Interesting read. It reminds me of yudowsky's objection to arguments of feasibility, where feasibility is contingent upon ignorance of the principles governing the system.
I've long felt that "in principle" was an intellectual sleight of hand that allowed the construction of arguments that were meant to seem definitive but we're actually more akin to hand waving.
I think it's legitimate as a technique for exploring "what if" scenarios but should never undergird any actual conclusion.
I thought your example of the electron made the point well. If it does not obey the rules by which we define an electron then whatever it is it's not an electron as we know it.
I think we're getting a little lost in the sauce here. "In principle" is a gambit. It is an admission that you do not have a well-worked-out model, story, or narrative to make the point, but you are asking/hoping your counterparty accepts this admission as the price of continuing to speak as if there was such a model.
Another, simpler but less nuanced, way to say it is "I am not aware of any reason why not X" So, then let's suppose X.
Let's go back to the Johnson-Penrose dialogue, which was quite clever and enjoyable. At each juncture, the Rock offers the gambit, and Penrose declines. This goes on for at least four rounds and it seems clear that Penrose would have promptly smacked down the fifth as Texas Sharpshooter. Such an exchange is an absolute shalacking of Johnson to the point of humiliation.
Penrose has demonstrated that Johnson cannot even in principle identify anything that he could learn in order to be able to know what he is talking about.
Now, all that might seem like an overly social distraction, but my larger point is that all the important you interactions you describe later on are fundamentally social interactions.
If someone had suggested in the 1800s that, in principle, we could cross the universe and come back before anyone on earth could blink their eyes, they would have been correct. At that time, in that place, between those people--in principle, you could. But this is the price of the gambit. Your supposition stands forever subject to revision.
It's also why having the gambit swiftly declined and subsequently rescinded should be seen as devastating. You're not even provisionally right. To put it in modal terms, we can hardly imagine a situation in which you would be wrong.
This is the point you are making about the electron, and I think it's correct. Attempting even to posit a world in which an electron's position and momentum run afoul of the concept of the electron itself. It's like sand slipping through your fingers. And that emotional sensation presages an epiphany if followed. Because somehow the person has just uncovered that their idea of a fundamental building block is not even wrong.
This, I argue, is why "in principle" exchanges should be allowed. They are a means of cutting to the heart of the matter and potentially revealing some deeply buried assumption that has confused your entire paradigm.
I'll just end by noting that you might argue we could uncover these assumptions if everyone were painfully explicit. And, in principle, I might even be inclined to agree. But you're already all but conceding that in practice, you'll induce a chilling effect on conversation. After all, you would be asking people to endure pain as a prerequisite to even beginning a conversation.
This reminded me of how analytic philosophy is somehow simultaneously both the most entertaining and the most tedious thing I can imagine spending your life doing. Anyway, Curt, have you ever seen this famous blog post of Charles Bennett, Schopenhauer and the Geometry of Evil?
I see the merits of carefully disentangling these distinct meanings of possibility, "in principle," but I also think the Rock's sophistry reveals something deeply human. Whatever social conditions led us into an evolutionary spiral of ever larger brains and more abstract language, kind of like what happened to Komodo dragons, we now are stuck living with the capacity to imagine counterfactuals in ways that other animals apparently do not, and it's not always a gift it's more often that we can't help ourselves from considering what we "should" have done in a certain situation. But our imaginations and the counterfactuals they generate operate on the premise that it was--in principle--possible for something else to have happened. I think you've done a good job of showing here that this belief is undecidable; we have neither the capacity to prove that history is determined or undetermined. But oddly enough, our knee-jerk belief that the past could have been different than it was--that we could have done this differently, better, been a contender etc.--undeniably *does* end up changing the future, and the world we inhabit today which is so different from the one our ancestors inhabited came about in steps exactly because of them making that same persistent error and then using their imagination to nudge human history bit by bit to it's present state. I don't have a specific point to make, just that observation that certain errors are productive--which is a theme found everywhere throughout evolution--and among the class of productive errors some are distinctively human. Conflating types of possibility so you can feel something like guilt or shame (more of one or the other depending on culture) and have those feelings direct your future actions, I think, is one of those errors. We are all the Rock, I guess is what I'm saying!
Many words (and expressions) are fuzzy and may "mean" different things to different people, depending also on context. When using s key word In discussion it may be helpful for the parties to first agree what they mean by it for purposes of that discussion so as to minimize the chance of talking past each other.
The problem I have with people suggesting "let's just agree on definitions" is that much of the time, the words are loaded beyond their intensional definition. For instance, "let's just agree God means your highest value," Peterson may say to the atheist, and then the atheist would be a "believer / theist" in that context. They would then say, "Well, I don't think that's how God is used," etc., and the same with "free will" / "truth" / "consciousness" debates. The reason there is such squabbling over definitions is because the definition is precisely what's at stake, not the consequences of some preliminary version for the sake of discussion in the moment. Disagreement often targets the connotative layer. Thus, shaving that layer off via stipulation leaves the true dispute untouched.
If I had one differing opinion, it's problematic to argue (from my POV) that a question such as the wave function and eye color is itself problematic, versus asking whether or not it is true. Saying something is or isn't true may be meaningful for reasons which are not phenomological.
Idk, "cancer vaccine big stinky failure" drives the point home, for people in the US or Canada maybe there's some fancy terminology about RNA which is left out of the universe, and it's published anyways. Either case, sort of a big stinky failure and not that interesting.
FWIW....The Down and Upside of thinking in terms of fundemental objects and theories of everything, everything small and everything which might necessarily have true narratives that we can barely conceive possible, all lives with the distinction like so.
Objects, get boring for intellectual curiosities. TOE, look like total bullshit. A self playing a role, must accept that concepts in language are themselves way more important than we give them credit for, for they perhaps balance what is tenable and what isn't. What's the story? What's the outer layers of an idea? In principle, an idea which works in principle which doesn't entail TOE or object properties it isn't necessitated, wasn't strictly asked for, at that time.
And so that's that. Everyone is a Nihlist or Pragmatist when in principle, they have no clue what they're fucking talking about.
The Rock is clearly attempting to employ a post hoc selection method. We can cut through his "in principles" by his final statement.
Essentially we are left with a set of unpredictable outcomes because though the set of states is knowable, and set is capable of choice (Axiom of choice), this requires the outcome set to also be infinite because the choices are infinite.
Well...we expand the set possible choices. Pigs can't fly, but we can (well they can if we bring them with us). We would have to define constraints on the choices, but at least the chooser can choose. This is what trips up the debate, because then what is "choice?" Can you derive choice from a neuron? Can you derive choice from a brain? Can you derive choice from anything? "What" is "choice?"
There are well known lemmas in modal logic, the DeMorgan equivalence under duality where possible is not necessarily not (, (and necessary is not possibly not.) This runs deep when you get into higher orders of nesting (necessarily possible etc) and accessibility structure.
Going from one galaxy to another in one microsecond is perfectly consistent with the standard model … if you are a photon. Light does not move in time, according to the postulates of special relativity.
But I like the way you are digging into the assumptions implicit in even the simplest speculations. Your recent interview with Barenholtz seemed to trigger some deeper questions about how science cannot be so easily detached from the ambiguities of language. I find a Nagarjuna’s approach using a four-part logic (The Catuskoti) a fruitful exercise in visualizing something analogous to two distinct approaches to conceptual superposition.
I have previously also recommended Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological approach to consciousness investigation, which ‘brackets’ the ontological implications in favor of necessarily first subjectively observing the structure of intention. I will gently nudge that perspective one more time, and suggest his student Heidegger deliberately lost the golden thread to instead pursue a theological agenda.
Hi Curt. There is an assumption in the statement that something is possible if it is not contradictory. The assumption is that contradiction (paradox) rules out truth.
Also quoting: “An actual” infinity is one that is actually infinite! We don’t have a simple way of conveying it other than by invoking images of a deity outside this universe.”
There is a simple geometric proof to convey the mechanism responsible for the infinities of extension and infinite regression. However, it sets an absolute limit on rationalism that falls short of the infinite.
Interesting read. It reminds me of yudowsky's objection to arguments of feasibility, where feasibility is contingent upon ignorance of the principles governing the system.
I've long felt that "in principle" was an intellectual sleight of hand that allowed the construction of arguments that were meant to seem definitive but we're actually more akin to hand waving.
I think it's legitimate as a technique for exploring "what if" scenarios but should never undergird any actual conclusion.
I thought your example of the electron made the point well. If it does not obey the rules by which we define an electron then whatever it is it's not an electron as we know it.
I think we're getting a little lost in the sauce here. "In principle" is a gambit. It is an admission that you do not have a well-worked-out model, story, or narrative to make the point, but you are asking/hoping your counterparty accepts this admission as the price of continuing to speak as if there was such a model.
Another, simpler but less nuanced, way to say it is "I am not aware of any reason why not X" So, then let's suppose X.
Let's go back to the Johnson-Penrose dialogue, which was quite clever and enjoyable. At each juncture, the Rock offers the gambit, and Penrose declines. This goes on for at least four rounds and it seems clear that Penrose would have promptly smacked down the fifth as Texas Sharpshooter. Such an exchange is an absolute shalacking of Johnson to the point of humiliation.
Penrose has demonstrated that Johnson cannot even in principle identify anything that he could learn in order to be able to know what he is talking about.
Now, all that might seem like an overly social distraction, but my larger point is that all the important you interactions you describe later on are fundamentally social interactions.
If someone had suggested in the 1800s that, in principle, we could cross the universe and come back before anyone on earth could blink their eyes, they would have been correct. At that time, in that place, between those people--in principle, you could. But this is the price of the gambit. Your supposition stands forever subject to revision.
It's also why having the gambit swiftly declined and subsequently rescinded should be seen as devastating. You're not even provisionally right. To put it in modal terms, we can hardly imagine a situation in which you would be wrong.
This is the point you are making about the electron, and I think it's correct. Attempting even to posit a world in which an electron's position and momentum run afoul of the concept of the electron itself. It's like sand slipping through your fingers. And that emotional sensation presages an epiphany if followed. Because somehow the person has just uncovered that their idea of a fundamental building block is not even wrong.
This, I argue, is why "in principle" exchanges should be allowed. They are a means of cutting to the heart of the matter and potentially revealing some deeply buried assumption that has confused your entire paradigm.
I'll just end by noting that you might argue we could uncover these assumptions if everyone were painfully explicit. And, in principle, I might even be inclined to agree. But you're already all but conceding that in practice, you'll induce a chilling effect on conversation. After all, you would be asking people to endure pain as a prerequisite to even beginning a conversation.
To put on my "modal philosopher" hat on for a second there is no practical difference between cognitive constraints and definitions.
If I want to constrain my conceptual space to all universes where 1 + x = x holds in some weird conceptual model/axiom-schema best you hold on tight!
What do I mean by "+" and "=" ?
I don't know yet! That's what I am trying to figure out.
This reminded me of how analytic philosophy is somehow simultaneously both the most entertaining and the most tedious thing I can imagine spending your life doing. Anyway, Curt, have you ever seen this famous blog post of Charles Bennett, Schopenhauer and the Geometry of Evil?
https://quantumfrontiers.com/2016/05/29/schopenhauer-and-the-geometry-of-evil/
I see the merits of carefully disentangling these distinct meanings of possibility, "in principle," but I also think the Rock's sophistry reveals something deeply human. Whatever social conditions led us into an evolutionary spiral of ever larger brains and more abstract language, kind of like what happened to Komodo dragons, we now are stuck living with the capacity to imagine counterfactuals in ways that other animals apparently do not, and it's not always a gift it's more often that we can't help ourselves from considering what we "should" have done in a certain situation. But our imaginations and the counterfactuals they generate operate on the premise that it was--in principle--possible for something else to have happened. I think you've done a good job of showing here that this belief is undecidable; we have neither the capacity to prove that history is determined or undetermined. But oddly enough, our knee-jerk belief that the past could have been different than it was--that we could have done this differently, better, been a contender etc.--undeniably *does* end up changing the future, and the world we inhabit today which is so different from the one our ancestors inhabited came about in steps exactly because of them making that same persistent error and then using their imagination to nudge human history bit by bit to it's present state. I don't have a specific point to make, just that observation that certain errors are productive--which is a theme found everywhere throughout evolution--and among the class of productive errors some are distinctively human. Conflating types of possibility so you can feel something like guilt or shame (more of one or the other depending on culture) and have those feelings direct your future actions, I think, is one of those errors. We are all the Rock, I guess is what I'm saying!
Many words (and expressions) are fuzzy and may "mean" different things to different people, depending also on context. When using s key word In discussion it may be helpful for the parties to first agree what they mean by it for purposes of that discussion so as to minimize the chance of talking past each other.
The problem I have with people suggesting "let's just agree on definitions" is that much of the time, the words are loaded beyond their intensional definition. For instance, "let's just agree God means your highest value," Peterson may say to the atheist, and then the atheist would be a "believer / theist" in that context. They would then say, "Well, I don't think that's how God is used," etc., and the same with "free will" / "truth" / "consciousness" debates. The reason there is such squabbling over definitions is because the definition is precisely what's at stake, not the consequences of some preliminary version for the sake of discussion in the moment. Disagreement often targets the connotative layer. Thus, shaving that layer off via stipulation leaves the true dispute untouched.
If I had one differing opinion, it's problematic to argue (from my POV) that a question such as the wave function and eye color is itself problematic, versus asking whether or not it is true. Saying something is or isn't true may be meaningful for reasons which are not phenomological.
Idk, "cancer vaccine big stinky failure" drives the point home, for people in the US or Canada maybe there's some fancy terminology about RNA which is left out of the universe, and it's published anyways. Either case, sort of a big stinky failure and not that interesting.
FWIW....The Down and Upside of thinking in terms of fundemental objects and theories of everything, everything small and everything which might necessarily have true narratives that we can barely conceive possible, all lives with the distinction like so.
Objects, get boring for intellectual curiosities. TOE, look like total bullshit. A self playing a role, must accept that concepts in language are themselves way more important than we give them credit for, for they perhaps balance what is tenable and what isn't. What's the story? What's the outer layers of an idea? In principle, an idea which works in principle which doesn't entail TOE or object properties it isn't necessitated, wasn't strictly asked for, at that time.
And so that's that. Everyone is a Nihlist or Pragmatist when in principle, they have no clue what they're fucking talking about.
The Rock is clearly attempting to employ a post hoc selection method. We can cut through his "in principles" by his final statement.
Essentially we are left with a set of unpredictable outcomes because though the set of states is knowable, and set is capable of choice (Axiom of choice), this requires the outcome set to also be infinite because the choices are infinite.
Well...we expand the set possible choices. Pigs can't fly, but we can (well they can if we bring them with us). We would have to define constraints on the choices, but at least the chooser can choose. This is what trips up the debate, because then what is "choice?" Can you derive choice from a neuron? Can you derive choice from a brain? Can you derive choice from anything? "What" is "choice?"
There are well known lemmas in modal logic, the DeMorgan equivalence under duality where possible is not necessarily not (, (and necessary is not possibly not.) This runs deep when you get into higher orders of nesting (necessarily possible etc) and accessibility structure.
Going from one galaxy to another in one microsecond is perfectly consistent with the standard model … if you are a photon. Light does not move in time, according to the postulates of special relativity.
But I like the way you are digging into the assumptions implicit in even the simplest speculations. Your recent interview with Barenholtz seemed to trigger some deeper questions about how science cannot be so easily detached from the ambiguities of language. I find a Nagarjuna’s approach using a four-part logic (The Catuskoti) a fruitful exercise in visualizing something analogous to two distinct approaches to conceptual superposition.
I have previously also recommended Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological approach to consciousness investigation, which ‘brackets’ the ontological implications in favor of necessarily first subjectively observing the structure of intention. I will gently nudge that perspective one more time, and suggest his student Heidegger deliberately lost the golden thread to instead pursue a theological agenda.
Thank you. I didn't phrase that part properly .
Hi Curt. There is an assumption in the statement that something is possible if it is not contradictory. The assumption is that contradiction (paradox) rules out truth.
Also quoting: “An actual” infinity is one that is actually infinite! We don’t have a simple way of conveying it other than by invoking images of a deity outside this universe.”
There is a simple geometric proof to convey the mechanism responsible for the infinities of extension and infinite regression. However, it sets an absolute limit on rationalism that falls short of the infinite.
https://doi.org/10.4236/jamp.2025.135099