Chapter 4: The Detected-But-Undetected-Apparatus in action
The basic idea of quantum mechanics relies on the wave-function of a system; one must understand what happens when two things that intrinsically should be seperated are instead isolated together. Next I present what the wave-function (and general nature of the disturbance) looks like when a detector is present, and then proceed with first forming the wave-function, estimating what it is, and thus inferring which systems detector-detectors were likely detected, then predicting how its impact on the system will look, and testing the outcome. The second is the same protocol with no detectors present. The Detected-But-Undetected-Apparatus is an alternative to science as a whole. Science as a normative enterprise would not only fail to explain what is there, but stand in need of correction on all fronts. But it is not only normative in the sense of supporting or correcting a course of action. Science is normative insofar as it takes the standards it proposes as normative in order to determine what phenomena are allowable and what not. This normative dimension of science is something that Kant refers to as normativity, and Schelling invokes in connection with immanence. (I will not return to Schelling later.)
Yet it’s not this power to determine norms or standards that makes science “incomplete” – rather it is this tendency to accept its prefabricated strictures and rules as fixed and beyond critique. In this sense, peculiar philosophical accounts of science, which postulate an ultimate creative power that can also control what gets detected and what doesn’t, represent an escape from what science “as science reveals” remains always in need of.
As we’ve already noted, this escapes the order of potency of things, which is constitutive and immanent. The things in themselves doesn’t’ do anything, but rather brings in the possibility of action by opening up new lines of emergence. For example, there’s no pre-existing form of the living ringed-ringed octopi and descendants that would, somehow, decide to be octopi, yet I can never be entirely sure what fish life would look like in a world without ringed-ringed octopi, or what octopi without their genetic endowment would be doing.
The Detected-But-Undetected-Apparatus is most often used as a technical object within scientific discourse, and in this capacity, its “incorrective character” provides for the range of things that science does declare. For example, an emission of X-rays is not observable, but the radiation can be found with no eyes, say, or even radioactive waves escaped by decay of Uranium 238. Things can be found as being in the analyzed and detected mode, and as being in the undetected, undetected mode. But this is not to deny the traditional standing of science. To compound the confusion reinforces the one we started with.
Science is a normative enterprise, but real science seems to escape any presumed normative grounds. This is why science disproves itself. Science refers to unintended effects and anomalies that it ascribes linguistic mantles of reality that rest on scientific assertion rather than human observation. Embedded in the very articulation and production of scientific objects in its exposited mode is its normative epistemology. Even if science can have free reign to “wrongly assume” anything, it can insist that “we” can now do reliable studies.
We made a promise in the previous post to not open the Pandora’s Box of normative philosophy any more than we actually do, but we did not realize we were straining at the screw of the doorknob. Below is a genre of philosophy critical for science to consider. The genre is the philosophy of science which also develops and deploys science. This is the literature of Scientists Who Write about Their Sciences. Science as literature, not merely history or pure theory. How can you shake this academic house?
As there is attractive biological cause, evident algorithmic cause: and no credible alternative theory as to the place and form of core numbers of cells engaging in a variety of random activities such as those computations as to chance that our species experienced such extensive population growth.
The number of cells can be considered an object of math. But there is no deep precision mathematics: we have no way of dealing with the normal frequent failures of math in very many settings. Let’s also say clearly this: Lack of ordinary probabilities did not prevent the successful completion of the human project as we can see.
Let’s also be clear that any statistical devices will prove fallible, even when (if) they conduct “what you might call experimental trials”. There is no Geiger counter that is not open-Just having trusted statistical procedures doesn’t establish all you might want to know about its credibility, even if it is an “all-purpose error cord”.