[Martin Taylor 2010.04.10.23.24]
[Shannon Williams 2010.04.10.1300]
OK. Martin, Bruce, et al. If you want to argue that there is nothing
more to be understood about 2-slit experiment, and that 100 years from
now the people will not know more about how to perceive any aspect of
the experiment, then fine.
I don't know where you got the idea that I would argue that, but I can assure you that I don't believe it at all (at least I don't believe it if you allow a more flexible limit than 100 years, remembering that Einstein's view of gravity didn't supersede Newton's until a much longer time had passed). One of my main mantras as a scientist is that all theories will eventually be discarded, modified or seriously refined, and that everything we now believe will at some point not be believed by anyone but weirdos. What we have at the moment is only a best guess at the environmental affordances "out there" that allow us to control many of our perceptions pretty well.
Surely there exists some physical
phenomenon isolated by some experiment which still baffles theorists.
Many, many!! I think just about any physicist will agree that although Einstein's relativity and Quantum Electrodynamics are the two theories that most precisely describe the observable universe in their appropriate domains, yet they are incompatible. There's an awful lot of effort going into finding a new way of perceiving (i.e. a new theory) that would cover both domains at once. Then, more prosaically, what is dark matter? We know it exists only from its localized gravitational effects in warping space-time around galaxies and galactic clusters. Less prosaically, is "dark energy" just a fudge factor to explain quite a few cosmic observations, or is Einstein's general relativity approach to gravity not quite right, or did the laws of physics change over the life of the Universe? The concept of a neutrino was a fudge factor to explain energy missing from nuclear events in order to retain the Law of Conservation of Energy, until people managed to build enormous neutrino detectors. For quite a few decades, a positron was only an idea needed to fill a symmetry hole in an otherwise effective theory, but now we use them for medical imaging. Are there parallel universes that "bleed" gravity from the observable one, and is this why the gravitational force is so many orders of magnitude weaker than the other three? Is there a "fifth force"? I could go on, but I think you may get the idea that your suggestion is right on the mark!
(Or for that matter, how does gravity operate from a distance?)
Einstein says it doesn't. What you observe at a human scale as a force operating at a distance can be viewed instead as a mass-defining distortion of space-time, within which objects acting only under gravity move along geodesics. But, as I mentioned above, General Relativity is going to have to be subsumed or superseded some time in the future, so maybe Einstein is wrong and gravity does operate at a distance.
The
point is that someday, future theorists will no longer be baffled.
They will run the experiment and get the exact same results, but they
will have different references.
There's that misuse of the word "reference" again. You mean (or I think you ought to mean) they will have developed different perceptual functions so that they see the experimental situation differently than we do.
The question is: how does the
theorist identify the blocking references?
What is a "blocking reference"?
For example, if you have a
reference that prevents temperature from rising above 100 degrees,
you will never know what you feel like at 101 degrees.
Making this statement more explicit, and assuming you are using "reference" as it is used in PCT, if you have a reference for not perceiving a temperature over 100 degrees (boiling water temperature in most of the world), you will act so that you are not exposed to such temperatures, either by moving out of the hot place, or by installing air-conditioning, or some such action. As you say, by doing so, you will not know what it feels like at 101 degrees. But how is this relevant to the argument about how ways of perceiving the world change over time, as they do, and not only for scientists?
If you have a
reference that prevents you from being silent in the presence of
another person, you will never know what it is like to see another
person in contemplation.
True. You will act so as to perceive yourself as not being silent in the presence of another person, and if that inevitably prevents all other people from being in a contemplative state, you will indeed never perceive a contemplative person.
If you have a reference that prevents X, you
will never be able to see that gravity is not working from a distance.
Put that way, I think you must be asking how someone would design an experiment that would test whether gravity works at a distance or not.
I think the problem is elsewhere. It's not in our intentions for the values we want for different perceptions (our references), but in the structures that create those perceptions -- our perceptual input functions and their interconnections. We need to be able to perceive things we could not perceive beforehand. When you have a pre-existing network of any kind, in which the strength and stability of the network depends on the linkages among its elements, it is hard to introduce novel structures without damaging some existing structures. You have to break down old ways of seeing things in order to see them in new ways, and some of the new ways are very hard. It's part of the problem that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. The old dog may not be able to create the perceptual structures that would have to be controlled in order for the trick to be performed, whereas the young dog has never built structured with which the needed perceptions woul conflict.
It's very hard to see atomic-scale entities, so, having no evidence to the contrary, we tend to imagine them as functioning in the way macro-scale objects do. But we have no justification for that kind of imagining, and since 1905, and more particularly since the mid 1920's, we have all sorts of evidence that this kind of imagining is wrong. Atomic-scale entities simply do not behave the way macro-scale objects do, even though the behaviour of macro-scale entities is the collective behaviour of myriads of atomic-scale entities. That's why quantum effects are sometimes called "weird" or "spooky". They shouldn't be. It's the arrogance of imagining that what we can't see must behave the same way as what we can see that should be called "weird" or "spooky".
How do we isolate these references?
Or rather, I would say: "What ways of perceiving must we discard in order to perceive more accurately?" Which, in PCT terms, means "what ways of perceiving must we discard in order that we can control more perceptions more precisely when the need arises?" I don't think there is any principled answer to this question. It's one reason why Bill thinks of e-coli type reorganization as necessary.
Martin
