I am grateful that Remo Ruffini saw fit to reply to my few paragraphs of rant
with two long messages.  His post opens with a series of quotations from
Levitt and others worthy of Le Rochefoucauld, Balthazar Gracian, Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg, and (pardon the postmodernism) Nietzsche.  Ruffini's
use of mottos and epigrams to introduce his post rivals Ernst Bloch.
Unfortunately they have little if anything to do with my post.

First I wish to deny that I have any "training" in physics, and did not claim
to have such.  I am not even house trained.  If I misled Ruffini or others on
this list I wish to set the record straight.  My jocular reference to getting
a degree in Austin Texas was to a philosophy degree.

With respect ot the Norton Wise and Livingston job issues, these were
discussed on this list (I think) and on the STS list over a year ago.  The
Chronicle of Higher Education has a report about the Wise case Liz Macmillen,
"Science Wars Flare at the Institute for Advanced Study," May 16, 1997.

Ruffini, understandably upset with religion and occultism (see long later
post) allignes himself with science.  But for science to replace a lost
religion, science must share religion's dogmatism and purity. Science must be
unsullied by biases, power, or human intention.  Ruffini apparently thinks
that, because I mention political connections of von Neumann, claims about
the influence of Weimar culture on quantum mechanics, etc., that I must think
that science is nothing but a social construction, a mere figment of the
imagination, or a pawn of power-plays.  However, to admit that ideologies,
social pressures and politics influence scientific theories or positions is
not to claim that science does not sometimes grasp the real world or that the
real world does not exist.

This dichotomy of scientism vs. purely politicized social constructionism is
similar to that Ian Pitchford has posed on this list between total allegiance
to evolutionary psychology vs. subjective social constructionism.  One can
deny avoid cruising the wilder shores of sociolbiological speculation without
denying the reality of evolution or a role for natural selection.  One could
claim that humans evolved while denying that Pinker or E. O. Wilson got the
story right.  Oddly the crew at the Skeptic, Skeptical Inquiry or Zetetic,
Prometheus Press (which published Stenger's book) etc. are skeptical about
everything but sociobiology, John Money's sex research (see the article about
hermaphrodites and the spurious nature of one of Money's case studies in the
recent Lingua Franca magazine) , and the memoirs of porn stars (who, might,
after all elaborate on the truth) which Prometeus Books publishes.  I suspect
that this blind spot is a product of a viagra-deprived macho-libertarian
world-view of the aging liberals at those publications.

Similarly, to discuss social influences on the interpretation of quantum
mechanics is not to claim that quantum mechanics is a purely political
fantasy.  The equations of QM predict successfully.  No one denies this.
There are facts of experiment which stand whatever interpretation one takes.

Since Ruffini objected to my mention of von Neumann's politics, my
retro-hippsterism
of language (Is it true that the 1960s are over?), etc., I shall be more
prosaic and didactic.  Stengers in the Skeptic article posted by Ruffini
shows how New Age folks have made ridiculous extrapolations from quantum
mechanics to holistic medicine, etc.  However, Stengers, in his eagerness to
disassociate QM from these uses, attempts to deny some of features of the
Bohr interpretation, and defang the peculiar aspects of the field
interpretation and non-locality construals which gave rise to these wild
misuses.

Stenger claims that, contrary to the quantum mystics, the Bohr interpretation
makes no reference to consciousness collapsing the wave packet, but only to
measurement.  This is true, but hardly vindicates making Bohr an objectivist.
 As Norwood Russell Hanson, [swashbuckling philosopher of science who looped
the loop in his WWII fighter under the Golden Gate Bridge, and defender of
atheism] once said, Bohr is like an umpire who sometimes says "I calls 'em as
I sees 'em," some times "I calls 'em as they are," and sometimes "If I don't
call 'em, they ain't."
Also Bohr has his own holism, not of the universe ala later Bohm, but of the
quantum object and the mesoscopic measuring apparatus.  The measuring
apparatus makes an uncontrollable disturbance with the object.  One can
squeeze out this holism of measuring act, and find it slip back in the window
via holism of non-locality.

My reference to von Neumann and the Budapest interpretation (supported in a
different way by his Budapest secondary school chum Eugene Wigner) is to show
that the consciousness interpretation of QM measurement is not solely an
addition to Bohr made only by ignorant New Agers.  My reference to von N's
establishment politics (and I might have added Wigner's conservatism in
reaction to the disastrous 1919 Bella Kun revolution in Hungary) was to note
that von Neumann's subjectivist views were not a product of New Age or
academic left spiritualism.  (Von Neumann was a resolute athetist until,
dying of pain of cancer, possibly caused by sneaking too close to nuclear
tests to get a peek, he called for a priest at the last moment).

Stenger seems to associate the aether theory and field theory with holism
(correct, I think insofar is coninuism is a decentered holism, somewhere
toward holism from atomism).  However, Stenger, in the book from which the
Skeptic article posted by Ruffini is taken, claims that the discovery of the
electron and Einstein's special relativity refuted and eliminated the aether,
and that holism was thereby refuted.  An allusion to this occurs in Stenger's
article, where he claims that New Agers take the non-locality and
superluminal connections as a cosmic aether.  However, the science warriors
are not all of one voice on this issue.  While Stenger wishes to get rid of
the field aspects of QM as much as possible to associate it with atomistic
materialism (as Lande attempted to do in a more extreme fashion earlier),
Steve Weinberg claims that fields are the real thing, and that mechanism is a
false view of physics, that he claims was foisted on physics by philosophers.
 (He mentions this  in his chapter "Against Philosophy" in "Dreams of a Final
Theory.")  It is odd to blame philosophers for the theory of mechanism.  I
thought people such as Newton and Laplace, both of whom have fairly good
physics credentials, had something to do with it.

With regard to "materialism"-- one can defend quantum mechanics as
materialistic as opposed to mentalistic by denying that consciousness has a
role in observation.  But the "matter" of quantum mechanics looses most of
the characteristics which traditionally characterized matter.  In the field
or wave aspect it is not impenetrable.  It is not simply located.  The
quantum state, even if it is completely deterministic, is not in physical
space but in an abstract, multi-dimensional, complex number valued space.
Some (including Hanson --no mystic) have called this "the dematerialization
of matter."

Val Dusek