Quantum Physics for Dummies and a New Idea

In 2018, doctors at the New York University of Medicine announced that they had discovered a whole new organ in the human body, naming it the interstitium. The interstitium is a dense network of interconnected tissues and fluid-filled sacs found throughout the torsos of human beings. It had never been discovered before because the science of anatomy was based on the dissection of cadavers and, when a person dies and is dissected, the fluid empties out of the sacs; previously medical researchers had misidentified the remnants of these sacs as being tears resulting from biopsy methods. It was only because of new technologies enabling researchers to peer minutely into the interiors of human bodies while the humans were still alive that researchers came to the extraordinary conclusion that they had discovered a whole new human organ. As I understand it, scientists are still unsure what the function of the interstitium is, although it has been proposed that it partly acts like a system of shock-absorbers preventing damage to other parts of the body when people are moving around. 

I learnt about the intersititium first through the British TV show QI. If I have readers who are unfamiliar with QI, I advise them to watch it on Youtube if they can't get it on ordinary TV. It used to be hosted by the inimitable genius Stephen Fy and is now hosted by Sandy Toksvig who is also Quite Interesting. QI specialises in reporting on incredibly surprising facts and speculations. The main point of the show is to reveal comedically how wrong everyone often is about things they think they know. For instance, did you know that the Immaculate Conception doesn't refer to Mary's visitation by the Holy Ghost but rather, according to official Catholic doctrine, the doctrine that Mary herself was born without Original Sin? I didn't until earlier this week. It was an episode of QI hosted by Stephen Fry that first introduced me to Rupert Sheldrake. The other thing QI often does is show that contrary to the idea that science has explained everything that there are mysteries from the trivial to the profound that scientists still haven't solved. For some reason, I find this very heartening, perhaps because it helps fortifies me in pursuing one of my life goals, my project of showing that the whole of psychiatry is bullshit. The only small drawback of QI is that because it often reports on the latest scientific findings, it may be promulgating errors that will not stand up to the test of time.

The main purpose of this essay is to discuss something QI gives little time to perhaps because it seems too complicated: quantum mechanics. I want to try to explain a part of quantum mechanics in such a way that it is clear to people who only have a slight understanding of physics and at the same time present in rudimentary form a whole new way of approaching it. I first wrote about quantum physics many years ago in two posts called "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat" and "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat Part 2" and have written a number of posts either directly or indirectly concerning probability, a key aspect of quantum theory, since. If I have a radical proposal it may be precisely because I am not an expert, that I have thought about this issue philosophically rather than mathematically. It may be that the problem with becoming an expert is that this involves accepting the orthodox position and so discourages independent thinking.

In the previous essay I discussed the current war in Gaza and before I discuss quantum physics I need to make a couple of corrections. In the previous post I said that prior to October 7, Israel was pursuing a normalisation agreement with Egypt. In fact it was close to making a deal with Saudi Arabia, a deal in which the Saudis would have officially recognised Israel as a state. I made this stupid mistake because I didn't factcheck my memory. I also said that 1400 Israelis lost their lives on October 7 because that was the number reported by all the news networks at the time– we now know it was closer to 1200.  My previous essay was a little stylistically unclear at one point because I had difficulty trying to articulate exactly what I meant but I hope my readers understood what I was trying to say. Since writing the previous essay I continued to research the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma and considered writing a full follow-up to it, replying to a podcast by Sam Harris and an interview I saw between Piers Morgan and Douglas Murray. I decided that rather than write something about it again myself it would be better if I simply direct readers to two podcasts by Ezra Klein, both available on Youtube, "An Intense, Searching Conversation with Amjad Iraqi" and "What Israelis Fear the World Does Not Understand". The first is an interview with an Arab Israeli who would like to imagine a world without 'ethno-nationalism' and the second with a Jewish Israeli who is a self described Zionist. Both are reasonable left-leaning people who just happen to have quite different perspectives. I will say one brief thing not about the present war in Gaza but about the Israel-Palestinian conflict more generally. The crux of the matter seems to me to be this. Palestinians want the Right of Return – that is, Palestinians in Gaza and those who have been (and are currently) being displaced in the West Bank, as well as the millions of refugees living in neighbouring Arab states, want to return to the homes their forbears fled or forced from in 1948 and, I think, 1967, homes that are now inside Israel. Israeli Jews want a Jewish state and in order for the state to be Jewish, they believe it needs to have a Jewish majority. In the previous essay I was a little flippant about this fundamental issue. What needs to happen is some kind of compromise. Of course there are horrible right-wing people on both sides who hate and want to kill their opponents but these people should be excluded from the conversation.

In the previous essay I also discussed the Second Law of Thermodynamics and I want to say something more about it before diving into quantum physics, something I implied but didn't say directly. The Second Law states that entropy always increases or, to put it helpfully but perhaps a little misleadingly, that isolated systems always tend to become increasingly disordered as time goes on. If we consider very, very small systems, however, such as a system consisting of a couple of protons and electrons, the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't apply. This is because we can't meaningfully say that one state of a microscopic system is more or less ordered than another. In fact even the term 'heat', a term that is very important to thermodynamics, doesn't really make sense when considering such microscopic systems. If we imagine a slightly bigger system, the Second Law applies weakly; it becomes stronger and stronger as we consider larger and larger systems. The Second Law applies almost absolutely when we consider macroscopic systems, such as a box full of air, a coal-driven locomotive, or even perhaps a person. It is easy to forget the difference in scale – something like a pen contains an unimaginably large number of atoms. At the human scale the Second Law does seem like an absolute law because macroscopic states are so much vastly larger than microscopic states. This raises an interesting philosophical question. In physics (although not in other sciences like biology) it is common to talk about Laws of Nature, where a law is a rule that the universe follows without exception. If we use this rough definition, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not really a law at all because exceptions occur, perhaps even very occasionally at the macroscopic scale. Something else comes to mind. One of the most important laws of physics is that energy is always conserved but it has been recognised for a long time that, as quantum and particle physics seems to imply, this law is violated when we consider particle interactions, although these 'perturbations' are so small and brief that we don't need to worry about them unduly. The law is obeyed in the long run. When we consider all this, Rupert Sheldrake's proposal that the Laws of Nature are not really laws at all but actually habits seems far less outrageous.

There is a second issue with thermodynamics that I implied but didn't explore. According to Wikipedia, the definition of the entropy of a macrostate is the Boltzman constant multiplied by the logarithm of the number of possible microstates associated with that macrostate (assuming that each microstate is equally probable). The problem here is that neither the term macrostate nor the term microstate has a clear definition. When thinking about this over the last few days, I became worried that the Wikipedia entry was simply wrong. In 2005 I did a fairly comprehensive course in first-year physics (not second-year as I said in the previous post). We covered thermodynamics, special relativity and a reasonable amount of quantum physics but not general relativity or, in any depth, the Standard Model. Although I still possess the textbook dealing with quantum physics, I lost the textbook containing the discussion of thermodynamics a long time ago and so have been unable to check whether Wikipedia is peddling disinformation. From memory, I seem to recall the textbook saying that we cannot meaningfully talk about the absolute value of a system's entropy but only about changes in entropy. 

In the nineteenth century, when the concept of entropy was first formulated, the change in entropy of a system was defined as the change in energy of that system (the amount of energy coming in or out) divided by the absolute temperature of that system. If we combine this definition with the Second Law, we can explain why if a hot object is placed in contact with a cooler object, the first will cool down and the second warm up and they will together tend towards a common equilibrium temperature. The nineteenth century understanding of thermodynamics was replaced by a statistical theory, formulated I think by Boltzman. In 1900, in fact, physicists were divided as to whether the Second Law was a hard law or a statistical law – Max Plank himself, I believe, thought it was a hard law. The statistical view won out (even though Lawrence Krauss gives the impression of still believing it to be a hard law). According to the statistical theory, it is actually possible for the hot object to get hotter and the cooler object to get cooler but this is very, very unlikely. My understanding was that we can derive the nineteenth century theory of thermodynamics from the statistical theory: the older theory 'emerges' from the statistical theory when we consider systems of larger and larger sizes. However, as I suggested above, I wonder if the statistical theory is itself adequately defined.

And now at last I turn to quantum physics. The first idea in quantum physics I need to discuss because the following discussion won't make sense without it is 'wave-particle duality'. Hopefully my readers have at least heard of this idea. At the human level we tend to think in particle terms: we think of a rock as composed of particles and, when we throw it, imagine it to behave like a really big particle that obeys Newton's laws. We also know about waves such as waves on the sea or sound waves. At high school we learn that light is made up of waves, specifically electro-magnetic waves. Waves and particles seem like two entirely different types of thing. However at the quantum level we can't easily tell the two apart. When we consider something like an electron or a photon, sometimes it is better to describe it as a wave and sometimes it is better to describe it as a particle. It depends on the situation. Everything actually possesses this wave-particle duality, not just electrons and photons, but for some reason this 'wave-particle duality' isn't apparent in the macroscopic world. I won't attempt to explain why it is not apparent here. What is important is that in the following discussion I will talk about particles having associated waves, even though this is not exactly right, because it will make the discussion easier.

The waves associated with particular particles, such as electrons, generally obey the Schrodinger equation. (If the particles are moving very fast, relativistic effects come into play and we need to use the Dirac equation instead, an equation more general than Schrodinger's and formulated later.) Interestingly you can't derive the Schodinger equation from prior assumptions or axioms. When Schrodinger came up with it in 1925 it seems to have just popped into his head. (Of course he had been thinking intensely about the new science of quantum mechanics for a while.) Schrodinger's equation is a wave equation. Schrodinger himself didn't know how to interpret it – because waves are spread out in space he thought that an electron must also be spread out in space. In 1926 Max Born offered the interpretation that has become a core part of quantum physics ever since. The wave function should be interpreted in terms of probability. The greater the amplitude of the wave at a particular point in space and time, the greater the probability of finding the associated particle there. (Mathematically, it is is bit more complex. The probability that a particle will be found in a particular region is the absolute square of the wave function integrated over that region.)

There is no way I can in this essay discuss all of quantum physics. One important, in fact foundational, idea in quantum physics, for instance, is 'quantisation'. If a particle like an electron is subject to boundary conditions, if it is for instance stuck in a box from which it cannot tunnel out, it takes on one of a discreet set of energy levels. This contrasts with classical physics in which an electron in a box can have any energy at all and where energy levels are continuous. I sense that there is a conceptual puzzle here but again I will not dive into it. My purpose here is to simply describe one particular example of quantum mechanics and show that it leads to an extraordinary conclusion.

The phenomenon I wish to talk about is diffraction. Basically, diffraction is the term we use for the fact that light, like other waves, bends around corners. This bending, in the case of light, is generally so slight from a human-level perspective that ordinarily we just assume that light travels in straight lines but diffraction has been known about since at least the eighteenth century. If we shine a beam of light, from a reasonable distance away, on a very small aperture (an aperture that is comparable or smaller than the wave-length of the light) and then examine where it lands on a screen placed some distance away on the other side, we find that the beam spreads out. It forms a band known as the general maxima and, on either side, a number a smaller bands known as secondary maximas. Until the idea of photons was proposed (in 1905 by a then little known German Jew working in a patent office in Bern), almost all the evidence, including the phenomenon of diffraction, suggested light was a wave; with quantum physics it became possible to describe the beam of light as, rather, an absolutely enormous number of photons. This is now where we start to get quantum. It is possible today to shoot a single electron or a single photon at an aperture and then observe where it lands on the screen. Even though we are, in a sense, dealing with a single particle, there is still a wave associated with that particle, a wave which we can call a probability wave. This wave, theoretically, diffracts and forms a general maximas and secondary maximas on the screen just as a beam would.

But now, finally, we arrive at the Measurement Problem. When this experiment is actually, rather than theoretically, performed, the very human scientist in the real world doesn't observe a wave forming on the screen; he or she observes the electron or photon arriving at a specific point on the screen. The wave function, as I hope I explained above, describes the probability of finding the particle at a particular point – before the measurement is carried out. When the scientist actually performs the measurement and observes the particle arriving at a a particular point, it seems he or she must come up with a new estimate of the probability of the particle being found there. In fact, because it is actually found there, the scientist must say that the probability of it being found there is 100 percent. Any other conclusion seems to me to be incoherent. (I will briefly mention one such incoherent conclusion, the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics, later in the essay.)

In the previous paragraph, in attempting to clearly describe the Measurement Problem, a problem that has bedevilled physicists for a hundred years, I may have done something extraordinary – I may have strongly gestured towards a (partial) solution. The rest of this essay will involve fleshing out this hint. The solution involves thinking about the nature of probability in a different way than people often do. This is something I have written about a number of times and I'll give some examples which might make my still very tentative theory a little clearer. 

Suppose we have a generic shuffled pack of cards without jokers and we ask, "What is the probability of Bob drawing the Queen of Hearts from the top?" Because we lack any information about the order of the cards, we should (rationally) assume that the probability is 1/52. We should assume this because every possible card order is, presumably, equally probable. Suppose Bob draws the Queen of Hearts and we see this. We now have new information. If we now ask, "What is the probability that Bob drew the Queen of Hearts?" we can say, "100 percent". However it seems that we can also ask the question, "What was the probability of Bob drawing the Queen of Hearts?" People, I believe, will usually say, "1/52" because they will consider what they knew about the pack prior to Bob drawing the card and will exclude from the model or picture in their minds of the situation the fact that Bob actually drew a Queen of Hearts. If Jane wins Lotto, people often say, "The chance of Jane winning was one in a million." However in a sense the probability that Jane won was 100 percent because it actually happened. The reason people say her chance of winning was one in a million is that they consider very general ideas about how lotteries work and ignore the fact that Jane actually did win. One last example. Suppose you have a friend who says, "The probability that Donald Trump won the 2016 election is 67 percent." You're entitled to say, "You're insane. Donald Trump actually won the election. The probability that he won is 100 percent." Your friend's claim only makes sense if she has reasons for thinking Donald Trump might not have won and can mathematically quantify her uncertainty. If, however, your friend says, "The probability that Donald Trump won the 2016 election was 67 percent," it seems she is saying something different. She is saying that based on the information she had at the time back in 2016 and excluding information she found out later, in particular the fact that Trump actually won, that this is her rational estimate of the probability of it occurring back then. Any estimate of probability is subjective in the sense that it is made by a person based on information he or she possesses, information that is always incomplete except when we are dealing with certainties. (In talking about probability in this manner I am, by the way, implicitly assuming determinism.)

The purpose of this essay is not to fully spell out a theory of what probability is but to talk about quantum physics, although I will implicitly be invoking the ideas I have thought about and suggested in the previous paragraph.  I'll go back to the diffraction experiment again. When many of us think about experiments like the diffraction experiment, we imagine that what happens is that the electron or photon is a wave until it is observed on a screen at which point it somehow suddenly turns into a particle. This makes it seems that the wave function disappears.  I used to believe something like this myself. Physicists and others, myself included, have talked about 'wave function collapse'. This term seems to make sense because, before the measurement, the wave function was spread out on the screen but when we observe it, we seem to find a particle arriving at a single point. It seems to have collapsed. However we need to bring in another idea from quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. I hope readers have heard about it. This principle says that if you have very great certainty about the position of a particle, you lose information about its momentum. This means that if the scientist measures with great accuracy the arrival point of the particle, she necessarily loses information about its momentum; its possible momenta are smeared out in a wave-like fashion. To put it simply, even after the measurement is performed, there is still a wave function associated with the particle. The wave function does not disappear when the measurement is made; rather it changes. I need to take this one step further. Before the measurement was made, there was one wave function associated with the particle and after the measurement is made there is another. But when we perform the measurement, the wave function the particle must have had before the measurement, when it left the emitter, passed through the aperture and sped towards the screen, also must change. When one performs the measurement, one must retroactively change the particle's past wave function. If the wave function is a real thing then when we perform the measurement, the past changes. If we want to assume that the past is fixed, then we must therefore suppose that the wave function is not really a real thing. What I am arguing is that the wave function describes what we can know about a particle. When we perform the measurement we are not changing the past but rather changing our knowledge not only about the present and future of the particle but also its past history. And yet, by gaining some new information about the particle we have lost other information.

Last year I wrote an essay, "Chance and Necessity" for a course in classical and medieval philosophy, an essay I published in this blog. In it, I drew on an essay by JME McTaggart and talked about an A Theory and B Theory of time. We can consider the idea I presented above in similar terms. Suppose tomorrow someone proved that Francis Bacon was the real author of all the plays hitherto attributed to Shakespeare and everyone comes to believe this. We could make a bizarre argument that this person has changed the past. Alternatively we could take the common sense view that it is not the past that has changed but our understanding of the past. Similarly the common sense view should be that when we make a measurement we do not change the past but rather our knowledge of it. However it is when we combine this common sense view with quantum physics that we arrive at some seriously radical conclusions.

This notion, that the Schrodinger equation does not describe something in the real world but rather what we can know about it may not seem very controversial to laypeople but, trust me, to physicists it is indeed off the wall. If quantum physics does not describe reality but rather our understanding of reality, it seems there must be some intimate relation between the laws of physics and the consciousnesses of sentient beings. This is because quantum physics is founded on ideas of probability and as I have argued above and in other essays any estimate of probability is subjective, in the sense that it is made by a person based on incomplete information. There is a second argument that supports this radical notion. Suppose the diffraction experiment is carried out by several people. Before the measurement they all agree on the wave function the particle must have based on observed or predicted data such as the width of the aperture and the momentum of the particle. The experiment is carried out by one physicist who measures the arrival point of the particle and 'updates' the wave-function in her own mind. However she does not immediately tell her colleagues. For a period, the first physicist has one idea of the wave function and her colleagues have another. It is when she tells them, when the new information gained by the measurement is communicated to them, that they themselves 'update' the wave function in their own minds in a kind of Bayesian way. My interpretation of the wave function is that it is a kind of model in a person's mind concerning the outer world based on the information she has and that it can vary from person to person. A critic may mount the following objection to this proposal. She may say that the particle, surely, must indeed have a real objective wave function associated with it but that the physicists performing the experiment got it wrong before the measurement and even after. This critic may even suggest that this real objective wave function can never be precisely known. I am unsure how to clearly answer this objection except to say that I suspect it relies on a misunderstanding of what a wave function is.  The wave function is based on the observable information associated with the particle; furthermore  it involves probability (even though Lawrence Krauss pretends this is not the case) and probability is, I believe, a subjective assessment made by person based on incomplete information. Therefore the wave function itself can simply not be described as objective.

This interpretation of quantum physics is only a partial solution. In the previous post I recommended that readers watch "Are Many Worlds and Pilot Wave the SAME thing?" by PBS Spacetime on Youtube. I said it was an accessible introduction to the three main interpretations of quantum physics – but perhaps it is not as accessible as I suggested. Therefore I will attempt to help out. The three main interpretations I shall discuss are the Copenhagen interpretation, the Many Worlds interpretation and the De Broglie-Bohm Pilot Wave theory. My theory is not compatible with the first two but may be compatible with the third. I shall briefly attempt to describe each of them.

The film Oppenheimer includes a very brief scene of a number of prominent physicists sitting around on chairs in Copenhagen. It is a nod to audience members who know a little about the history of quantum physics; it gives the impression of the physics community getting together to reach a consensus about how to  interpret it. In talking about the Copenhagen interpretation here I shall not rely on memory but refer to the Wikipedia article on it. The Copenhagen interpretation has its roots in talks given by Max Born and Heisenberg in 1927 but the term 'Copenhagen Interpretation' didn't catch on until the 1950's; it has been for a long time the default interpretation that is often taught to students. The Copenhagen interpretation can't be attributed to any single physicist and there may be variations on it; nevertheless I will try to sketch some general features. In 1927, at the Solvay Conference,  Max Born and Heisenberg declared "we consider quantum mechanics to be a closed theory, whose fundamental physical and mathematical assumptions are no longer susceptible of any modification." According to the Copenhagen interpretation all the real information about a particle concerning its position, momentum, and energy can be derived from a knowledge of its wave function; there are no 'hidden variables'. The wave function is objective. However reality is fundamentally indeterministic, random, a randomness that becomes apparent when one makes a measurement. When a measurement is made it seems we find out something new about the particle but this new information comes from nowhere, is causeless. The idea that I advanced above, that the measurement actually changes the wave-function, does not seem to have occurred to people who formulated and subsequently subscribed to the Copenhagen interpretation; they seemed to regard the wave function and measurement as two quite separate types of thing. The problem that particularly vexed the early proponents of the Copenhagen interpretation was not so much the measurement problem but rather where to draw a line between the classical deterministic macroscopic world of scientists and measuring instruments and the peculiar quantum indeterminate microscopic world of wave functions and particles – I feel physicists worry less today about where to make this 'cut'.  Adherents to the Copenhagen interpretation are encouraged to just ignore the measurement problem, to treat it as not a problem at all. They are advised to just do the maths and not worry about why a particle ends up at a particular point on a screen. Famously N. David Mermin summed up the Copenhagen interpretation as "Shut up and calculate!"

In the previous post I suggested that Lawrence Krauss gives the impression that he wants to ignore the measurement problem and reported how he considers quantum physics to be deterministic even though he concedes that a measurement produces a random change. Having thought about it, I have concluded that this must be because he subscribes to the Copenhagen interpretation. Krauss is also a determinist and so I wonder how he reconciles these two incompatible belief systems.

The Many World interpretation seems to me a kind of development of the Copenhagen interpretation. Like the Copenhagen interpretation all the information about a particle is derivable from its wave function. The difference between the two is that the Many Worlds interpretation holds that what people have termed 'wave function collapse' never really occurs; even when a measurement seems to be made, the wave function continues as if it hasn't. The universe according to this interpretation is constantly splitting into alternative universes, perhaps all the time or perhaps only when measurements are made, I am unclear which. Consider the diffraction experiment again. Suppose we imagine a line down the middle of the central maxima; the Many Worlds interpretation holds that a number of universes split off and of the universes that branch off, half have the particle arriving on the left side and half have the particle arriving on the right side. I am unsure if Many Worlds proposes that the number of universes that branch off when a measurement is performed is finite or infinite. It is this interpretation of quantum physics that inspired Everything, Everywhere, All At Once and all the recent Marvel films.

At this point I shall digress a little. Another interest of mine is literary interpretation.  I believe that successful stories, especially films, are arguments in favour of some core proposition. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once is an argument in favour of the idea that free will exists. Its central message or moral is, "No matter how shitty your life has become, you can improve it by making the right decision." Everything, Everywhere, All At Once won the Best Picture Oscar and this fills me with hope because it suggests that the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences has some understanding of quantum physics and its philosophical implications.

Even though Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is a good film, I must reject the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics. My reasons are philosophical rather than mathematical. When the scientist performs the measurement, she does not observe and participate in all the possibly infinite universes that branch off. As far as she is concerned, the particle arrives at a definite location; she only observes and is aware of one of the possible universes. The Many Worlds interpretation does not really solve the measurement problem, it just kicks the can down the road. The problem becomes a problem of consciousness instead, a problem that is the province less of physicists than of philosophers of mind. We need to explain why the scientist observes only one universe, not some smeared out collection of all the possible universes that can arise from the wave function. Physics, in the end, must depend on empirical evidence and in the real world, as you and I know, a person only observes a single universe. The problem with many worlds can be illustrated with an example. Consider the friend who says, "There is a 67 percent probability that Donald Trump won the 2016 election." According to Many Worlds this is reasonable statement to make. Your friend is saying that of all the universes that split off just before the election, 67 percent of them contained Trump winning and 37 percent of them didn't. If you think your friend's statement unreasonable, I contend you should also reject Many Worlds.

I turn now to the third interpretation. The DeBroglie-Bohm theory is the most famous of the 'hidden variable' theories. The nice thing about this theory is that it is conceptually so simple, In this theory, waves and particles are two distinct types of thing. Particles are real things that always exist; their associated waves are 'pilot waves' that guide the particles through space. Bohm introduced a new equation, the guiding equation. Particles are influenced by both the Schrodinger equation and guiding equation; they don't travel in straight lines but sort of wobble about. The theory is deterministic. However, the guiding equation is explicitly non-local. What this means is that the position and velocity of a particle depends on all the other particles in the 'universe', where what we mean by 'universe' is everything involved in the experiment, perhaps even the scientist performing the experiment herself. DeBroglie proposed the first version of this theory in 1927 but was bullied into accepting the Copenhangen interpretation instead; it was revived and properly developed by David Bohm in the 1950s. It was considered a fringe theory for a very long time – for two reasons I believe. First, physicists have tended to dislike non-locality. (Einstein famously used the term 'spooky action at a distance' when criticising quantum theory.) Second, even though the particles move deterministically under the influence of the Schrodinger equation and guiding equation, we can never know precisely where they are and how fast they are moving unless at some point (in the past, present or future) we learnt where all the particles in the universe are located through some some of magic (it can't be empirically worked out). Physicists don't like this because they like doing experiments to prove things and Bohmian mechanics is experimentally unprovable. This is one reason the Copenhagen interpretation was so popular – it only dealt with observables.

Recently however the pilot wave theory has become more fashionable. Non-locality is today far more accepted than it was in the past. Physicists now, mostly, believe in something called 'entanglement', the idea being that if two particles become 'entangled' and later we perform a measurement on one of them it instantaneously affects the other even if the two are very far apart when the measurement is performed. More importantly, the DeBroglie-Bohm theory seems to solve the measurement problem. If the particle is always a particle, it should surprise no-one that when it arrives on a screen it seems to be a particle rather than a wave. In fact, both Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy say that the DeBroglie-Bohm theory solves the measurement problem. 

This is not a consensus opinion however. In the Youtube video by PBS Spacetime that I mentioned earlier, Matt O'Dowd presents an argument, an argument proposed by fans of the Many Worlds theory, that seems to imply that pilot wave theory doesn't solve the measurement problem. The argument is based on the fact that according to pilot wave theory the particle has no effect on the wave function. If this is true, the fact that there is a particle that actually passes through the aperture and arrives on the screen should have no effect on the probability distribution we theoretically find on the screen and so doesn't explain why we find the particle at a particular point. I have been thinking about this and have decided that these Many Worlds enthusiasts are making an error; they are continuing to believe that measurements never occur. I argued above that when we perform a measurement the wave function changes. If any physicists read this blog, I would put it to them like this: when we perform a measurement we are effectively introducing a new boundary condition that affects the wave function. Even if the particle does not affect the wave function, the measurement does.

The reason pilot wave theory has become more popular is largely because of the influence of a more recent physicist, John Stewart Bell. It is Bell's work that led to the idea of entanglement. Bell proposed an experiment that could show whether non-locality is a real thing or not; when such experiments were eventually performed they did indeed show that non-locality is a real thing (assuming something known as Superdeterminism is false). The experimenters won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work last year or the year before. Bell was very influenced by Bohm. In fact, he objected to the term 'hidden variable theory' on the grounds that such supposedly hidden variables are the very things revealed by measurements. Despite the current popularity of Bohm's theory, there are significant difficulties with it. It is very hard to reconcile pilot wave theory with Einstein's Theory of Relativity because Relativity says nothing can travel faster than light. Bohm's theory depends on the Schrodinger equation and, as I pointed out above, the Schrodinger equation (unlike the Dirac equation) is non-relativistic. The challenge for physicists who find some value in pilot wave theory today is how to reconcile it with Relativity.

In trying to clearly understand and explain the Measurement Problem, and in thinking about it over the last few days, I believe I have realised the mistake proponents of both the Copenhagen interpretation and Many Worlds interpretation have made. Consider the diffraction experiment again. The wave function possessed by the photon or electron has historically been determined only by some information, specifically the width of the aperture, the momentum of the particle, and the distance to the screen, but not all the information. When someone makes a new measurement, she acquires new information and so must update the wave function; at the same time she loses some information. My contribution, if it is wholly mine, is to add to quantum physics a new way of looking at probability. Any estimate of probability is subjective in the sense that it is made by a person based on the information that the person possesses, information that is incomplete. The Schrodinger equation is probabilistic and must therefore be subjective. This implies that different people can come up with different values of the particular wave function for a system if they have different information about the system. If there is an objective world that we all share, these different values can only incompletely describe the system and the differing wave functions should rather be understood as describing what particular people know about the system. This is what I was trying to say in the posts about Schrodinger's cat years ago and I still may not be expressing myself clearly. I feel that this proposal supports some 'hidden variable' theory but is not conclusive. If we decide for other reasons however that the world is deterministic, this way of looking at probability may supplement such deterministic theories.

I want to say something about how I came up with this idea. It may seem at first as if I am being arrogant but if you read on, you'll find I'm not. Although my background is in English literature, I have always had an interest in physics. In 2005, I did the paper on physics although  I failed to understand the Schrodinger equation at the time. The paper got me thinking about it though. In 2007, almost immediately after I became 'sick', my father gave me a long article about Bell's Inequality. I wasn't in a state to make sense of it then and I still don't know why he gave it to me. My father is a smart man but he isn't a physicist. In 2008, I think to distract myself from ongoing emotional distress, I set myself the task of deriving E=MC squared from a small set of assumptions and Maxwell's equations. I deliberately chose not to look up any proofs on the internet. There were pieces of paper covered in algebra all over the house. At one point during the year, I accidentally derived the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. This principle is not, as some people think, a law arrived at empirically, through experimentation –  you can derive it from the DeBroglie wavelength and the mathematics of waves. I derived it from doing calculus on the normal function. I finally derived E=MC squared at the end of the year, just before I became 'ill' again. 

In subsequent years I continued to think about relativity and worked out a much simpler proof for E=MC squared. When I wrote The Hounds of Heaven in 2012, I included a scene very near the beginning where Jess talks in voice-over about wave-particle duality and wave function collapse. Of course it wouldn't have rung true for Jess to deliver to the audience a rigorous explanation of quantum physics – her brief soliloquy is more consistent with the understanding of an amateur who has an interest in a wide variety of topics. A small regret I have about the film is that I gave Jess my own obsession. The real girl that Jess was based on is very clever but she is more interested in poetry and neuroscience than quantum physics. In 2013, I became 'ill' again and at the beginning of 2015 began writing this blog. For a long time this blog has been the most important thing in my life. I think in 2018 or 2019 I wrote the posts about Schrodinger's cat. I actually gave a copy of these posts to my psychiatrist partly to show I wasn't dumb. I suspect that he may have thought it crazy New Age ramblings because, for one thing, in them I said that any probability estimate is 'subjective' without defining what I meant by the term 'subjective'. The argument I made in those posts is different to the one in the essay – it was based around the Schrodinger's cat paradox rather than a discussion of diffraction but it was on the right track. The error I made in them is that I used the term 'wave function collapse' and I now realise that this was misleading. In those essays I also used the term 'Bayesian'. I thought 'Bayesian' denoted a way of viewing probability close to the one I was advancing. Not long after, I looked up Bayes' Theorem and decided that I must have made a mistake, that I had used the wrong word. I considered going back and rewriting the posts. Although I do not know exactly how to apply Bayes' Theorem to quantum physics, I now realise that the term Bayesian is roughly the right word because, roughly, Bayesian denotes the idea that one change one's probability estimates based on new evidence. 

It was very recently that I came back to the issue of quantum physics, actually not long before I wrote the previous post. The stimulus was a Youtube clip by Sabine Hossenfelder. In this essay I am not plagiarising her: rather she dropped a hint which sparked the novel idea of this essay. When briefly mentioning quantum physics she chose to use the term "update" rather than "wave function collapse"; she also used the word "Bayesian". It was these hints that led me to the idea that a measurement actually changes the wave function and, having thought about it, this prompted me to write this essay. In fact, I believe Sabine's view and mine must be different because she thinks measurements are performed by measuring equipment, as many physicists do, whereas I think they are performed by people. I also suspect she believes in Superdeterminism. If so, it is of course possible she could be right.

In 2013, I told my friend Jess about the rather spectacular marks I had received for the GRE exams I took in 2004. I was trying to impress her. But I also told her that I could only explain my results by supposing that I had read the minds of all the other people in the world who were taking the exams at the same time. In 2009 I heard a voice talking about Plotinus, the ancient Greek philosopher and so looked him up. Plotinus believed in a "world soul". What I am attempting to suggest here is that the idea I have proposed in this essay may not be wholly attributable to me but may have emerged from the collective mind of all the people thinking about this issue recently, the same way that quantum mechanics rapidly developed in the 1920s from the work of many physicists thinking about the same issues at the same time. My idea depends on a theory of what probability is and, if the world is deterministic, I don't see how anyone can say this theory is wrong.

I have just watched Sabine's most recent video, called "The End of Science" in which she suggests that it might be the case that science will never again be able to make radical new discoveries, an example she gives being the the apparent fact that no-one has discovered a new organs in the human body for a very long time. Obviously she has never heard of the interstitium.

Doing Your Own Research

 I admit that sometimes my essays have become a little loose. Rather than write a post on one theme I have for a while often tried to discuss a number of different topics in a single post, an aesthetic defect. This post will perhaps be like that. There are a number of different thoughts that have occurred to me since my last post and I wish to present these thoughts, niggles, even though there may not be a common theme. If there is a theme, it concerns the way we make sense of the world based on what is reported in the media and what information we can find on the Internet. Of course, the major event that has occurred since my last post is the barbaric attack on Israel by Hamas and Israel's barbaric response and like everyone else I want to venture some opinions on it. I shall discuss the niggles first and the current conflict in the second half of the essay.

The first niggle concerns an error that I might have made myself. A theme of the previous essay was that there are two traditions within philosophy, one constructive and the other destructive. I borrowed the terms Richard Rorty used in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature to describe them, "systematising" and "therapeutic". In the essay, I argued that Postmodernism, a destructive form of philosophy, had perished and the systematising tradition was again in vogue. I did qualify this statement by saying that I hadn't surveyed every philosophy department in the anglophone world but nevertheless this theme ran through the essay. I have realised, of course, that this view runs counter to the perception of American universities that the right-wing media and Bill Maher, for instance, often present. These cultural commentators often describe universities, usually in the past Berkeley but in the last couple of weeks Harvard as well, as indoctrinating their students in woke Postmodernism. I suspect that the truth is far more complex. In English departments, a lecturer will usually have completed his or her Doctorate on one particular author and will then go on to teach that author although he or she may subsequently pick up other topics. This is probably true of Philosophy lecturers as well– they are all specialists. It may be that general courses giving overviews of whole fields are not taught. This makes it difficult to determine if there is a prevailing paradigm within philosophy at the moment and what it is. 

A second niggle. One of my concerns, as may be apparent, is with the proper use of the English language. Something that I've noticed recently is a small change many speakers, such as CNN presenters and even BBC presenters, have introduced into their speech. They say things like, "How barbaric of an attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians." What is the preposition "of" doing in this sentence? You should simply say "barbaric an attack". This peculiar innovation in grammar started in America and seems to have spread to Britain. I have, however, not noticed any New Zealanders I know introducing an extraneous "of" into their conversation between the adjective and the article. I dislike this recent sloppiness. I know that language changes all the time but it is the moral duty of anyone interested in clear communication to try to hold change back. The pedants are the preservers of the English language. In a wonderful essay called "Authority and American Usage", David Foster Wallace defends prescriptivism over descriptivism when it comes to the meaning and use of words, an essay which I think has profound philosophical implications. It is important to try to stick to the rules. So I think if anyone out there is so sufficiently impressed by the talking heads that they think it grammatically correct to insert the preposition "of" into such sentences, I want you to know that the presenters are getting it wrong. 

A third niggle. For many years I have noticed how often talking heads in particular use (and abuse) the term "deconstruct" and for many years this has really bothered me. I've wanted to talk about this for a long time. The word "deconstruct" was coined by Jacque Derrida in 1967 in the book Of Grammatology. Derrida argued that texts (and philosophical arguments) are built around binary oppositions in which one term has priority over the other: for example Plato set up a binary between spoken speech and writing and argued that writing is pernicious because it is detrimental to memory. This implies that "oral speech" is better than (prior to) "writing". Deconstruction involves inverting the binaries in a text or argument and then showing how the two terms cannot exist without each other. Derrida himself performed this operation on Plato. I think deconstruction is a really useful interpretive strategy and I myself deconstructed Neil Gaiman's comic book A Game of You in several posts way back in 2017. I do not now think Derrida's underlying theory is correct though – Derrida draws inspiration from Saussure and I am unsure if language is a system of differences as Saussure claims. There is a great mystery associated with the nature of concepts (signifieds) because although words are consciously available to us, the concepts associated with particular words are not really accessible. To expatiate on this would take me to far afield. My main point is that since 1967, deconstruction entered the English language through Humanities departments. It took on a vaguer meaning: to deconstruct a text meant to show it had meanings other than the ones intended by the author. Nowadays people use the word "deconstruct" simply as a synonym for "analyse" or "critique". I know I'm being pedantic again but it bothers me when people use words that they don't understand.

The fourth niggle also involves language. I really dislike the relatively recent overuse of the word "impact". American journalists often ask questions like, "How did this impact you?" and CNN has a site called "Impact Your World", a title that strikes me as gibberish. Most of the time you can simply replace the word "impact" with "affect" and not only does the sentence have the same meaning, it doesn't conjure up connotations of people as cars caroming off each other. Even worse is the recent adoption of the incredibly ugly word "impactful", an example of the way Americans are constantly turning nouns into verbs and verbs into adjectives.

The niggles I have discussed are general ones involving language but I also get annoyed when supposed experts make stupid mistakes. I occasionally watch Lawrence Krauss's podcast on Youtube. Krauss has taught physics at several universities, including Yale, knew Richard Feynman and considers himself a friend of Noam Chomsky. It is tempting to regard him as an expert. He often interviews really interesting people but has an irritating way of talking constantly about himself rather than letting the guest talk. Recently I saw an interview he did with Robert Sapolsky who I thought was really interesting – I have ordered Sapolsky's book Determined from my local bookshop. But during the interview Krauss made a stupid mistake. He said the Second Law of Thermodynamics is absolute, inviolable, that the entropy of a macroscopic system can never decrease. This is wrong. I know my suggesting Krauss said something really may seem an extreme claim but let me explain.

Suppose you have a box separated by a membrane into two compartments, with all the gas on one side of the membrane. You then pierce or otherwise remove the membrane. The gas will then almost certainly expand to fill the box more or less evenly. This is the Second Law in action – but note that I said "almost certainly". All the gas molecules are moving around randomly and so could theoretically all end up again in one half of the box if only briefly, although the probability of this occurring is miniscule. Now consider another thought experiment. The box, sans membrane, now only contains one gas molecule. The probability of it ending up in the right side of the box is 1/2. If there are two molecules the probability of them both being in the right side of the box at some specific time is 1/4 (the probability of them both ending up up in the right side of the box at any time at all would of course be much higher). Suppose the box is 1 metre cubed – at normal atmospheric pressure, the number of molecules in the box would be around 10 to the 23rd power (if the Internet has it right). The probability that all the gas molecules would at some specific time be all in the right side is 1/2 to the power of 10 itself raised to the 23rd power. If this did occur, it would be a massive apparent violation of the Second Law but it is possible. Admittedly the probability of such an event occurring is so small it is tempting to say it is impossible – but it is not absolutely impossible. The Second Law is a statistical law rather than a hard law. It simply says that entropy in macroscopic systems overwhelmingly tends to stay the same or increase, not that it can never decrease.

Although I am discussing niggles, there is an interesting aspect of thermodynamics that I think worth pursuing, worth a digression, an aspect that straddles the borderline between physics and philosophy. In the above example, we considered two possible macrostates: the first being when the gas is all in in the right side of the box and the second being when the gas is evenly distributed throughout the box. For each of these two macrostates, there are a vast number of microstates, a microstate being an exact description of where each molecule is and its momentum. It is because there are vastly more possible microstates associated with the second macrostate than the first and because we can assume each microstate is equally probable that the second macrostate is the one that will come to dominate. However the issue here is that I do not think there is any clear definition of the term 'macrostate'. Thermodynamics was invented in the nineteenth century and originally concerned gases (and such gaseous concepts as pressure, temperature, and volume) and then heat engines. As time has gone by, there has been a tendency to extend the notion of entropy to everything, to explain the passage of time itself in terms of the Second Law. I have done this myself. Consider however the following question: what is the entropy of an egg? In order to determine the entropy of an egg we would have to count all the possible molecular compositions, microstates, that what we are calling an egg can take while still being an egg. The entropy is simply (assuming that each configuration is equally possible) the logarithm of this number (according to Boltzmann). But you and I might disagree about the definition of this term 'egg' and come up with different numbers (although we might agree that after an egg falls on the floor, the smashed egg has greater entropy than it did when it was intact). Consider now the following little fable. Bob sends Jane a telegram in Morse code that translates as Shelly's Ozymandius but Jane does not know Morse code and consequently puts the message into the conceptual bin "random collection of dots and dashes", a macrostate with very high entropy. Clyde then sees the message and, knowing Morse code, recognises it as Shelly's Ozymandius and assigns it a very low entropy because there is only a single sequence of dots and dashes that can be decoded into this poem. For Jane the macrostate is "random collection of dots and dashes" while for Clyde it is "Ozymandius in Morse code". Jane and Clyde have different notions of the macrostate that the message belongs to and consequently calculate its entropy quite differently; there seems no clear way to establish which of them is correct. It seems that thermodynamics depends on the way human beings conceptualise and categorise physical systems, on human meaning making, a counterintuitive thought. 

The idea that I have just advanced is not wholly original with me but is inspired by something Roger Penrose says in Cycles of Time although he does not explore this idea philosophically. It may be that information theory also approaches this idea, although I suspect not from a philosophical perspective. I should note that I have of necessity oversimplified somewhat. In reality not only is it hard to define a 'macrostate' it is also hard to define a 'microstate' because positions and momenta are continuous rather than discreet and so a gas in a box actually has an infinite number of microstates. To count the microstates involves a kind of 'course-graining'. Still I think it is an interesting thought.

I have another niggle with Lawrence Krauss. In the interview, in a Youtube clip, and probably elsewhere, he has argued that quantum mechanics is deterministic. His argument is that the wave function evolves deterministically. This is true, it does evolve deterministically – but only up until the point when someone performs a measurement. When a measurement is performed, the wave function changes and, according to conventional theory, this change is partly random. Although Krauss concedes that when we perform the measurement, according to conventional theory, the data we collect is somewhat random, he seems to be arguing that measurements lie outside quantum physics. I know I'm not an expert but everything I've read suggests that the measurement problem, or what is sometimes called wave function collapse, has been the central problem in quantum physics for a hundred years. The measurement problem spawned Everything, Everywhere, All At Once and all the recent Marvel films.  It seems that Krauss is capriciously re-demarcating the boundaries of quantum physics in such a way as to put the measurement problem outside it. Perhaps he just doesn't want to think about the measurement problem. Krauss, like another physicist I follow, Sabine Hossenfelder, thinks the universe is deterministic and doesn't believe in free will, but neither has reconciled these prior metaphysical commitments with quantum physics. I myself am a determinist who doesn't believe in free will but my explanation is that some kind of mystical agency or perhaps élan vital determines where an electron ends up on a detector. But, then, perhaps I'm a crank.

This brings me to Sabine. I like her videos. Recently she relayed research that had found that the probability that a coin flipped will land same-side up is actually not quite 50%, a finding based on a study by a group of physicists who tossed a coin thousands of times. This is very relevant to issues to do with probability that I have discussed earlier this year in this blog. But Sabine also makes mistakes. Recently she argued that capitalism and science go together and used the trajectory from the discovery of penicillin to its mass manufacture as evidence of the way capitalism enables science. A number of Youtube videos have shown that the history of penicillin is more complex than Sabine suggests and in the early years involved public funds and state intervention. These clips can be found on Youtube. Another mistake I believe she made recently is that she said that all hidden variable interpretations of quantum physics are local. I do not feel on as firm ground here as I do when criticising Krauss but everything I've read suggests that the DeBroglie-Bohm pilot wave theory is both a hidden variable theory and non-local. Rather than mount an argument against Sabine myself, I refer the reader to the interesting and accessible Youtube video from PBS Spacetime called "Are Many Worlds & Pilot Wave THE SAME theory?", an introduction to the three main interpretations of quantum mechanics which can be understood with only a little background in physics (and a video which also shows how outside the mainstream Krauss is). This is not to say that people should stop watching Sabine but rather that they should take her video essays with a grain of salt as with other Youtube videos.

Readers may wonder if I am qualified to weigh in on quantum mechanics when I specialised originally in English literature. In 2005 I did a paper in second year physics and didn't get particularly good grades. However for a period of many years after I would read and re-read my physics textbook every night, particularly the chapters on quantum physics, in bed before going to sleep. Eventually the textbook fell apart. It reached the point where I had the chapters on quantum physics memorised and would go through them in my mind at night while lying in bed. I also often used to read popular expositions on physics such as the book by Penrose I mentioned above. Nowadays I am addicted to educational videos on Youtube as readers of this blog may have noticed. I may not be alone. There may be many autodidacts in the world who are constantly absorbing new information from Youtube and other online sites such as Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopaedia of the Philosophy. This is partly a good thing because knowledge is now increasingly accessible to anyone who can afford a computer and Internet connection, although it also threatens universities who have traditionally been the repositories and guardians of knowledge. Another downside is that there are so many people expressing views online that it can be hard arrive at the truth about matters. If you only watch the Darkhorse podcast and associated sites you may end up with a skewed view of the Covid vaccine, for instance. This may lead people to think that Youtube and other sites should somehow filter their content so that only verifiable truth floats to the top. The problem with such censorship is that it could lead people to think that contemporary views about matters such as, for instance, psychiatric disorders are correct when they simply aren't. The best approach is for viewers and readers to think critically about what they are digesting and to try to get their information from a wide variety of sources. This may not be a fully satisfactory solution. For instance, I often feel reading Wikipedia that it is authoritative and reliable but over the years have noticed a number of occasions when it has just been plain wrong.

I have been discussing niggling annoyances with the way language today is used in the media and the way 'truth' is presented on Youtube. I have just suggested that so long as you read widely and think critically a person can arrive at some reasonable understanding of the world. It is possible today for a person to 'do his own research' and have as good an understanding of a subject as a person who is recognised as an expert. For instance, although I rarely use Google Scholar, it is possible for a layperson to access a great deal of academic literature, the same literature read by the professorial class. In saying this I know I am running against the received wisdom of many, particularly on the Left, that we should 'trust the experts' and not venture opinions on subjects we lack first hand experience of or have done a doctorate on. This view of course emerged because of the Covid epidemic. There is an interesting issue here. The 'argument from authority' is considered a fallacy but we are encouraged to just accept everything experts say because somehow they have got themselves into positions where they can be regarded as experts. For instance, there is strong social pressure to regard psychiatrists as experts, something that can have highly deleterious effects on patients. In fact, many psychiatrists are incompetent and the whole of psychiatry is founded on false premises. One of the reasons for my recovery from the 'illness' I suffered was that I rejected the power psychiatrists have had over me. The people who experience mental illness are the real experts on their mental illnesses, not the doctors who treat them; certainly, I understand the mental illness I suffered better than the psychiatrist who currently treats me.

The notion of expertise is relevant to the academic teaching of philosophy. Sometimes famous philosophers have made arguments that just make no sense. For example, the modal argument for the existence of God, proposed by Alvin Plantinga, just doesn't work as I pointed out in the post "The Modal Ontological Argument". When the Sleeping Beauty problem was first publicly proposed by Adam Elgar, he defended the 'halver' position with an argument that is incoherent and relies on a confused notion of probability as I showed in the post "Time, Probability and Bad Science Part 2". It is not that I have opinions different from Plantinga and Elgar but rather that their arguments just don't make logical sense. The issue here is that Plantinga and Elgar are famous philosophers, supposed experts, and so students may not realise that they have been presented with dumb arguments. I sometimes wonder if philosophy lecturers deliberately teach bad philosophy to test the critical faculties of their students, to see if the students can spot the errors. 

The theme that is emerging from this essay is the difficulty we have sifting truth from error on issues that have become part of the global conversation. On October 7, Hamas launched a terrorist attack on Israel that claimed 1400 Israeli lives, and took hostage around 220 people. Israel responded by sealing off the Gaza Strip so that food, water, medicine, and electricity couldn't get in, launched an aerial bombardment ostensibly intended to destroy Hamas militia but which has destroyed much of the civilian infrastructure, and has just over the last two or three days initiated a land invasion. Over nine thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been killed so far, at the time of writing, and, according to Defence for Children International, as of two days ago, over 40% of them are children. Since the invasion I have been compulsively watching CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera. (I don't watch Fox.) Although I already had a little knowledge of the history of Israel and Palestine, my knowledge was very incomplete; I have since read a few articles on Wikipedia about the history and sought out online article and some Youtube videos concerning the conflict. One channel I have found on Youtube that is thoughtful and informative is the New York Times Podcast, which has involved Tom Friedman and Ezra Klein. Klein and Friedman are left-wing Jewish journalists based in New York who, while recognising the horrific nature of the attack by Hamas, also acknowledge the history of Palestinian oppression and dispossession and support a two-state solution. I recommend this channel. I would like to say something about the current conflict myself. I know I am not an expert and that this is a highly charged topic, that it may be risky to talk about it at all. Two or three days ago I read that a National Party MP here in New Zealand had got in trouble with our new Prime Minister for saying something about the conflict in a private email. But the Internet is awash with people expressing opinions and I feel that it might be important for me to say something.

In the previous essay, written before October 7, I discussed rationality and irrationality. When a catastrophe occurs, we all seek to find a 'rational' explanation: religious people sometimes even blame natural disasters on social changes they consider sinful. Similarly we look for a rational explanation for what happened in Israel and is happening in Gaza. We might assume that the leaders of Hamas had rational motives. But if the leaders of Hamas were rational, they must have realised that their attack would trigger this enormous Israeli response. The initial event that led to the 2014 Gaza war in which over 2,125 Gazans were killed and nearly 11,000 wounded was the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers; what happened on October 7 was orders of magnitudes worse. So if we assume that the leaders of Hamas were rational, in a very real sense we can hold Hamas responsible not only for the Israeli casualties but also for the killing, injuring and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza since October 7 because the leaders of Hamas should have anticipated how Israel would react. Because we look for rational motives, many commentators, including Friedman, have claimed, without real evidence, that Hamas launched the attack because Israel was negotiating a normalisation agreement with Egypt. It has been argued that Hamas, feeling that Palestinians were being abandoned by their traditional allies. sought to deliberately provoke a war in order to garner sympathy from the citizenry of other Muslim countries and trigger a wider war in the Middle East. This is similar to the argument often advanced that Al Qaeda carried out the 9/11 attacks in order to provoke a war between the West and the Muslim world. Such arguments assume that Hamas was behaving rationally but I do not think this is the case. It is likely that the militants who broke through the wall and rampaged through Southern Israel were driven by religious and nationalistic fanaticism and a hatred of Israelis, motivations that seem irrational to liberal Westerners because we tend to believe that rationality involves self-interest or disinterested consequentialism. Perhaps the militants thought God was on their side. In the episode "The Jewish Left is Trying to Hold Two Thoughts at Once", Klein and his fellow contributors go further, suggesting that the barbarity of the attack may not even have been intended by the Hamas leadership, that the militants who broke through, not realising it would be so easy to get past the fence into Israel, ran amok. It is possible that the primary aim of the Hamas leadership was not geopolitical as Friedman and others have suggested but simply to take hostages hoping for a prisoner swap. In fact, a week ago, Hamas offered to release all the hostages in return for the release of all Palestinians in Israeli prisons, an offer that the Israeli government rejected. Many of the Israeli casualties were at a music festival and so one might conclude that Hamas carried out the attack because they knew the festival was being held that day. But the fact that the attack occurred almost exactly on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war strongly suggests that this was the reason for the timing. That the festival was being held on the same day and therefore the attack so horrific might have been a terrible coincidence.

Although I have said that Hamas can in a very real sense be held responsible not only for the Israeli massacre but the deaths and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza since, in another very real sense very many people are responsible for it because very many people are complicit in creating the conditions in Gaza that inspired such hatred. It has been widely reported that Benjamin Netanyahu had an unofficial policy of deliberately bolstering Hamas because by creating disunity among Palestinians he hoped to make the dream of a Palestinian state an impossibility. Gaza has been under a blockade for sixteen years. The building of Jewish settler communities in the West Bank similarly was a deeply immoral project to pursue. There has been a lack of sympathy with the plight of ordinary Palestinians and the hatred of Palestinians by some commentators inside and outside Israel upsets me. Sam Harris has based his support for Israel on the fact that Hamas has the stated goal of eliminating Israel but a poll of Palestinians in Gaza carried out just before October 7, as reported by CNN, found that over half supported either a two-state solution or a single state in which Jews and Arabs had equal citizenship. (I note here that although this was reported on CNN, I have had difficulty finding the poll on the Internet. I also note, for the sake of balance, that the poll suggests a sizeable portion of the Gazan population does indeed support Hamas.) Bill Maher said recently that we should support Israel unconditionally because Israel shares Western values, such as endorsing LGBT rights and women's rights. This is a weak argument. I suspect that Maher is a kind of consequentialist like Sam Harris and should thus believe, as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill did, that we should try to aim for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. If this is true, the values people hold are either irrelevant or only indirectly relevant. There is a related point. Although the bulk of Israel's population is liberal, there is a segment of right-wing ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, a group excluded from military service for religious reasons, and it is this segment that drives the growth of settler villages in the West Bank and got the most right-wing government in Israel's history elected. There is a sentiment among this group that Israel should extend from the River Jordan to the sea because it was the land promised to them by God. In 1993, after the Oslo accord, some move towards a two-state solution seemed possible but the process was stymied partly by an attack on a Hebron mosque by an American Jewish settler and by the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by an Israeli settler who opposed the two-state solution. Harris and Maher are both vehemently anti-religious but are guilty of inconsistency because they both fail to call out Jewish religious extremism. Furthermore Harris and Maher are critical of Identity Politics but fail to see how coloured by Identity Politics their views on Israel and Palestine are. 

Something else I've noticed is that even when commentators concede that the establishment of some kind of Palestinian state might be just, they argue that the tactics that have been employed by Palestinian groups, such as for instance attempting to fire rockets into Israel, disqualify them from being morally defensible agents. They argue that if the Palestinians were engaging in non-violent resistance the way Indians under Gandhi did or the way civil rights protestors did in the Unites States in the 1950s and 1960s, the world would have more sympathy for them. An important early moment in the civil rights movement was when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955 and another important event was, of course, the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr in 1963. The question I want to raise is this: what forms of non-violent resistance were available to Palestinians? 20 per cent of Israelis are Arabs and can carry out strikes and marches but the Palestinians in Gaza can't somehow cross the perimeter fence and mount a peaceful march on Jerusalem waving banners and placards and calling for the Israeli government to enable them to form a Palestinian state. They are walled in. In the podcast by Ezra Klein, one of the contributors points out that Palestinian leaders who have sought to change the political situation through nonviolent protest and civil disobedience tend to be jailed. In 2018 and 2019, thousands of Gaza Palestinians would gather just inside the perimeter wall to protest on Fridays and sometimes on other days. a movement called the "Great March of Return". They were not calling for the destruction of Israel but rather for a lifting of the blockade and the right to return to lands seized from their forebears in 1947 and 1967. Although sometimes Palestinians would burn tyres, attempt to damage the fence, throw stones and Molotov cocktails, and send incendiary kites into Israel (kites that caused scrub fires but didn't threaten any Israeli lives), the protests were mainly peaceful. The Israeli military would gather on the other side of the fence and snipers would fire on the Palestinians through the gaps. According to the United Nations site "The Question of Palestine" one Israeli soldier was killed and seven injured during the protests. 214 Palestinians were killed, 46 of them children, and 36,100 were injured. Many of the injured required amputations. Yes, 214 Palestinian lives is quantitatively less than 1400 Israeli lives but it is still terrible and there should still have been a global outcry at the Israeli crackdown on this protest but, unlike what happened on October 7 this year, it was hardly covered by the media. Bill Maher recently said that he thinks part of the definition of the word 'liberal' involves support for Israel, but I think this is stupid: part of the accepted definition of 'liberal' involves the idea of universal human rights including the right to peaceably protest. Although the "Great March of Return" was not completely nonviolent, to crackdown on a mostly peaceful protest using lethal force is monstrously illiberal.

To be successful, nonviolent protest needs people sympathetic to it in the oppressor group and in other countries. One reason the US civil rights movement was successful is that African Americans had friends and allies who were white and a major reason the Apartheid regime in South Africa was dismantled in 1994 was the international pressure brought on the South African government to abandon this racist system. A very important event in New Zealand history is the 1981 Springbok tour when tens of thousands of New Zealanders protesting against Apartheid disrupted a number of matches between the All Blacks and the visiting South African rugby team; the tour had been permitted by the then government, under Robert Muldoon, even though there was an international boycott on South African sports games. However there has never been any effective organised internal or international pressure on the Israeli government to try to resolve the Palestinian question. This is discussed in the Ezra Klein podcast mentioned earlier. Since around 2001, there has been an international movement known as Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions which has tried to exert some pressure on the Israeli government and although a number of famous academics and artists have signed on, BDS has never become massively popular, I think at least partly because it has successfully been misrepresented as antisemitic by Israel. Incredibly, Israel actually has a law that allows people in other countries to be sued civilly if they call for a boycott of Israel. In 2018, two New Zealanders, one ethnically Jewish and the other ethnically Palestinian, wrote an open letter to Lorde urging her to cancel her Tel Aviv concert because of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians; Lorde thought about it, read up about it, and decided to cancel the performance. Subsequently the authors of the letter were sued by two Israeli teenagers in Israel claiming that the cancellation caused them mental distress, and fined 19,000 New Zealand dollars. Of course, the idea that two New Zealanders could be fined by an Israeli court for an opinion expressed in New Zealand is absurd and the fine was never paid. I did not pay close attention to this controversy at the time but I think I recall seeing that a New York rabbi had written a piece for a New York newspaper suggesting that Lorde's decision showed how antisemitism was growing among the youth. The fact that criticism of Israeli policies is often conflated with antisemitism means that we live in a world in which it seems that the only people permitted to criticise Israel are Jews like, for instance, Tom Friedman, Sam Seder, and Noam Chomsky.

In discussing the current war in Gaza, in trying to make sense of the ethics involved, it may seem that I have contradicted myself. I have said that in a very real sense Hamas can be held responsible not only for the events of October 7 but also for the subsequent death and misery in Gaza. I have also argued that Palestinian grievances against Israel are justified, have argued for a kind of collective responsibility because very many people inside and outside of Israel have been complicit in creating the conditions that impelled Hamas to launch its attack. The issue here is that the term 'responsibility' is hard to pin down, as implied in the previous essay. However, in presenting the Palestinian case so strongly, I am partly reacting to some of the rhetoric of people I follow. Bill Maher often says that people who criticise Israeli policy don't know their history. This is because in Bill Maher's mind the history of Israel has been one in which the Arab countries and Palestinians have always sought to wipe Israel off the map, have mounted multiple wars to do so, and have been successfully repelled every time. The truth though is more complex. The principle cause of the 1967 Six Day War was Egypt's decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and it was Israel who made the first military move. During the war Israel captured a number of territories including Gaza and the Sinai peninsula. Egypt's aim in initiating the Yom Kippur war in 1973 was not to destroy Israel but to reclaim the Sinai peninsula. Of course the history is long and complex and I am only picking out details, but, even if the idea that the whole past history of Israel is one in which it has been defending itself against Muslim nations who want to destroy it were true, we live in 2023 now and the world can change. Before October 7 there seemed strong hope of a normalisation of Israeli relations with its neighbours and hopefully the current war shouldn't derail this. It is true that many Middle Eastern countries do not officially recognise Israel but in practice they now know Israel is here to stay. It is possible that if Palestinian aspirations were realised, either through a two-state solution or the formation of a single Israeli-Palestinian state, this would pave the way for formal recognition of Israel by the countries around it.

I can remember an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher from several years ago in which the political situation in Israel and Palestine came up. Maher, of course, defended Israel. A guest asked him "Have you ever been to Gaza?" The Gaza Strip has often been called the largest open air prison in the world and when the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, visited it in 2021, he described it as "Hell on earth". And this was before Israel started dropping bombs on it.

So, what should Israel and other countries be encouraged to do? Israel's stated war aim is to destroy Hamas but this seems to involve the suffering and deaths of many innocent Palestinian civilians including children. A number of American Jewish writers, artists, and academics wrote an open letter to Biden shortly before October 19 that says, in part, "We call on the US government to seek an immediate ceasefire and to use our resources towards providing aid ensuring the safe return of hostages and building a diplomatic path towards peace." I have been struggling in my own mind to work out the moral calculus. It seems that if a large terrorist attack occurs, the country attacked has a right to declare war on the organisation responsible. But by the same kind of logic the government of Israel should also be held responsible for the oppression of Palestinians and the deaths that occurred during, for instance, "The Great March of Return". Israel's right to defend itself should not also be a right to kill children. Perhaps Israel could have invaded without dropping bombs that have not always been well targeted and without cutting off food, fuel, electricity, and medicine from getting into the territory. I worry also about how the IDF will be able to discriminate between Hamas fighters and civilians on the ground during the invasion. Despite such concerns, a ceasefire may not be a realistic possibility. Setting aside such answerable questions, we also need to ask what political situation should obtain in Gaza when the war, perhaps with the surrender of Hamas, finally ends. Some in the Israeli government apparently favour the expulsion of Gaza Palestinians into Egypt, a policy which would be ethnic cleansing by definition, but it seem more likely that there will be another full scale Israeli military occupation. I would like to suggest an alternative, that some kind of UN agency or organisation, some international force that is sympathetic to the Palestinians, should take over the governance of Gaza, as happened in Bosnia. This UN agency would be an interim government that would exist only until a new state can be established.

I have a strong sense that the two-state solution is no longer a live option. However we can pretend for a moment that some perfect solution is imaginable and realisable. In a perfect world I believe a single state containing both Jews and Arabs with equal rights should be created, a state that could be called Israel and Palestine interchangeably the same way New Zealanders sometimes refer to New Zealand as Aotearoa. This is the best end goal and also Chomsky's favoured position. In fact in 1946, when what we now call Israel and Palestine was simply known as Palestine and was ruled by the British, the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry made the following recommendation regarding it: "in order to dispose, once and for all, of the exclusive claims of Jews and Arabs to Palestine, we regard it as essential that a clear statement of principle should be made that Jew shall not dominate Arab and Arab shall not dominate Jew in Palestine." This recommendation was rejected by the American government under Truman. The idea of a single state in which Jews and Arabs have equal citizenship rights may also seem an impossibility. It frightens some Israelis because it could mean that Jews would become a minority 'in their own country'. To such objections I would point to New Zealand history. Maori have for well over a century been the minority in their own country but they just deal with it. This solution may just too utopian to be practicable but the alternative is no possible solution at all and utter despair.

As I said above, this essay is partly a reaction to the rhetoric of people I follow on Youtube. Today I watched a little of Bill Maher's show, specifically the New Rules segment, in which he reiterated his argument that we should support Israel because it represents Western values. During the segment, he said that Israel had never seized Gaza but of course, as I pointed out above, it did, during the 1967 Six Day War. Sam Harris has a new podcast episode out called "The Infernal Logic of Jihad" which I am reluctant to listen to because I suspect I know his argument in advance. Harris has long maintained that there is something evil in Islam itself, that it is an evil idea that we should resist. He will almost certainly have argued that Islamic ideology is the root cause of the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 and will disregard the fact of many decades of Palestinian oppression. (If I have falsely prejudged this episode and thus misrepresented you Sam, I apologise.) A moral problem with this argument is that although Harris has insisted that we should hate Islam rather than Muslims, it is easy to slip from a hatred of Islam to a hatred of Islamists – despite the fact that many Muslims are not fundamentalists and very very few Muslims are terrorists. A logical problem with his argument that Islamic terrorism arises from Islam itself is that the Koran specifically states that Jews and Christians are also "People of the Book" and should be respected and allowed to practice their own religions. The people Mohammed himself sought to conquer and convert were polytheists at a time when polytheism was common in the region. Anti-Jewish sentiment is not a natural part of Islam; it arose in the Middle East during the twentieth century as a result of the establishment of Israel. In the previous essay, "Rationality and Irrationality" I said that a problem with much philosophical argumentation is that it is untethered from reality. Similarly the arguments Maher and Harris make often strike me as empty rhetoric. I encourage fans of Maher and Harris who read this blog to also do their own research. A good place to start is with an essay I found this evening in the London Review of Books called "Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank".

This essay was written over a number days. It is based on my own research, that is, what I could gather from media outlets and sources online. Sometimes I have cited my sources and when I haven't, you can assume I found it on Wikipedia, so if there are serious mistakes Wikipedia can be blamed. I'll finish the essay by talking about Real Time with Bill Maher. I have watched Maher's show for a number of years because sometimes he says interesting things. But I am going to be critical of him here. Maher is ostensibly a Democrat and obviously intends his show to be a forum in which Republicans and Democrats can debate the important issues. For instance, he conducted a grovelling interview with the detestable Benjamin Netanyahu and recently interviewed Ron DeSantis, an interview I decided not to watch. The problem here is that Maher spends more time attacking the woke left than Republicans. Recently he disparaged higher education on the grounds that he thinks it is controlled by the woke left and another time quite recently blamed overregulation on the woke left. I would recommend that he make his show a true Democrat show by transforming it into a forum in which moderate and progressive Democrats can work towards common policy; at the moment, Real Time with Bill Maher is a gateway drug to Republicanism. I suspect that the main reasons Bill Maher is a Democrat are that he hates religion, likes marijuana, and has gay friends. And he understandably despises Donald Trump. If he were a real Democrat though he would spend more time discussing the real problems America has today, problems those outside it can so plainly see. These problems include over-incarceration, gun reform, and the lack of universal healthcare, the issues that John Oliver, who has more sympathy for the marginalised and oppressed than Maher, often focusses on. An alternative to this would be for Maher to admit he has become more conservative in his old age and come out as Never-Trumper Republican.