General Discussion — Bitbol, Grinbaum, Pooley Part 1

0:00 So it's really a moving occasion. And what I will do is try to trigger the discussion by some provocative remarks about the content of the conference overall. So I would like to pinpoint among the recurring themes of this workshop what might be the most controversial of all, and thus the most interesting. It is not very difficult to draw a more or less fuzzy line, a dividing line, between two types of interventions. The first type was made of attempts at reconstructing quantum theories, which may be what are meant to account for and even maybe also to reconstruct the gravitational quantum mechanics by means of what we may call neutral or agnostic axiomatic. An axiomatic about the bounds of available experimental information and axiomatic about the algebraic structure more generally a principle theory in the style of Einstein, as opposed to Lorentz's program of constructive explanation. The second type of interventions were meant to express frustration about the state of affairs and the need for a program of antique picturing of the world compatible with the predictions of quantum theories. To me, it was very striking to see program of research stems from such a strong need for figuring out what the world independent of us looks like, that it is ready, that this trend, I would say, is ready to accept partial inadequacy, or at least provisional inadequacy, of the proposed models in the name of future developments that would satisfy this need. The question I'd like to ask at this point It's not my only question, so it's a provisional question.

2:30 To the proponents of this line of thought is the following. Can they accept that there might be ways the world is that would prevent any inhabitant of this world to get an exhaustive picture of it? I know it's a little bit circular, but it's a possibility. Next remark. Can there be ways the world is that would prevent any inhabitant of this world to get a faithful picture of it? It's a possibility. It's a possibility that... You first said exhaustive. You first said exhaustive. Yes, I repeat exhaustive. Yes, that's true. Because you can always get complimentary partial pictures, of course. What we do, we all do, and we know that we can do that, usually. Next remark. To be sure, there is a realist way to see and criticize the agnostic program, which, with its talk of neutral, possibly non-referring information, has a renunciation to the great task of physical science, which is to elucidate the fabric of reality, or maybe the mind of God, as I think some scientists such as Stephen Hawking did But I must insist on the fact there is also, conversely, a Kantian or neo-Kantian way to see and criticize this dream of going beyond a unified law-like account of phenomena towards a characterization of what there is. would first call this dream pre-critical. Because they would point out that this dream is very similar to the one of the young pre-critical Kant of the inaugural dissertation of 1770, expressed in a beautiful way by a very short sentence of this book by Kant. He says that senses show us things as they appear, whereas reason displays how things are. Kantians would also characterize this dream as a hubris in Greek,

5:00 or an excessive ambition of reason, to reach by its own means the ultimate cause and fabric of things, whereas its only function and its only true capacity is to apply to experience in a stratified reconstruction. This stratified reconstruction can be characterized as follows. First, operate a synthesis of appearances according to invariant structures that can be treated as objects. Then connect the phenomenal objects through universal laws. further than that, to an attempt at elucidating the ultimate origin of phenomena would be an unwarranted extrapolation of the powers of the limited, the bounded powers of reason. Now, accepting that the aim and capacity of reason is not to reveal the ultimate origin of the domain of phenomena, but only to offer scenarios able to extract out that can be dealt with as if they were objects independent of us and that can be ordered according to unifying laws allows us to make sense more easily of some features of the history of physics. For instance, of this matter that was alluded to by or dealt with by Paul Teller, namely this problem of provisional and partial knowledge. To be sure, many physicists of the past have been guided by representations of what they thought the world is like. But at each revolutionary step, they were forced to perform a more or less complete tabula rasa, pushing down, or pulling down, I don't know, a large amount of former presuppositions and pictures of the world. There was, for instance, the pulling down of Cartesian mechanisms by Newton, replaced by mathematical laws connecting the so-called Kepler's phenomena, which were called Kepler's laws, of course, but that Newton called phenomena in his principle. There was also the pulling down of models

7:30 of rods and clocks by Einstein, replaced at least provisionally by axioms and duration, there was Heisenberg's reduction of observables. To be sure, new models then emerged. But in view of their relatively short-term acceptance, who could contend that they are more than useful scenarios stating what is the set of intersubjectively acceptable targets for manipulation and use at a certain stage of history? Who could be certain that the further stage of the history of physics forces to reshuffle our tentative furniture of the world beyond recognition and with no warrant that there will be one day a final stage. So these are some provocative statements, only meant, of course, to trigger a hopefully very heated debate. Well, I'm going to do something else in maybe even five minutes, but not ten. I'm going to ask two questions. I think, well, it's you who will tell us what you think about the conference, but I found two connections that I think are worth exploring. One is between the space-time part and the quantum part, actually a missing connection. So there is no connection, but maybe there should be one. And the other connection is between the continent transcendental philosophers and the talks that we've heard here and the reconstruction text. So something Michel has already briefly mentioned. So let me tell you what I think these connections might be, and then we'll see if you think this can be proved for a lot. So between, so this is number one, I want to say, between the Braille-envised archival and reconstruction, I see such a close link

10:00 that it's sort of appearing and arising from this conference that it becomes almost an identity and this goes in two ways well from here we've heard from Michael Friedman about Einsteinian elevation experimental laws postulates, and then development of a theory out of those. Now, in Reconstruction, what is happening in Reconstruction, and we had some examples, but let me take, let's say, Joe Boob's example here. This is a part of my usual talks about Reconstruction, so I'm feeling pretty happy that I'm telling you this part of the story. What happens in Reconstruction is that we have these axioms or principles or postulates like no cloning we are trying to derive the theory from this principle, maybe adding some more axioms but now what is the status of these principles, where or not do they come from, so there is a problem of justification of what we take as principles from the reconstruction framework and the way we justify this is usually by appealing to our practice and to intuition and then saying we practice physical theory, we find out that this thing holds and then we elevate it to the status of principle and derive and reconstruct point of theory out of that so the question I asked Michael, and maybe some of you might remember is whether this going down from a priori which is sort of absolute to relativization of a priori allows us a variety of theories and he said yes so going down from here we're going to lose the aspect of doing the physics of the world we may elevate we may actually make mistakes we elevate different things to the status of postulates have different theories and then go and see what the theories tell us about the world and going from here we can use different postulates and get different theories and you know again here is something different, and maybe intentionally even not making the theory of the world, so not hoping to get the right theory of the world, but still get different theories.

12:30 So there is a very good similarity in my mind about these two movements from the reconstruction group and further relativizing a priori so that it becomes more More of a pragmatic postulate, pragmatic in the sense of deriving one theory, more of a here-and-out postulate than an a priori in the content set. So this was my first point, and this is something I would like to discuss. Here's a second point. I'll write less on the board for the second point. so in all talks about quantum theory we have heard this word which is very characteristic of quantum theory thanks to the word Heisenberg but actually we don't really see ourselves doing it otherwise and this is the word system so look for example at the relational view that Matteo presented at Revelle's interpretation well everything is relational information is well what one observer knows about the system is relational what is not relational is the agreement between the observers on what constitutes the system S is the same S And the same way, almost all approaches to quantum theory. The notion of system is a primary notion. And this is something which is not the case in relativity. The notion of system is not a part of the vocabulary that we need in order to do relativity. it. And this seems to me to be maybe a key, maybe a part of the key to bring together these two things. So this is something that I leave open to the discussion. I'm going to stand here so I can see the hands Oliver first and Catherine I want to pick up on

15:00 distinction that Michelle drew between the people he painted as following a sort of Einsteinian principle theory approach doing massive reconstruction with these of axioms, and the alternative which was sort of pursuing, you know, let's get to the fabric of reality. It seems to me that there was a distinction like this, but I'm not sure I would draw it in exactly that way. And in particular, okay, so the way I thought that, so the way I saw it was that there were some people who were, so this is the Kantians, the people who were engaged in the reconstruction project and Paul Teller's talk. The way I understood these programs is that they somehow involved taking the observer outside of physics and somehow saying that physics could only be understood in terms of our investigation of the world, that thinking of us as investigators in the world to somehow shape the nature of physics. And the Ontik program was really just saying that physics is trying to give us an objective picture of the world, trying to give us something like the view from nowhere. And going back to Einstein's... So I think that the analogy with Einstein is wrong, because Einstein's principle theory approach is completely compatible and complementary to this sort of view from nowhere project. It's just, you know, what you're trying to get at, Whereas, clearly, the view from nowhere project is completely incompatible with the view that says no, you know, the very nature of scientific inquiry, if it means that, you know, if we're trying to work out how to understand science, we've got to see ourselves as inquiring agents and so on, that's going to shape what kind of project science is. when we're theorizing about it, we've got to take that into account that necessarily the inquiry of the observer is outside the system of science. And it seems to me that there's this alternative point of view, basically Quinean naturalism, which doesn't ignore all the subjective aspects of our perception and the way we're theorizing, but somehow tries to create a happy circle. It's naturalistic, it admits that there's going to be revision, but it just doesn't have this to my mind unhappy removal of the observer, the measurer

17:30 from the subject of science Any direct response to that? Yeah, I mean I'm not sure if my sort of operational approach I was discussing would be one of the things we're doing that way definitely that's the kind of framework was operating in. But that doesn't really mean that I'm happy with that framework as the way science ought to be. It just seems to me that's what we have at the moment in quantum mechanics. And I would love to see this way of talking about the perspective of some observer on the probabilities of the outcomes of manipulations the observer's going to perform. I would love to see a way of getting all these perspectives together in one framework, whether it's a topological quantum field theory or somehow related to these ideas. But I don't really see how it's going to work at the moment, so I'm just trying to understand better what quantum framework is, and partly in the hope that understanding the nature of these sorts of frameworks, you might see how to put them all together. So you're a pro tem agnostic. Well, I mean, is ask questions like, well, in quantum mechanics we have this way of looking at dynamics as completely positive maps acting on the density matrix. But we can also represent those completely positive maps by adjoining another system, having a unitary interaction between the two systems, and so forth. So for instance, an actual question that pops up is, can we do that sort of thing in these more general frameworks? and is there any way somehow getting it all to work out in a way such that there isn't some arbitrary notion of measurement or kind? Paul Tapp. Again, a plea for considering the lively possibility that the best way to understand the world may be from a plurality of perspectives rather than thinking that one of them is privileged. for finding that plausible. Two very different ways I can know about a mental, in particular, a sensory state. I can know about it by description.

20:00 And I can know about it by being in it. These are radically different ways of, in some sense, knowing about the same thing. And I'm tempted, perhaps very hastily, to generalize this, just intended as an illustration, that we should consider the possibility, the option of thinking of human knowledge as seeking to understand things through many avenues and not seeing one avenue as privileged. Catherine? I have a question. I wanted to tell one of the first time I think the only way the cancer can accept that the observer should be taken out of the picture And the correcting for its presence, for instance, there is a picture of the idea of the evolution. How is an objective picture of the solar system? And it was just by first putting the observer back into the picture, and saying that a motion of planet cannot be taken as an absolute trajectory, but only as a trajectory related to a terrestrial observer and then out of this moment of return to the observer and in relation to the observer then draw a certain picture which was satisfactory enough as a representation of what would be seen from any perspective so I think form of justification in the first time it was a certain

22:30 relation so this is why I think the third question Michael Friedman I think it's more or less related to that and also to the question of system that you mentioned and I think system are also present in relativity and in fact it may be that I have a very naive view of what this theory relativity and quantum physics says but for me they share really a common structure in the sense that both us about what is the objective world on one part and what also we can know from this objective world and what is in the objective world are systems and systems what they are they are in the theory they are formalized in quantum physics by wave functions or by quantum fields and in general relativity by covariant quantities. And in both cases, the theorists define the status of the observers. To the observers, they associate some machinery, and the knowledge is the application of the machinery of the observer to the system. And this is some kind of projection. But the more I work on that, the more I have the impression that the status of objective reality, observer, process is the same in both theories and so the notion of system also has a very similar status in both. Do I not agree? I think I completely disagree. Interesting. Well, there are many ways to disagree with this. Let me point to at least maybe a couple of possible objections. One objection would be to question the word objectivity. And there are many ways to do this. One you had from the relational approaches. Another one you have from the transcendental approaches. So weak objectivity versus strong objectivity in this whole debate. Another way to object to this is to question the notion of systems in the world.

25:00 Because what is a system in the world? Well, you can say it's an object with properties. But then we know that the notion of property is a problematic notion. We have to be very precise about what quantum theory can tell us about properties. But then, okay, let's say we don't want systems to be objects with properties. We want them to be something else, maybe just collections of degrees of freedom. But then, okay, how do we know which degrees of freedom are allowed out there? How do we know which degrees of freedom go together and don't go together? And all things like this. So there are objections from quantum theory and from relativity to the notion of systems. So there are many ways not to disagree with the objective systems points of view, both attacking objectivity and by attacking systems. Just to answer very quickly, as I told, I didn't take the word objective in a philosophical technical science meaning, but very naively. And what I claim is that inside the theory, if you have something objective, it is very well defined what it can be. For instance, in quantum theory, nothing can pretend to be objective except, I think, the wave function or the field, and in general relativity, the covariant quantities. is, I don't pretend, of course, that they don't go together. Within the theory, yes. But when you take those things together, that doesn't work. Separately for each one. I had a hunch that Brigitte, is your remark on this issue? The loss to that point. Oh, OK. That's right. I have a issue. Catherine, do you have a remark on it? Then I think it's Mike or then Brigitte. Lucien was on this. Sorry? No, no. Lucien was on this. Lucien, I didn't see you. So, I think there are systems in both . In general, you can . But I think when you put it together, there's probably a real problem in a system. probably a system does seem to have something that persists in time. And if you have fuzzy causal structure, if time is something that is in some sense unaligned by quantum numbers, then of course a notion of system.

27:30 So in my approach I wanted to be careful to try to make it about the notion of system. and I think I did that to my naive mind I've never heard of anyone talking about preparing a system in GR well but what is the preparation of a system in quantum physics is just the interaction of a peculiar system which is the observer with another system so if you look that from outside this is an interaction between systems in preparation. Part of the issue with preparing systems in GR is just a very track down one, but they tend to be very heavy. Rob, did you want to comment on this? Yeah. It seems to me that perhaps the notion of systematic operational approach to expertization is actually a problem if your hope was to be entirely operational and reduce everything to just lists of things you're going to do in the lab and have no ontic notions at all, so not only are you not going to talk about the use of freedom or property resistance, but you're not even going to assume that a preparation device could sound a system because that might get you into trouble to assume that. If that's the hope, then I don't think the way that most of the operational expectations are phrased achieves that because they typically say things Like, imagine, I'm talking about a preparation of one system, or a composite system. And there's a notion of system there that hasn't been defined in terms of, oh, a system is just a set of preparations that have some algebraic structure, or whatever. So, a system has not been defined in entirely operational means. So, there's a fragment of ontological baggage. And I think Lucene's framework fixes that problem. it seems to me we have an hour now maybe we should take it Mark did you want to just jump just one little thing when you prepare a system in quantum physics you don't simply

30:00 act on the wave function of the system but on the wave function of the system plus observer plus some part of the world also so the notion of system in quantum physique is a very crude idealization I think that's a primary notion that's a sort of fundamental thing that's an element of the language of the fundamental language it comes with the assumption of the cut it comes with the assumption of the cut I think it's much more well if we can add one sentence just to close I agree that maybe Lucerne's way of looking at things could be a way out of this, but one thing I'm sort of worried about in this kind of approach, the way Lucerne formulates things with the knob and data, is that somehow we are still looking, once we have our data, we're still looking for something that unites data with these X indices. This, to me, is an indication that we still want to speak about entities that have maybe some spatial identity or something like this. So I think that maybe it's a good way, but we need to see whether going back to grouping things, by putting things into groups by spatial or temporal identity is not just a very sort of cheap and direct way to fall down into the mechanical framework instead of staying at the level where we've put ourselves by abstracting from the notion of system. Your comment's not on this. No, no, it's not on this. Okay. I guess I want to say something about this issue I'm not quite sure what, but I think it's very important to be careful about what are the problems in physics that are motivating these kinds of views and what are kind of general philosophical predilections that you then want to, in all circumstances, adopt. So you always want to be a Kant thing or you always want to be a Lyft. That seems to be not a fruitful way to bring to bear

32:30 those kinds of questions with the details of physical theory. So, for example, Kant. I mean, Kant's view, as I read, is very much bound up with his understanding of the internal physics and his attempt to make some kind of route between Leibniz and Newton and so forth. And so, on the one hand, there's nothing in Kant that has anything to do with problems in quantum mechanics of whether the subject is or is not in the natural world. The empirical self is in the natural world, no problem. He has something that's not in the natural world, which is really the moral self. and what he's worried about is how can determinism of classical modernity physics be consistent with the freedom of quantum morality, et cetera, et cetera, and so there is a kind of large philosophical worry that everybody at the time had, and Leibniz and Spinoza did, that's motivating the one important bit of who is ejecting the subject from the world, but it's not a problem in physics. when we get to relativity, it looked like there might have been such a problem when people started talking about observers all the time, But I think in relativity, it quickly became clear that that was a way of talking about reference frames, and eventually it was talking about the fact that the really embarrassing thing is space-time, and the space and time are projections, and so on, so that we all know. So nothing about the special of the observer in the sense of anything like a subject or a person was really important there, or really entangled in any essential area of physics. something that was interestingly intended with Kant was the fact that we changed our geometry and our laws of mechanics. And so his notion of the a priori could not possibly survive what happens to relativity. And that's what I was trying to do with the rule of a priori is say, how can we still have some kind of quantumism consistent with that? But no special problem about subjects and zero-verses is rising there. Now, of course, with quantum mechanics a very special problem about subjects and because the fact that von Neumann axiomatized the theory with a postulate about that and with a cut, and Bohr and other people in different ways raised this problem again. There it seems really intrinsic to the physics that one has to, one way or another, worry about this very general philosophical-looking problem about observers in general and their objects

35:00 or counterpart systems in general. And that has to do with very special features of the physics of quantum mechanics, So, for example, it's not very immediately obvious to me that the Rebelli kind of moves that we heard about, which I thought were very interesting, and I want to know more about that. But, you know, when Jean said, oh, well, this is just what we always knew from Kant, that, I confess, made me nervous. Because, you know, there you really have the actual subjects of the world. for reality, they are anything. They don't have to be a person. And those are the things that only have partial whatever, knowledge of the world. Well, that's a very special thing. Maybe you could bring that into relationships somehow or other with Kantian limitations and the antinomies and so on, but I think when we really want to think about the historical root from what Kant meant by that, which is about physics and a bunch of other weird stuff happening in the 18th century, and, you know, what revaluating that company are now worrying about. I think that's something to ponder. John, would you like to relieve Michael's nervousness? Yeah, yeah. I don't want to be nervous. In fact, I wrote my command. I want to support the agnosticism, conceptual, physical theory. And I say that we don't need a supplementary, anti-conception. First point, physics concerns phenomena. Trajectories, spectral rays, etc. And phenomena are relational entities, which are inseparable from their condition of accessibility observation so if the content of objectivity is phenomenon, it cannot be ontological first point second point, so ontology is pre-critical second point, but even without ontology, we can nevertheless try And if we are successful in this construction, it is different.

37:30 We don't need more than a reconstruction. I use the term of computational synthesis of phenomena, called the reconstruction of phenomena. And if we have a good computational synthesis, we don't need more. Third point, such a computational synthesis is extremely hard to construct, extremely difficult. It has to solve what I call the inverse problem of conceptual abstraction. extraction, you go from the phenomenal diversity to the unity of concepts. When you reconstruct phenomena, you have to go, in the other sense, from concepts to reconstruct the phenomenal diversity. and it is an extraordinary challenge for that we need essentially equations equations are associated with very general concepts and the solutions are incredibly and without this type of algorithms it is absolutely impossible to reconstruct the domain It is quite impossible because we don't have devices. So this is a step back. And what I like is that it proposes a general device for the computational synthesis. Now, saying that objectivity is conceptually determined by universal categories, and it is the transcendental analytic, these categories are schematized, and in a physical theory can be mathematically interpreted, what Kant called the mathematical construction of categories.

40:00 but how they are mathematically interpreted using the mathematical formulation of the condition of accessibility to phenomena. And this is a fundamental principle to construct mathematical categories using the mathematical formulation of the definition of a phenomena. OK, now for sensible phenomena, the conditions of accessibility are the forms of intuition, space and time, and so you have to reinterpret the general categories, cosignity, et cetera, et cetera, in geometrical terms. And so physics is necessarily a uniform geometry in the field. But in quantum mechanics, transcendental aesthetics is not spatial time point. Conditions of accessibility are of another time. And you can perfectly generalize this transcendental point of view to other physical theory. And I think that I have shown that this general sonata device remains extremely operational, even in modern theory. And so for me, trans-sanitarism is very, very accurate. But the point is, I repeat, is that if you are able to do a good computational synthesis, approximative, of course, a good computational synthesis, you don't need any supplementary computing process. I don't know why you would need this supplement. Why a perfect, ideally perfect, mathematical reconstruction of Ben-Amour is frustrating? You don't need anything more?

42:30 I think there's another very important point of culture and heritage the conceit of nature and the distinction between constitutive and regulated principles. And on one hand, this is true that when I'm alive, after all, and now, and how many of you have a most clearly standing in front of each other, and, or at sea plant, and this is a historical state of human development at all, that Kant was absolutely convinced, on the right hand, your first provoking point, that the world is such a way that we, in other times, but on the other hand that we should try to exhaust according to the regulated principle of the unity of our knowledge and also according to the principle of the unity of nature. So this is quite another way than the system, It's a system of knowledge on the one hand and on the other hand nature is an infusion system, a system of infusion laws. This is a very important point in Kant because on the one hand, my view of the kind of knowledge today is that in view of modern theory, in the fields of physics, the constitutive regulative distinction should be reconceived and should be looked at what parts of the constitutive remain and what are more regulated principles than constitutive. On the other hand, And Kant's own regulated principles of never achieving complete knowledge of the world, but achieving more and more knowledge and aiming. This is the united unity of our knowledge. This is, I think, at the moment, this is of the program of the unified physical theory of the first training. It's also the basis of the very proper of a pattern meditation. and without the idea of systematic unity, of physics,

45:00 one might say, you might pretend yourself that the physics is just a collection of models of the validity and there is no quest for systematic unity. Comparing this would mean to dispense with the very idea of science, because of the scientific knowledge is systematic knowledge. but the other aspect is to try to find the issues between the different concepts of our theoretical analysis. Chris has had his hand up for us one time. We must hear from Chris. So I wanted to come back to Michelle's question and do a typical philosopher's trick by not answering the question directly but wanted to draw some distinction. Well, there are two sets of distinctions I want to draw. The first one, we need to get clear on what we might mean by an exhaustive picture of the world. So I've got at least three things that we might mean by that. So the first one, we might need an exhaustive picture as a listing of all the things that we said about some object, or a group of objects, or the world as a whole. Now, I suspect, okay, because what can be said, in order to talk about what can be said, I need to talk about what concepts are in the quarry. To talk about all things that could be inserted, it looks like we're going to have to quantify all concepts, and I doubt that domain is well-refining. So I think that first notion of an exhaustive picture is an incoherent one, so it should just be dropped. We can't mean that by an exhaustive picture. The second one, what we might mean by an exhaustive picture, well, it could mean something like a causally and or explanatory closed theory of some domain of phenomena and things. And then the third option could be that we mean theory of every domain called the whole domain of the phenomenon of the name of the whole. Now that last one we should probably reject as a foolish reductionist idea to the part of the humans who are trying to all the thought from earlier. But that didn't mean we're giving up science for disrespecting the thought that you can do genuine science in different domains and only one set of laws to do everything could be probably an explanatory proposed So we should probably reject the third option. So it really looks like the interesting one is whether or not we can have conditions

47:30 that rule out the possibility of causey and or expanatory close theory of some domain of phenomena in fame. So that's the thing we're doing, which is an option there. Let me use this. I don't mean ruled out in practice or ruled out in principle, on, because it's very likely that in practice there are going to be some domains of non-intentities that are coming, systemically sensitive, in some way. So those are the kind of restrictions I want to draw. To get to this with a philosophical memory, if you might have been trying to poke and see what might come back out, I want to answer that better grammatically. I think what Wittgenstein was writing in the philosophical investigations was that nothing would do as well as there's something about which nothing can be said. And that's what I'm saying. Well, I think we should end on that note. Can I just ask for a little clarification in your remark? In your second sense of exhaustive, are you allowing for empirically equivalent systems? What do you have in mind? Well, you just imagine your favorite exhaustive characterization of some domain of physics. Could you imagine a different one with a different ontology behind it that would explain the phenomena as well, but there'd be no mapping between the two? So that would be, I hope that wouldn't turn out because I'm not going to mind a realist position to be kind of . Tell us more about it, because I thought John was kind of challenging. What more do you want? Yeah, yeah. But the common garden, you know, the world's out there, we need to bring concepts to it, so the concepts you possess are concerned about what you can say, the truth value of what you say is concerned about how the world is, and then tables and chairs are the same kinds of things as electrons. You realize what we introduce new sets of concepts, have more statements, kind of testimonies, so it's the extension of common garden thinking about the world. But it's more than that, it's something that's important to bear in mind when you're thinking about various programs in physics. For example, the information . It's not just some kind of common sense . It's something that's important. So you need to have good reasons to give it up because it is such a common sense notion. and typically my objection

50:00 is that people do it up too quickly and they don't recognize that you do that so it's on really help it because then you don't get any explanation and explanation is really why you're doing it Ali, are you going to circle the wagons here? Well I guess I want to respond a bit to John's challenge really quickly it seemed to, that the picture you were painting seemed to evolve, requiring that we knew what we were talking about when we were talking about the phenomena. And the examples you gave, projectors, spectral rays, I mean, these aren't objects of everyday experience. I think the realist picture, I mean, I'm sort of a realist in a sort of fairly minimalist, quietest, quignant sense, is just denying that there's, you know, that you should be drawing important the way you're conceptualizing science between, you know, the everyday world and the world that's described by science. And of course, you know, there is an apparent mismatch between, you know, colors as we're describing in science and, you know, our color as we experience it, and a mismatch which means that, you know, we can't think of experiences transparently revealing to us the nature of reality, but the overall scientific story presumably still allows that, you know, well it's giving us a view from nowhere picture in the way the Quine universe thinks about it, and I think it's the view from nowhere picture that's being rejected by certain philosophical views, and it's that bit of the non-political picture that I'm concerned about, because rejecting the view from nowhere seems to be privileging the contents of that experience or something like that, which I think doesn't ultimately stand up. When you recognize that the science actually does have stuff to say about the way observers interact with systems. John, do you want to respond? I think I should let Michelle respond, then Alexa. I just have a remark about what you said about the necessity to get an explanatory causal explanation on one or so on the next. What I was wondering about was, what do you mean about this exigence when you are confronted with only probabilistic predictions?

52:30 For instance, would you be unsatisfied by the fact that quantum theory has not been an explanation, especially in theory? Could it be about the generation of a response with integration of the ? Yeah, so I don't depend too much on the causally. So that's why I said causally and all explanatory. And of course, you can have different levels of demand for explanation. and sometimes you can get explanation by realising that a certain kind of demand that you were raising was a misplaced one but in the quantum case the correct response seems to me to be thought that there was a reduced more stochasticity in the theory which of course is contentious it would be just to say well hey if a theory is reduced to be stochastic it's my best theory, I can still be a realist about it I can still be a realist about the probabilities, something like that But I can't ask for a demand, why did this particular outcome happen more than that one? I was just thinking of those questions in the stochastic theory. But the theory as a whole could still be explanatory in the same thing. But I don't want to tell a big story about that. So in that case, they have a problem because it seems to be that you accept that the theory can be a theory about . and then investigate the standard . Well, what's that? The problem is that that's not a theory that can be applied because it's actually making a statement. For example, in that way, you make a suggestion possible. I mean, what kinds of considerations about why we don't have any? The standard quantum mechanics, if you like, isn't a theory which would be the main interpretation. And then in return, if you want to agree with us, you can say, actually, what's this theory supposed to be saying about that kind of world that we might say actually interpretation is going to have to draw in my horns. The best I can do is be instrumentalist in this domain. And that's a considerable feat. Local instrumentalism quantum mechanics is a bad thing. So if you found, you should try and avoid it if you can. The cost might be too high.

55:00 who's closest to paulo um alexi i think i was trying to answer john let me try another answer due to this challenge of why why we why we need ontology it would be very good not to have one you know it would be very good to be able to connect a just directly with another trace in the chamber. But the problem is that we are finite beings, so we tend to do things in the economical way. And this is how we first find out that it is easier to have a theory via some presuppositions about what exists phenomena and then we just make this last step which we may like or not like where from constituting ontological constituting elements of reality as tools for connecting phenomena we slip toward believing that they are there and this is such a common slip that we all make it in a way. So the reason behind is twofold. First, we are finite beings and we do things in the economical way. And second, there is this element of belief. There is slipping from one thing to another. Yeah, it's a very short answer. so you say it is because we are finite that it is useful to use an ontology it is rather extraordinary because for Kant it is exactly the inverse the opposite it is because we are finite that ontology is metaphysical speculative and has to be eliminated from science but for Kant The incarnation of our ontology is noumenal, but in Kant you have the idea that it is very

57:30 useful and natural to make the hypothesis that there is an underlying reality. It is what Kant called the grounding. But the point is that this grounding, which can be useful for us, finite design, is completely inaccessible to science, and so has nothing to do with science. I don't think, well, I don't think that's... But realistically, you are happy to see. It's useful. And as far as we agree with the questions of Michelle, and not a bit of a remark but a bit of an impression on the discussion of Kantianism. In the last presentation, we said that we need reconstructions to speak a configuration of the notion of knowledge and they said that I agree. So it seems to me that the answer to the question of Michelle is very simple. The answer depends on the reconstruction of the notion of knowledge and that I do not like to give an answer proposing before a reconstruction of knowledge. So, for these other words. The critical impression is on Kantianism, that Kantian Kant, the revolution, was the first radical reconstruction, reconfiguration of the notion of knowledge. This is, we know the world was the development of Kantianism in the 19th and 20th century. We know from the relationship of Kantianism and use of terminology. But what is the point of Kant from this point of view? It is not only constructivism. If we speak of constructivism and we stop the real speaking of Kant or about constitution, it is not strategic. It may be dangerous because the first step of Kant is a redefinition of what it means for us to speak of the object of knowledge.

1:00:00 If we speak of constructivism kind of this idea of constitution, but after we evaluate this position, going on speaking as metaphysical realism or as a realist of the common sense, We have a possibility to evaluate the true meaning of the next one as the type of cancer. If we adopt all these aspects of the question, many things said by a scholar, certain aspects and so on, we may agree. But in the background, there is a definition of what it means for us, knowledge or knowledge. So you cannot evaluate this otherwise. Going back...