“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, August 7, 2011

Quantum Anxieties: Realist Magic Sneak Preview

This is from the intro:

Any attempt to reduce the dialetheic properties of objects—they are both themselves and not-themselves at one and the same time—is doomed to failure. These attempts to smooth out the terrain of things are rife in metaphysics: objects are made of atoms; or they are substances decorated with accidents; or they are components of a machine; or they are instantiations of a process; and so on. Such smoothing-out also occurs in physics. Nonlocality, for instance, and quantum coherence (the way particles seem to be blurred into one another or occupying several places at once) seem to refute the law of noncontradiction at a basic level of material reality. So theories such as the many worlds explanation get rid of the inconsistency. The trouble is, such theories maintain noncontradiction at the cost of a potentially infinite number of parallel universes that open up to accommodate the inconsistent positions of a quantum. It's a bit like sweeping dust under the rug. It doesn't really go anywhere.

2 comments:

Petrus said...

Well, as long as I can still live "anywhere"... I don't even mind if someone comes and pulls the rug out from under...

khadimir said...

Do you view process metaphysics as claiming that things are the "instantiations of process" or was the comment unrelated? If so, why?