Philosophical Vegan Forum

It's important to appreciate the broad range of interpretations of mind-dependence/mind-independence, and that to a substantial degree those interpretations blur the line between these categories, which is unhelpful.

Meaningful interpretations create a sharp line, which is what we use here. When we speak of mind dependence, we mean it is the opinion of a mind, one not otherwise intended to reflect objective facts outside that mind, that makes something moral or not. That is a belief; one without inherent truth value beyond the fact of the belief itself.

The belief "Chocolate is delicious." is an opinion.
The belief "Bob thinks Chocolate is delicious." is a fact belief which purports to represent the objective fact of the opinion Bob holds.

This is crucial to understand in order to comprehend the functional boundaries of mind-dependence. If we regard the belief "Bob thinks Chocolate is delicious" to be mind-dependent despite there being objective truth value to the claim outside the mind that believes it on the grounds that a mind is involved in the scenario being described, then everything becomes mind-dependent: not just psychology, but all of science which is based on some level on observation or interpretation by minds.

People may believe that morality is or is not mind-independent, but the claim that morality can NOT be mind-independent on the grounds that it is thought of, analyzed, affects, or is measured by its affect on minds is inherently linked to a deeper factual subjectivism about reality and the universe (often magical thinking). For further in depth reading onto this topic and the collaborative implications of such interpreaions please open the following: (see Objective-subjective distinction)

Ok now this is the sticking point is... this chapter talks about this but recorrect me if I'm wrong.

The interaction of observers and the observed.

The theory of relativity does not undermine objectivity in science, but on the face of it quantum mechanics presents something of a challenge in this respect. There are, however, in reality two separate issues as far as quantum mechanics is concerned. The first is that, because of the ways in which certain properties are connected at the microscopic level, one cannot measure certain pairs of properties at the same time: a precise measurement of position and a precise measurement of momentum is not possible. The more precise the first measurement, the less precise the second, and vice versa. One of the problems in the early development of quantum mechanics was accounting for how electrons jumped from one orbit to another, and this was solved in part by Heisenberg’s ‘matrix mechanics’, which allowed one to calculate the probability of an electron jumping from one orbit to another. Matrix mechanics enables one to represent position and momentum in arrays of numbers called matrices. If position and momentum matrices are both applied to a state, however, then the result we get differs depending on which we apply first, because the way in which the mathematics works means that operations performed on the matrices are non-commutative, that is, the quantities cannot be transposed: a × b does not equal b × a. The upshot of this is that it is impossible to know both quantities simultaneously with the same degree of precision.

This is closely associated with, but not quite the same as, the second issue, which is that the act of measuring physically interferes with the measured object. One early interpretation of this phenomenon, the Copenhagen Interpretation, formulated by the physicists Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others in the years 1924 to 1927, maintained that particles were not in a physical state when not being measured: it was the act of measurement, which involved an interaction between a measuring apparatus and a measured system, that put them in a physical state. Moreover, on the Copenhagen Interpretation, this interaction is very problematic and peculiar because the measuring system obeys classical laws, whereas the measured system obeys quantum laws.

The lesson that some have drawn from this is that measurement or observation affects the system observed, so we can never know what the system would be like without observation or measurement. The peculiarities of quantum mechanics make it difficult to understand even in its own right, and in fact what seems to have happened is not that people have studied quantum mechanics carefully and have tried to draw consequences from it, but rather have not studied it at all. Quantum mechanics itself has no consequences for the general question of objectivity. However, if one takes the second issue that I have isolated – interference – as what is at stake, ignoring the first, then one can indeed raise the general question of objectivity. This is what has happened. The question of the impossibility of accurately measuring both momentum and position has simply been assimilated to the issue of interference, which is something that has a much longer history than quantum mechanics. What is in effect claimed is that there is an analogy between the quantum mechanics case and one that may arise in the observation of human behaviour, for example, where the fact of being observed might inevitably and perhaps unconsciously lead one to modify one’s behaviour.

The analogy breaks down, however. The problem in quantum mechanics is that position and momentum in micro-particles don’t have a physically determinate value in themselves. There is no analogue to this in history, law, and the other disciplines. But more importantly for our purposes, the case of modification of behaviour is something which we can develop techniques for dealing with, whereas this is explicitly not possible in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. But there is a sleight of hand here.

The ship has, of course, Such techniques have been around since antiquity, and were further developed in the 16th century in the context of legal and historical testimony in a particularly interesting way. Francesco Patrizzi, in his Dialogues on History of 1560, had attempted to show that the historian can either be impartial, or informed, but not both. He begins by rejecting secondary sources as virtual hearsay, and he divides primary sources into the partisan and the objective. Then, replying on a number of Machiavellian assumptions about the nature of rulers, he sets up a dichotomy between the partisan observer and the objective observer. Partisan observers – in this case, those sympathetic to the ruler – in virtue of being partisan, have access to the relevant information, because the ruler can rely upon them, but because they are partisan they will not provide an objective account of this information. By contrast, objective observers, namely those who are prepared to be critical of the ruler if this is merited, will not have the ruler’s confidence (precisely because they are objective), and so will not have access to the source of the relevant information. The example is not a far-fetched one: consider only the very widespread practice of government briefings to selected journalists.

Patrizzi concluded that it is ‘utterly and totally impossible for human actions to be known as they were actually done.’ His contemporaries responded that there are a number of ways in which we can establish credibility and plausibility, similar to those applied in law where, for example, doubts are held about a witness’s credibility, and we take into account such factors as the probative value of corroborative testimonies. In short, the problem is not one of a sceptical challenge to the objectivity of history per se but rather problems about evidence and reliability. Practitioners of the discipline will usually be best placed to deal with these. The same range of solutions is available to the anthropologist or psychologist, for example, who is concerned that the observation of his or her subjects causes them to modify their behaviour or statements in some way.

In short, the quantum mechanics case is different from that of the changes that interference can induce in measurement and observation. The fact that something or someone may alter its behaviour when being measured or observed, does not in itself mean that objectivity is not possible. All it means is that new procedures have to be devised to secure objectivity.