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- Michel Bitbol. He's presently Director of Research at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. (speaks in foreign language) Archives in Paris, France. He received an MD and a PhD in Physics and an (speaks in foreign language) in Philosophy. And after a start in scientific research, he turned to philosophy of quantum mechanics.
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He then studied the philosophy of mind in collaboration initially with Francisco Varela, and developed a concept of consciousness based on an epistemology of first person knowledge. From the very beginning, his work has been guided by what Edmund Husserl called the mothers of knowledge. Namely, the dynamics of lived embodied experience, but also, the life world of
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laboratory objects and practices. He's the author of Schrodinger's Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics and several other books on quantum mechanics and philosophy, epistemology and consciousness. So, let's welcome Michel, merci. - Thank you very much. (clapping) So, I want to start from this wonderful quote from Zarathustra, from Nietzsche. The creator, he said,
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wanted to look away from himself. That's why he created the world. You could just revert to the proposition and say, okay, since we are so absolved into the world, we tend to look away from ourselves. And it's exactly what we want to revert now. How can we become of this blind spot?
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How can we become aware of the blind spot of science? That's my question. It's quite difficult when we are completely absolved into the objective elements of our experience, but maybe there is a way. Oh, okay. How should we do? Yes, good. Okay, first of all, we have to characterize several varieties of blind spots.
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Some blind spots are quite easy to see. For instance, this one. The so-called blind spot by vacancy. When you have just black area into your visual field, you say, oh, by contrast with respect to the rest of my visual field, this is a hole. This is something missing. So it's quite easy to see it. The second case is more interesting,
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and it's the typical blind spot of the retina. There is something missing, but on the other hand, you do not see a hole instead of what is missing. You just see a continuity with the rest. And you only guess that there is something missing by contrast with something that appeared earlier. So, it's a case for the original blind spot.
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You have done already this exercise yesterday, of trying to see the black dot. And sometime, it disappears, but there is no hole in the visual field. And there is a third possibility. It's the so-called aware spot. So, let's do an exercise, suggested by Douglas Harding. You show with your finger everything, this is a table, this is a screen,
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this is a ceiling, and so on, and you turn your finger and point here. And what do you see? At the surface, you would say, I see a finger. But in fact, this is a typical mistake of one who tries to see the finger but not the moon that is shown by the finger.
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And what is shown by the finger is what? I see no quality here. I see something empty and free. To let everything else arrive to me. And I see especially, I feel the origin of awareness. The origin of my awareness of this finger is where the finger points.
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So, we can realize that there is something special here. Okay, this idea has been expressed beautifully, as you all know, by Wittgenstein. And it has been quoted by Robert. Nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye. Is it true? Is it really true? At any rate, before we answer this question,
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you can generalize. Nothing in experience allows you to infer that it is experienced. What do you see? Objects. Do you see experience? No. Do you realize that objects are experienced? Usually not. And Nishida Kitaro, the Japanese philosopher, generalized or extended these remarks to size,
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to objective size. He said, as soon as one has adopted the standpoint of objective knowledge, the knower doesn't enter into the visual field. So it's the same idea but applied specifically to objective knowledge. Now, how do we usually realize that all these things are seen by an eye? My eyes. Well, we can use a mirror
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and get a third person view of ourselves, especially of our eyes. This is the left, the picture of the left. But what about the visual field itself? Can it reveal anything about its being seen by an eye? Yes. Why, because there is a structure of a vanishing point and vanishing lights,
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converging towards the vanishing point. The vanishing point is the expression in the visual field of it being seen from somewhere. Namely, from an eye. What about experience now? The case of experience is more tricky because there is no way to get a third person view of experience.
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And therefore, you only have experience seen from the first person standpoint. Yet, there are features that are typical of this experience. For instance, the analog of a vanishing point is called by philosophers such as Heidegger, situatedness. The fact that everything is experienced from somewhere.
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And this from somewhere shows that it's not just sort of blank experience. It's experience seen from somewhere. So there might be a way, very difficult way, because usually, you don't do that. But there might be a way to realize that all these things are not just things,
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but they are experienced. And this move from the things to the experience that, to the experience of the things, this move backwards is called by Kant, by Husserl and so on, the transcendental deduction. Okay. So, it was Kant who invented a new use of the word transcendental.
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You know that in the Middle Ages, and still in the usual meanings of words in English, transcendent and transcendental are almost synonymous. It means beyond, beyond what? Beyond appearances. Beyond experience. Something that explains experience, but it's not directly experienced. But Kant distinguished between the two meanings.
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He said, as soon as we posit with the unconditioned, outside of all possible experience, the ideas become transcendent. So this is the usual meaning of transcendent. Kant uses transcendental in a completely different sense. It's not what is beyond appearances. But what is below appearances. And becomes the condition of possibility
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of these appearances. It's from where appearances appear. That is the new sense of transcendental by Kant. Now, what can you say about the transcendental? Can you speak of it? Can you use words to describe it? Can you characterize the condition of possibility of it?
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And Kant says no. This, namely, the transcendental, cannot be further analyzed or answered because it is of such condition that we are in need for all our answers and for all our thinking about objects. So, the transcendental itself cannot be an objective thought. It is a condition for any objective thought.
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And yet, we can do what Kant called transcendental deduction. Because as soon as we realize the structure of our experience, we can derive some properties of the condition of possibility for there being an experience of a set of elements that we can take as if
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they existed as part of us. The as if clause is very important in Kant. Now, let me list a series of statements about the transcendental. In fact, a transcendental is something that is, or not a thing, of course, but it's very well known and it has been well known for a very long time. For instance, these quotes are drawn from
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the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. And they characterize the Brahman. The Brahman is precisely the transcendental in the sense of Kant. It is never seen but it is a seer. It is never heard but it is a hearer. It is never thought but it is the thinker. It is never known but it is the knower. So, this is very clear. It is the source of knowledge. The source of thing and so on.
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And the question is, how should he know the knower with the implication that it's impossible to know it? Because the knower cannot know itself. And yet, these sentences deny the impossibility. Since someone, one day, in the author of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad,
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realized that there was something from which everything is thought, seen, heard, and so on. And the author called that the Brahman. Now, there are modern quotes. For instance, this one that I love by Ernst Cassirer. Consciousness is a goal to which all knowledge turns its back. It's still a goal. We want to know something about consciousness.
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But each time we try to do so, we are moving away from what we want to know or to study. It's a wonderful paradox. And also this very clear statement by Michel Henry, French phenomenologist. Consciousness cannot be shown, for it is the power to show. Where is consciousness? It is from where everything is shown.
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From where the show is given, I would say. Okay, maybe I can skip some of these sentences, including the wonderful one by Giovanni Gentile, an Italian philosopher, and turn to Husserl. So, according to Husserl, the ego, he was speaking of an ego. And maybe it's an improper way of putting things. But it was Husserl's manner in the,
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at the time of his so-called transcendental turn. The ego who bears, sorry, within him the whole world as an accepted sense, okay, the world is a sense for the transcendental ego, according to Husserl. And who, in turn, is necessarily presupposed by this sense,
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is called transcendental. Here is the definition that Husserl gives of the transcendental. And now, you know that Husserl discovered Buddhism about, at about 1924. So he was given the book. A translation of the Sutta Pitaka in German. And the author of the translation asked him to give a command, a preface.
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And in his preface, Husserl wrote the following sentence. Buddhism looks purely inward, in vision and deed. It is not transcendent but transcendental. So Husserl, maybe he was right, maybe he was wrong. At any rate, he recognized immediately in Buddhism something that was amazingly akin to his phenomenology.
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Buddhism has no transcendent god, but it explores the transcendental field of consciousness. How do you do that? How do you lend into this field that is to be explored? To do that, you have to perform the epoche. The epoche is a Greek word, meaning suspension, cessation. Primarily, it is suspension of verbal judgment.
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This idea was posited long ago by Greek thinkers such as Pyrrho, the skeptic, and the stoics. And according to them, it was necessary to suspend any judgment about the value, the beauty, and so on of things just to reach a direction. They are as they are and we don't have to judge them. You certainly know that Pyrrho
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was very much influenced by his Indian knowledge. He traveled to India with Alexander the Great, and he brought back some Indian ideas. But in phenomenology, you don't only suspend the verbal judgments. You also suspend the pre-verbal judgments. Namely, when you see something like that, you don't necessarily say, this is beautiful or this is gray or this is a table.
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You immediately take it as a table because you think, okay, I can use it to put my things, to work on it, and so on. So, immediately, even before you have pronounced the word table, you recognize this as a possibility of using it as a table.
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And even that is to be suspended by the epoche. So what do you obtain then? We'll address the question later. What is left after you have suspended even the pre-verbal judgments? At any rate, it's very important to understand, against many contemporary judgments, that the epoche is not just a rhetorical element
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of who sells philosophy. Many of my, sometimes my colleagues, say, oh yes, that's just a sort of verbal element of his philosophy. No, according to Husserl, the epoche is dramatic. It's something that changes suddenly your state of consciousness. It's not something cheap. He says, phenomenology implies a complete
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self-transformation which can be compared to a religious conversion. You see things completely differently when you have performed an epoche. This epoche is radical. It's immediate and so on. But it's similar in scope to Descartes' doubt. The famous doubt about everything. About things and so on.
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The only difference is that in Husserl, you don't doubt things out there. You just suspend any judgment about them. You don't say they don't exist. You don't say they exist. You just let them be as they are. Namely, here. Apparent. Nothing more. But then when you have lost
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the world by the epoche, you can conquer it anew in a universal self-examination. What does it mean? It just means that when you analyze what is left after the epoche, you see all the processes by which we tend to reconstruct our belief in and extend in the world. So from here and in this experience,
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you have all the material that is needed to reconstruct a set of beliefs about things out there. But then it's very important to understand that once you have suspended the judgment about things that you see in your visual or sensory fields, you have to do something in order precisely to examine
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the modalities of the reconstruction of your belief about these things. To do that, you turn your gaze and you examine these acts of consciousness, out of which your belief in external things is built. But there is a paradox of the epoche. On the one hand, it looks a very difficult act to perform.
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Some people say, no, I could never perform the epoche. It's too difficult, it's not natural. My everyday common sense way of being is completely adverse to that. But in fact, it's an illusion. In fact, it's very easy to perform the epoche. The epoche is always performed and we don't know it. We don't realize it.
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This was said, for instance, by Michel Henry. But maybe even more strikingly by Jean-Paul Sartre in his book, The Transcendence Of The Ego. He said, the natural attitude imposes a huge effort and a longterm education to be performed. It's an effort.
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Precisely, a symmetrical effort which fits quite well with the description of Robert a little bit earlier. It's a symmetrical effort to extract invariance from experience and to stabilize an experiencing pole, called the ego, placed in front of things. It's a symmetrical effort
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to extract the subject and the object. When this effort, for some reason, relaxes, or when it becomes too painful to perform, suddenly, poof. We are again in our natural state, which is a state of the epoche. And Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a whole novel called Nausea in order to describe this accident,
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as he called that. The accident of everyday life. Which is to fall suddenly to the epoche. Suddenly, he's a hero. (speaks in foreign language) Realized that there was no past. There was no medieval events and so on that suddenly popped out from the book he was reading in the library. But it was just black characters
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written on white paper. Suddenly, poof, finished. All this transcendence, all this me dreaming of the Middle Ages, finished. He just see, oh, just paper, black dots. That's it. It's the kind of accident that may happen when you perform, inadvertently, the epoche.
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So now, about the science of nature. Okay so, the missing element in science is precisely the realization that all these objects are seen from somewhere. So, from somewhere in a very elusive sense, namely, from this famous aware spot, but also, in a very concrete sense,
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all these things are seen from our everyday world, the life world. Electrons, protons, quarks, and so on, what they turn out to be is just inferences that we do from marks on the screens of our apparatuses in the laboratory essentially.
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So this is the life world. This is the sudden collapse into the laboratory after we have dreamt of this wonderful universe of quarks, forces, quantum fields, and so on. So, according to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.
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So, of course he discovered something. Very important, how to mathematize natural phenomena. But on the other hand, discovering that was also a way, has at least the implication of covering something, of concealing something. He concealed the origin of this knowledge
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by trying to show how you can derive the life of the nowhere out of the nowhere's intellectual byproduct. Namely, a theory. A physical theory. So, according to Husserl, the subjective relative, namely, the true origin of knowledge.
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The life world, the where spot, and so on, is supposed to be overcome because you have something, you have discovered something that you think is more fundamental than your departure. However, the subject relative is not something irrelevant that must be passed through, but that which ultimately grounds the theoretical validity for all objective verification.
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So whatever problem you have in your knowledge, and suddenly you think, oh, that doesn't fit, there is a problem, and so on, what do you do? You stop projecting your attention onto the set of theoretical object you have, and you come back where you are. Where are you? In the laboratory observing dots on the screen.
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And then you think, is my picture adequate to the dots I'm seeing now in the screen? That's what occurs at each scientific revolution. Suddenly, if things, scientists say, poof, finished, all this theory, I have to think everything again from what is given to me. For instance, it's a case in Einstein's
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creation of the special relativity, when he says, I no longer believe in ethos, time, space. I just see that I measure length and measure duration with clocks and so on. That's it. Same for Heisenberg. Reduction to observables. So there is this collapse of beliefs
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at each scientific revolution. It's very important not to forget that. The blind spot of the science of nature was also expressed beautifully by Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty wrote the following thing. He said, okay. Classical science takes the world as an object under a neutral and external gaze. But, he said,
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even then, even at that moment, nature resisted. Why, because nature could not be posited entirely before the scientist. There was something that was resisting. It was the body of the scientist. The own body of the scientist. This own body that had, as Ivan told us, a double face.
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Seeing and seeing. I can see my body but I see, also, I realize that it is where from the seeing is done. And then, Merleau-Ponty denounced the reaction of classical science to that. The reaction was to make, to transform my body into an object. And he said, no, it cannot be done entirely.
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This is wrong and this leads to problems. We'll see which problems after that. And Michel Henry put that in a very dramatic way because he thought that the forgetfulness of this power point, the abolition of life in favor of a model of the world that is dead, basically, is the original sin of our civilization.
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What he calls the origin of barbarism. So, he wrote a book that is translated into English. Barbarism. Okay, can science, okay, is it just a problem for our humankind as a whole? This forgetfulness of the origin of knowledge? Or is it also a problem for science? And I think, I claim that it's really a problem for science.
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And I claim that virtually all the problems of foundations, of the so-called foundation of problems of science, arise from the blind spot. One of them has been wonderfully tackled by Godel. It was the problem of, the dream of Hilbert of justifying mathematics only formally and so on. That was broken by Godel.
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But all the other problems of science, outside mathematics, in physics especially, arise from this blind spot. So it's not completely innocent. We should not completely be happy by saying, okay, I can't forget it because science is so efficient. I don't care about the origin of science. Okay, the explanatory gap has been quite well
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explained by Ivan. But I can summarize it by saying that the problem is how can we give an objective explanation of the subject? You immediately see the problem here. And especially, how to recover subjective experience after having intentionally banished it in the process of objectification? We have created science by excluding ourselves,
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and then we want to recover ourselves out of the byproduct of this exclusion. This is just a problem. An absolve. But the same for the measurement problem of quantum mechanics and the second principle of thermodynamics. We want to explain that Schrodinger's cat is seen dead or alive, whereas its quantum state represents it
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as dead and alive. And this is a problem for everyone. It has been a problem for one century now. Almost one century. But the problem is immediately seen as absurd because that means that we want to recover experienced actuality after having intentionally banished it in favor of a pure statement of possibilities and probabilities.
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What is the quantum states, after all? As, for instance, Grace would say. It's just a statement of probabilities that is useful to us to bet about results of measurement. So, how do you want to recover the actuality of an event out of the statement of probability and possibility? It's the same for the second principle of thermodynamics.
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So many physicists wanted to explain irreversibility out of the time symmetrical laws of physics. Mostly, mostly, time symmetrical. And here again. So, problem is how to recover the experienced irreversibility after having intentionally banished it in favor of a metric of clock readings. What is called the time of physics is not the complete time.
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It is time minus duration minus the sense of evolution minus the so-called a series of the time clock. So, there is a flaw here again. We want to recover something that has been excluded from the beginning. In order to build the science, we ask to recover that. Usually, people, in order to say that
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finally, for instance, we'll have, we'll obtain an explanation of how experience can arise from the objective world. They give sort of an inductive argument in science. In the history of science. They say, okay, we have reduced heat
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to mean kinetic energy. We have reduced life to biochemical networks. Reduced time to dimension of Minkowski space. Reduced color to wavelengths. You reduce those to make an ism, computers and so on. Reduced information to a probabilistic formula. The Shannon one. And therefore, one day, we'll succeed to overcome
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the last mystery which is experience. Lived experience. Good example was Daniel Dennett. But in fact, this inductive argument is wrong. Basically wrong. Why? Because each time you see one of these reduction, the reduction is not reduction of something subjective to something objective. It's reduction to a global microscopic variable
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to a set of microscopic variables. But the two sets of variables are objective variables. For instance, let me take heat, which is so popular, as an example of what is to be reduced in order to get an explanation of consciousness. What is reduced to mean molecular kinetic energy is not the feeling of hot or cold.
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It's not that. It's just a thermometer reading. Namely, thermal microscopic thermodynamics can be reduced to a certain extent to statistical thermodynamics. But not the feeling of hot and cold. And so on. You can do the whole list. In each case, you see that what is reduced to a certain model
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is an objective variable. And therefore, experience cannot be seen as sort of a symptom of this series of reduction. Because experience is systemically excluded from every such reduction. So, experience is the origin and the horizon of research.
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And it's not something that is in the focus of these series of reductions. So, let me give some examples. I don't know. Tell me how long I have. - [Marcelo] Seven minutes. - Okay. Maybe, so I will treat just that case and not the measurement problem. But it's the same issue.
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So, you know the famous objection of Loschmidt to Boltzmann. He said, okay, but you derive the second principle of thermodynamics that has to do with irreversibility out of the set of purely reversible equations, the equations of classical mechanics.
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So it's impossible. You cannot do that. Therefore, Boltzmann answered, okay, I know. It's not that there is a complete irreversibility, but that irreversibility is much more probable than the reversibility. And in order to demonstrate this, he introduced two subjective symmetry,
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one, in fact, one symmetry breaking principle, that was of subjective origin. He introduced the hypothesis of molecular chaos, on the ground that we cannot know, we cannot know all the positions of the particles. The same for the coarse graining that was introduced by Gibbs. It was exactly that, for that. Because we cannot know
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all the microscopical movement. Okay, then there were so many developments, but one of the main trends in the research in the foundations of statistical thermodynamics, was to find, to locate desperately what is the objective source of the irreversibility. So many attempts were made.
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Cosmology, the theory of chaos, and so on and so on. And each time, people say, okay. But there is still a subjective element here. And since, in the chaos, it's a problem. It's just because our knowledge cannot be infinitely fine grained. But then you realize that after all, what you desperately want to obtain
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at the end of the process of elaboration of a physical theory might have been present at the beginning of it. And you suddenly realize, as Isabelle Stengers noticed, that the physical lows that are said are equivalent between before and after, have been made possible by measurement operation. But any measurement apparatus denies this equivalence.
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Why? Because you use the measurement apparatus, there was no results before, and there is a result after. Here is a symmetry, basic symmetry. Before you had no information, then you have the information. Or as Bohr would say about the thermometer. The thermometer is an instrument that is based on the assumption
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of an irreversible transfer of heat between the bath and the element of the thermometer. So, the very measurement of temperature, which is the basic fact of thermodynamics, is due to presuppose what we want to obtain at the end of the process.
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Namely, irreversibility. So, I skip all these ideas about quantum mechanics. Maybe I can elaborate on this slide. Because it's exactly the same in quantum mechanics. We want to obtain actuality out of the set of possibilities. I told you that before. And what we do, in fact, is project actuality into the set of possibilities.
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All these attempts at solving the measurement problems are exactly that. They are projections of actuality, namely, the precise value of a variable obtained during a measurement, onto the structure of possibilities. For instance, Bohm. Bohm, what does he do? What is a hidden variable? It's the projection of a pointer ridding
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onto a certain variable, such as the position, that is supposed to exist independently of measurement. So he projects this actuality onto the model. Then he says, oh, but in fact, when I put a measurement apparatus, the quantum potential of this measurement apparatus modifies the position that I've postulated.
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But that's just a disturbance. But the position exists. To me, it seems that it's just a projection of what he wants to obtain. Namely, the variables of things bear the mark of actuality that is typical of what we measure. Of what we get into the laboratory. Same for GRW.
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What does he do? Okay, he sees that the Schrodinger equation doesn't contain any term of projection, of reduction of the wave bracket and so on. So, he imposes it on the equation itself, introduces a statistical term in it, and says, that's what I wanted to get. Namely, a description, an objective description.
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Something outside of me, of this actuality. But this actuality has been imposed artificially. And then, people tried desperately to justify it by gravitation, by quantum gravity and so on. But it's only an a posteriori move. The first move was just to say, actuality, I don't see it in the set of possibilities
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that is described by the Schrodinger equation, through the evolution of function, so I impose it on it. And so on. Everett is a wonderful example of that because first of all, he deploys the structure of possibilities. Of possible measurement outcome. Into multiple worlds structure.
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So in fact, he immediately give actuality to the possibilities themselves. But even before picking one. And then, very interestingly, first and for what Jenna was saying, Everett says, okay. But these spots that I wrote on the blackboard, namely,
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eigenvectors, the proposition of eigenvectors, that I also say it to many worlds. Each spot has a possibility of being endowed with a standpoint. With a standpoint of someone who, by inhabiting this world, would see this result rather than another one. So here, he projects the actuality
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into the possibility models, and he extracts one of them as, say, the one that has been observed effectively in the laboratory. So, here is the process by which people try to hide the blind spot. They project the blind spot inside the model, and they mistake the symbol
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they have introduced in the model for the thing itself. Namely, for experience. So, I have to stop here, even though I had a conclusion. But I think it's enough for discussion. - Thank you very much. (clapping) So yes, so if you have questions. Right, if you have questions, we can do it during the panel discussion, which will be this-- - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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- You want to ask now? Yeah sure, go ahead, as we, you're going to be in the panel, so you can also ask there. I'm just worried about time again. - I'll be quick, I'll try. Thank you so much, that was fascinating. I have a question about Kant. I was very pleased that you started with Kant, and it made me realize, probably should've given a different kind of talk this morning because I have another paper on Kant
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and the origin of perspectivism. The question is, you talked about transcendental deduction in particular there. And I wonder what your view is on the sources of the standpoint and the importance of the point of view, the human agent in Kant. Because this is something I'm very interested in, and for my work, I've been looking primarily
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at the ideas of reason as an imaginary standpoint where he uses exactly the metaphor of a vanishing point that creates the deception as if there were objects beyond the mirror. But there are no real objects. But nevertheless, they play a regulative role. And so, I just wonder what you think about that. - Ah yes, of course. It's the idea of a regulative ideal. Namely, we try to elaborate our reason,
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conception of what is beyond phenomena. Essentially, the noumenon. And the noumenon is nothing else and nothing more than the vanishing point of all our efforts to once reconstructing it from the vote of reason. And the reason here, and of course, you know that Kant reproaches reason for going beyond what it can do by
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having purely abstract reasonings instead of just making the synthesis of phenomena by pure understanding. So, the reason, and he has a beautiful metaphor. He says, the reason goes beyond the field of its legitimate pretensions, and this is similar to a bird who,
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having seen that he or it flies better in rare air, would think that the flight would be even better in emptiness, in void. So I think he reproaches reason for going too far, with respect to its legitimate field of operations. Thank you.
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