“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, January 23, 2011

Treating Objects like Women 4: Anti-Positivism

Another distressing side-effect of Bohrian QT:

—quantum systems are unanalysable
—therefore what is analysable is not quantum
—therefore reality is empirical
—determination is positivist

Bohr's position is basically positivism, in which only empirically measurable ontic things are analysable.

So again, if you base an ontology on this view of quantum theory, you are basing your ontology on an unanalysable system. You are consigning humanities to the garbage bin. Or you can embrace positivism, but you have to sacrifice your “quantum ontology.”

Bohm and Hiley begin their counter-argument like this. Chaotic systems are determinate but not in the strictly linear way that positivism prefers. Chaotic systems are classical. Reality can't be positivist...

We want to be able to say things about reality, not simply admire its intra-active processual unanalysability.

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