E.D.: on the philosopher John Schumacher (in connection with the previous post)

  
E.D.: on the philosopher John Schumacher (in connection with the previous post) 

From: E.D.
    To: Arjun Janah
    Sent: Fri, Apr 18, 2014 3:00 pm
    Subject: RE: Blog post of our correspondence re. probability. 

<Some personal details in the e-mail below, not directly related to the main discussion, were deleted by Arjun when posting on 04/20/14.>
  
Arjun,

    I didn't realize that physicists didn't have an answer to this question. I thought the standard interpretation of q.m. was that there is no "objective" reality until an observation occurs, collapsing the wave function. I thought Schrodinger's Cat Paradox was supposed to raise doubts about this interpretation, but that most physicists did not see it as a problem.

   I never studied q.m in any depth. I studied physics when I was an engineering student at RPI.  In addition to that, I took philosophy classes with John Schumacher, who was a former math student who became a philosopher. He graduated from RPI  in 1966 and was radicalized by the student movements of the 60s. A classic "hippy" in his appearance and philosophy,  he was interested in eastern mysticism (buddhism) and, because of his RPI education, also interested in combining his interest in buddhism with his knowledge of physics.

   (John Schumacher) and a couple of other members of the RPI philosophy department knew David Bohm and invited him to speak on campus. They were particularly interested in David Bohm's interpretation of q.m. and in the "holographic" theory of the universe.  All this was very heady stuff and I was quite interested, although I never did learn enough q.m. to know what to make of it. John Schumacher published only one book in the late 80s which was a synthesis of philosophy and q.m., titled "Human Posture".  He died young at age 54 in 1999.

    The crux of the issue was non-local causation. Q.M., in some interpretations, at least, allows for immediate causal connections over a distance. Bell's theorem was supposed to provide proof for such local causation. But later I learned that, in fact, Bell's theorem can't be used to prove non-local causation.*
  
<* See also E.D.'s modification of this statement in the next post -- Arjun 04/20/14.>

    During his student years at RPI, John Schumacher was a student of John Koller, who is a expert on Eastern Philosophy--especially Indian philosophy. John Koller is still alive and I see him occasionally. There were other philosophers at RPI in the 60s that also exposed John to eastern philosophy. Also at RPI in the 60s was David Thoreau Wieck, a leading post-war American anarchist philosopher.

    Ultimately, I think David had the biggest impact on John, and both directly and indirectly through John, on me.

     During his student years at RPI, John Schumacher was a student of John Koller, who is a expert on Eastern Philosophy--especially Indian philosophy. John Koller is still alive and I see him occasionally. There were other philosophers at RPI in the 60s that also exposed John to eastern philosophy. Also at RPI in the 60s was David Thoreau Wieck, a leading post-war American anarchist philosopher.

    Ultimately, I think David had the biggest impact on John, and both directly and indirectly through John, on me.

    John Schumacher was an anarchist, and his anarchism leaned pretty heavily towards communist anarchism.

    I think his interest in non-local causation was an attempt to show how the capitalist view of social reality, in which individuals are separate and competing entities, is false. In fact, John wanted to show, people are more radically connected to one another. Thus social life is held in common, and an egalitarian, non-hierarchical society, in which we are all "one," fits best with reality.

    A lot of John's book, "Human Posture," I think, tries to explain how we ever came to believe we are separate if the reality is that we are not. It does that in a psychological, sociological and metaphysical way.

    Ultimately, I have come to believe that John's primary commitment was political, and that he merely used mysticism, physics and metaphysics to help him meet his political commitments. I have also come to doubt his interpretations of mysticism and physics and to think that he would have been better off just focusing directly on politics.

    Although I've come to see this as a chink in his sterling armor, I still think of him as an extraordinary personality--practically a mythic being come to life, or rather, an archetypal persona, and it is tragic he's no longer with us.

E.D.