Edward Feser: Koons on Aristotle and quantum mechanics

Monday, January 2, 2023

Koons on Aristotle and quantum mechanics

My review of Robert Koons’s excellent new book Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? appears at Public Discourse.

204 comments:

StardustyPsycheJanuary 2, 2023 at 11:55 AM
"What is most original in Koons’s book is his argument that quantum mechanics is best interpreted as vindicating the Aristotelian hylomorphist’s view of nature."
“quantum hylomorphism,”
No, the trend is always toward the bottom, as it were. Modern physics moves us ever more to reductionism. Particles themselves are merely illusions, rather, only fields are truly existent, particles merely being somewhat localized manifestations of fields.

More speculatively, some theoretical physicists are working on strings as the fundamental reductionist building blocks.

"The meat of the book is a sustained critique of several well-known interpretations of quantum mechanics"
Right, clearly modern physics is highly incomplete. Poking a few holes in it is not difficult with a bit of research and merely doing so does not support hylomorphisim.

"According to hylomorphism, the parts of a material thing are less fundamental to it than the whole"
Indeed, hylomorphism holds that nonsensical position.
"For example, hydrogen and oxygen exist in water, but only as constituents of the water rather than as entities in their own right. "
You simply didn't reduce far enough, Dr. Feser. Consider the protons, electrons, and neutrons. Clearly they don't know they are part of hydrogen, oxygen, water, or anything else. They simply go wizzing about as they do, interacting as they do with whatever happens to be in the vicinity.

Oh, yes, I know, you are saying I am now guilty of not reducing far enough, and right you are, because, of course, protons and neutrons are themselves composite, being composed of quarks. Yet even that does not reduce us to the bottom, say, fields of various sorts, which are manifested as electrons, and various sorts of quarks, among the the other residents of the particle zoo.

Do these fields somehow have a "purpose", perhaps to make water wet, or to make air breathable, or to make a fusion reaction in the sun that ultimately warms my face mid-day? Such Aristotelian notions are at best quaint sepia colored legends.
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AnonymousJanuary 2, 2023 at 3:06 PM
Physicist Stephen Barr in his First Things article ' Faith and. Quantum Physics" makes similar points as Koons.
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Mister GeoconJanuary 2, 2023 at 4:05 PM
There are some Christian apologists like Michael Jones from Inspiring Philosophy have argued that quantum mechanics proves idealism. What are your thoughts on this issue, Professor Feser?
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CosmicCatJanuary 2, 2023 at 4:25 PM
Aristotle couldn't even figure out that raw meat can't produce flies. His logic was that he let his wife leave some meat outside, didn't look at it for a few days, and concluded that it generated flies by itself. Why should we take him as an authority on logic when he couldn't even figure out something young children could?
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ccmnxcJanuary 2, 2023 at 8:00 PM
Just finished this book tonight. I think it would be generous to say I understood half of it. All the same, I'm glad to see Thomists engaging at a detailed and technical level the relationship between philosophy of nature and current physical theory.

One thing that was hit home for me is how pervasive microphysicalism is in our conceptualizing of physics and how this tendency bears some genuine responsibility for all the puzzles and seeming paradoxes quantum theory gives rise to.
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Walter Van den AckerJanuary 3, 2023 at 1:37 AM
"But as Koons points out, science itself is also undermined in either an atomist or a monist view. For there would also be nothing having the natures and purposes that we take our sense organs to have. Hence we would have no reason to believe that the world the senses present to us in any way corresponds to what is really out there—in which case, all the observational and experimental evidence on which science is based would be as illusory as everything else."

That seems a non-sequitur to me and it is based on a misunderstanding of what "illusory" means in this context. A chair, e.g., would be illusory in the sense that at its basic level, it has no real "chairness". Nevertheless, the particular constitution of whatever fundamental particles make up the "chair" does exist and that constitution makes it the case that you can sit on a chair but it wouldn't be a good idea to sit on a razour blade even though the blade is made up of the same particles as the chair.
The same goes for our sense organs. They are sense organs and not chairs because that's how their fundamental particles are organised.
The "form" is not an illusion in the sense that it doesn't exist at all, it is an illusion because it doesn't exist as a somehow semi-independent quality.

So, everyting is, in a sense, "really out there" and that includes our sense organs, which do have "natures and purpose" in the same way a chair has a nature and a purpose.

Whether something has matter and form because it was shaped for a purpose or simply by coincidence does not make a difference. A stone can be as sharp as a razour blade even though it was not sharpened on purpose.
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Gaëtan Cantale-MiègeJanuary 3, 2023 at 3:04 AM
Unfortunately, there is no Kindle version for this book, and I will have to wait it to be delivered with Amazon in Switzerland, hence my comments will be comments on (Feser’s) comment which is not the summit of the state of the art to discuss about this topic.
I think it is rather ingenuous to wish to establish hylomorphism as the right paradigm to interpret quantum mechanic without doing the effort to analyze the logical structures that support the Aristotelian, the Newtonian, and the Quantum mechanical world.
There has been a deep void in understanding the World from Illuminism to nowadays: (1) the deep misunderstanding of the nature of space and time on side, which became like a “box” where all bodies are contained, and which paradigm impedes very clever people to understand the meaning of physics at a reality layer; (2) the consequential shrinking of the Aristotelian/Thomistic logic into a poor subset, namely the Boolean logic, by avoiding to take into account the reality of the existence of things (medium term typically) to validate a reasoning; (3) the objective lack of understanding of what a form is, letting platonic idealism invade the field of scientific reflection (typical of the Descartes pretention to find the soul, which is the form of the human body, inside the pineal gland).
Hence there is no wonder that people do not actually understand that general and local theories of relativity are not the physics of a space-time universal box (i.e., how could the universe be a big block of space and time, while neutrinos and photons, in their own reference’s frame exist for zero second in an infinite space, while for each of us all what we experience and even think is in our physical past, etc. etc.); the symmetries that we find (which are actually the expression of the law of physics) are never perfectly realized in the nature (e.g., time cannot be reversed); or when reflecting on quantum mechanics the paradigmatic incapacity to understand that the form of a system, included its potentiality, is not an element of space and time and that it is impossible to decorrelate a potentiality from the objective possible ends of the considered quantum system.
The Newtonian world is an impoverished world which thinks essentially in terms of BArbArA, while science proceeds falsifying reasoning like BOcArdO, and while everyday people actually uses essentially a DArII logical structure, and Quantum Mechanic the similar DArAptI.
What defines univocally a form is the final cause of it, which is typical of the Quantum Approach of measurement: in contrast, reductionism, which is fine for engineering purposes, cannot pretend to define, per construction, the final cause, even though it allows to understand “the how” this last one is made "reachable", it cannot trigger per se that one.
The final cause is, at the end, what gives form to the form included the Quantum form within a world which is driven by Aristotelian logic and, all of that, without paradoxes.
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Paul D. Van PeltJanuary 3, 2023 at 3:59 PM
This is speculative, at best, IMHO. Working backwards, there are no paradoxes---only discrepancies we are unprepared to work out. Quantum mechanics contains some, and, as we see it, we cannot resolve them. There are matters of physics, and, matters of metaphysics. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas were not physicists, so far as I know. Neither were they, necessarily, metaphysicists---if that would have mattered. It puzzles me when writers try to correlate very old knowledge and application with newer information and experience. When did science an mathematics begin?

My mind goes to Copernicus and Galileo, followed by DesCartes and Newton. Clearly, these were not the only ones. In whatever case, I wish Mr. Koons well with his book. Everyone has their own album to do.
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Vincent TorleyJanuary 4, 2023 at 10:30 AM
Hi Ed,

In your review, you write: "According to hylomorphism, the parts of a material thing are less fundamental to it than the whole—and, indeed, exist in the whole only as potentially independent things rather than as actual entities in their own right."

However, in "Five Proofs of the Existence of God" (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), you write: "And a composite is less fundamental than its parts in the sense that its existence presupposes that its parts exist and are put together in the right way" (p. 70).

You can't have it both ways. If the parts of a thing are merely potential, relative to the whole, then they cannot be ACTUALLY put together in the right way, as they would have to be in order to compose a whole.

You also write in your review that "the larger universe is merely the sum of the ordinary middle-range objects that make it up—contrary to monism’s claim that the universe as one big lump is the only fundamental entity (with ordinary objects being mere modifications of it)." OK, so what are the ordinary middle-range objects that make up the universe? Is a galaxy an object? Is a star an object? What about a planet, an asteroid, a boulder, and a clump of earth? Do they or don't they have a substantial form of their own? If hylomorphism is true, then the answer cannot be "yes and no." It has to be one or the other, because a substantial form cannot be half-actual.

The metaphysics of common sense may tell us that particles are real and fundamental, but a physicist will tell you that particles are best viewed as excitations of fields. See here: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122570/what-is-more-fundamental-fields-or-particles

Contrary to what you claim, quantum mechanics offers no support for the Aristotelian hylomorphist’s view of nature. Aristotle did not view a thing's position and momentum as observer-dependent properties of that thing, which are merely potential until it interacts with a middle-sized object. For Aristotle, a thing's position is absolute, not relative. See this article: https://physics.bgsu.edu/p433/Spacetime5.html

I should point out that while it's easy for Koons to criticize this or that interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are about 15 mainstream interpretations, not to mention the minority interpretations. See the following table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics#Comparisons

How would Koons answer the questions in the table?

Finally, Catholic doctrine does not require us to suppose that humans and other living things are fundamental. What it says is that they are real, and that their reality cannot be reduced to that of their constituents. We don't need to adopt hylomorphism; we just need to reject reductionism. Cheers.

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Paul D. Van PeltJanuary 5, 2023 at 5:13 AM
Lots of lively participation---and contentiousness---on this blog. Were I Dr. Feser, I would be pleased. I have considered the critique of my last comment. I mentioned Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, claiming they were not physicists. I'll stand by that, unless philosophers and ecclesiastics are also physicists. I don't think so. On the metaphysical plane, spelling intentional, I suppose religion takes a seat. Insofar as metaphysics and religion both deal with matters that are not strictly evidentiary. Are religion and philosophy neighbors on the plane? It would seem so. They certainly are in university humanities departments, had you not noticed. And so, is religion philosophy? There is evidence of this. Belief, after Davidson, is a propositional attitude, and both religion and philosophy are propositional. Carry on.
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Vincent TorleyJanuary 5, 2023 at 7:39 AM
Hi ccmnxc and The Deuce,

For the record, I broke with the ID movement back in 2016, after concluding that its scientific claims didn't add up and that its mathematical arguments were invalid.

The Thomistic version of hylomorphism espoused by Koons (and by Ed) is quite radical. What it says is that a proton which is part of a human body isn't a proton: the constituent particles of ordinary objects are "only potentially rather than actually entities in their own right," as Ed succinctly puts it in his review. The claim being made here is not just that they're only potentially independent; rather, what Thomists claim is that they're only potentially entities. However, Albert the Great and Duns Scotus held a different view: namely, that the human body contains forms at multiple levels, which means that the particles comprising it are still particles.

A physicist will tell you that the protons in a human body are indistinguishable from free-floating protons, and that their properties undergo no change when that body dies. This indicates that they do not cease to be entities, when they're incorporated into a human body.

I might add that there is a fundamental dis-analogy between quantum indeterminacy and the Aristotelian notion of potency. According to Aristotle, while an object is only potentially F, it is not actually F. By contrast, with quantum indeterminacy, when some property of a particle (say, its spin) is not defined (say, "up-or-down", or "F-or-G"), we cannot say it is not actually F ("up"); all we can say is that it is not (actually) up-and-not-down (F-and-not-G) or down-and not-up (G-and-not-F).

The discovery of indefinite properties at the micro-level has no bearing on the question of whether we need to invoke the concept of potency to account for accidental or substantial change at the macro-level.

Finally, while I agree with Ed that radical atomism and radical holism pose a threat to Christianity, I would suggest that the antidote is not radical hylomorphism, but a more nuanced view, which recognizes that ordinary-level may be viewed as fundamental from one perspective, as aggregates from another perspective, and as modifications of a larger whole from yet another perspective.

I'd like to wish you and Ed (and Koons) a happy New Year.
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Rafael NobreJanuary 5, 2023 at 2:06 PM
Greetings from Brazil ! I have been an atheist and communist my whole youth and teen ages untill in 2017 i started to read conservatism and story of the church, cristianism etc (Olavo de Carvalho helped me a lot). Nowadays i reiceved many good reviews of your books, Mr Edward Feser. What book would you reccomend me to make me get rid once for all from this materialist thinking that is still left in my mind, i have been trying for so long to let my atheism go and dive deep into transcendency, thank you so much !
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AnonymousJanuary 5, 2023 at 7:18 PM
Rafael
You don't need to read a book to rid yourself of atheism and materialism. You need to pray.
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Paul D. Van PeltJanuary 7, 2023 at 1:59 PM
I looked back at the Koonsian title, a question on obsolescence. Seems to me that, sooner or later, everything/everyone becomes obsolete. This is not rocket science. Which is approximately, if not exactly, the point. It matters not to me how others cleave to the history of religion, philosophy or science. Those cleaveages (chuckle) are based on interest, preference and motive. If, and only if, this is a foundation of his thesis, it is tired rhetoric. Read Kenneth Burke if you care to know about rhetoric.

The ideas, manifestos, theses of many thinkers are obsolete. If science, as some claim, is in trouble; civilization is in triple trouble. Faith, as a practical influence, is worthless. Metaphysics is of little value.
A pity. It was an origin of science. Hmmph, said the camel...
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AnonymousJanuary 7, 2023 at 6:19 PM
from Prof. Feser's review: 'According to hylomorphism, the parts of a material thing are less fundamental to it than the whole—and, indeed, exist in the whole only as potentially independent things rather than as actual entities in their own right. For example, hydrogen and oxygen exist in water, but only as constituents of the water rather than as entities in their own right. They potentially have such independent existence (via electrolysis), but until that happens what actually exists is the water as a whole substance."

1. As I remember, in Aristotle, a part of a substance can itself be a substance. An eye is a substance; "pale" or whatever is said "of" the eye, i.e. the eye has accidents.

2. The four "elements" are archai, "first principles," according to De Generatione et Corruptione. But archai are causes. And ontologically prior to the four "elements" are the contraries, hot/cold, wet/dry. What is meant by saying, e.g., that the water and the wet/cold exists only potentially in, say, a frog, only to be made actual when the form-matter composite is granted an act of existence, if "water" and "wet/cold" are archai of the frog?
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ficino4mlJanuary 7, 2023 at 6:22 PM
I tried to comment but can't figure out what seems to be a new system. I'm too old to keep up with this blog, lol.
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Paul D. Van PeltJanuary 8, 2023 at 5:13 AM
Back a ways, (January 5) I remarked that I did not think much of either Aristotle or Aquinas as physicists. That drew criticism of course. I also commented on obsolescence, at one point. My remarks appear to have gotten some agreement from Stardust, who sounds well-read and a lucid thinker. Obsolescence is, at times, relative, at times tied with irrelevance. The thinkers referenced were not obsolete in their time(s). No one knew any better, or if they did, were not talking; or, if talking, were not being heard. If Albert Einstein had spoken with either figure, he would have both smiled and frowned at their explanations/exclamations. Other more recent thinkers likely would have reacted in like manner. Responsible people, IMHO, try harder to think better and do the best they can with what they have and know. That is all any of us can do.
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ficino4mlJanuary 8, 2023 at 6:28 AM
I posted the stuff above about GC. The standard view about elements in Aristotle is this:
". For Aristotle an element of something is the most basic constituent of that thing. It is indivisible into
things that are different in form, which is to say that it cannot be analysed into further constituents - or 'elements' - of its own. The elements of bodies, then, are the simplest constituents of bodies (Metaph. V.3, 10l4a26-34, De cáelo III. 3, 302al4-21). ... Aristotle analyses fire, air, water, and earth into more fundamental constituents. Consequently the latter - usually believed to be the primary
'qualities', the contraries hot and cold, dry and wet, and often also 'prime
matter' - are more deserving of the name στοιχεία, or 'elements'. These items - the contraries alone, or together with prime matter - are considered the true elements of bodies because together they compose fire, air, water, and earth... in his view, fire, air, water, and earth are not elements strictly speaking, because they reveal under analysis further, more fundamental, that is, more elemental, items." ~ Timothy J. Crowley, Phronesis 2008.

In the Meteorologica, Ari says that what we call fire is different from "real fire," which is an excess of heat. The problem I'm puzzling over - and not just now, though Prof. Feser's review recalled it - is what happens when, say, a hot thing is destroyed. "The hot" in it doesn't just poof out of actuality and revert to prime matter. Something hot is left over and is a constituent of a new thing. So it's a puzzle, how "the hot" would NOT be a constituent of either the prior or the subsequent heated substance.

This question recurs when we substitute protons and neutrons or whatever for "the hot/cold/wet/dry." For Aristotle, "an 'element', strictly speaking, is the primary material constituent into which bodies divide, or into which bodies can be analysed {Metaph. V.3, 10l4a31-34; De cáelo III.3, 302al4-19; cf.
Metaph. III.3, 998a22-b4; cf. Metaph. VII. 17, 104lb31: στοιχεῖον δ' εστίν εἰς ὃ διαιρεῖται ἐνυπάρχον ὡς ὕλη)" ~ Crowley.

One may say, we never have "the hot" just by itself apart from substances that are hot. On the other hand, "the hot" bridges across corruption and generation, so it's hard to see how it exists only potentially apart from either substance. It does work during the bridge, so it seems to persist in act. Lindsay Judson said in a colloquium that what persists from corruption to generation is just the hot's "extension." Unfortunately, I never got the chance to ask him to develop this thought afterwards.
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Paul D. Van PeltJanuary 8, 2023 at 3:49 PM
Some of the commenters to this post are pretty mired in the 'perfections' of physics in modern times. I understand that, I think. Insofar as claims regarding fusion energy; artificial intelligence; transhumanism and machine consciousness are not doing so well, one wonders what the protagonists have to crow about? This stupid machine I am using does not know the difference between 'crow' and 'grow'. Transhumanism got translated as 'grandbabies'. Really? Does anyone think AI can approach the nuances of human reason? In any coherent way. If there is no reliable means of teaching machinery human cognition, what good is it, beyond building automobiles or somethings else, on an assembly line? Well, yes. Economically speaking, an employer does not need to worry about health insurance, or retirement benefits. Trade offs go to capitalism---our bread and butter. When machines wear out, they are scrap. Fair enough.Everything blows up; breaks down; falls apart or wears out. Sellars quipped: philosophy is an attempt to see how things...hang together...Nagle said: reality is how things probably are; not how they might possibly be. Rorty said pragmatism has consequences. Yes, it does
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wrf3January 9, 2023 at 10:54 AM
In Feser's review at Public Discourse he states that the "common sense" view of QM is "basically right". Given that we know the failures of "common sense" views in math and physics, why should anyone take "common sense" as a reliable metric to the workings of the universe? Feynman, for example, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41Jc75tQcB0, says:
"We see things that are far from what we would guess. We see things that are very far from what we could have imagined and so our imagination is stretched to the utmost … just to comprehend the things that are there. [Nature behaves] in a way like nothing you have ever seen before. … But how can it be like that? Which really is a reflection of an uncontrolled but I say utterly vain desire to see it in terms of some analogy with something familiar… I think I can safely say that nobody understands Quantum Mechanics… Nobody knows how it can be like that."
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Paul D. Van PeltJanuary 9, 2023 at 1:43 PM
Well. Exactly.
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Screwtape JenkinsJanuary 9, 2023 at 2:31 PM
Would a relative layman in both hylomorphism and quantum mechanics be able to profit from this book? I've always been a big fan of Koons, but a lot of his stuff is a bit over my head.
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Paul D. Van PeltJanuary 9, 2023 at 3:22 PM
..."nature behaves in a way like nothing we have ever seen before...' Well of course it does. That is the fundamental point of what we call science. Richard Feynman was one of half a dozen geniuses of the twentieth century. Along with Turing, Russell and Oppenheimer. The amazing thing about geniuses is they know their limitations. I admire Dr. Feser for sticking to his convictions. I do not have to agree with them. I have asserted that metaphysics is a tool for thinking.. not an end within itself. I stand by that.
As someone dear to me has said:
Kirk, out.
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bmillerJanuary 10, 2023 at 11:47 AM
Given that we know the failures of "common sense" views in math and physics, why should anyone take "common sense" as a reliable metric to the workings of the universe?

Depends on what one means by "common sense" doesn't it? It's common sense that one's conclusions should not contradict one's premises nor one's method for reaching one's conclusions.

Take for instance the Copenhagen interpretation of QM. Nothing really exists until it is measured. But the measurement instrument/observer must already exist in order to measure anything... creating a vicious regress.

It's what happens when scientists are poor at philosophy.
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AnonymousJanuary 10, 2023 at 1:24 PM
Where does Heisenberg interpret QM as vindicating hylomorphism? I'd love to read that.
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AnonymousJanuary 10, 2023 at 7:29 PM
Some people here keep repeating things like that particles have the same properties, such as mass, whether or not they are bound.

They do not have the same mass. A particle dropped into an potential well emits energy as radiation as it falls into the well and that appears as a loss of mass, i.e. an electron bound within a human body has a lower mass than a (relatively) free electron outside the body.

The mass of a free electron is:

9.1093837015 × 10−31 kg (https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&client=ms-android-verizon&source=android-browser&q=mass+of+a+free+electron)

Of a free proton is:

1.67262 × 10−27 kg (https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&client=ms-android-verizon&source=android-browser&q=mass+of+a+free+proton)

Of a free hydrogen atom is:

1.67 × 10-27

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JOHN DIGREGORIOJanuary 13, 2023 at 8:17 AM
David Mermin wrote a great article in Physics Today back in 2009 and said this about quantum fields: "...When I was a graduate student learning quantum field theory, I had a friend who was enchanted by the revelation that quantum fields were the real stuff that makes up the world. He reified quantum fields. But I hope you will agree that you are not a continuous field of operators on an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. Nor, for that matter, is the page you are reading or the chair you are sitting in. Quantum fields are useful mathematical tools. They enable us to calculate things..." https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.3141952
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Paul D. Van PeltJanuary 13, 2023 at 1:07 PM
Kudos to the thinking of Mr.Digregorio and his diligence in parsing out what other thinkers and doers have thought and done. It reinforces my contention that physics is not philosophy, nor do their promises and distinctions rely upon one another. Nor did philosophy enable physics or the other way 'round. Which is, in any sense you wish to invent, or discount, cause for the separate realities of both. Ergo, ancients, who fumbled around with notions they did not understand, were not fully what they wanted to be.

To repeat myself, they just tried harder to think better, and so on...

Finally, I care little for the interests, preferences and motives driving most of this. None of them are on my agenda. No horse there. No dog, either.
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Paul D. Van PeltJanuary 14, 2023 at 5:16 AM
Thanks for the remarks from Bohr. I had forgotten about him.
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Rafael NobreJanuary 18, 2023 at 8:28 AM
@Cantus
@Tadeo
@Talmid
@ficino4ml

Guys i just received today notifications for your messages ! I will read them all !! Thank you so much for your attention
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Rafael NobreJanuary 18, 2023 at 8:30 AM
@Tadeo

I started reading the Last Superstition in portuguese, and youre right, It was intelligible untill they started talking about that universals subject. I just could'nt really understand that, and untill today that subject is confuse in my mind. Something about Ockhams nominals i guess. I understood that an important step is to understand deeply this universals idea, and i guess transcendency will seem more logical to me.
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ficino4mlJanuary 21, 2023 at 7:06 PM
As an old gerund grinder, I have no clue about Newtonian physics (I peeled rubber getting a B in college), let alone quantum mechanics. On this thread, I see Thomist A telling Skeptic B, you simply fail to understand P and Q. And then Skeptic B replies, no, you simply fail to understand P and Q.

This is where disputes on here tend to end up. "You simply fail to understand Aquinas..."

Meanwhile, in real life, millions of petitionary prayers go unanswered -- unless you're fine with the answer being, No. "Help me escape this predator." Nope, no escape, because the no escape was the gracious will of the First Unmoved Mover. No moving any agent to stop the predation because that just how the First Unmoved Mover rolls.

What story will shut me up? "You simply fail to understand Aquinas"? "You just want to sin"? Something else?

I have learned much from Prof. Feser's works and from this blog. The place where many discussions end is not a place of certitude, despite what is often claimed.

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Gaëtan Cantale-MiègeJanuary 22, 2023 at 4:30 AM
I would like to gently point out that space and time do not have inherent existence, but rather are epiphenomena or, more accurately, are literary devices within the framework of scientific discourse. Motion is only a displacement "in space and time" as a linguistic construct; motion is simply the change in state of any entity. If an entity does not undergo a change in state, nothing occurs and there is no "flowing time" for it. Time is only a numbering of different changes in state, just as space is only the enumeration of the extension of a body.
Therefore, when Aristotle states that a mobile does not move as long as its state changes, he is correct. Without a cause, it does not change state and does not move. His physics states something fundamental with respect to the symmetries observed in physics, the first being that of Galileo's group, which states exactly this and that is that the laws of physics at rest or in constant motion (i.e., when the entity does not change state even if the observer is at rest or in motion with respect to it) are the same; not only that, but this is also consistent with the Lorentz group, and that is, if an entity is constantly accelerated in a gravitational field and, therefore does not change state while always remaining equally accelerated, here too the laws of physics do not change for it. That is, Aristotle's approach is perfectly compatible with both Newtonian and Einsteinian-style physics. And certainly compatible with a physics that would claim that the tearing, understood as the first derivative of acceleration, that it undergoes is always constant.
Aristotle's argument thus concerns physical reflection on symmetries as such (and which are, in fact, the laws of physics) and retains, certainly, a certain relevance.
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Gaëtan Cantale-MiègeJanuary 26, 2023 at 2:46 AM
In the realm of philosophy, it is crucial to examine the notion of contextuality in quantum mechanics and its corresponding Kochen-Specker Theorem, which carries the same weight as Bell's Inequalities. These concepts challenge traditional notions of determinism and can be more effectively understood within the framework of algebraic topology, as opposed to deterministic philosophical frameworks where they may appear as paradoxical. In reality, they serve to disprove deterministic approaches and force a reevaluation of our understanding of reality. which is totally compatible with A-T.
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Gaëtan Cantale-MiègeJanuary 27, 2023 at 2:48 AM
(1) It is not the case that the two particles are in the correct bottom-up configuration from the start, and that our ignorance about this configuration is solely due to the fact that we have not yet performed the necessary measurements (this is the perspective of Newtonian deterministic physics). (2) In quantum mechanics, once produced, the two particles do not have an objectively defined "actual" configuration, but rather possess the objective "potentiality" to express one of the two possible configurations when measured. An apparent paradox arises only if we try to consider the two particles as being independent from each other after their production, because, in this case, once we measure the state of one of them, due to Einsteinian Relativity, there is no way that the result obtained by the measurement apparatus becomes instantly known by the other one which is now at a certain distance so that also this one can change its potential quantic state into a value which would be coherent with the one expressed by the particle measured first. (3) The apparent paradox comes from wanting to apply Newtonian categories, like determinism, to a Reality which, like in Aristotelian physics, does not need them in order to be fully operational. E.g., wanting to conceive the production of these particles as being the one of two actual particles is a gratuitous claim which comes from nowhere but is only supported by a too narrow Newtonian paradigm. (4) Instead of that, if you accept what is called non-locality and contextuality (exactly like we do accept it for the notion of potentiality in Aristotelian physics) then there is no paradox at all and entanglement becomes something ordinary we all experience everyday (I gave somewhere else the example of measuring the "breakability", which is a potentiality, of a bridge, "breakability" which is non-local and very much contextual and when that measurement happens, by breaking or not said bridge, this involves immediately the whole bridge independently from its length and the distance between its two opposite entrances)
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bmillerJanuary 27, 2023 at 12:15 PM
Gaëtan Cantale-Miège,

I understand QM doesn't contradict Aristotle and I understand the QM description of what happens to entangled particles before measurement.

It seems to me from the description I've given above, that QM and classical agree that momentum is conserved among the 2 particles and that once one is measured we know the value of the other. There doesn't have to be any information transmitted between detectors in either case just the knowledge that the 2 particles were entangled to begin with and the ability to use the process of elimination.

Why would a classicist think that information would need to be transmitted faster than the speed of light? The instant he measures the spin of one, he knows the spin of the other without any time lapse.

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bmillerJanuary 28, 2023 at 11:51 AM
Gaëtan Cantale-Miège,

I understand that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle rules out precise measurements of both momentum and position at the same time. But this does not seem to be relevant to an observer measuring only the spin of one of a pair of entangled particles and by so doing knowing the spin of the other.

The classicist could claim that since we know that the particles can only have 1 of 2 spin states and since they are entangled, the pair will have opposite spin states (due to conservation of momentum) during their trajectories to the detectors but we won't know which is up and which is down till at least one is detected and then the state of the other is known. The classicist makes the same accurate conclusion from the measurement results from one detector as the QM theorist. Neither requires superluminal information transfer so there is no paradox in either case.

Again. Where is the paradox supposed to be here?

The only disagreement is about what is really happening until the first measurement. But really finding out would require a measurement before the detector and that makes the disagreement unresolvable in principle.

Maybe I have a misunderstanding of the entire entanglement story. Let me lay out my understanding point by point and talk about some issues I see.
1) Entangled particle pairs differ from non-entangled particle pairs in that when measuring non-entangled particles there is no correlation between their 2 possible spin states while there is a correlation between the 2 possible spin states of entangled particle pairs. The correlation of entangled particle pairs is complementary in that if one is measured as up, the other is always measured as down (as in pi-meson decay)

2) In the case of pi-meson decay, each particle must have complementary spin to preserve conservation of momentum.

3) Experimentally we always observe that entangled particles behave this way.

It seems to me that if some new experiments come up with different results, we have to conclude at least one of several things.

A. Something is wrong with the experiment:
The particles weren't entangled in the first place.
The measurement devices were not set properly or were incapable of measuring accurately.
Something unknown interfered with the experiment.
There was an error in math when interpreting the results.

B: Our theory is wrong
We don't understand how entanglement works and so cannot reliably entangle pairs.
We don't understand how our measurement devices work.
Conservation of momentum is wrong.

I think it's a bigger story if QM does away with conservation of momentum.
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