From: mitsu@nic.cerf.net (Mitsuharu Hadeishi)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Report on Philosophies of Physicists
Date: 3 Sep 92 09:20:52 GMT
Organization: CERFnet


In article <1992Sep3.040350.23169@math.ucla.edu> barry@arnold.math.ucla.edu
(Barry Merriman) writes:
>In article <2634@news.cerf.net> mitsu@nic.cerf.net (Mitsuharu Hadeishi) writes:
>>  The standard Western boolean logic is
>> clearly an approximation; not even a very good one in many cases.
>> Because Eastern philosophy subsumes "ordinary" logic as a subset,
>> it happens to be quite adequate to deal with both classical and
>> quantum physics.
>> 
>> Mitsu
>
>The above is all at the most metaphorical level. Is there any situation
>in the experience of the Eastern philosophers in which boolean logic 
>was strictly violated? (I.e. a situation precise enough to be
>cast into predicate logic, in which the logical operators did
>not work properly). I think not. Therefore we conclude they were
>either very interested in non-logical modes of thought, or they
>incorrectly understood what boolean logic was (quite likely).

        It is very difficult to answer your question briefly,
since to fully answer it would require that you have studied a great
deal of Eastern philosophy.  The relevant questions lie along
the lines of "what does it mean to make a statement about something?",
"what is the relationship between a model and the thing modelled?",
"what is the nature of the subject-object relationship?", and so forth.
These are questions of basic epistemology, in which the Eastern
schools of philosophy make very different basic assumptions about
how one goes about understanding these issues than are made in
Western logical positivist schools, particularly those that use
Boolean logic as their basis.

        However, again, for me to really get into these issues
would require a lot of careful study on your part, otherwise we
would both be wasting our time.  It would be like a physicist trying
to explain the equivalence of the Heisenberg matrix and Shrodinger
wave formulations of quantum mechanics to someone who does not
know elementary algebra much less calculus or any other form of
higher mathematics.

>What this has to do with QM is not clear to me.

        The basic issues of epistemology, etc., that are raised
by most of the Eastern schools of philosophy and answered very
differently from most logical positivist Western schools are exactly
the kinds of issues raised by QM, particularly when you consider
the measurement problem.  That is to say, if you've already gone
into these issues in the context of Eastern philosophy, you will have
a head start in trying to understand the philosophical problems
associated with quantum measurement.  The basic reality is that most of
maintstream Western philosophy has gone into much less depth into these
issues than have most of the Eastern schools, to be blunt about it.
That is, in this matter, Eastern philosophy is generally much more
sophisticated (as a whole) than the Western schools in this area,
and QM happens to be subtle enough that the standard simplistic
epistemological assumptions made by most Western schools of thought
are not fully up to dealing with these matters.

Mitsu

Newsgroups: sci.physics