Just curious — I ran across this article from back in March that rips into Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking for their ignorant comments about philosophy. I’d like to think better of all three of them. Does anyone know if any of them made any responses to their numerous philosophical critics? Is there any sign that they’ve learned from the criticism?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Here’s some good news:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/nyregion/how-bill-nye-the-science-guy-spends-his-sundays.html
“I was legitimately criticized for an offhand remark about philosophy, so I’ve been reading books about philosophy, trying to catch up. The process of science, you could make a reasonable claim, is actually natural philosophy.”
I can’t find any indication that Hawking or Tyson changed their opinion, though.
Tyson has clarified his remarks somewhat in his comments to a blog post by Lewis Powell: https://horselesstelegraph.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/an-open-letter-to-neil-degrasse-tyson/
It should also be noted that responses from philosophers have not been uniformly condemnatory. See, for example: http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/05/what-wayne-myrvold-thinks-neil-de-grass-tyson-got-right-guest-post.html
But also: http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/05/what-wayne-myrvold-was-too-generous-about.html
As a PhD candidate in philosophy myself, I’m wondering whether it even makes sense any more to speak of philosophy as a single discipline. Compare contemporary philosophers of science to old school analytic metaphysicians to deconstructionists to those doing ancient Greek exegesis and you’ll find very little in common in terms of background assumptions, research aims, or methodologies. My own wheelhouse is in the philosophy of science, and even this subdiscipline has become considerably specialized along the lines of the individual sciences it studies. In my observation, most, e.g., philosophers of physics DO have considerable training in physics and fairly regularly work, conference, and even co-publish with working physicists. Ditto for philosophers of biology, philosophers of neuroscience, etc. While I recognize the necessity of this specialization trend (though it’s also a product of a shitty publish-or-perish academic culture that incentivizes smaller and smaller projects), I do find it regrettable that there are so few philosophers these days grappling with bigger picture scientific issues (the realism debate, intertheoretic reductions, incommensurability, naturalized epistemology, etc.).
Doubtful. If they’re looking for evidence presented in a scientific journal, because they think that’s the only thing that could possibly count, not some other kind of criticism from some other source (e.g., logic failures, evidence elsewhere, etc.), then they’re probably digging in the wrong spot and won’t change. Or they weren’t looking anywhere, because they were too busy preparing their next thought-leader talking points to pontificate about … that’s possible too.
They probably haven’t cracked open a philosophy book in the past several months or interacted with their critics in any meaningful way, so most likely you’re going to be disappointed. That’s partly an educated guess, but in fact I read Daily Nous and some other online sources, to keep up to date and so forth. I think they’d report on such things if there were something to report, and as far as I’m aware they haven’t. (They have of course offered coverage and criticism of the assorted pronouncements of Nye/Hawking/Tyson/Dawkins/Harris/Dennett/etc., so it’s not like they’re simply oblivious to it or not bothering with it or whatever.)
I don’t think they were completely off base. I hold with the late Polish-born philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, who wrote, “The relation between science and philosophy is like the symbiotic relationship between the countryside and town. The former provides the latter with food receiving garbage in return.”
I think most of the garbage comes from the quarters of philosophy that refuse the food science offers.
I don’t suppose it plays well around here that “so many smart guys” can be “such idiots about philosophy” demonstrates rather tautologically that being an idiot about philosophy is no bar to being a smart guy.
IOW that in point of fact “idiocy” about philiosophy does not bar one from making (sometimes extremely) valued contributions at the forefront of human thought.
I know well that science is sympatric speciation of disciplines, and that science was once unquestionably a branch of philosophy. But the formalization (by their divergent social practices) have yielded mutually incompatible ways of thinking. The result, as commented upon by a wide array of scientists is that philosophy is now irrelevant to science and ongoing and increasing comprehension of the world. Yes I’m aware that there are scientists – some among the giants, near peers of Hawking, who disagree … but that disagreement itself is evidence of the vacuity of value for philosophy as practiced today.
— TWZ
It would make more sense if the metaphor was reversed. Everybody lives in the philosophical countryside, and the scientific towns (along with other features perhaps) are scattered on it. Maybe you have a job in one of those towns, maybe not — there is productive work to do in many places, and being productive need not be defined as “the type of thing you do in a particular part of a particular town.” Anyway, if you’re imagining yourself as some kind of space cadet who can do science elsewhere, without some kind of philosophical underpinning or another, you’re simply mistaken.
What are these ways of thinking, and what is incompatible with what?
Perhaps a wide array of scientists are talking out of their asses, because they have no idea what relevance it has to science. You don’t actually see, on the other hand, a wide array of philosophers making such claims. Why is that? Why did you assume (or what made you decide) that this particular wide array made the correct conclusion and the other didn’t?
So even if it isn’t such a wide array, even the fact that isn’t any such agreement… that’s evidence of what exactly? What’s supposed to help us determine whether this claim is true or nearly so or has any merit whatsoever? The fact that there exist scientists who may be talking out of their asses means….?
Besides that, why is the value of philosophy, as such, being measured in terms of what it can do for science or scientists? Why can’t it be doing its own thing? Who says everybody needs to be helping out scientists with their work? Some of us have other shit to do, which is worth doing just as much as your shit (or more or less or in any case it’s something else that people do). If the claim is that actually scientists don’t need this help anyway, why is that being treated as an appropriate way (or the way) to evaluate non-scientific pursuits?
I’m not sure where the idea comes from that science can provide all knowledge of all things. To me, it seems pretty obvious that science, while incredibly useful, can’t answer all questions or provide all knowledge. Ethics alone is a huge and important area where science can’t really provide answers.
Oh, you mean looking at research on the effects of certain ethical decisions by social scientists, like abortion, and incorporating those answers into further ethical philosophy on the subject is out?
Well, science can provide information on how something like abortion affects people, but the significance of that information depends on one’s ideas about ethics, which would come more from philosophy or religion rather than science.
Non-atheists see public-facing atheists being tone-deaf, self-absorbed, and bigoted and assume all atheists are like that = Problem On Part of Atheists.
Non-philosophers see public-facing philosophers being vacuous, pretentious, and engaged in tedious verbal masturbation and assume all philosophers are like that = Problem on Part of Non-Philosophers.
I’m still waiting for someone to explain this one.
I’m not sure, but to be charitable, I don’t think springa73 was making any claims for ethical non-naturalism or something along those lines. It’s not that such empirical evidence doesn’t/can’t exist, or that we have to use some supernatural (or other non-natural) means of making such determinations, other than knowing things which reduce to physical facts about the stuff in the world and how that stuff behaves. Instead, it’s that in actual practice there is no well-defined, currently-existing domain or discipline of science (like sociology or biology or whatever) which puts them to use in that way. That is not institutionally what any of the things we normally call “sciences” do — maybe they could or should or would but they don’t. Hence, the sciences do not in fact provide that service to us. That is however something moral and political philosophers do, as well as something other people do (however badly or unprofessionally). This can be knowledge you’re getting that doesn’t come fully and directly from science. Of course nobody should be disputing (and most people don’t) that all those people should care what the relevant empirical evidence says (however it was obtained, by a psychologist or an astrophysicist or whatever those people might call themselves). The point is just that there is this other useful work to do, which isn’t being done by scientists according to scientific methods or principles.
But there’s often an implication, from scientists making sloppy (and simplistic, naive, parochial) claims that their disciplines offer the only access to knowledge (in contrast to religious dogmas for instance), that words like “knowledge” or “facts” or “truth” can’t apply to ethical claims because they don’t fulfill certain scientific criteria. If you think it’s true that murder is wrong, for example, the implication is then supposed to be that some known science must have demonstrated that fact, that this result can be found somewhere in the relevant literature. If not, then it’s an illusion, some kind of error in reasoning, or you must be implicitly supposing that there are non-natural things. But that’s not a genuine problem, since we don’t have to play this silly game of saying sciences do it all when they clearly don’t — you could just revise your sweeping claims about what the sciences actually do and what they don’t actually do.
If you have reason to believe that your perceptions coincide with reality in one case, it doesn’t follow that your perceptions are veridical in all cases. Is there anything else that needs to be explained?
@13
I mean, I generally think it’s a little bit of both, in both cases. I think the non-atheists and non-philosophers are wrong for making sweeping statements based off of poor representative samples, but I also think it’s a problem with asshole atheists and navel-gazing philosophers too.
I wonder how man non-philosophers, compared with non-atheists, can actually name and meaningfully reference the work of those whose vacuity, pretension, and onanistic tediousness they find so objectionable.
*how many, that is.
I’ve had a problem with this cavalier attitude toward philosophy (and more generally, the humanities and sometimes even the social sciences) from positivists who claim that their specific way of doing science constitutes “critical thinking”. DeGrasse Tyson is quoted as saying:
“I don’t know of anyone who received that training in the 20th century that has contributed materially to the moving frontier of the physical sciences.”
That’s not the purpose of philosophy. It’s also not the purpose of many other sciences, and it certainly is not what I would call “critical thinking”.
The problem is that right now, academia becomes more and more obsessed with this idea that an academics’ purpose is to “contribute” to progress and “be productive”. It’s no wonder, because most funding has these conditions written into the application process. As a historian, I’m part of a discipline that spent the last 100 years refuting the idea that we can use historical examples as a kind of lab experiment to “test” for certain policies and decisions. And now that idea is coming back in full force, because there’s money in it. That’s very uncritical thinking.
“They probably haven’t cracked open a philosophy book in the past several months.”
Hawking hasn’t “cracked open” a book in decades, how could he?
Considering not just his age, but how much time even the simplest things in life take him, I am inclined to being extremely lenient if he chooses not to educate himself any further and concentrates on sharing his own vision.
at one point in we only had little understanding of the existence we found ourselves in what it was or how it worked were little understood. what the nature of existence was left to the philosophers and the priests but gradually we learned more about what is going on and how it works and a branch of philosophy became science and the explanations of pure thought gave way measurement and verification.
I have heard little of philosophy that sings and much I have heard contains assumptions that are at best unproven and often just simple wrong. Politics of philosophy and the philosophy of politics it is,Just a little too Ivory Tower for me generally and seldom uses simple words to say anything simply.
uncle frogy
einsophistry makes a very good point in their #17
Science is used to find truth. That doesn’t mean truth will be found.
Make me laugh.
I recall being amused when Hawking opened History of Time with “philosophy
is dead.” Hard to tell if that was a joke, but based on subsequent
comments, it was not.
Clearly he lacks a philosophic cast of mind if he is going around talking
about how artificial intelligence is the greatest existential threat to
mankind.
They have to make decisions about what to pursue. Do they want to measure
blades of glass all day, or the I.Q. of Sub-Saharan Africans? Do they want
to spend millions of dollars a year looking for signals from aliens?
As Ross Douthat pointed out (probably the only good observation he’s ever
made), morality cannot be found under a microscope.
That should have been “made me laugh,” not “make me laugh.”
And “blades of grass” not “blades of glass.” Just woke up…
This article sums up my opinion about philosophy almost perfectly.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/46/Newtons_Flaming_Laser_Sword
I work in the field of computer vision and I had almost exactly the same conversation as described in the article with two PhD students in philosophy. And it is incredibly frustrating.
Oddly enough, I was lured into philosophy from biological anthropology by the work of Patricia and Paul Churchland, philosophers who are staunch critics of Searle and, pointedly, longstanding champions of the use of ANNs to model and understand human cognitive processes.
Perhaps it’s just the circles I tend to travel in, but I don’t know a whole lot of Platonists in the field.
@26, Compuholic:
interesting article, thanks. I understand the problem, but I think it only applies for conversations in natural science fields. That example he brings for philosophers inferring conclusions from language was an important and powerful argument against God, as part of the omnipotence paradox. Thus, it’s not just playing around with language, it’s an important part of everyday reasoning and logic and has relevance for society.
The argument around artificial intelligence also doesn’t convince me. The philosopher’s distinction between “real” and “simulated” mistakes is a weak argument by any standards, be they scientific or philosophical. But the actual argument was that an AI program, like any other program, always does what it is told to do, what is written in its code. The scientist’s answer to that is “there is every reason to believe that a human brain is a machine”, but that is a reductionist assumption that isn’t based in any empirical evidence. Thus, he basically makes the same mistake as the philosopher.
I also find it hilarious that Dawkins is so dismissive of philosophy, seeing as his own views seem to stem from highly simplistic versions of positivism and utilitarianism.
@Bernardo Soares:
You are probably right on that. In other areas it is much harder to come up with concepts that are sufficiently precise in their definition to arrive at meaningful deductions. Human language and society is messy.
The only assumption needed for this claim is that everything in this world operates on a set of rules. Any other assumption would be equivalent to “it is magic”, where anything can happen. And I disagree strongly that there is no empirical evidence for that. Literally every advance in science is the discovery and refinement of our understanding of these rules.
The brain operates on physics which are the rules (which might not be fully known or understood). The only difference is that in a computer program, we fully know and understand the rules. And even that doesn’t mean that we can always predict the outcome given a set of starting conditions.
The term “machine” is too broad. “The brain is a machine” conveys no useful information.
The dispute is over which kind of machine. It is reasonable to scoff at extrapolations based on equating the brain to a digital computer (e.g., mind uploading, etc.), but it is also reasonable to scoff at suggestions that the brain transcends physics in some way.
@penalfire:
Totally agreed. My point was not that the philosopher is right, but that both make the same mistake.
@Compuholic
that “set of rules” argument, just like the image of the machine, is much too abstract to be of any help. And it remains pure speculation to posit that every phenomenon is determined by physics. That might theoretically be true, but a) only in the most abstract way (I have enough experience as a historian to be very sceptical about the possibility of an Asimovian psychohistory) and b) it doesn’t help us understand all real world phenomena (or we wouldn’t need all the other fields of science) – thus, that argument has more in common with philosophy than you might care to admit.
I would also argue that the fact that we know and understand the rules of a computer program, but not those of a brain, points to a pretty fundamental difference between the two. It also means that as long as we don’t know the rules according to which a brain operates, we won’t be able to reproduce it.
@penalfire
I agree that machine is a broad term. A machine – as computer scientists usually use the term – is any system that consists of an initial input, a set of states and rules which serve as transitions between those states (like a Turing-Machine).
And when understood it such a way it ultimately doesn’t make a difference whether a machine is digital or not. Any input or state – be it continuous or discrete – can be approximated digitally to arbitrary precision.
“This is a field where prominent figures have argued that God is constantly creating the entire world in every moment”
PZ, do you or anyone else here think this is a valid inquiry? This statement alone makes me wholeheartedly support Hawking, Tyson and Nye. It would have been far, far more useful if you cited say neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland for a worthy retort. Nitwit philosophers like Goldhill who ponder whether we “live in the Matrix” or if our “brains are in vats” do not seriously add to knowledge. The absolute worst of the lot are po-mos who say “gravity is a social construct” while jumping off a cliff. If you agree with Goldhill’s stance then you might as well give a platform for Deepak Chopra or Stuart Hameroff and consider their opinions as valid. Thumbs down for Goldhill. You should have selected a better philosopher.
All the other fields of science (with the exception of computer science, mathematics and philosophy – which all don’t really qualify as “science” in the sense of “understanding nature”) operate on different levels of abstraction as physics. But ultimately everything comes down to physics, the interactions of different particles of nature through various forces.
Of course in order to understand chemistry you probably don’t want to think of nature on the level of quarks and Gluons and you don’t need to. Similar for biology and and sociology.
And while you are right that it is ultimately speculation that the brain is determined by physics, it would be insane to assume otherwise.
No it doesn’t. I can give you an artificial neural network. I can tell you the rules on which it operates and with pencil and paper (and lots of time) you can step by step follow every single calculation. Do that for two pictures showing the same object. One gets recognized the other one doesn’t. Despite the fact that you know everything that there is to know about the internal workings you still won’t be able to tell why the network recognized the one while it didn’t recognize the other.
Same problem for the brain. We (roughly) know how a single neuron works. But the function of the brain is an emergent property of millions of them interacting with each other.
“The brain is a machine” is used to express the possibility of reproducing
functions of the brain in silico. The assumption is that this is an
attainable goal precisely because humans can build machines and therefore
humans can build a brain.
“The brain is more than a machine” in its rational sense is used to express
skepticism that the arrangement of matter that produces brains can be
reproduced with typical machine-making means. There might be principles
crucial to the functioning of a brain that we as humans, with our limited
perceptual capacities, will never be able to grasp. That argument, I think,
has some credibility, as long as it stops short of demanding that the
scientists stop trying, and is only used to ridicule futurist fantasies.
“The brain is a machine” also lends itself to reductionist ideas about
perfect reproducibility. Whatever is being created is different, even if it
can do subtasks that its model can do. Those differences might be trivial
when comparing a word processor to a typewriter, but they are certainly
non-trivial when one speaks of artificial consciousness, etc.
The brain is a machine. Too complex to emulate with stuff the brain can build. Like drawing a map with enough detail it has to be drawn in full scale. etc. etc. nowhere to go. nothing else to say.
for now,
erp
“brain is a machine” is true in only the most generic use of the word “machine”. As in, the brain is composed of living cells that respond with fixed sets of outputs for a given set of inputs, and connected together in a complex fashion. With enough detail, it is hypothetically possible to emulate it in enough detail to make its operation indistinguishable from a bio-brain.
ugh
that’s my lame attempt at contributing to this conversation, which is flying way overhead. fly well, up there.
@32 Bernardo Soares:
“And it remains pure speculation to posit that every phenomenon is determined by physics.”
Yet all other “speculations” fall afoul of Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword.
From my web page “Disgust With Philosophy“:
I believe philosophical thinking is a necessary tool. But not for any knowledge or wisdom. The only valid use I find for philosophy is to REJECT ideas: most prominently those of philosophers. When students tell me they are interested in philosophy, I want to steer them away from it: what a futile waste of time!
Most defense of philosophy is a waste because there is no cladistic agreement about what philosophy is. Is it paraphyletic because science has been carved out from philosophy? Is it polyphyletic because philosophy has incorporated mathematics, which has a different origin? Is it simply some ancient grab-bag of subjects without real relationship? Or is it some ghastly organism with commensal origins like the eucaryotic cell?
It is easy to disbelieve in the vast majority of philosophy for the exact same reasons you can disbelieve in the vast majority of religion.
They contradict each other so very much that at most only a tiny fraction could be true.
They are usually not rooted in observed reality: they believe untestable things such as souls or morality.
They play stupid word games.
Their logic is grotesque.
They usually slide in is/ought fallacies or ideals/absolutes which do not exist.
I’m collecting a number of references to criticisms of philosophy.
What is Wrong with Our Thoughts? A Neo-Positivist Credo.
The famous “forty different ways in which thought can go irretrievably wrong” about the number three. I can’t recommend this highly enough.
“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea : Evolution and the Meanings of Life” by Daniel Clement Dennett.
Plato is Terrible: rants of a frustrated philosophy student.
Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline
On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit
Why Do Philosophers Talk so Much and Read so Little About the Stone Age? False factual claims in appropriation-based property theory
Does Science Need Philosophy? Why the “Gotcha” Argument Fails
Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword
Philosopher: “What color is the sky?”
Student: “Blue.”
Philosopher: “Let us then proceed from the fact that the sky is blue to reason thusly….”
If only the student would observe that the sky is not always blue: it can be gray on a cloudy day, it can be black at night, and sun, moon, stars, clouds, birds, etc. can all make it different than plain, solid blue. If we say the sky is blue, that is not a fact: it is a vague observation or generalization, ignoring the many exceptions, ignoring the scientific explanation of scattering of sunlight and privileging daytime over nighttime conditions. It is not a valid premise that philosophy can be built upon. Most philosophy actually starts with such invalid premises, and it is not too difficult to spot them.
If you must study philosophy, I recommend Daniel Dennet as the philosopher I would criticize least.
I can only continue to agree with penalfire, who makes a much more eloquent and coherent argument than myself.
“There might be principles
crucial to the functioning of a brain that we as humans, with our limited
perceptual capacities, will never be able to grasp”
Then you might as well let Stuart Hameroff with his wacky woo quantum mechanics theory of consciousness take over this blog. If there is something other than the electrophysiology and neurochemistry at play, then pray-tell what are these extra “principles”. Are they supernatural?
Not supernatural, but possibly beyond the grasp of human beings. Might take
a different creature to discover them.
What basis do you have to think that humans are capable of discovering
everything there is to know about electrophysiology and neurochemistry?
The limits of scientific progress are quite clearly not set by our limited perceptual capacities, because we can invent machines to augment those capacities. The same is true of our limited cognitive capacities – and in addition, human beings collectively can understand far more than they can individually. No individual mathematician, for example, understands anything close to the whole of current mathematics – but the community of mathematicians does.
We might go infinitely in X direction when Y direction is what is necessary
to discover Z.
I’m only claiming that humans (and human-augmented humans and human-created
machines) are not capable of discovering everything, and some of the
undiscoverable properties may be necessary to achieve things like a perfect
understanding of the brain.
Either way, it is absurd to claim in 2016 that we will or will not obtain
that perfect understanding of it. We might.
@42 penalfire
“I’m only claiming that humans (and human-augmented humans and human-created
machines) are not capable of discovering everything, and some of the
undiscoverable properties may be necessary to achieve things like a perfect
understanding of the brain.”
What’s your line of reasoning to reach this conclusion?
@40 you said
“What basis do you have to think that humans are capable of discovering
everything there is to know about electrophysiology and neurochemistry?”
So I turn the question back on you. What basis do you have to think that humans are incapable of discovering
everything there is to know about electrophysiology and neurochemistry?
Be more specific.
That is not what I think. I think humans might not be capable.
To answer the question reformulated for what I think: humans might not be
capable because humans are limited in kind and degree with regards to
capacity.
If something is matter in space, you can analyze it with physics as a physical object.
That’s different from claiming that the best way to understand that thing is with physics. It’s hard enough knowing how a single hydrogen atom behaves — that shit by itself takes some industrial-grade mathematics, as simple as it may seem, and even after that’s done you can’t get physicists to agree about a realistic theory (some don’t even think they need one, which makes me wonder why they went to all of that trouble).
Nobody’s ever going to tell you the history of the Civil War, help you with your taxes, predict how Clinton will win in 2016, treat your insomnia, explain your experiences of Mahler’s Symphony no. 1, or explain just about any other thing you may want to know, by solving the Schrodinger equation for the appropriate system. It’s hard to understate how extremely difficult those would be, and I’m confident that it will never ever happen for as long as people exist (and obviously you can forget about it after that). All of those things do of course consist entirely of matter moving around, but we have many other special sciences or non-scientific areas of expertise, with different concepts and languages and methodologies, that are more useful for providing some kind of explanation which is reasonably concise and useful and comprehensible to human beings. We can make at least some progress on them right now, without much direct help from physics which already has enough problems to solve, so that’s what people have been doing.
Reducing to physics simply doesn’t imply that it’s knowable or explicable in the fullest possible sense by physics. You’re just committed to the claim that all of it is physics, if you think there’s no more room for additional ontology in the world. (No more room in a coherent, parsimonious, respectable worldview that has a decent chance of being true — not no more logical possibilities because of course those can’t all be ruled out.)
I don’t think that makes a brain a machine. Machines (as the word is normally understood) are not the only physical things, and the statement should be that the brain is a physical object. I think we do know that as a fact; but on the other hand, it’s not clear what useful results you can derive from something like that.
Sorry, it’s hard to overstate how extremely difficult those physical explanations would be. It’s super-easy to understate them.
Don’t be so ridiculous: you made an assertion, rivendellyan asked you what reasoning led you to it. You are the one that needs to be more specific.
In what ways, and why might these ways make them incapable of discovering
everything there is to know about electrophysiology and neurochemistry?
There are real limits to knowledge, and some of them have already been discovered, but you’re just throwing out vague, groundless speculations that add nothing of any use or interest to the conversation.
cr @45:
Ah yes, all those silly physicists who haven’t thought about their work as deeply as you have, and who don’t accept whatever it is you consider a “realistic theory”. You should write a book. Or at least send stern emails to various physics departments.
Rob, I don’t think I should bother justifying scientific realism to you right now. Since the issue here that we were talking about is what there really and fundamentally is in the world (like for example particles or strings or whatever, which move according to laws of motion), the only valid answer physicists could offer will come in the form of a realistic theory. Not an instrumentally useful gadget that makes good predictions when you run experiments — a theory which makes substantive claims about what there actually is in the world. That’s what there is to explain, so you say those are real and attempt to explain them. And there isn’t much point in explaining unreal things, is there?
Still, it’s not all that hard to come up with something that meets those simple criteria. So, it’s not as if those kinds of theories don’t exist. But the fact is (whether you care or not) that there isn’t a single unique answer that respectable physicists have agreed upon, just as I said. I don’t see why you should have an objection, when I was trying to be honest and transparent about the fact that textbook or orthodox physics itself doesn’t offer that. I’m not hectoring anyone or writing any stern emails, and I don’t get what there is about it that could make you upset. So, buyer beware, your mileage may vary, etc. — that’s just the best I can do with what I have — I don’t know what else you expect to me to say.
KG:
I agree that there are “real limits to knowledge.” What follows is that
there might be “real limits” to what we can discover about
electrophysiology and neurochemistry.
What is the disagreement? Do you think humans can discover everything there
is to discover about nature? Do you think we can discover everything about
electrophysiology and neurochemistry?
I’d prefer to narrow down the query before going on a long explanation. For
rivendellyan’s sake as well as mine. I asked for more specificity for
practical reasons, not as an evasive rhetorical tactic.
Humans are limited in the number of ways that they can think about
problems. Some problems can only be solved by thinking about them in a
different way. Do you want a list of unsolved problems in science? Are you
certain we’ll solve all of them eventually? Might some of these problems
need to be solved to know everything about electrophysiology and
neurochemistry?
There is nothing speculative or vague about the fact that humans have
limited capacities, and that humans rely on those capacities to make
discoveries.
cr @49: Why on Earth do you think I’m upset?
You continue to wear your classical biases on your sleeve; “what there really and fundamentally is in the world” must be concrete objects moving according to equations of motion, and any theory not saying that is just “an instrumentally useful gadget that makes good predictions when you run experiments”.
For the umpteenth time, why should the universe conform to your notion of what constitutes real and fundamental? Maybe operator-valued fields with definite symmetries and commutation relations are real and fundamental. That our feeble human brains may not be able to picture such things is not an argument against that.
@consciousness razor, #45:
But “physical object” a little too broad. A proton is a physical object; so too is a tea cozy, a banana, a candy bar, a lump of granite, a lump of cement, a slide rule, the planet Earth itself, a steam engine, and a watch (found on a heath). It’s not just that the brain is physical, but that it is operating dynamically in a regular way, following the laws of physics (chemistry, biology, etc).
The brain is a machine in the sense that it is mechanistic.
Is this really such a problematic term?
See also Compuholic @# 33. I’ve had a CompSci education, so I tend to think of the term “machine” as at least potentially having a broad and metaphorical sense, which may be influencing my defense of the term.
I didn’t claim that. I think that’s an obvious place to start, given our everyday prescientific experiences of the world. If you can come up with an empirically adequate and coherent theory which does that, I don’t see a compelling reason to opt for some more exotic or abstract theory which isn’t improving anything about the empirical results. It turns out you can have a theory like that, so I’m satisfied at least for these purposes, since it looks like a simple option with a minimal amount of theoretical baggage.
No, anything like that isn’t an example of a genuine physical theory about the world, concrete moving objects or no concrete moving objects. You can give me something else with whatever kind of stuff you want, but I need to be able to take it seriously as a complete and fundamental theory about physical reality. If you’re not doing that because you’re happy with instrumentalism, I don’t understand what relevance it’s supposed to have here.
Maybe so. I’m not sure how you get tables and chairs out of that. But assuming you have that kind of stuff straightened out, what’s the problem?
You’re invited to have a seat at the table and offer that, if you believe you’re telling us something about reality that’s true. But if it’s not something that can be taken seriously, I’m not sure I’ll be able to make sense out of what you think you’re adding to this conversation. I think you can perfectly well counter arguments that the mind isn’t identifiable with a physical object like a brain, or doesn’t completely operate according to physical laws. But in order to do so, you need to be saying something about what’s really happening in the world we live in — so all of these shenanigans with QM instrumentalism that we’ve talked about to death have to go, if conversations like this are headed anywhere. It’s not going to work to bring something which isn’t postulating anything coherent or definite about what’s real. If you’re not interested in the conversation or don’t think you’ll offer anything that might be helpful, then of course nobody said you needed to be a part of it.
Owlmirror to CR,
It connotes a deterministic rather than a stochastic system, and it connotes teleology.
I’m not following you here. Why isn’t a piece of granite a machine in the sense that it is mechanistic? I mean, I don’t know what you mean by “mechanistic” apart from having to do with mechanics: the thing can move. That’s what physical objects do too, no?* So I don’t get what distinction you’re making.
*(Rob: I mean at least in the everyday sense of macroscopic objects in 3D space, whatever you say the real things are doing if it isn’t something like that.)
@26
It is mind blowing to me that of all disciplines a computer scientist could so trivially dismiss philosophy. Computer science is litterly one of the newest children born from the cauldron of philosophy, specifically formal and symbolic logic. Every single computer language is simply a special case of symbolic logic.
As always it seems as a division of philosophy grows and becomes more specialized it starts to see itself as distinct and seperate from philosophy. But at heart all the sciences in fact almost all human knowledge is at its root simply a subdivision off of philosophy. Obviously some separated sooner than others, but they all started with some philosopher arguing about the nature of the world.
Even the scientific method, the fundamental base on which all science is rooted is philosophical at its root. Philosophy has for eons defined knowledge as ‘justified, true, belief.’ (With some modern concerns). And what is the scientific method but the practical application of that maxim to the natural world. Observe a phenomena, acquire as much data about it as possible, and use that data to create a belief system consistent with the observations.
So what will be the next great scientific area of inquiry? Not a blessed clue. Two hundred years ago formal logic was just a game philosophers played in their spare time. Today it runs the world. But it’s a good guess that the next ‘science’ that will argue philosophy is useless is currently being born in coffee shops around the world by philosophy students discussing the nature of something that science doesn’t yet have a good grasp on how to measure.
And for anyone who is still unsure… Take a look at the current issues in physical surrounding if the universe is a hologram, which is directly in the field of epistemology, and skepticism. It is only now that the physical tools have advanced far enough to potentially investigate questions philosophers have dealt with for thousands of years.
stumble #56
It isn’t though. It’s a brain in a vat that is a butterfly dreaming it is a man.
Obviously.
The entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.
@consciousness razor:
I think this page reflects something close to my understanding of the term:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-mechanisms/
With summaries such as:
So your chunk of granite isn’t mechanistic in and of itself because its natural state is uniform and static.
Although I note the page does state as well:
and later bluntly states: “Machines are human-made contrivances with each part added and organized by a designer to perform a function”, which definitely is not the sense of “machine” that I intend or understand from the original usage above.
Owlmirror,
Indeed. A finite-state machine is not a physical thing.
cr @53:
The Standard Model hasn’t improved anything?
And apparently you’re both the host (“You’re invited to have a seat at the table and offer that”), and the arbiter of what can be taken seriously, and what is “real”! Nice.
I’m not at all sure what your last paragraph means. You can only counter ‘mind as non-physical’ with Bohmian mechanics?
Well, I’m not sure about that way of putting it, but I think I get the point. There’s no function which a typical chunk of granite has (not one that you’re usually interested in identifying), so you don’t have a reason to say it or its parts are a mechanism of a function. On the other hand, a functioning brain is presumably one that thinks — pretty much any old functioning brain in any circumstances will do, and it has parts which act somehow as the mechanism of thinking. Yes? I think you can separate that specific functional idea of “mechanisms” from questions about whether it’s designed, teleological, deterministic or indeterministic, and so forth. Those seem like different issues.
But I would normally reserve a word like “machine” for something that an agent made: its mechanisms were intentionally arranged in order to have a particular function. That’s what the machine was meant to do, or somebody could mean to use it another way if its arrangement of parts is useful for that other job. (I assume, John Morales, that it could function appropriately only part of the time because it works stochastically, or maybe it’s supposed to give you a stochastic output — still a machine, I’d say, but maybe not the best design you could come up with, depending on what it does.)
You might talk about evolution designing brains in a sort of metaphorical sense, but it seems like something will have to give if you’re describing these things literally. Anyway, I’m happy to say that “physical object” is too broad to be very useful — so I agree, it does seem too broad and doesn’t get me very far in clarifying much of anything about it. You ought to be able to use other sciences besides physics for things like this, since they could be a little more helpful. But when you describe it as “mechanistic,” the first thing that pops into my head is physics again, so maybe that’s still too broad.
Where did you get the idea that I’ve rejected the Standard Model? It wasn’t from me. If you think I’ve said classical physics is right, the point must have sailed way over your head.
No. I literally said there are other options, which is how you can make some kind of fucking sense out of the claim (which I also made) that physicists don’t agree on which option they ought to pick. I did implicitly mention “particles” (yes, I was indeed thinking of BM) as an example of what you could have in a realistic theory, one which in fact gives you all of the same predictions as the Standard Model. That’s the thing that somehow you got into your head I reject, but I have no clue where you got that. Because BM and textbook QM are (by design) empirically the same, then indeed the thing doesn’t improve on itself, and they both improve on classical physics which we can all toss out the window as fundamentally wrong. You asked whether your “operator-valued fields with definite symmetries and commutation relations” are reality, and I said that could be so. So if you’re actually reading what I said, point to someplace where I said or implied anything like that.
I think this brain and mechanism discussion is a digression; point being that what most people understand as philosophy* is not seen as useful or empirical (reality-based), unlike science.
—
* Stumble made a good point @56: as soon as something becomes useful, it’s no longer seen as philosophy (e.g. logic, empiricism). Another point worth noting is the paradoxical nature of arguing against the merits of philosophy, because so doing is itself a philosophical endeavour.
cr @63:
All the same predictions? There are lots, but let’s keep it easy. Show me a Bohmian calculation of the electron’s anomalous magnetic moment. The lowest non-trivial order will do, which should give α/2π.
I think it could be argued and I have read such arguments that there are no things (objects) at all there are only events in time. that is the implication to the understanding of reality that comes from the discoveries of modern physics.
The brain is as much a process as a thing as is a “lump of concrete” none are stable and all change over time. Because their rate of change is hard for us mere humans to preceive does not in anyway alter the fact of their changing.
uncle frogy
What is the scientific method but a philosophical tool. Each of its parts such as falsification has well documented philosophical underpinning. Science is philosophy at work.
unclefrogy, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”.
This would be a dull world indeed without Uncle F.
…what the fuck does that have to do with my point?
Well, let’s see…
Thank you for at least reading what I wrote before responding to it.
However, I believe this has been addressed already.
You, and perhaps our host, are effectively arguing that people should default to “Impressed With Philosophy” and must earn, and rigorously justify, becoming Unimpressed.
OTHER FIELDS ARE NOT SPOKEN OF THIS WAY ON THIS BLOG.
This has been my point all along. Not that the perception that philosophy is useless is correct, but that it is a rational response to the contact with philosophy most people have…and that any other field would be called out for their poor outreach, but philosophy is supposed to get a pass based on grounds of similar quality to “HOW DARE YOU CRITICIZE IT IF YOU HAVEN’T READ IT IN THE ORIGINAL KLINGON?!”
It connotes a deterministic rather than a stochastic system
….I see someone’s never done prototype testing.
Huh, new form of blockquote fail…
Mechanistic doesn’t denote deterministic. It’s easy enough to create a machine that reacts one way in the presence of atomic decay and another way otherwise.
Azkyroth to einsophistry:
Is that what you imagine? Clearly, it’s not very effective upon you.
I refer you to my #64.
Really. So, this blog does not in the same way suggest people should be, um, “Impressed With Feminism” or “Impressed With Atheism” when people diss those as foolish and purely subjective.
(And it really amuses me you link to an informal logical fallacy, as if that were not a philosophical tool. You really should have paid more attention to my #64)
—
To me:
You’re right; the closest I have come to that is debugging code.
I think you missed the point, though.
DanDare, as I earlier noted, this is a digression from the topic.
FWIW, I did not write it denoted it, I wrote it connoted it.
(You crank the handle, the wheel turns if the machine is not broken)
—
In passing, a deterministic system can still be unpredictable. cf. “chaos theory”.
(And then, there’s a simple matter of the degrees of freedom for a system, which can also render prediction intractable)
Re Einsophistry:
Colin McGinn. disgusting excretor of Disgust and Mysterianism, who among other things, with one undergrad course in physics declares ex cathedra that there are properties of space that physicists have missed that have something to do with consciousness. David Chalmers and his zombie band. Even Dan Dennett whom I otherwise admire greatly has the inexplicably dense habit of missing the obvious and neceesary connection between the conceptualization of qualia and the physical binding of the senses (to be fair what he attacks of qualia are the “features” his colleagues assert which are in fact indefensible other than as word games … but he misses the connection demonstrated by Andy Clark that there IS a binding of such ideas to the physical).
— TWZ
spring73 @ 10:
Science, at least physics, knows quite well that there are severe limits on the knowedge accessible in the universe.
Nobody marginally competent asserts that all (describable) knowledge can be determined by science.
On the other hand science is just a word for formalization of verifiable means of establishing knowledge … with empiricism having historically become the de-facto standard. (Even analytic knowledge can be verified and often only so by instantiating the concepts as tokens and moving them around by standard rules in the material world and observing the physical result). So practially, there is no objective “knowledge” that is at all accessible that is certain knowledge by any means greater than that discernable to science.
The “all knowedge” argument is a dishonest canard. What makes you think that “all knowledge” is available to philosophy of any stripe?
— TWZ
Rob Grigjanis:
You use the same wave equations as traditional QM and can derive the same probabilities for “measurement” situations. The difference is that in BM there actually are particles with definite trajectories, according to the guiding equation. Does the guiding equation make bad predictions? No, it doesn’t, as far as I’m aware. So what’s the problem?
Why do you think it should make a different calculation for the electron’s anomalous magnetic moment? Would you explain what you think is supposed to be inconsistent or do I have to guess? But why bother? Maybe you should learn a few things about it first, then tell me what’s wrong. We’ve discussed this several times before, and the issue seems to be that you’re not paying attention or not interested in learning anything about it.
cr @78:
Oh sweet weeping baby Jesus, the irony. There is a vast conceptual and mathematical chasm between what Bohmian Mechanics has been able to replicate (by construction to begin with, then laboured patchwork), and quantum field theory. You can’t just say “BM agrees with QM, therefore it agrees with everything that’s been done since the Schrodinger equation”. In QFT particles are created and annihilated; there are virtual particles, Feynman diagrams, etc. It’s not the same theoretical framework as pre-QFT quantum mechanics at all. Learn some field theory before you pontificate and wave your hands about “the same wave equations”.
If you’re going to make claims about “all of the same predictions as the Standard Model” fucking back them up before telling me to “learn a few things”.
You can certainly have a Bohmian version of QFT. You can find papers on arxiv about it, if you’re actually interested, instead of assuming that what you might have heard about BM decades ago still holds (if it ever did). For example, one of the first hits when you search for “Bohmian”:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06141
So what’s the issue? Are you claiming that it makes the wrong predictions?
cr @82: Oh, do fuck off. I’ve been aware of attempts to construct a Bohmian field theory for years. Congratulations on your googling skills, and your totally laughable condescension (did you pick up this bullshit tactic from Richard Carrier?). Attempts do not justify your absurd claim. The paper you linked to doesn’t even discuss gauge invariance (a pretty bloody major element of the Standard Model).
You made the claim about “all of the same predictions as the Standard Model”. Back it up or shut the fuck up. Show a fucking prediction.
colonelzen:
How is this specific to philosophers? Speculative philosophical ideas are certainly not restricted to philosophers.
Elon Musk: “Chances are we’re all living in a simulation'”;
Ray Kurzweil: “maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high-school student in another universe”;
Alan Guth: “Are We Living in a Simulation?”
…
and so forth. Then there’s John Wheeler, Max Tegmark, Seth Lloyd, Frank Tipler, etc.
@Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y:
I’m arguing no such thing, with or without that weasel word “effectively.” Nor do I think this. I’ll be the first to call bullshit on broad swaths of the current landscape of academic philosophy. This doesn’t require me to spurn the whole enterprise–precisely because, as I said earlier, it is a single enterprise in name only. Yes, there are still philosophers who attempt to reason their way from first principles to substantive truths about the world solely from the comfort of their armchairs, and yes, these people are silly. But there is an increasingly large number of empirically oriented philosophers who ought not be tarred with the same brush. Some of these do experimental work themselves, sometimes in collaboration with scientists. Others help frame scientific questions and research programs, interpret scientific results, critique or defend particular research methodologies or statistical analyses, scrutinize, explicate, and refine scientific principles (e.g., Occam’s razor), and generally help clear up conceptual confusions in the empirical domains to which they’re allied. All of these are valuable, if not always glamorous, scientific contributions. If you want to get more specific, I’d recommend delving into the work of the following:
w/r/t Biology: Elliot Sober, Roberta Millstein, Susan Oyama, Philip Kitcher, Sahotra Sarkar, David Hull, and Bill Wimsatt
w/r/t Physics: Elaine Landry, Huw Price, Craig Callender, Ruth Kastner, Tim Maudlin, Alisa Bokulich, Tian Yu Cao, Thomas Müller, Michael Silberstein
As for your three…counterexamples?, we’ve got:
1. Kant: An old dead guy who, like most old dead guys, had some weird beliefs about stuff. He also, for what it’s worth, was among the first to articulate the notion that perception was “theory-laden,” a notion borne out by contemporary computational neuroscience and readily demonstrable using artificial neural networks.
2. Some rando with a Master’s degree.
3. People who think our naive, intuitive folk psychology ought to be replaced with a more scientific alternative. Are you really objecting to this? This is Philosophy done right.
Other fields also aren’t thrown without qualification under the bus just because someone found a silly statement made by a worker in one of those fields–a fortiori because a worker in one of those fields who’s been dead 100+ years made a silly statement. Should we dispense with all of physics because Roger Penrose has some stupid ideas about consciousness and immortality? Because String Theory is untestable? Should we scrap biology because of the excessive contrarianism of some of the epigeneticists? Is it so hard to grasp that we have more options here than “All of Philosophy is valuable?” and “All of Philosophy is worthless”?
I will agree that Philosophy (or the parts of it I wish to defend) has an outreach problem. I don’t however, think that’s the sole or even primary reason behind the sweeping, cavalier dismissals we’re seeing from Nye, Tyson, Hawking, et al. One could reasonably argue that, qua influential public figures, they incur a greater burden of due diligence, compared to the average shitshooter, when it comes to making such pronouncements. Now, it’s possible that they have all done much more than the cursory Google searches you’ve done, that they’ve made a good faith effort to see what contemporary philosophers have to say where their work intersects with the relevant sciences and have soberly evaluated that work and found it wrongheaded or useless…but nothing in their public statements suggests they’ve engaged in any such activity.
@ colonelzen
I’m not sure what the takeaway here is supposed to be. I agree that McGinn is not–and never has been–worth listening to. I also deeply regret the influence that Chalmers has had in the Philosophy of Mind, although I should note that he’s walked back his dualism quite a bit in recent years (his M.O. still remains largely unempirical, though). You then fault Dennett for failing to miss an important connection “between the conceptualization of qualia and the physical binding of the senses” (I assume here you’re alluding to his rejection of phenomenal unity on the basis of his multiple-drafts model of consciousness) but credit Andy Clark, another philosopher, with having “demonstrated” that connection. Your position, as evidenced by earlier posts here, seems to be that Philosophy is “vacu[ous] of value,” so are we meant to infer that Clark’s demonstration, though correct (in your estimation), is of no value? Because the connection was already “obvious and necessary”? If so, could you direct me to where Andy’s given this demonstration (the dude has written a lot over the years, and I haven’t dabbled in Phil Mind in some time)? I’d like to evaluate it myself.
Einsophistry @ 86
I don’t deny that there are “good” philosophers … it’s quite possible that without Dennett’s yeoman’s work keeping reductionist ideas alive and tennable for discourse in philosophy that scientific investigation of consciousness would still be off-limits do to the woo stigma attached to it by philosophy.
There *could* be a valued place for philosophy and its disciplines along side science (rather clearing away conceptual mismash from ideas that genuinely merit scientific investigation) but their lack of terminological rigor and downright intellectual dishonesty (Viz “Dennett denies consciousness”) makes such futile.
My claim is that science need not heed nor concern itself with philosophy … at least until as a discipline it cleans up its act. (and other than repudiating it …. Read up on “second order science”).
At all events, Clark’s demonstration of a reduction of qualia: http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/people/clark/pubs/ACaseWhereAccessImpliesQualia.pdf
— TWZ
Argh. “due to” rather than “do to”.
I’m not quite sure how to even parse that claim.
That seems akin to saying “Painting need not heed nor concern itself with art”, given that the former is a subset of the latter.
Oh, and for what it’s worth I’m a deep fan of “multiple drafts”. If anything it doesn’t go far enough … I’ve elaborated a little more schemata over Dennett that yields a hypothesis that consciousness (and I’d be a good deal of all – conscious and otherwise) working of the brain is – so far as information processing goes – “genetic algorithm” …
That is our conscious experience is not what we receive from our senses, but is what we simulate a-priori based upon past senses … and the best matching of a plethora of sims, split second by split second becomes “fixed” to carry forward subsequent simulations. It comes to match senses “good enough” to navigate the world … with circumstance by circumstance adjustment to that detail such that gets detailed as needed but never much beyond what is needed.
But again there needs to be some binding to sense input to choose the “winners” by the algorithm. Such binding are fairly close to the minimal accessible aspects of experience … aka “qualia”.
— TWZ
— TWZ
I should have been at deep pains to point out (if it’s not obvious to everyone, as it should be) that my schematic extensioni of Dennett is purely speculative. I’m simply pointing out why I think MD is rather more than right.
— TWZ
Vivek, upthread I acknowledged the philosophical lineage of science but asserted a metaphorical speciation event over the past hundred or so years. Science once was but is not now a branch of philosophy any more than astrophysics is a branch of astrology.
— TWZ
Rob Grigjanis:
Why are you acting like this? This all started, remember, with a tangential remark I made about the difficulty of interpreting physics, to know what the theory says about reality, even in the case of simple things like a hydrogen atom. I still don’t get how you could’ve taken objection to that, and I thought it was a fairly uncontroversial thing to say.
When you started complaining about BM (which I used as an example, not the only one), I thought that maybe this time you could tell me clearly and specifically what you think the problem is, if there is anything that you actually have in mind. For instance, you could claim BM makes some specific predictions which experiments have shown are demonstrably wrong. I’d happily reject it, if I actually had a compelling reason like that, but I don’t know of any evidence that falsifies it. Do you? Or if it isn’t something like that, then what is supposed to be the reason I should conclude that it’s wrong or that it’s a bad theory in some sense or another?
Maybe you could tell me what I’m missing, but it’s not actually my job to dispel every imaginable concern or question you might have, before you even say what it is. If you sincerely want to know these things, because you suspect that maybe it’s going to be an issue, ask people who are much more knowledgeable than me — I know you can look through the literature yourself. And if you’ve already done that and come to a conclusion, then you could tell me what that is — I’d actually appreciate that — instead of vaguely hinting at the possibility that maybe there’s a problem that you won’t specify (or this other one, once the first has been addressed, then another and another), because there’s nothing interesting to say about that.
If you’re happy with some kind of QM interpretation with some kind of an ontology and a coherent solution to the measurement problem, then I’m not going to complain. Maybe you do have something like that, in which case, why would you take any of this as a criticism?
Vivec probably isn’t claiming all of the sciences (not “Science”) are “a branch” of philosophy.
As an aside, if I were going to talk about branches of philosophy, in the broadest sense, I’d list a few fundamental ones like metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. Specific topics in philosophy (which might cover any/all of those) would involve categorizing things differently, like phil. of mind, phil. of math, phil. of physics, phil. of history, and so forth.
Instead, the claim (I think) is basically that you are unavoidably doing philosophical work when you do scientific work. You are dealing primarily with metaphysical and epistemological issues, in order to come up with something that can tell us about the world, something that we can probably trust because there’s an attempt to use some kind of fairly reliable and reasonable methods (things that are somehow supported logically and empirically). If that’s not what you’re doing, then “science” may not be the word you’re looking for, whatever this activity is about.
So “science need not heed nor concern itself with philosophy” seems to translate into something like “doing science isn’t necessary for doing science.” But that would be a silly thing to say. That isn’t what you wanted to say, right?
If metaphysics and epistemology are playing no role at all, and if you agree that those are prime candidates for things that can properly be described as “philosophical” at any point in history however academic departments or funding agencies or whatever may have rearranged themselves, then I have no idea what the hell you think you’re doing whenever you’re doing this strange thing you call “science” that doesn’t touch upon them in one way or another. Are you not telling me about the world when you do it, and are you not addressing any issues about how you know what you think you know? Why can’t philosophers, whenever they are dealing with such things themselves, have something useful to say about it? Or rather why is it that the whole field can’t do it … with a few exceptions that you happen to like or ones that you happen to know about? Even after you throw in all of these qualifiers, what exactly are you trying to say?
Philosophers like to claim scientific metatheories are metaphysics. I deny and refute such.
Metatheories are the conceptual framework scientists use to hold predictive theories together and to form hypotheses to extend them.
I submit these are *models* not metaphysics. They need not be reflections of “real” to work; they need only contain correlations to consistencies of the material universe that are a superset of the collective of predictive theories and contain elements of consistency paralleling the world at large that have not yet been subsumed into predictive theory.
It is not necessary or even pertinent whether practitioners believe or not that their metatheories are “metaphysics”. All that is requisite is that (as we know to be true) the universe has numerous and complex deep and wide consistencies and that the metatheory at question can be conceptually extended in ways that may illuminate such. It’s not even luck as there are deep relations between consistencies of the universe, so the odds of some conflation of working predictive theories yielding experiments that will at least begin to illuminate some other consistency not yet encapsulated in theory are really fairly good.
— TWZ
wut. I don’t see a refutation of anything, although I do see a bunch of inscrutable assertions. (Reminds me of some bad philosophy.) Maybe you should walk that back a step.
Is science somehow helping us understand something, perhaps? What is it helping us do? What are its predictions or models about? Does it have something to do with what the world is like, or something to do with how the world appears to us in our experiences or according to some kind of empirical consequences that we can detect?
What do you think are the requirements for something to be metaphysics, or for claims/theories/models/etc. to have metaphysical content or implications?
Note that @95 didn’t actually deny or “refute” the role epistemology plays in science.
Also, CR has it right, and put my point in far better terminology. Trying to extricate the philosophy bits from science doesn’t leave much of anything resembling what we’d call science behind.
I don’t see and don’t hear anyone criticizing speculative analysis in general.
What I do hear is a great deal of conflating general speculative analysis with “philosophy”.
This is the same equivalence as a desire to do well for others as religious.
— TWZ
cr @93: The problem is that you keep making claims you cannot back up. If you actually read some of the literature you blithely toss out after a quick google, you would know why you can’t just say things like “all of the same predictions as the Standard Model” and “You can certainly have a Bohmian version of QFT”.
Let’s look at the link you provided in #82. It limits discussion to fermions interacting via a Coulomb potential. No photons or other bosons. Read the conclusion to see why trying to introduce photons to their picture (a Dirac sea model) is problematical. And then tell me how calculating the anomalous magnetic moment (or any other property arising from a one-or-more-loop Feynman diagram) is no problem for BM.
colonelzen,
Do you deny that epistemology is necessary for science, or the construction of scientific methodology?
If you do not deny this, do you deny that epistemology is not a matter of philosophy?
If so, how is that so?
Me @100
*do you deny that epistemology is a matter of philosophy?
Good thread.
Excellent clear wcontributions especially from penalfire and consciousness razor if I may say so…fwiw.
I’ll also just throw this old Dennet quote from Darwin’s Dangerous Idea circa 95 in there as it seems appropriate:
“There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination”
thanx again