Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Tuesday, 4 September 2018

You can't quantify everything

My take on whether everything is measurable, the relation between physical and the non-physical, a rant about "what's it all about when you get right down to it", a fifty tonne meerkat, a bunch of sharks, and why I find the common sense view more appealing that contrived philosophies.

We have an equation - an actual honest-to-God equation, not some namby-pamby wishy-washy handwaving philosophy discussion - showing to us that there are things we can't measure. And I, for one, think that's rather neat.

Some properties are innate, others are relational. While every property arguably does have relations to every other, they aren't all intrinsically relational. But true completeness can never be measured. It's neither physical nor relational : it's conceptual. And conceptual properties, despite being very useful scientifically, can have disturbingly un-scientific aspects... consider more subjective concepts like justice, or guilt, or yellow. Can you quantify them ? Can you put a number of how fair an action is ? Guilt's an especially nice one. If someone was discovered to have aided a criminal, the original criminal's guilt clearly isn't diminished, not even as a fraction of the total guilt, because they obviously wouldn't have diminished responsibility because they had assistance. Guilt isn't like mass or energy, which are conserved - you can't even quantify it at all.

Are conceptual concepts real ? Clearly yes, but they're non-physical. Which means that reality is more than physicality. It does seem, though, as though hard science, mathematics, and subjective philosophy all suggest that we simply cannot describe the entirety of the Universe by noting which atoms are currently bashing into each other at any particular moment. Something much more interesting appears to be going on.

These are non-physical, immeasurable things, apparently having a profound effect on reality ! Does this mean there are some things we'll never be able to understand rationally, or simulate ? Is idealism correct after all ? Is the boundary between physical, objective reality and subjective thought more blurred than we might like ?

This Equation Shows You Can't Quantify Everything

Yeah, I used a clickbaity headline. So sue me. Recently I went on an extensive rant about the fundamental assumptions of science. One of them, I said, was that things subject to scientific analysis have to be measurable. And that's basically true, I think... but there are interesting subtleties which are worth exploring.

4 comments:

  1. Hey! Science does not assume things must be measurable. Science requires that science is measurable without making any claims that science alone would define reality.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I would say it assumes that anything that can be studied scientifically must be measurable. Anything that can't be measured is (as I've been saying for bloomin' ages) not necessarily wrong, but beyond the remit of science. It's only scientism (which I despise) that would make the claim that everything must be measurable.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Exactly Rhys Taylor .

    In other words, science does not claim that reality would be constrained to what has been or can be defined or studied in scientific terms. The limits to what can be described are practical, cost-based, not magical or anything. Living beings exercising science have physically limited capacity and are therefore unable to produce an exhaustive description of reality.

    Nature's complexity is kind of magical, if you allow the metaphor, in that it is so great that it can never be grasped fully -- even if we can reasonably well for our practical intents and purposes.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Indeed Sakari Maaranen. You don't need quantum weirdness to constrain what can be known. Practical limitations are every bit as important as physical ones : limited knowledge doesn't undermine or devalue science which can be done, it just means you can't analyse everything scientifically. That in turn does not imply the existence of mystical woo (though I would even be prepared to entertain the possibility).

    I suppose an even more trivial example would be the past. Even in a deterministic universe there'd be know way to monitor everything with sufficient accuracy to infer everything that happened in the entire history of the universe, but that doesn't mean that anything magical was going on before records began.

    What I'm particularly trying to drive at is that there's no need to do away with non-physical notions in order to save the scientific method. The common sense view that these things clearly do exist (in some sense) and are influential works just fine despite being poorly understood by science, and doesn't open the door to invoking magical pixies etc. as some people seem to think.

    ReplyDelete

Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.

Review : Pagan Britain

Having read a good chunk of the original stories, I turn away slightly from mythological themes and back to something more academical : the ...