The atom doesn't exist.

[Dreamtimer]

When photons can behave like waves or particles depending on us observing the question becomes so much bigger. Clearly there's an influence of consciousness.

[Aragorn]

When photons can behave like waves or particles depending on us observing the question becomes so much bigger. Clearly there's an influence of consciousness.

Not in what they are, but in how we perceive them.

[Dreamtimer]

Isn't our perception all we have? We have no real objective way to determine what the 'building blocks' of nature are. Do we?

[bsbray]

Not in what they are, but in how we perceive them.

But that goes back to the fundamental problem, the reason we still need theoretical physics: we don't really know what they "are." We just have theoretical models to fit our experimental data, that describe certain consistent behaviors of these things.

[lcam88]

Well said bsbray!

Here is the next question: does theoretical physics really help us know what they are? Or does it help us think we know what they are?

I like your reasoning Dreamtimer.

Maybe what is important is how we experience photons. If we choose to "experience them" through a double-slit apparatus we get a wave-like result. If we choose to use a photosensitive media to detect a photo, we experience it differently.

Does any of this remind you of recent experiments on plants that the Anderson Institute (previously linked and mentioned in ref to time dilation and frame dragging). Specifically how the genetics of the plants where altered in their experiment?

[bsbray]

Here is the next question: does theoretical physics really help us know what they are? Or does it help us think we know what they are?

Robert Anton Wilson wrote a book, Quantum Psychology, where he talks about this problem. It's the problem of whether or not reality is ultimately subjective (ie, "we only know the reality we experience, nothing more") or objective ("something must absolutely exist regardless of whether it's perceived or not"). It's a very old philosophical problem that has never really been resolved and the dialogue between different fields of knowledge ("hard" sciences vs "soft" sciences) suffers because of that. The thought process underlying the scientific method itself is based on some preconceived ideas about how reality "must" work.

We think we are really learning what something "is" by looking at it closely enough, but it's impossible to reach pure objectivity about it because it's impossible for us to remove our status as human beings, observing everything totally subjectively through eyes and ears, not to mention the great amount of interpretation that comes out of our human brains. It's totally unavoidable but we can't pretend that it doesn't happen. All of these things prevent the idea of "objectivity" in the strictest sense.

Robert Anton Wilson argued that it would be better for us to use "English prime," or "E-prime," which eliminates the verb "to be," and its other forms: "is," "are," "am," "was," etc. Because we never truly know what something "is" we could save ourselves a lot of confusion by remembering that we can only really say how something appears or seems to us, or what it is doing, but not this abstract concept of what it fundamentally "is."

[lcam88]

Robert Anton Wilson wrote a book, Quantum Psychology, where he talks about this problem. It's the problem of whether or not reality is ultimately subjective (ie, "we only know the reality we experience, nothing more") or objective ("something must absolutely exist regardless of whether it's perceived or not"). It's a very old philosophical problem that has never really been resolved and the dialogue between different fields of knowledge ("hard" sciences vs "soft" sciences) suffers because of that. The thought process underlying the scientific method itself is based on some preconceived ideas about how reality "must" work.

We think we are really learning what something "is" by looking at it closely enough, but it's impossible to reach pure objectivity about it because it's impossible for us to remove our status as human beings, observing everything totally subjectively through eyes and ears, not to mention the great amount of interpretation that comes out of our human brains. It's totally unavoidable but we can't pretend that it doesn't happen. All of these things prevent the idea of "objectivity" in the strictest sense.

Robert Anton Wilson argued that it would be better for us to use "English prime," or "E-prime," which eliminates the verb "to be," and its other forms: "is," "are," "am," "was," etc. Because we never truly know what something "is" we could save ourselves a lot of confusion by remembering that we can only really say how something appears or seems to us, or what it is doing, but not this abstract concept of what it fundamentally "is."

An alternate strategy then would be to see if we have greater understanding doing the opposite. Rather than trying to be purely objective in the sense of removing our status as humans, our interpretation and brains from observation to keep it "pure", we should accept that we are part of the experiment whether we like it or not, that we can be objective even while immersing as much of our experience and observation into what is. This strategy would permit absolute objectivity insofar as we accept that we also are learning about ourselves.

Objectivity is different from neutral or inert just as long as we accept certain givens: "We exist as part" is probably better than "We pretend we don't exist" only to find our existence is an obstacle to the pretension being tried.

I like how the issue of knowing what-is degenerated to semantics of communication. Communication is only meant as a way to share ideas, not define them. It relies of shared experiences and references or symbols that can be identified as having the same or similar meaning by the sender and receiver of messages. By trying to define ideas with language, we are attempting the same as to create physics with mathematics.

If the limitation is not necessarily the language, but the capacity to experience ever more wide a range of experiences to simply know, it stands to reason that immersing ourselves more completely into our experiments would yield better capacity to know.