead gradually to a model of this sort. It is the (for now) end result of many years of reflection, and I’m already becoming more comfortable playing with it and getting new results out of it.

Perhaps it’s just my Lacanian and Badouian ways, but I tend to think that formalization is a mark of the real. Lacan liked to say that it is only through formalization that we manage to grasp a bit of the real. I emphasize the “bit” because the Lacanian thesis, like the object-oriented thesis, is that we never entirely, completely, or transparently grasp the real.

This reference allows me to make a nice ontological self-reflexive point about Graham’s diagrams. One of Harman’s core claims is that objects withdraw from one another or never directly encounter one another. This is the Kantian moment in Harman’s ontology. Where Kant holds that we never have direct access to the thing-in-itself, emphasizing the relationship between mind and thing-in-itself, Harman generalizes this thesis to all relations between things, regardless of whether or not humans are involved. This is precisely why Harman’s ontology, despite being an ontological realism is also an epistemological anti-realism. In my own ontology, I refer to this general feature of things with the concept of “translation”. As Gadamer (and Quine) taught us, every translation is a transformation. When I re-situate something from a source-language into an object-language in the process of translating it, the object-language does not leave the original unchanged but produces something new. Finnegan’s Wake is not the same book in French that it is in English. This, incidentally, is the reason that we’ll always need new translations of great texts. Like Harman, I generalize this feature of translation as it pertains to language to all objects, viewing all interactions between objects as forms of translation where one thing transforms the differences it receives from another thing. I thus arrive at a very similar conclusion regarding the thing-in-itself. The grounds of the Kantian hypothesis about the inaccessibility of the in-itself are not to be located in epistemology, but are ontological features of any relations between things, regardless of whether minds are involved or not. The point then I’m trying to make about diagrams is that they are ways of “alluring” or evoking the real. They are mechanisms of, in my vernacular, translation that bring some bit of the real into relief or coax it out of its hiding.

 

Warning: Object(s)ions in the Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear

One of the central theses of psychoanalysis is that the manner in which we interpret others says more about the structure of our own desire than the desire of the other person we’re interpreting. I am not sure one even has to be an advocate of psychoanalytic theory to endorse this thesis. Given that we don’t have access to the minds of other people our attributions of motives to others must proceed by analogy to ourselves, such that we attribute motives to others based on what motivates us. It is with this thesis in mind that I’ve found myself amused by a certain claim that has been floating about the blogosphere lately. Here the thesis is that I and a few others are forming relationships with other academics such as Harman simply for the sake of promoting our own academic careers. In other words, the suggestion is that I do not blog as much as I do for the reason that I’m genuinely engaged with the things I blog about, nor because I genuinely appreciate the philosophical positions of folks like Harman, but because somehow these relationships will advance my academic career.

This is a truly peculiar and baffling thesis. First a little reality check. I am a Continentalist. If there is one thing Continentalists almost viscerally despise, it is any form of realism. Whenever the signifier “realism” is evoked, one of the first charges you hear is “naive positivism!” or “reductivism!” If one is truly looking to land a plum position in a Continental philosophy department, hanging your hat on the peg of “speculative realism” is hardly a wise strategy for doing so. Similarly, it would be no exaggeration to say that Continental philosophy departments are dominated by Heideggerians and phenomenologists. Harman’s work, as admirable as it is, has generated a tremendous amount of hostility from Heideggerians and phenomenologists as a sort of sacrilege. Working on the premise that job committees in Continental departments are very likely to have at least one scholar representing this movement, one is certainly not doing themselves any favors by siding with object-oriented ontology. Additionally, Latour’s work is often looked down upon in philosophy departments as either a relativistic postmodernism as depicted by Sokal, or as that of a second string French thinker trailing far behind big daddies like Derrida and Deleuze. One certainly isn’t doing oneself any favors by taking Latour seriously.

Second, the way to advance yourself in your career is to publish in the most prestigious journals and with the most prestigious presses. You don’t exactly do yourself any favors publishing in obscure journals that aren’t recognized as the primo journals in your field, nor do you do yourself many favors by publishing with currently unknown presses as I will soon be doing with The Democracy of Objects. Moreover, for the non-established academic the simple fact of blogging, I think, can be a black mark against you. On the one hand, blogging remains suspect for many old school academics. This is especially true in philosophy where attitudes tend to be somewhat provincial and luddite in character. In addition to this, blogging leaves a long trail of comments where your less than stellar moments, your poorly thought out ideas, your weird ticks and passions, etc., are there for everyone to see.

No, if anything, hanging one’s hat on the peg of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology looks more like an act of career masochism than a way of advancing your career. I am not holding my breath for DePaul, Villanova, Penn State, Memphis, etc., to come knocking on my door. If I do these things things then this is because I am passionate about philosophy and ideas and believe there is genuine merit and importance in these positions. What is intriguing is an interpretive frame that suggests that advancing one’s career is the most likely and most plausible motivation for writing a good deal or interacting with other thinkers. This is especially absurd when said writing is on a blog rather than in publications in prestigious peer reviewed journals that count on your CV. Such an interpretation seems to say more about one’s own relationship to philosophy and writing than the motivations of others. I also find myself surprised that folks who were patronizingly and insultingly criticizing others for “beating up” on a “poor defenseless grad student” are suddenly beating up on a grad student who has taken the initiative to start an academic journal. Then again, these things never make sense.

 

Object-Oriented Ontology Journal

I’m very pleased to announce that Paul Ennis has founded a new open access peer reviewed journal devoted to object-oriented ontology. From Another Heidegger Blog:

EDIT: Thanks to the Open Humanities Alliance ‘Speculations’ has moved from an idea to a fully operational online peer-reviewed open-access blog. This means we can move toward stage 2: submissions.

Looks like we’ll have an OOO journal (online and open access) in the coming months.
I think I’ve managed to wrangle some submissions from Ian, Levi and Graham. Now if you don’t want this to be some kind of OOO love-in you best get writing those critical responses to OOO. If you do e-mail and let me know. I’ll be mailing most of this blog’s readers anyway hassling them for submissions. You might as well just give in and send me a possible paper.

Provisional title: ‘Speculations’
(I’m stressing the word provisional here…)

 

Alright This Just Irritates Me!

Okay, I have to admit that my buddy Peter over at Philosophy in a time of Error has irritated the hell out of me with his last two substantial posts responding to me (the post on Derrida and tonight’s post responding to my remarks on the principle of parity). I suppose this is a good thing as it motivates me to expand on my remarks, but damn it, I’m still irritated (no doubt because I’m still up at 2:30 marking papers!). Anyway, in response to my post on parity Peter writes (quoting in full; hopefully he won’t mind):

Anodyne Lite writes:

For example, strict social constructionists and anti-realist humanists accuse realists of valorizing science and cry “No Master Narratives!” when findings from science are invoked to support a viewpoint, while they themselves then go on to posit some other, alternative narrative that gets valorized and does all the heavy lifting in their epistemology (be it politics, the social, the “human”, language, etc.)

This is said by Larval Subjects to represent the fallacy of “special pleading” (I suppose with the cry, it’s somewhat literal). LS then cites Latour, and that’s all well and good. But I—-blame me!—-haven’t even heard the words “master” and “narrative” since I put together a panel six years ago on 25th anniversary of Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition—-a book that Lyotard in retrospect didn’t like because of the effect it had—-and before that, I can’t even remember. I raise this because working on certain figures, you get to see this sort of reaction too often, and I don’t want to see this go into the next decade.

read on!

 

Special Pleading Fallacy

I wanted to draw attention to a fallacy that Anodyne Lite mentions in relation to one of my recent posts on epistemology and realism. The “special pleading fallacy” roughly consists in submitting something else to a particular form of critique without applying what I call the “principle of parity” or the “principle of reversibility” to one’s own theoretical concepts. As defined by Merriam-Webster’s:

Main Entry: 1par·i·ty
Pronunciation: \ˈper-ə-tē, ˈpa-rə-\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural par·i·ties
Etymology: Latin paritas, from par equal
Date: 1608

1 : the quality or state of being equal or equivalent
2 a : equivalence of a commodity price expressed in one currency to its price expressed in another b : equality of purchasing power established by law between different kinds of money at a given ratio
3 : an equivalence between farmers’ current purchasing power and their purchasing power at a selected base period maintained by government support of agricultural commodity prices
4 a : the property of an integer with respect to being odd or even b (1) : the state of being odd or even used as the basis of a method of detecting errors in binary-coded data (2) : parity bit
5 : the property of oddness or evenness of a quantum mechanical function
6 : the symmetry of behavior in an interaction of a physical entity (as a subatomic particle) with that of its mirror image

Here, of course, the principle of parity refers to the first sense of the term, referring to the equality of critical procedures or the manner in which a critical procedure or strategy of critique should be applied to the position itself.

read on!

 

A Follow Up on Critique

I’ve received a number of emails asking me why I deleted this post and asking that I re-post it. I guess my thoughts on the matter were that “meta” discussions of how people communicate with one another, how they should communicate with one another, norms of civility, and trolls, gray vampires, and minotaurs have the paradoxical effect of generating more conflict, not less. Luhmann makes this point in his later sociological work, observing that when social discourses turn to discussions of norms conflicts in social systems tend to quickly ensue. However, since others have asked for the post, I here re-post it without further ado.

Riffing on Graham’s remarks about critique in the ordinary language sense of the term, I will say that I have become especially critical of those who participate online without revealing their true name or identity to the public. The standard argument is that a person’s true name and identity shouldn’t matter and we should just focus on the content of arguments and positions. I don’t see it this way at all. The person who does not make their identity public risks nothing through their engagement with others. They can be the biggest asshole in the world, spout the most ridiculous absurdities, engage in the most trollish, vampirish, or minotaurish behaviors without having to suffer any real world consequences for how they’ve participated or engaged with others. This isn’t true for the rest of us who have either a) left enough clues for anyone enterprising enough to discover who we are, or b) who participate with full disclosure of who we are. In these cases our engagement online can significantly impact our careers and future career opportunities. We have to live with the “paper trail” that our interactions produce and which we cannot erase or control. We can have others post our name whenever they might like, thereby drawing Google their way or have to deal with what we write. At the very least, as a condition for critique in the ordinary language sense of the term it should be conditional that the person leveling the critique themselves risk something and be accountable for their critique with respect to their own genuine philosophical engagement. The person being criticized should be able to say x (not the screen name, but the person’s true proper name) argued y and y should be tied to that person. Absent this, I’m not really sure how any discussion is really possible.

On these grounds, I’ve reached the point of simply ignoring comments from assholes, trolls, grey vampires, and minotaurs who do not publicly reveal their identity. As I see it, if they’re not making a real existential risk with their public engagement then there’s no reason for me to allow my blog to be a platform for their remarks. Why? I’m the one taking all the risk and they lose nothing. They are not avowing their position or dealing with the consequences of their utterances. Because they have not entered into discussion publicly and in good faith, they have nothing to lose but I have a lot to lose by entertaining such folks and interacting with them. No doubt I’ll be accused of hypocrisy here as there was a time where I carefully strove to hide my identity. However, even then I made enough comments about my book, conferences I was participating in, and articles I was publishing for any enterprising person doing a search on me to discover who I am. And indeed others did post my name, link to me with my name, and so on such that in certain instances I asked them to delete it.

read on!

 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Whenever the concept of memes comes up it seems that people get really incensed. I’m baffled by this reaction. What is it about this concept that gets folks so worked up? I certainly understand the point that meme theory is underdeveloped, but this is a call for theoretical elaboration and development, not outright rejection. I get the sense that memes get some worked up for one of two reasons. On the one hand, I sometimes sense that hostility to the concept of memes is really driven by disciplinary territory disputes. Here you have the upstarts like Dawkins and Dennett come along, spout the word “memes”, and suddenly everyone yahoo that knows nothing about social theory or the broad and deep discipline of semiotics gets all excited. I wonder whether there isn’t a little of resentment and envy at work here. On the other hand, I get the sense that some associate memes with socio- and psychobiology (more on this in a moment).

From the standpoint of object-oriented ontology, I find meme theory extremely attractive precisely because meme theory treats memes as real objects or actors in the world. Here, more specifically, are the reasons that I find memes attractive:

1) Far from falling into vulgar socio- and psychobiology, meme theory allows us to tell a far more complex story about human beings and behavior. The central thesis of meme theory is that at some point in human biological history a new type of replicator emerged in contrast to gene replicators. Genes are replicators in the sense that they are units of some sort that get copied or replicated through reproduction. Under Dawkin’s formulation, at least, the “aim” of genes is not the advantage of the organism, but to get themselves copied through reproduction. In this respect, genes construct vehicles (bodies, organisms) as strategies for getting themselves replicated.

Just as we do not act primarily for the welfare of our cars but use cars for our own aims, genes aren’t primarily “interested” in the welfare of bodies or organisms. This comes out with special clarity in the case of the preying mantis, but also my favorite animal, the octopus. In the case of the preying mantis, of course, the female devours the male preying mantis’s head after mating with him. In contributing half his genes the male has done his work. His sole value after mating consists in contributing nutrients to the impregnated preying mantis. Moreover, were the male to go his happy way after mating he might mate with other females, generating dangerous competitors to the offspring of his first mate. Cruel world. The case is similar with the octopus. After the female octopus is impregnated she finds a well protected cave or pipe and lays her eggs around the mouth of the cave opening. For the next few weeks after laying her eggs she never again leaves the cave, but rather spends all of her time jetting water over the egg sacks hanging from the cave opening and cleaning the eggs with her tentacles. Once the eggs hatch the female octopus is free to leave the cave, but at this point she is so weakened from lack of food (she hasn’t hunted during this whole time) and is very quickly, and somewhat ironically, devoured by the fish and crabs that she previously feasted upon. Once again, the genes of the female octopus were not acting on her behalf, but rather she was a vehicle or strategy for getting her genes replicated. When that replication is complete her job is done. Cruel world.

read on!

 

A Brief Remark on Critique

Over at Object-Oriented Philosophy Harman has an interesting post up critiquing critique. As Harman writes:

A more general thought… It continues to surprise me that some people really think that merely negating someone else’s position is a productive way to hold discussions.

Imagine the following scenario: you’re reading a book, and you find something that you think is wrong. You feel moved to write to the author about it. How do you go about this?

Option A would be to write to them and say: “You’re completely wrong. I disagree.” (And by the way, I do get letters like this, as do many authors.) But where the hell does the discussion go from there? What are you going to say back to them? “No, I’m right.”

Now, we all do read things from time to time that are just utterly false, and that need to be called out. (Such as Klausmeyer’s comment, or Carlin Romano’s true hatchet job on Heidegger in a recent issue of the Chronicle.) But barring those sorts of situations, which are relatively rare, if you’re moved to engage in some sort of critical exchange with a person, it’s probably because you find something of value in their position.

Quite right. Somewhere or other Deleuze talks about how he felt absolutely compelled to flee conversation and I think it was precisely for the sorts of reasons Harman here outlines. Generally “critique” in the sense that Harman is using it places all positions on a flat plane as if they are equivalent or dealing with the same problems and then proceeds to adopt a position and criticize the other position from that standpoint. The problem with this approach to “philosophy” (this model of critique isn’t really philosophical at all), is that it fails to first understand the position which it is critiquing.

However, while I here agree with Harman’s critique of critique, I do feel compelled to flag the point that the term “critique” is used in a variety of senses in philosophy. Harman, of course, is aware of this, yet I nonetheless feel it is important to clarify this point as I think there’s a lot of confusion as to what, precisely, is being rejected when some in the SR camp reject the model of critique in philosophy.

read on!

 

Downgoing– The Democracy of Objects

The time has come for my posts here to become far less frequent. I really need to get cracking on The Democracy of Objects: An Essay in Object-Oriented Ontology and believe that the major contours of my position are outlined and ready to be worked through in written detail. At present this is what the general structure of the book, chapter by chapter, looks like. It will, of course, change as I work through it in more detail. So without further ado:

The Democracy of Objects: An Essay in Object-Oriented Ontology

Projected Table of Contents

1. Introduction– What is the relation between relations and relata? The relation between relations and relata as a key problem in contemporary epistemology and ontology as a result of the anti-realist turn which argues that philosophy should interrogate our mode of cognition of objects rather than objects themselves (i.e., our relation to objects); The problem with relational conceptions of being; realism as a four letter word, the difference between realist epistemology, anti-realist epistemology, anti-realist ontology, and realist ontology; not your daddy’s realism; a respectful nod to Lee Braver; outline of the book.

2. Copernican Revolutions– What is humanism?; A diagnosis of the Ptolemaic orientation of contemporary philosophy; the call for a true Copernican ontology, arguments for a transcendental realism; the difference between transcendental realism, empirical realism, and transcendental idealism; the problem with epistemological and ontological relationism. Here I will rework a number of Bhaskar’s arguments for realist ontology while distinguishing my ontology and, more broadly, object-oriented ontology from Bhaskar’s position. In addition to this I’ll probably take up some of Harman’s critique of the arguments of transcendental idealism as well. What is a transcendental argument? Transcendental realism and transcendental idealism; blackboxes. Surprise.

Part I: The Onticological Analytic– Doctrine of the Endo-Relational Structure of Objects

Preface– The question of what must belong to beings or objects by right (quid juris) in order to render our praxis or relation to the world intelligible, i.e., the need for an analytic of objects in isolation from their relations. The difference between a knowledge of objects, questions of access to objects, and a philosophical ontology of objects. Why ontological questions are not exhausted by epistemological inquiries or questions of access.

3. The Principles of Onticology– The Categorical Scheme: Whitehead and the idea of a categorical scheme, the principles of onticology (the ontic principle, the principle of translation, the principle of irreduction, etc) along with their deduction.

Intermezzo– The ontological grounds of anti-realist epistemology (follows directly from the principles of chapter 3). How anti-realist epistemology nonetheless leads to a realist ontology of objects.

4. Spectral Objects– The Endo-Relational Structure of Objects: Here I try to rehabilitate a version of substantial forms and distinguish the proper being of objects from material or physical being. A critique of Locke’s and Kant’s critique of substance. Roughly this is where I treat the being of objects as systems of notes composed of attractors in a phase space. This allows me to articulate the relationship between substance and qualities as well as what persists in objects changing across time.

Intermission– Platonic Reminiscences: For a pluralist ontology, i.e., the domain of being is broader than the domain of natural or material objects. The role that time has played in our conception of what counts as real; Plato’s ontological levels in the divided line and how these grades of reality map on to temporal determinations ranging from the eternal and unmediated to the fleeting and mediated; the problems with equating being with eduring; in defense of “artificial” (i.e., produced) objects and their autonomy.

5. Strange Mereologies: Basically the arguments I’ve been making about mereological relations of parts to wholes, objects containing other objects, the independence of objects from one another, the meaning of the term “independence”, and the necessity of this sort of mereology; a friendly response to Shaviro on becoming.

Part II: The Onticological Dialectic: Doctrine of Exo-Relations Between Objects

Preface– The question of how, in light of the arguments and analysis of Part I, we must conceive relations among objects; the idea of ontological dialectic; Kant’s transcendental dialectic; objects are independent of their relations but this does not entail that objects do not enter into relations, nor that through entering into relations objects are not affected in a variety of ways.

6. The World is Flat: The case for flat or immanent ontology that refuses overmining and undermining explanations (against both reductivism and anti-reductivism); a single plane of being ranging from the least powerful or consequential to the most powerful and consequential in which signs and minds have no less a status to the real than stars and planets and where stars, planets, DNA, etc., are not reduced to minds.

7. Objects of Interpretation: Latour’s thesis that all objects interpret one another, not just humans interpreting the world about them or texts interpreting texts; the theory of translation among split or withdrawn objects; Doctrine of black boxes; the “withdrawal” of objects. Basically an account of what happens when objects interact with one another and how no object is a vehicle for other objects in-forming another object through a transparent, frictionless medium; entropy and work; the problem of ports and firewalls or how do objects communicate?; the doctrine of selectivity or “not all objects communicate!”

Intermezzo 2 Remarks about anti-realist epistemologies again and ontological confirmation of these positions; critique of their excesses and detrimental impact on inquiry. Why anti-realist epistemology nonetheless requires a realist ontology.

8. Networks, Assemblages, and Categories: (I need a better title here) The distinction between an object and a network of objects (the question of when we shift from separated objects to a new object); dependency relations between networks where objects nonetheless remain independent; and the theory of categories I’ve developed in terms of Lacanian discourse theory and Badiou’s understanding of categories; networks as dynamic and ongoing systems. Note on where both Badiou and Lacan go wrong in reducing objects to their categorical or dialectical relations.

Conclusion: The end of nature and culture; implications for epistemology; keeping track of work; asking better questions, the end of narcissism and the affirmation of the wound; the re-construction of the history of ontology with realism as its guiding clue.