From: mitsu@nic.cerf.net (Mitsuharu Hadeishi)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Report on Philosophies of Physicists
Date: 3 Sep 92 23:11:36 GMT
Organization: CERFnet

kim@Lise.Unit.NO (Kim Gunnar St|vring yhus) writes:
>In article <2697@news.cerf.net>, mitsu@nic.cerf.net (Mitsuharu Hadeishi) writes:
>>barry@arnold.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) writes:
>>>>...
>>>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,
>
>(in other words, you don't know the answer.)

	Well, yes, but then, who does?  :-)

>. . . . .
>The point of an explanation is NOT to be precise, but to make the
>listener understand as much as possible.

	Agreed.  However, the question being asked is a very
subtle question, with many potential areas for misunderstanding,
confusion, and so forth, and I have to insist that it is impossible
to discuss the issues directly until the reader has become at
least somewhat familiar with the various modes of thought involved.
What is "obvious" to me is not necessarily obvious to you, and
this type of question hinges precisely on the meanings of
words and concepts which are generally thought to be "obvious".
As my freshman advanced calculus professor once told us,
"never underestimate the trivial."

	Believe me, I have tried to address these issues using
brief discussions before, and I could do so now if I wanted to, but in
my experience I have had very little success communicating the
basic ideas to someone who has not already tried to think about
these issues in depth.  Although the basic concepts seem rather
simple and "obvious", I have found that when attempting
to discuss them with people who have not done any serious
work in philosophy (Western or Eastern), I cannot seem to make
myself understood clearly.  I believe the reason is simply that there
are so many ambiguities in the English language (or any language)
that for every sentence I write, there are ten or twenty hidden
assumptions, and if you do not carefully elucidate every single
one of those assumptions, major misunderstandings arise.
Therefore to even give a "simple" explanation requires pages
and pages of supporting discussion, something I'm not really
prepared to do in a forum such as this.  There are many
existing texts which address these matters (and are,
unfortunately, either extremely technical in nature or are
rather vague---the vagueness is an attempt to motivate
understanding rather than explain.)

	If you want an introduction to the kinds of issues
I am talking about from a Western perspective, I would refer
you to Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_, which
does get into some of the basic questions in some depth,
though it is with a very different style than the Eastern
philosophers tend to take.  I warn you, however, that
his work is extremely subtle and difficult to understand
readily, and if you are not prepared to make a signficant
effort to understand it, I suggest you not bother trying.

	In sum, the problems are so subtle and so filled
with the potential for misunderstanding that I have long since
given up on trying to explain them in brief.  The only answer
that makes any sense is that one must look into the questions
yourself and read some existing texts that go into these
problems in much greater detail.  There is no "simple"
explanation of these issues that can really elucidate
even the barest outlines of the truth; in fact, any such
attempt I have found inevitably mires itself in irrelevances
due to the ambiguities and subtleties of the issues being
discussed.

>You seem to think that the unclearness of eastern philosophies
>mirrors the spread-out wavefunction in QM. This is wrong, since
>it is possible to build boolean algebra with QM models, and build
>QM models with booelan algebra. F.ex. a computer calculating the
>wave function, build with transistors developed with QM.

	No, this is not what I am saying.  What I am saying is
that the interpretation of quantum mechanics raises many subtle
philosophical issues which force you to consider these issues
much more carefully than has been the case with previous
physical theories.  In Newtonian mechanics, for example, the
simplistic epistemologies of most Western philosophical schools
sufficed---one might argue that it is precisely the simplicity
of the epistemological approximations being made that allowed
the West to develop these areas to such a great extent.

>barry@arnold.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman):
>That sounds good on paper. However, I must then ask: given their
>conceptual headstart, why was QM developed in the west, not the east?
>
>Perhaps the very same philosophical precepts that you  say
>'favor' the eastern mind also discourage them from devolping
>detailed scientific theories of nature.

	Yes, this is correct.  The more sophisticated epistemology
has had all sorts of complicated side effects, one of them being
that the development of analytical science was significantly retarded
in the East.  Analytical science has been very succesful in areas such
as physics and chemistry in which the Boolean approximation is
relatively accurate.  However, development of psychological, mental,
and similar disciplines was signficantly enhanced by the more
sophisticated epistemology, and this is where most of the "best
and the brightest" of the East spent their energies, and the Boolean
approximation works very poorly in these areas (so the West
by comparison is relatively backward in this respect).  (Behaviorism,
for example, is a laughably simplistic cognitive model which also
does not work very well.  Eastern approaches to mental health are in
general much more sophisticated and succesful than traditional
Western approaches, although many modern Western approaches,
such as Jungian psychology and other subsequent approaches,
have borrowed from the East, and are correpondingly more effective
as a result.)

Mitsu