Welcome friends!
I thought I’d take a little break this week from my seemingly endless fascination with the moral and intellectual train wreck of contemporary American conservatism as expressed by President Trump and the Republican Party and instead return to a more general sort of subject I discussed in some of my earlier posts: the problems that can result from failing to distinguish ideas about reality from reality itself. In some of my earlier posts I lambasted religious and economic conservatives for confusing their simplistic stories of the world with the real world or let’s just say the world we perceive ourselves to inhabit. However, I was watching TV the other day and it occurred to me I may have been doing something rather similar myself. Don’t you hate it when that happens? So easy to perceive problems in the context of what other people are saying or doing but tricky sometimes to perceive the same problems in the context of one’s own activity. Let’s take a quick look at that this week.
The television program I was watching when I made my small discovery was a short documentary on Albert Einstein on the long-running and always or at least often fascinating science program Nova. I must admit I’ve never spent an excessive amount of time studying or thinking about physics and I’ve long been prone to a certain amount of confusion when thinking about Mr. Einstein’s contributions relating to relativity and space time and that sort of thing. Well, it finally occurred to me much of my confusion might be related to the very old and very traditional philosophical problem of equivocation, that is, using the same word to think about different concepts and more specifically in this instance failing to distinguish abstract and arbitrarily defined words and ideas from statements about the real world of the senses and observations using those same words and ideas but in very specific senses. Like religious folk and economic conservatives who end up thinking they’re discussing the real world when what they’re really discussing is a very pretty and perfectly logical world of their own creation that exists only in their own heads I was switching back and forth between abstract concepts and particular concrete expressions of those abstract concepts in the observable world with results any reasonable person might expect from such an exercise.
Let’s have a couple of examples. One segment of the program dealt with one of Einstein’s initial thought experiments involving the notion of “simultaneity.” Imagine someone standing on a train platform. Two lightning bolts hit an equal distance to either side of him so the light waves arrive at his location at the same time. This fellow would perceive the two events as “simultaneous.” Now imagine a lady zipping through the same train station on a train let’s say is traveling quite fast and indeed near the speed of light to make the effect more obvious. Based on her position relative to the lightning bolts and the time it takes the light waves from the two events to reach her she would conclude they were not simultaneous. The conclusion is that the judgment of whether any two observable events are simultaneous is relative to the observer. This seems simple enough but one can get rather a headache if one imagines we’re talking about the concept of simultaneity rather then the expression of the concept of simultaneity in terms of statements about observable events like lightning bolts. If one does a thought experiment in which one imagines the two people involved are omniscient and aware of events as soon as they take place without having to observe anything in particular then light waves and positions and speeds and so on become irrelevant and both the postulated individuals would have little difficulty agreeing on whether the events were simultaneous or not. The concept of simultaneity is not inherently relative but the expression of the concept of simultaneity in terms of observing events in the real world is necessarily relativistic due to the role light plays in observing events and judging their simultaneity. To keep things simple one has to be clear what one is talking about.
Another example involves this issue of time not being a constant. Consider the case of “gravitational time dilation.” Turns out you can prove the existence of this phenomenon quite easily with two atomic clocks and a mountain. Well, I suppose theoretically it could be any clock but precise atomic clocks come in pretty handy unless one is talking about one heck of a mountain. If one starts at ground level with two clocks perfectly synchronized then drives one of the clocks up the requisite mountain and back down again one will find the clocks are no longer perfectly synchronized. The one that was up the mountain will be a few nanoseconds ahead of the one that stayed at ground level. Why? Because everything slows down the nearer they are to massive objects. And when I say everything I mean everything. Well, not the speed of light. That’s a constant. Always something isn’t there? Anyway I’m talking about everything else so things like clocks including the aforementioned atomic clocks, biological functions like cells aging and neurons in one’s brain firing, all that stuff. This is just a physical law of nature that would appear as familiar and unremarkable to us as the observation that thrown objects fall back toward the Earth were we in the habit of zipping back and forth at great distances from massive objects so we could observe the effect on a regular basis. It only seems odd because we live our lives more or less the same distance from our nearest massive object, the Earth, so we never really notice it. This simple concept can really throw one for a loop if one fails to appreciate that by “time” in this context we’re talking not about the concept of time but the expression of the concept of time in terms of observable events like clocks ticking and people aging and so on. We can of course imagine in our minds a sort of “time” that does not have this feature and is indeed a constant. Imagine we were magical incorporeal creatures who could instantaneously check the time of any event against some giant clock in the sky. I suppose in that case we’d all have the same time and we’d say something like clocks including atomic clocks don’t always measure “time” accurately and corporeal creatures don’t always age at a constant rate of “time” and so on. Again, my point is that one has to be clear in one’s own mind about whether one is talking about the concept of time, which can be anything one likes really, or the expression of the concept of time in terms of observable real world phenomena constrained by the laws of physics such as readouts on atomic clocks and people aging and so on. Two different or potentially different things. Don’t want to get them twisted or jump back and forth between the two.
Now I’m thinking about it I suppose the potential for just this sort of equivocation was probably what led philosophers working in the old mid-twentieth century school of logical positivism to their radical notion that concepts not operationalized in terms of real world observable phenomena are “nonsense.” Well, that’s one way of dealing with it I suppose but of course I would argue that proposition is itself nonsense. One can speak meaningfully about concepts and ideas without caring one whit about how they might be expressed in this world or any other or indeed whether they ever could be so expressed. Seems to me a prime example of what they call throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
So what’s the point? Well, I suppose just that when it comes to unintentionally substituting stories about the world for the world there’s a lot of it about and it’s not just religious folk and people fascinated by neoclassical economic theory who can end up forgetting sometimes which road they’re on. It’s a useful bit of knowledge in my opinion. Once one appreciates how easy it is to get muddled in this very common way one is in a much better position to help other people, such as religious and economic conservatives, emerge from their own pervasive fog of confusion and start talking reasonably again.
