No More Learning

One must have in mind that when Margenau affirms that "No- body has seen this force of physical attraction, and no one ever will. " (1978, 335), he is properly saying something that any reflexive person could deny: by definition, what is seen are the effects of force, while force itself cannot be seen. And what is said about seeing must be said about touching too: the tactile sensation itself is the effect from the force one assumes to exist; force is conceived as the capacity to produce these
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effects, and the capacity cannot be touched. No physical force is em- pirical data. It is a mental construction that we imaginarily project on the physical world, for which it is required that the content of the projected concept is extracted from somewhere else.
Inferring that physical strength actually exists is another thing. Following Einstein, however, we must warn everybody that such inference is illegitimate. The syllogism should contain a universal affir- mative premise, easily refutable by a single negative case. The premise would have to say: 'Every time there is impression of force, force exists'. In order to refute this, one only needs to bring up the experience that everybody has had in the train station while waiting for our train to start moving: if the train that is next to us starts to move and we see that through the window, we have the impression that we are moved by a force of acceleration which actually does not exist. A single case like this is enough to prove that perception about a physical force is a subjective impression provoked by the peculiar manner in which are our anatomic organs constituted and to their physiology.
Curiously enough, the experiments prove that the sensation we have of the force of gravity is highly unreliable. The experimental psycholo- gists and physiologists have achieved to tackle a man just by making him see things. With his two feet well set on the ground, this man is shown by means of a cinematograph what our eyes see when the car in which we drive stops violently or makes an abrupt turn. This man feels the force that impulses towards the right, and his muscles, in order to keep the equilibrium, apply all their effort to the left, and when that happens our man falls down to that side. The force that he felt did not exist. Again: there is the sensation of force, but there are no forces. The alleged premise is simply false.
One should take into account that in the sensation of angular, rota- tional or gravitational momentum, the correspondent organs are certain ear parts called bony labyrinth and vestibule, with expansions called the saccule and the utricule. The labyrinth is composed by three semi- circular canals whose planes lie approximately perpendicular to each other. All this interconnected forms a cavity that is filled with a liquid called endolymph and the cavity is covered with hair cells that have nerve terminals on their base which transmit electrical signals to the brain in function of the movement of the endolymph, a phenomenon that occurs when the body accelerates or stops completely. As a matter of fact, perceiving static pressure or gravity is a task of the the saccule
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and the utricle, whose hair cells are covered with a jelly like liquid in which little calcium granules float; these granules apply pressure to the hair cells. But we must state three very important things about this organ:
1) The information transmitted by this entire organ is proprioceptive, not exteroceptive like the one that is transmitted from the Cochlea, since the eardrum perceives the vibrations from the surrounding sonorous environment, not the vibrations of vellum hair within the organism.
2) The entire system is connected with the reflex centre which governs the eyes, the neck and the extremities. This is what explains the experiment of tackling down a man by visual data.
3) There are several tricks in order to make this organ work without the existence of the forces that he forces himself to believe that exist, e. g. with electrical energy, with chemical substances, drugs, and even with hot and cold water, since temperature changes make the endo- lymph circulate and put more pressure to the granules.
The thesis according to which there are forces in the physical world would have to be based on other reasons. To affirm that they exist because 'we feel them' is not a good argument, because, obviously, we feel them sometimes despite they do not exist. Such an argument would be as unscientific as saying that there are surfaces because we feel them; in physics this argument in favor of surfaces has never been acceptable.
A different argument would be to pledge that the existence of forces in the physical world is required to explain the phenomena. But Hegel attacks this brutally as we have seen. Who can accept as explanatory an entity nobody knows what does it consist about? It would be useless, of course, an exit like the following one: We know that there is a force, even though we do not know what it is like. That is tantamount to say: We know that blictiri exist but we do not know what blictiri is. It is obvious that there is no trace of knowledge in any of these intellectual whims. It is impossible to know if there is or not an X, when that X is not given any content.
And if no content is given to the word 'force', the only content that is present is that of the phenomenon we wanted to explain. And this is a mirror game: they provide us as explanation the same fact of which we demanded an explanation: "properly speaking, there is no concrete
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content in the category of force" (VG 114). And if someone pretends to indicate any empirical data as a content we can reply what Hegel already said: "force [. . . ] is not something perceptible" (GP III 84).
4. expLanatory factorS
Now, the concept of force is paradigmatic. It would be a mistake to believe that Hegel's attack is invalid because physics have substituted the concept of force by the concept of field, energy, mass, momentum, conservation, probability and law.
In first place, as we demonstrated, atomic and molecular physics still employs force carelessly. And in the second place, that is what is penetrating of the Hegelian analysis: all concepts of reflection (Reflex- ionsbestimmungen), which are supposedly explanatory, have the same content, or more precisely speaking, the lack of content that the con- cept of force has.
One only needs to mention what says Hegel about the last concept we mentioned in our list, namely, the concept of law, which is by the way the decisive concept in physics as in the other natural sciences, so that his critic concerns to all of these disciplines: "forces have exactly the same form as law" (PG 119); "both have the same content" (ibid); "the explanation includes the law in the force, as in the essence of the law" (ibid. ).
It is very important to understand what has just been told to us. Whoever advances a law as an explanation of a certain phenomenon does not evidently mean that a mental operation called judgment --for the law is a judgment with a subject, a verb and a predicate-- suffices to produce a real phenomenon whose existence needs to be explained. And obviously it does not mean either that a certain set of words, which would be the expression of the law in mere sounds and ink- would suffice to produce the real phenomenon in question. On the contrary, what the person that advances a law as the explanation of an observed phenomenon wants to indicate is that something real is in- tertwined with the empirical facts and that, without being itself an em- pirical data, is capable of producing the empirical effects in which the phenomenon consists. That the law is not an empirical data has already been expressed (III, 9): the law contains an 'all' or an 'always' and it is impossible to observe those contents by empirical means. Nobody
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knows exactly what it signifies, and yet nobody doubts that it exists and produces empirical effects. And those are the same characteristics of force according to our study: a real entity that is behind of phenomena, that is not observable in itself; an entity of which no one knows what it consists of and yet has the capacity of producing phenomena and explaining them.
This is why the Hegelian critique against force is also valid against the law and other allegedly explanatory factors: as explanation of a certain phenomenon we are given an entity whose only definition is to be explanation of the phenomenon.
We pointed out that, in order to avoid such critique, it would be useless to pretend that the law is not explanatory but only descriptive. A proposition that says 'always' or 'all' cannot be descriptive. Not a single verifiable fact can be described with those words. Now, in order to scientifically and justifiably advance a thesis, this thesis has to be an object of experience or something that is necessary for the object of experience to exists, that means to say, a factor that explains the exis- tence of the phenomenon; otherwise, what one affirms is nothing more than a whim, an irrationality that has nothing to do with the work of science.
This dilemma is indispensable to understand the systematization of concepts started by The Science of Logic. The book of being deals with the concepts which are supposedly immediate or descriptive: we have seen quality, quantity, continuity, discretion, intensive, extensive, limit, finite, and being itself. Hegel proves that the alleged immediacy is merely imaginary, that all are mediated and lack of meaning if the mind does not go the next step forward. The book of the essence deals with the concepts supposedly explanatory, mediated determinations or reflections which do not have their origin in observation. One dem- onstrates there too that they do not explain anything and that they lack meaning if they do not reach the spirit (the concept), which is the sub- ject of the third book.
As a guide we could have these two sentences: "Truth is the essence of being" (WL II 3). "The truth of being and essence is the concept" (EPW 159)
It could seem that the object of essence is outdated since no science speaks nowadays of essences. But that is only a superficial consideration. The first thing that a scientist does, consciously or unconsciously, when he deals with a baroque set of empirical impressions, is to precise what
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are those impressions about, that is to say, he tries to determine what kind of object or fact lays before him. In other words, what he must do is to determine the essential. It is the Kantian problem of subsumtion. The essence is the universal concept under which we subsume the phe- nomenon: Is it a rock? Is it a tribunal? Is it a circus? Is it a book? Is it a joke? Is it a promise? Is it a requisite? Is it a whim? Is it a wedding? Is it a landscape? Is it a nightingale? Is it a speech? Everything depends on this essential discernment which, by the way, is closely related to the theory of Gestalt, but it is not reduced to the visual, since it com- prises all things intellectual and human. We had already quoted this text: "It happens as always that one alludes or mentions a perception or an experience; so soon man has spoken there is a concept there, there is no way of making it aside, it reappears in the mind as a clear sign of universality and truth, since it is precisely the essential" (GP I 336). The word essence is maybe obsolete, but the concept of essence, it doesn't.
Now, "the essence is determined itself as explanation (Grund)" (WL II 63). This is why Hegel arranged the supposedly explanatory under the captaincy of essence. By definition, the essence of a body explains why the body is like it is. That would be tantamount to explain the most important thing, but evidently, that does not happen here.
When I say that what I have in front of me is a tree, I explain the multiple and varied empirical impressions that are coming to my senses. I do not only orient myself in the middle of a chaotic parade of sensations. Impressions are what they are because what I have be- fore me is a tree.
Therefore, the affirmation according to which being and essence complement each other has two senses. First, this affirmation means that we cannot describe without explaining; the crucial thesis that entirely refutes those who believe science must be reduced to descriptions. In order to describe we need to use some universal concept, and since this concept tries to grab the essence, one infers that it must have an explanatory purpose. Second, the truth of being is the essence because (cf. Zubiri) the essence is in the being itself making it being what it is, so that other aspects or non-essential details are expendable and irrelevant: they are mere appearances.
But this is only a mirror game according to Hegel. Just as in the case of force and law, so the essence is presented to us as an entity that lies beyond the phenomena and explains them, but it is an entity that nobody is able to explain. It offers itself as the explanation of the phenomenon,
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but its only definition is to be the explanation of the phenomenon.
This identity between essence and phenomenon has been commented at length, as if it were a thesis that Hegel defended as a part of his system; in reality, that very identity is what Hegel criticizes in the concept of essence in order to reject it.
Hegel rejects every allegedly explanatory concept because the only true explanation of the world is the spirit. We immediately see how this critique is valid against all the above mentioned concepts: field, energy, etcetera. But we need first to examine more closely an interpretative question. Commentators did not perceive that the book of essence is that of the allegedly explanatory concepts; they missed the fact that this book is divided in three parts: essence, phenomenon and reality. The union of the essence and the phenomenon is reality, as synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis, so that all this movement constitutes reality; it explains it in the mind of those who believe in the above men- tioned explanatory concepts. In addition, everything leads us to the most explanatory concept we can think of, which is no other than that of cause, and whose critique we have made in our third chapter.
We already said why Hegel named that entire treatise under the name of essence. As the encyclopedic summary tells us, the essence "is, essen- tially, explanation (Grund)" (EPW 121 A). And the treatise itself tells us: "the essence determines itself as explanation (Grund)" (WL II 63). But a simple glance to the concepts there contained is enough to persuade us that they are only allegedly explanatory concepts. 'Form' and 'mat- ter' since they were coined by Aristotle, have had no other purpose than explaining facts. The conditions in which the existence of a being depends, contribute also to the explanation of that existence. The prop- erties of a being explain why such being operates as it does and how it is in fact constituted. The principles of identity and (no) contradic- tion evidently want to explain why things are this way and cannot be otherwise.
The category whole-parts: certain being is like it is because it is constituted by certain parts, or because it forms part of a certain whole. An attempt to explain its existence was to evaluate a being in terms of 'possible and 'necessary'. And let us not speak about categories like force, substance and Grund.
The substantive Grund and the verb begru? nden need to be succinctly clarified. The term 'explanation' has two different usages that depend on the nature of the grammatical subject (if it is a person or a thing).
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For instance, one person explains certain fact by indicating its causes; but we also say that the cause explains the existence of the effect. The German verb begru? nden has also these two usages. The substantive Grund, in its material meaning, means a ground, a fundament, or a ba- sis. In theory, begru? nden would mean to lay the foundations of some- thing, but in its scientific meaning Grund is a real entity by means of which one explains the existence of an entity or an event. In regard to that meaning, one would have to translate Grund as 'explanatory fac- tor', but we also say that the cause as real entity is the 'explanation' of the effect. This is how we have translated Grund in the previous pages, because 'laying the foundations' would be only a metaphori- cal language that is not pertinent to the question. That we are loyal to Hegel's thought is confirmed by the titles of the two annotations of the section called the "The Determined Grund"; in both of which the word Erkla? rung --which means explanation-- appears. Besides, this is corroborated by the fact that all the systematization effectuated by The Science of Logic would lack if the second book did not thematize the explanatory concepts, in contrast to the first book which thema- tizes the allegedly descriptive ones. Without this dilemma the whole work lacks its sting of truth.
But let us deal now with the modern explanatory concepts.
We lay aside the imaginative figurations, which can be varied. The figurative imagination, of field definition, in physics has the same con- tent --or lack of content-- that the definition of force: an entity that is not empirical in itself, that means to say, that is beyond or underneath the physical manifestations, and whose only characteristic is the ca- pacity of producing this empirically perceptible manifestations. What we see are the metal arrows that are orientated towards the poles, but in moment at all do we see the field itself. One even calls it a 'field of force'; one conceives it as an aggregate of forces. D'Abro says some- thing very illustrative in regard to gravitational fields:
For instance, the force of attraction exerted by the sun on a planet varies with the position of the planet. Let us observe that the gravitational force is disclosed only through the behaviour of the planet; nevertheless, we may reason as though a force were still in existence at each point of space around the sun even in the absence of any planet. We are thus led to conceive of a region of space at each point of which a force is present. The aggregate of such forces is called a field of force. (1952, 215). (The italics are mine)
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To be sure, in electrostatics and electromagnetism one deals not with masses or planets but with charges.
The empirical data is the trajectory and movement of the planet. The field as such is not an empirical data; it is an entity that is posed in order to explain why empirical data are as they are. In this regard, D'Abro makes also an interesting point:
The magnitude of the force at the various points of a given field is proportion- al to the mass of the particle on which the force is acting. There is no sense, therefore, in attributing any definite magnitude to the force at a given point until the mass of the particle has been specified. (ibid. ).
It turns out that the same force of the field is something indefinite; it is not an entity with determined characteristics; it depends upon the 'patient'; the latter determines the magnitude of the form. The mirror game which we have previously criticized could not be more obvious: the allegedly explanatory entity does not have any other content than the phenomenon it intended to explain; we only have the illusion that such phenomenon has been explained, because we have added an en- tity whose only content is to explain it!
As a matter of fact, to speak of a field in this regard is to employ and metaphor and to start poetizing. In its proper sense, a field is a plot of land, an inhabited portion of an earthly surface. What physics mean to say is a certain set of forces, and I do not manage to conceive how they could possibly come to believe that they have abandoned the 'obsolete' Newtonian concept of force. The difference between force and field consists in that physics believe that they imagine the latter as occupying a region of space, while force seems not to have extension. But since the field as such is not visible, then it is not imaginable. The same thing happens as with space: there are people who believe to see the space that exists between that table and the wall, but the only thing he sees is the table, the floor and the ground. The Newtonian scientist affirms the action at distance evidently holds that a force is extended through space from one body to another so that, in terms of extension, there is no difference whatsoever between them.
Margenau's next quote converges with what D'Abro said:
A non-material field is not descriptive of any material property (although it is usually caused by matter) but describes some latent effect that would
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take place at a point of space under certain circumstances. [. . . ] Nothing, however, may actually exist or be evident at that point. What matters is that if a charge were placed at that point defined by x, y, z it would experience a force proportional to the function of the field. (EB 25, 823, 1)
From the above we can say that the content of field poses unrealistic conditionals. D'Abro only ascribed fields a hypothetical 'as if' content. On the one hand, the field does not exist where (space) and while (time) it is not exerted. On the other hand, in the moment in which it is exerted what we have there is a force and only a force. But the Newtonians that speak of action at distance also hold that the only thing that exists between bodies is force. I do not see in what sense does the physics of fields has abandoned the concept of force, nor in what sense it has abandoned the concept of action at distance. Besides, we have shown (III, 8) that this entire problem in regard of the action at distance renders itself as a pseudo-problem when we realize that contact does not exist and that the difficulty lies in action as such, not
in action at distance.
We do not need to go back to the concept of mass --whose defenders
regard it as a truly explanatory concept--, for we have pointed out that force comes within its very own definition. Since the definition of force lacks content, the concept of mass is also undefined. By the way, it is noteworthy that mass is directly conceived as a resistance force that is opposed to displacement, and that inertia itself, whose quantification is mass, is also commonly conceived as a force that resists the change from rest or movement. The only thing that physics perceive in all this business is the displacement and the duration of it: mass as such is not perceptible. It is an entity that is posited in order to explain the empiri- cally perceivable data.
Since momentum is defined as the product of mass by acceleration, the moment implies all the force that is implicated in the mass. There- fore, it carries all the lack of content and all the tautological game of mirrors that the explanatory entity called force entails.
Since Einstein demonstrated that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, we have to say the same in regard to energy itself. All the lack of content which characterizes force enters in the definition with mass.
But even leaving that aside, it is perfectly obvious that energy is iden- tified with force, for it is commonly defined as the energy of carrying
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out work. Work is the effect, the observable phenomenon, the transla- tion of a body from a position to another that is even higher. In addition, we saw that force is commonly conceived as the capacity of producing certain observable effects: the 'power' of causing certain manifestation. It follows that energy, in perfect identity with that Newtonian force that physics naively believe to have abandoned, is a non-perceptible entity whose existence is posed in order to explain the empirically observable phenomena. This is why Hegel warned us that the concept of force "is the most prominent one" (GP III 84), stressing the fact that it is not prop- erly a concept but rather certain 'way of thinking'. What physics has made after Hegel is to shuffle in very different ways this same concept or lack of concept, in the hope of inventing new and different ideas.
By the way, what the popular formula of Einstein affirms is that mass transforms energy and vice versa: as statement that seemed to be fabulous in its times and which is still regarded so, but if physics with true scientific rigor demanded themselves true definitions with contents, that would not need to surprise anybody, for both mass and energy are always force: a posited explanatory entity that lacks content.
The only difference that exists consists in the diverse kind of mea- surements that scientists whimsically decide to carry out. However, one should notice that they are not measuring mass or energy themselves, in spite of the fact that they believe to be measuring that. In the case of mass, what they measure is the acceleration that a body suffers when certain force is applied to it, that means to say, they measure the space covered by the body in a given time; in other words, they measure a length and they divide it in a certain number of seconds. Best case sce- nario, what would be empirically measurable is length and that thing which physics call time: mass in itself is not perceptible or measurable. In the case of energy what they are measuring is work, that means to say, the distance along which a mass has been moved and the dura- tion of that movement; the bigger the distance the bigger the work; the bigger the time the smaller the work; length and time, that is what they measure; energy itself is not perceptible or measurable. It all depends on the imaginative combinations that physics make with length and time; they call one certain combination mass and the other energy; but that one combination transforms into another should not surprise any- body, since they are all mere multiplications and divisions that one can make with a pencil and a sheet of paper. Since they are only force, mass and energy themselves lack content; and no one should be surprised
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by the fact that a thing that lacks content is transformed into a thing that also lacks content.
Since 1860, and specially since 1890, the law of conservation of energy has become the touchstone of physics and perhaps of all natu- ral sciences up to the extent that Max von Laue says that one intends to deduce from it the rest of all natural laws and constructed an entire worldview around its form (cfr. Schilpp II 1970, 515). As for physics in particular goes, whoever studies these treatises corroborates that they are constructed upon Hamiltonian equations, and all what these supposes is that the sum of kinetic energy and potential energy is un- alterably conserved.
One can appreciate in Taylor and Wheeler to what extent the enthu- siasm for the law of conservation of energy has escalated. Defined in Newton's terms as the product of mass by speed, the momentum is not unalterably conserved in the collision of particles that travel near the speed of light. "We must therefore choose: We must abandon either the Newtonian expression for momentum or the law of conservation of momentum. The law of conservation of momentum has become so im- portant to us that we shift to it as a new foundation. We start with the law of conservation of momentum and from it derive the expression for momentum defined as that vector quantity which is conserved in all frames of reference. " (1966, 102)
In other words, momentum is defined as what is 'conserved'.
At first sight, the person that comes to us, boasting about his large scientific experiments, seems to possess a very profound knowledge of the universe, especially when he says to us that the existing quantity of energy in the world does not decrease or increase: it is always con- served in his opinion. His words are sonorous and impressive; but if we ask him what energy is, what that august, impressive and unalter- able thing is, he answers to us: what is conserved.
The law of conservation of energy has this grandiose content: one conserves what one conserves.
To make such statement one does not need to carry out the most elementary experiment; one does not need either to have any knowledge of reality whatsoever or to open his eyes to look at the world. One only needs certain intellectual masochism to take pleasure in tautologies.
The sharply tautological character of the law of conservation of energy was obvious before Taylor and Wheeler made their mortifying choice. If the term energy does not have content and yet one affirms
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