Bohm on self-fragmentation

Physicist David Bohm reflects on how a fragmenting philosophy, like mechanism, even though mistaken, tends to become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and to create fragmentation in the objective world:

Of course, there are areas in which the production of fragments is relevant and appropriate (e.g., the crushing of stones for the making of concrete). But what we are discussing here is that irrelevant and inappropriate fragmentation which comes about quite generally when we regard the "parts" as appearing in our thought as primary and independently existent constituents of all reality (including ourselves). A world view, such as mechanism, in which the whole of existence is thus considered as made up of such "elementary" parts will then give strong support to this fragmentary way of thinking, which in turn expresses itself in further thought that sustains and develops such a world view. As a result of this general approach, man ultimately ceases to give the divisions between things their proper significance (e.g., as useful or convenient ways of thinking, indicative of the relative independence or autonomy of these things), and instead, he begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually made up of nothing but separately and independently existing components. Being guided by this view, man then acts in such a way as to try to break himself and the world up, so that all seems to correspond to his way of thinking. He thus obtains an apparent proof of the correctness of his fragmentary self-world view, not noticing that it is he himself, acting according to his mode of thought, who has brought about the fragmentation that now seems to have an autonomous existence, independent of his will and of his desire.

Fragmentation is thus an attitude which disposes the mind to regard the divisions between things as absolute and final, rather than as ways of thinking that have only some relative and limited range of validity and usefulness. It leads to a general tendency to break things up in an irrelevant and inappropriate way, and so, it is evidently inherently destructive. For example, though all parts of mankind are now actually fundamentally interdependent and inter-related, the primary and overriding kind of significance generally given to the widespread and pervasive distinctions between people (family, profession, nation, race, ideology, etc.) is preventing human beings from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival. When man thinks of himself in this fragmentary way, he will inevitably tend to put his own separate Ego first, or else his own group. He cannot seriously think of himself as internally related to the whole of mankind and therefore to all other people. Even if he does try to put mankind first, he will tend to think of nature as something separate, to be exploited to satisfy whatever desires people may happen to have at the moment. Similarly, he will think body and mind are independent actualities, and he will go on in his thinking to divide these further, into various parts and functions, each to be treated separately. Physically, this is not conducive to over-all health (whose root meaning is "wholeness"). And mentally, it is not conducive to sanity (which has basically a similar meaning), as is indeed shown by an ever-growing tendency to the break-up of the psyche, as neurosis, psychosis, etc.

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David Bohm, "The Implicate Order: A New Approach to the Nature of Reality" in Beyond Mechanism: The Universe in Recent Physics and Catholic Thought, ed. David L. Schindler (Lanham, New York: University Press of America, 1986), 13-36 at 36-7.

Dijkstra on Language

A video I saw on "Dijkstra on foolishness of Natural Language Programming" (April 11, 2025) helpfully exposed me to some of Dijkstra's ideas on language. It's a short piece, but I'd like to focus on the central paragraphs:

In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native tongues. This would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated, but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the burden, life would become easier for us. It sounds sensible provided you blame the obligation to use a formal symbolism as the source of your difficulties. But is the argument valid? I doubt.

We know in the meantime that the choice of an interface is not just a division of (a fixed amount of) labour, because the work involved in co-operating and communicating across the interface has to be added. We know in the meantime —from sobering experience, I may add—that a change of interface can easily increase at both sides of the fence the amount of work to be done (even drastically so). Hence the increased preference for what are now called "narrow interfaces". Therefore, although changing to communication between machine and man conducted in the latter's native tongue would greatly increase the machine's burden, we have to challenge the assumption that this would simplify man's life.

A short look at the history of mathematics shows how justified this challenge is. Greek mathematics got stuck because it remained a verbal, pictorial activity, Moslem "algebra", after a timid attempt at symbolism, died when it returned to the rhetoric style, and the modern civilized world could only emerge—for better or for worse—when Western Europe could free itself from the fetters of medieval scholasticism—a vain attempt at verbal precision!—thanks to the carefully, or at least consciously designed formal symbolisms that we owe to people like Vieta, Descartes, Leibniz, and (later) Boole.

The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.

Recall that Dijkstra was primarily known as a computer scientist, and most famous for the shortest-path algorithm named after him.

What really caught my attention here was the knock on the Scholastics (who admittedly sometimes got to rigid about terminology) and the exaltation of Viete, Descartes, and company. Then the "ruling out all sorts of nonsense" phrase. I don't know much about the man's personal beliefs, but the latter statement inclines me to think that he would include "unscientific" beliefs like creation and God among the "nonsense", but, if not him, then there are plenty of people out there who would happily apply his statement in such a way.

And yet Dijkstra is perfectly right about this. He's perfectly right in what he explicitly says about this language needing to be unambiguous.

The piece missing is that the application of the language he's talking about is not the standard use of language. Instructing a machine requires language with no ambiguity. It is imperative language: do this, then do that. It's not even simply scientific language in the usual sense, which itself strives to rule out ambiguity and embrace univocity, but something much narrower. It might be the narrowest use of language there is.

This imperative language contrasts with the more prosaic use of language to make observations about the world, or even to instruct another person. These uses of language admit of ambiguity. Indeed, ambiguity is in some ways an advantage. Regarding even scientific language, Werner Heisenberg put it this way:

Furthermore, one of the most important features of the development and the analysis of modern physics is the experience that the concepts of natural language, vaguely defined as they are, seem to be more stable in the expansion of knowledge than the precise terms of scientific language, derived as an idealization from only limited groups of phenomena. This is in fact not surprising since the concepts of natural language are formed by the immediate connection with reality; they represent reality. (quoted more completely here)

So Dijkstra's statement is correct about computers, but would be sorely incomplete if it were about language in general. Computer languages separate themselves from normal, natural human language by being exclusively about control. There is no room for freedom of interpretation in instructing a machine, which is both its glory and its limitation. But this separation of computer languages from human language, makes them a whole other thing. And the exaltation of computer languages over human languages slides us further down the path of dehumanization.

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Edsger W. Dijkstra, 'On the foolishness of "natural language programming".'

Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1958).

The Face Palm of Hossenfelder on Qualia

Sabine Hossenfelder, whom I generally like and who's probably one of the most sane of the public physicists, thinks scientists have managed to measure qualia.

I suppose it's inevitable a physicist will incur into philosophical territory. In this case, Dr. Hossenfelder has done so in the way that seems best calculated to display her ignorance of philosophy. Qualia are by their nature unmeasurable. They are experiences, subjective if you will, that correspond to qualitative parts of the external world.

The difference is between the inside and the outside of an experience. Measure all you want, you'll still be poking around the outside of experience, and never penetrate to the inside, what it's like to have the experience. Being "approximately inside," as it were, doesn't make the real thing. Suppositions and creative renaming don't make the real thing.

In reality the scientists have measured the way brains react to similar stimuli. As a friend helpfully pointed out, the experiences of different organisms are incommensurable, even when those organisms are nearly identical; while the technique described might be a useful tool for, say, helping compare pain levels between patients, it falls short of explaining what pain feels like.

Dr. Hossenfelder would do better to study a little good philosophy before spouting off like this again. Lately I've been reading Michael Augros's very good book The Immortal in You, which would be an appropriate primer on the issues that Hossenfelder tries to discuss here.

A Promising New Formulation of Quantum Mechanics

I've been watching the series of interviews that Curt Jaimungal conducted of Jacob Barandes from Harvard. The first, which is probably the most exciting (bang for the buck), here, runs over two hours. I found the discussion scintillating and probably the best thing on approaches to quantum mechanics in quite some time.

So far, I don't know much about Barandes's approach beyond what I've seen in these videos, but my understanding is that he derives the textbook axioms of quantum mechanics, which have always appeared rather strange and arbitrary, from a couple much simpler and entirely natural axioms involving undivided stochastic systems. And that this broader picture does away with the need for mystical interpretations of QM, including and most especially Many Worlds.

For those more interested in the formalism, there is this two-hour online seminar Barandes gave on the derivation of Hilbert Space from his stochastic expressions.

A friend who's an active theoretical physicist thinks this approach can provide some new tools for understanding physics. He says Barandes knows what he's talking about. I like Barandes's philosophical approach to physics, though I do think it's too limiting to restrict philosophical physics to the analysis of physics, theory and experiments. Why not also allow it the analysis of nature itself?

To me the most appealing point of Barandes's Undivided Stochastic Systems approach is the "undivided": the fact that motions are treated as indivisible wholes, and that imposing the requirement that these wholes be treated as divisible is what produces much of the quantum craziness. Recall that in the latter half of Physics, Aristotle discusses the wholeness of motions, and further, that the unity of motion is closely related to the unity of substance. I'm not sure there's a close connection of Barandes's work to Aristotle, but the former does seem to provide an opening for an incipient unity or teleology. More study is needed.