Various esoteric traditions apply different modes of expression for the same metaphysical truths. We may name the two most known esoteric languages as ecstatic and scholastic. Early Daoist use of reverse symbolism as for metaphysical truths and its critical way of viewing formalist understanding of traditional teachings, common virtues and popular beliefs show that it applies an ecstatic language, which, being called shaṭḥ in Sufi terminology, has a detailed literature and technical description in Sufism. This article tries, after a short (...) survey of the concept of shaṭḥ in Sufism, to consider some early Daoist teachings such as wuwei, disparagement of moralism, and disparagement of rationality from an Eastern Sufi point of view regarding shaṭḥ to achieve a clearer insight into the gnostic aspects of the tradition, and to avoid certain possible misunderstanding of the teachings. (shrink)

This is a preliminary version of an article to appear in the forthcoming Ashgate Companion to the New Philosophy of Physics.In it, I aim to review, in a way accessible to foundationally interested physicists as well as physics-informed philosophers, just where we have got to in the quest for a solution to the measurement problem. I don't advocate any particular approach to the measurement problem (not here, at any rate!) but I do focus on the importance of decoherence theory to (...) modern attempts to solve the measurement problem, and I am fairly sharply critical of some aspects of the "traditional" formulation of the problem. (shrink)

Tian Yu Cao has written a serious and scholarly book covering a great deal of physics. He ranges from classical relativity theory, both special and general, to relativistic quantum …eld theory, including non-Abelian gauge theory, renormalization theory, and symmetry-breaking, presenting a detailed and very rich picture of the mainstream developments in quantum physics; a remarkable feat. It has, moreover, a philosophical message: according to Cao, the development of these theories is inconsistent with a Kuhnian view of theory change, and supports (...) better a quali…ed realism. (shrink)

Extensionalism, as I understand it here, is the view that physical reality consists exclusively of extensional entities. On this view, intensional entitities must either be eliminated in favor of an ontology of extensional entities, or be reduced to such an ontology, or otherwise be admitted as non-physical. In this paper I argue that extensionalism is a misguided philosophical doctrine. First, I argue that intensional phenomena are not confined to the realm of language and thought. Rather, the ontology of such phenomena (...) is intimately entwined with the ontology of properties. After providing some evidence to the popularity of extensionalism in contemporary analytic philosophy, I investigate the motivating reasons behind it. Considering several explanations, I argue that the main motivating reason is rooted in the identification of matter with extension, an identification which is one of the hallmarks of the mechanistic conception of nature inherited from the founding fathers of our modern scientific outlook. I then argue that such a conception is not only at odds with a robust ontology of properties but is also at odds with our best contemporary physics. Rather than vindicating extensionalism contemporary science undermines the position, and the lesson to be drawn from this surprising fact is that extensionalism needs no longer be espoused as a regulative ideal of naturalistic philosophy. I conclude by showing that the ontological approach to intensional phenomena advocated throughout the paper also gains support from an examination of the historical context within which ‘intension’ was first introduced as a semantic notion. (shrink)

A final version of this paper is in press as: Bickhard, M. H.. The Dynamic Emergence of Representation. In H. Clapin, P. Staines, P. Slezak Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation. Praeger.

This is a systematic review of the concept of indistinguishability, in both classical and quantum mechanics, with particular attention to Gibbs paradox. Section 1 is on the Gibbs paradox; section 2 is a defense of classical indistinguishability, notwithstanding the widely-held view, that classical particles can always be distinguished by their trajectories. The last section is about the notion of object more generally, and on whether indistinguishables should be thought of as objects at all.

Cao makes two claims of particular philosophical interest, in his book "The Conceptual Development of 20th Century Field Theories". (i) The history of these developments refutes Kuhn's relativistic epistemology, and (tacitly) (2) the question of realism in quantum field theory can be addressed independent of one's views on the probem of measurement. I argue that Cao is right on the first score, although for reasons different from the ones he cites, but wrong on the second. In support of the first (...) of these claims, I review in detail the correspondence between the treatment of critical phenomena in condensed matter physics, and of scaling in the renormalization group of RQFT. (shrink)

The cosmological relevance of emptiness—that is, space without bodies—is not yet sufficiently appreciated in natural philosophy. This paper addresses two aspects of cosmic emptiness from the perspective of natural philosophy: the distances to the stars in the closer cosmic environment and the expansion of space as a result of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Both aspects will be discussed from both a historical and a systematic perspective. Emptiness can be interpreted as “coming” in a two-fold sense: whereas in the (...) past, knowledge of emptiness, as it were, came to human beings, in the future, it is coming, insofar as its relevance in the cosmos will increase. The longer and more closely emptiness was studied since the beginning of modernity, the larger became the spaces over which it was found to extend. From a systematic perspective, I will show with regard to the closer cosmic environment that the Earth may be separated from the perhaps habitable planets of other stars by an emptiness that is inimical to life and cannot be traversed by humans. This assumption is a result of the discussion of the constraints and possibilities of interstellar space travel as defined by the known natural laws and technical means. With the accelerated expansion of the universe, the distances to other galaxies (outside of the so-called Local Group) are increasing. According to the current standard model of cosmology and assuming that the acceleration will remain constant, in the distant future, this expansion will lead first to a substantial change in the epistemic conditions of cosmological knowledge and finally to the completion of the cosmic emptiness and of its relevance, respectively. Imagining the postulated completely empty last state leads human thought to the very limits of what is conceivable. (shrink)

Niels Bohr famously argued that a consistent understanding of quantum mechanics requires a new epistemic framework, which he named complementarity . This position asserts that even in the context of quantum theory, classical concepts must be used to understand and communicate measurement results. The apparent conflict between certain classical descriptions is avoided by recognizing that their application now crucially depends on the measurement context. ;Recently it has been argued that a new form of complementarity can provide a solution to the (...) so-called information loss paradox. Stephen Hawking argues that the evolution of black holes cannot be described by standard unitary quantum evolution, because such evolution always preserves information, while the evaporation of a black hole will imply that any information that fell into it is irrevocably lost---hence a "paradox." Some researchers in quantum gravity have argued that this paradox can be resolved if one interprets certain seemingly incompatible descriptions of events around black holes as instead being complementary. ;In this dissertation I assess the extent to which this black hole complementarity can be undergirded by Bohr's account of the limitations of classical concepts. I begin by offering an interpretation of Bohr's complementarity and the role that it plays in his philosophy of quantum theory. After clarifying the nature of classical concepts, I offer an account of the limitations these concepts face, and argue that Bohr's appeal to disturbance is best understood as referring to these conceptual limits. ;Following preparatory chapters on issues in quantum field theory and black hole mechanics, I offer an analysis of the information loss paradox and various responses to it. I consider the three most prominent accounts of black hole complementarity and argue that they fail to offer sufficient justification for the proposed incompatibility between descriptions. ;The lesson that emerges from this dissertation is that we have as much to learn from the limitations facing our scientific descriptions as we do from the successes they enjoy. Because all of our scientific theories offer at best limited, effective accounts of the world, an important part of our interpretive efforts will be assessing the borders of these domains of description. (shrink)

Much debate has ensued regarding the challenge to scientific realism provided by consideration of certain problematic episodes of theory change in the history of science. This paper contends that there is an interesting case which has been overlooked in this debate, namely the prediction of the positron by Dirac from his ‘hole’ theory, and its subsequent replacement by a theory which failed to contain a central, and essential, theoretical posit: the ‘Dirac sea’ of negative energy electrons. Accounting for this case (...) with the ‘divide and conquer’ strategy of contemporary scientific realism proves particularly troublesome, even for the structural realist. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to offer a conceptual analysis of Weinberg's proof of the spin-statistics theorem by comparing it with Pauli's original proof and with the subsequent textbook tradition, which typically resorts to the dichotomy positive energy for half-integral spin particles/microcausality for integral-spin particles. In contrast to this tradition, Weinberg's proof does not directly invoke the positivity of the energy, but derives the theorem from the single relativistic requirement of microcausality. This seemingly innocuous difference marks an important change (...) in the conceptual basis of quantum physics. Its historical, theoretical, and conceptual roots are here reconstructed. The link between Weinberg's proof and Pauli's original is highlighted: Weinberg's proof turns out to do justice to Pauli's anti-Dirac lines of thought. The work of Furry and Oppenheimer is also surveyed as a “third way” between the textbook tradition established by Pauli and Weinberg's approach. (shrink)

Analysis of Emmy Noether's 1918 theorems provides an illuminating method for testing the consequences of coordinate generality, and for exploring what else must be added to this requirement in order to give general covariance its far-reaching physical significance. The discussion takes us through Noether's first and second theorems, and then a third related theorem due originally to F. Klein. Contact will also be made with the contributions of, principally, J.L. Anderson, A. Trautman, P.A.M. Dirac, R. Torretti and the father of (...) the whole business, A. Einstein. (shrink)

We show that the Bohmian approach in terms of persisting particles that move on continuous trajectories following a deterministic law can be literally applied to QFT. By means of the Dirac sea model – exemplified in the electron sector of the standard model neglecting radiation – we explain how starting from persisting particles, one is led to standard QFT employing creation and annihilation operators when tracking the dynamics with respect to a reference state, the so-called vacuum. Since on the level (...) of wave functions, both formalisms are mathematically equivalent, this proposal provides for an ontology of QFT that includes a dynamics of individual processes, solves the measurement problem and explains the appearance of creation and annihilation events. (shrink)

In November of 1925 Born, Heisenberg and Jordan wrote an article together in which they demonstrated that Einstein's energy fluctuation formula could be derived from quantum mechanics. They remark that the equations are subject to reinterpretation. Specifically, the states of radiation oscillators can be reinterpreted as numbers of quanta of radiation. They also connected this latter idea up with Bose-Einstein statistics. Heisenberg wrote to Pauli that it was Jordan who contributed the idea of reinterpreting the terms. This was the first (...) step toward quantum field theory. In August of the following year Dirac derived Einstein's A and B coefficients for induced transitions between states but on the assumption that the electromagnetic field could be treated classically (Dirac 1927). In 1927 Dirac lay the mathematical foundations for quantum electrodynamics. Early that year he combined quantum mechanics, special relativity, and radiation theory in treating the electromagnetic field as if it were an infinite collection of oscillators. (shrink)

We show that the Bohmian approach in terms of persisting particles that move on continuous trajectories following a deterministic law can be literally applied to quantum field theory. By means of the Dirac sea model—exemplified in the electron sector of the standard model neglecting radiation—we explain how starting from persisting particles, one is led to standard QFT employing creation and annihilation operators when tracking the dynamics with respect to a reference state, the so-called vacuum. Since on the level of wave (...) functions, both formalisms are mathematically equivalent, this proposal provides for an ontology of QFT that includes a dynamics of individual processes, solves the measurement problem, and explains the appearance of creation and annihilation events. 1Bohmian Mechanics from Quantum Mechanics to Quantum Field Theory2The Dirac Sea Model3Equilibrium States and the Vacuum4Excitations of the Vacuum and the Fock Space Formalism5The Appearance of Particle Creations and Annihilations6The Merits of the Bohmian Approach. (shrink)

I consider the arguments to show that the vacuum energy density should receive a large contribution from the zero-point energy. This is the cosmological constant problem, as it was originally framed. I suggest that the matter is interpretation-dependent, and that on certain approaches to foundations, notably Everett's, the problem is a formal one, rather than one based on physical principles.

Relativistic quantum theory poses a number of conceptual problems over and above the non-relativistic mechanics. From a purely mathematical point of view it is also much more sophisticated. Even the kinematic theory poses considerable difficulties: locality, antimatter, negative energy, and charge are already systematically linked in ways that cannot simply be paraphrased. A further complication is that in the midst of this structure we have what is usually called the Newton-Wigner representation (or, in the case of the Dirac theory, the (...) Foldy-Wouthuysen representation), in which fields and states are no longer covariantly described and where the “local” self-adjoint quantities (NW-local observables) do not obey microcausality, but only satisfy equal-time commutators with respect to a particular inertial frame. If we pass to this represenation, we obtain at a stroke the basic structure of non-relativistic quantum field theory; it is not too hard to descend from that to a many-particle mechanics, and to recover the usual definitions of localization. (shrink)