Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein
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No, we don't. We only have first-order knowledge of our perceptions of things. And quantum mechanics shows us that those perceptions can be radically different from the underlying reality.
Of course, Einstein can be forgiven for making this mistake because he didn't know about the Bell inequality and the subsequent experiments, so it is understandable that he would cling to the hope that something would come along and rescue QM from the EPR paradox by somehow extracting classical reality from the Schroedinger equation. But modern thinkers cannot be so readily absolved.
No, but they can go on a 40 year goose chase trying to reconcile the many different string theories that don't have any physical evidence to substantiate.
QFT is one of the most successful theories we've created, but GR is still our best theory regarding gravity. There's still no evidence for the graviton. We probably need something else besides QFT to describe the nature of reality
I feel we really should sort these papers into a category "physics in imaginary universe", so other people do not get confused.
The evidence for QFT is orders of magnitude stronger than the evidence for GR, and the two are incompatible. The empirical evidence is simply the fact that gravity exists; if there's no graviton then how does gravity work? If the right model isn't one of the (obscenely many) possible string theories, then what?
I'm sceptical about string theory, but unless and until we come up with a better alternative, it's the only option. (People love to compare it with epicycles - but until you have the insight that lets you eliminate epicycles, you use them, because how else do you get on with doing science?)
Then it us a "simulation". "Pixels" of reality rendering.
I would answer your question but not worth the downvotes like my original comment.
The simulation hypothesis is nothing except sciencey-sounding creationism/dualism.
According to GR, gravity per se is a kind of illusion caused by the movement of particles in a curved space-time. The more basic effect is spacetime curving itself around mass(/energy).
Now, whether this interaction itself is quantized or not (if the curvature comes in integer multiples) remains unknown. It is very much possible that gravity/space-time curvature is a different kind of effect than the other three fundamental interactions, and that it is not in fact qunatized, so there is no graviton.
And unto string theory, the problem with it is that it doesn't explain anything new. It posits some ideas of how gravity might work in a qunatized form, but any actual tests of the correctness of those calculations requires studying a black hole up close, which won't happen very soon. And of course, it infamously does so at the cost of adding lots of new elements to physics (extra dimensions, extra particles) none of which are testable or observed. And it still doesn't fix other problems of QM/QFT, most notably the measurement problem.
Plus, there is no actual need for String Theory to say that it's the best option we've got for X. For whatever we want to model, we can use either QFT or GR.
Right, but you can't actually do physics (that is, QFT) in that model. You can model a universe made up of particles that have mass and no other properties, and, uh, that's it.
> Now, whether this interaction itself is quantized or not (if the curvature comes in integer multiples) remains unknown. It is very much possible that gravity/space-time curvature is a different kind of effect than the other three fundamental interactions, and that it is not in fact qunatized, so there is no graviton.
I mean, yes, but in that case what is it? I would love for someone to come up with a non-graviton model that describes gravity while remaining compatible with QFT. But unless and until someone actually comes up with that model, gravitons are the best we can do.
> And unto string theory, the problem with it is that it doesn't explain anything new. It posits some ideas of how gravity might work in a qunatized form, but any actual tests of the correctness of those calculations requires studying a black hole up close, which won't happen very soon.
Directly observing both mass and non-mass aspects of particles at the same time is hard, sure. But we know that particles exist and have both mass and charge (and colour and all that)! They must in fact be subject to both QFT and gravitational effects at the same time. Yes, I can't immediately show that up on my desk in the lab, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with "ignore gravity unless you're working with big stuff, and then if you're working with big stuff ignore the whole rest of known physics and use this radically different theory (that, again, fundamentally contradicts the entire rest of known physics) to model what it's doing". I mean, yes, it does work for all the experiments we can currently do. But it's not at all a satisfactory model of how the universe actually works.
Therefore, grand pronouncements about how the universe is "really" a static four-dimensional object "because that's what relativity says" are just wrong, for the exact same reasons.
Perhaps even in the "not even wrong" sense, on the grounds that it is no different than taking Newtonian physics and making ground pronouncements about the nature of the universe. Newtonian physics implies things like "there can be no absolute speed limit in the universe"; not just that there isn't one, but that there can't be one for the transforms it uses to be valid. There is such a speed limit and the transforms it uses aren't valid. Declaring the universe to have this or that characteristic based on relativity is no different than declaring it must not have a speed-of-light because that's what Newtonian physics says. The only difference is that "everybody" knows the latter is wrong; the former is just as wrong.
So in general getting too worked up over what Einstein's relativity says about the universe at this level is a waste of time, no pun intended.
Science history being what it is, it is quite likely that if we ever do penetrate down to what time "really" is it'll be even more mind-blowing than a static four-dimensional universe, but that's a problem for the future. (And the current leading contenders in that theory race I'm not sure are any more disruptive than QM already was. Total chaos space/time at scales so small that they are in some sense literally microscopically microscopically microscopically microscopic may be vaguely unsettling, but to my mind doesn't seem to add anything philosophically material that QM didn't already introduce.)
Of course, the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that even if this substance exists, it can't be dragged around, so frame dragging can't be an explanation for the constant speed of light, making the whole idea unnecessary. Future observations predicted by SR and GR would probably not have been compatible anyway.
But, getting back to your point, if this ether had existed and had been the medium through which light propagates and had been draggable by moving objects, then this would not have been a contradiction or even modification of Newtonian mechanics.
Please don't use the word "wrong". Alchemy is wrong. Astrology is wrong. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics get many things right but are probably "incomplete" in the same way Newtonian mechanics wasn't wrong, only incomplete.
I think this is important because physicists that popularize often make grandiose claims about how reality is when they should know better and then these claims form popular imagination in ways that shutdown thought.
Approximations aren't "wrong", they are just simplifications of something less wrong, usually in certain corner cases. Sometimes approximations are derived from the broader theory, and sometimes the broader theory comes later. (And of course, sometimes old theories are proven plain "wrong" by evidence and new theories, but those are things more like alchemy, or mistakes in math proofs, and less like Newton's laws).
Finally, iff we follow your logic then we can say nothing is ever "right". Philosophically it may be useful to realize we may never know the ultimate truth with 100% certainty, but in everyday English "right" can simply mean "appropriate".
I think it’s true that wrongness is relative to the use-case. But, on the other hand, before things like the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and the Michelson-Morley experiment, a lot of physicists thought they had the big picture of the universe basically right and just had to fill in the details. The revolution of GR and QM was barely even suspected and this should give us pause when it comes to our confidence in the modern picture of the universe. Relativity and QM will always be useful as models of the spheres they model, but the worldview we’ve built on top of them could change drastically overnight (in historical terms).
They are practical though. In that sense astrology can be said to be practical too.. hides.
I think you are partly right. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are incomplete rather than wrong. I don’t think either has been falsified, it’s more that they are just useless in specific cases.
This is in contrast with Newtonian mechanics, which implies Galilean transformation when changing reference frames, which looks right at our usual scales, but is plainly wrong in the general case.
However, the things you mention are not even wrong. As in, they are not falsifiable so you cannot say whether they are right or wrong in theory.
Of course they have. If you try to use SR or GR to predict how particles behave, you will get none of the quantum effects we have observed experimentally.
If you try to use QM or QFT to predict how the planets move* or at least how black holes move, you'll get predictions that don't agree with what telescopes have observed.
So yes, both of the theories have already been falsified.
* I have been told that there are some ways to account for gravity in regular QM in a way similar to GR that essentially work until you get to the kinds of strong fields near a black hole, where they break down again.
This is hard to get on board with. A theory of time is incomplete without a history of clocks? Have I misunderstood?
Do you know of any completely physically correct theories?
It seems to just be saying: your theory uses clocks to illustrate it but doesn't include the history of clocks. I don't think that's quite what you're describing.
* Every thing that happens, happens at a time. Let's call those things "events" from now on. It's nonsense to claim that a thing happened, but never (at any point in time) happened.
* Every event happens in a place. It's nonsense to say that a thing happened, but nowhere happened.
* Every event MAY be related to one or more events, called its causes.
* There is an ordering on points in time, so that an event's time-point comes after the time-point of all its causes.
Without these assumptions, how are you going to do experiments, or draw any conclusions about the world? In fact you pretty much need one more, which is that every event has at least one cause (otherwise there's not much point in scientifically investigating it). These basic categories are certainly no replacement for physics. They're just the bare minimum to start an investigation into physics. But if the way you describe your physics contradicts it, then at best there's a communication problem.
Einstein showed us this more than 100 years ago - please keep up.
The points do not imply Newtonian physics, or any kind of physics at all, because they assert only a ordering relation on events. They put no measure on those things, and certainly no absolute measure.
You clearly also did not understand the problem of trying to do experiments, or even to learn from experience at all without assuming these things.
Really, how much clearer could I have made those things?
What is a "time"? Is it a number? A string like "uyeuhwydyjghafjhbhsjahsgg"? Some opaque object? Is it possible to compre the "time" of two different events? If there are two different events, did they happen at the same "time" or at different "time"?
Time is a word, and I'm trying to establish the absolute minimum common sense rules for using that word. Obviously we have to use other words to do that, words like "event", "cause" and "order" (note, not "object"). But that's OK, the point is to explain what we mean by these words in relation to each other.
To answer your questions explicitly:
* Time, in this philosophical, pre-experimental sense, is not a number. It does not have anything like a unit or scale. It's certainly not a gobbeldygook string.
* You can only order the time of two events, and only if one is in the set of causes of the other (or the causes of causes etc. Talking about an ordering implies that, I hope you agree.) If an event A has two causes B and C, all we can say for sure is that the times of B and C are ordered before the time of A, because that's what we mean by these words, time, cause and event.
* No, you can never say for sure that something happened at the same time. You can maybe order the times, if they are in a causal chain - in that case it makes no sense to say they're equal. If they are not in a causal chain with each other, you can say nothing about their order (or equality). We know nothing about the order of B and C.
In Newtonian Mechanics, everyone agree to assign the same time to the same collection of events.
In Special Relativity, the same time is assigned to different collections of events by different observers.
In General Relativity, it's more complicated.
Back to your original comment
>>> *Every event happens in a place.
Does each event get a different place, of places can be shared between events?
> Does each event get a different place, of places can be shared between events?
Why is this even a question? It is obvious from the definition that two events can happen at the same place at different times.
The theory instead (wisely) says nothing about events happening at the same time.
> Why is this even a question?
It's very strange that two events can not share the same "time". This is not the usual definition of time in physics [1]. So it's a natural question if the same strange property apply to "place".
Also, the definition of "time" in a world with special relativity makes it necessary to include (x,y,z) so "time" includes all the information included in "place". Why is it necessary to have both concepts?
[1] I think it gets more complicated in General Relativity, but I never took that course :( .
They perfectly match the idea of events as 4D points in Minkowsky space time. Points 1 and 2 are matched by describing any event by its (x, y, z, t) coordinates in some reference frame. Point 4 is matched by the fact that the Lorrentz transform preserves the ordering by t of events which are timelike separated.
Many seem to forget that even in relativity, all observers agree on the order of events that are close enough together in space. For example, any possible observer agrees that the pyramids are older than Hacker News (though they will disagree on how much older).
What the GP is saying is that this framework definition of time is in fact a series of requirements that any physical theory of time must fulfill to be recognizable as talking about time. That is, any theory that doesn't match those criteria is not talking about the same thing we are when we say time.
Some philosophers and other types of scholars would question whether we should cede all sense of reality to that which can be objectively measured. You might say that there's no one "real" time. Perceptual time is real because it matters to the person experiencing it.
I don't think the point is to deny objective time or physics, but just to say that it is incomplete as a way describing lived reality. And probably also that we'll never have an understanding of neurology that's complete enough to let us even fully characterize perceptual time scientifically.
So, we should accept that there is more to time than what physics can tell us.
Perhaps we should use two different word for the "perceived time" and for the "clock time". The good days, when I go to sleep all the night appears to go away in an instant, but it isn't. It's more useful to have a physical defined "clock time" and then explain why the brain is bad estimating durations using the "perceived time".
> A: ...A very interesting question is why and how Einstein’s work was able to shed its mundane origins and parade itself as theoretical, cosmological and universal.
The "mundane origins" here are Einstein's uses of the mostly then-relatively-new technologies of clocks, trains, bullets and rulers. I feel that the view Canales is setting out here is a mistaken reading of the history, and that Einstein was addressing "theoretical, cosmological and universal" concepts from the beginning, only referring to mundane entities for pedagogical purposes. By the late 1880's it was becoming clear that some of the further implications of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory were at odds with cosmological assumptions, a tension made more pointed by Michelson and Morley's 1887 aether-wind experiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#History
He is either:
- an early proto-Post-Modernist, who denies anything they don't advocate can be true;
- an early woo-quantum-consciousness connector of mysteries, all mysteries are each other's explanations.
Would, perhaps, Mr Bergson be a French philosopher?
The first paragraph is already troubling for me, the "fact the past, present, and future all coexist" is a gross misinterpretation of general relativity, a borderline esoteric atrology-type view, and I can't believe that such mistaken view grew to be the "dominant view in the philosophy".
As time is part of the 4 dimensional Minkowski space, saying that the future, past and present don’t coexist would be like saying left doesn’t exists when you’re going right.
Every possible observer has a clear view of their own past and their own future. As long as two observers are a long distance from each other, they may disagree on the order in which events that happen far away from each of them happen.
But, they will never disagree on the order in which events that are close to either of them happened. And, if they ever meet, they will have a shared notion of what is in the past and what is in the future compared to the moment of their meeting (that is, any event that is in the future compared to their meeting for one of them is also in the future after their meeting for the other).
Not in any way that is inconsistent with an evolving universe, actually. Sure, an observer may exist at some coordinates in 4D spacetime where they are detecting light from Sagittarius A that in our frame is 1000 years old, but also light from the Sun that in our frame is 1000 years from now. But that observer cannot be meaningfully said to be either in our present nor in our past. And if we ever "meet" to discuss our observarions, it is guaranteed that it will be no less than 1000 years from now, after we also see the sun evolving. We'll essentially only disagree about how old the light from Sagittarius A was.
Most importantly, SR is not consistent with any ordering of events that breaks causality. If I drop a mug and it shatters, no observer can see the mug shatter and then see me dropping it. So, there is no reason to believe that the shattered mug already existed somewhere in space time when I dropped it, though there is also no reason to believe that it didn't.
The result is that some reference frames have other frames future and past events, so to the grandparent posts point, there is a real sense in which the future exists along with the past. No reference frame gets to say what the official “future” is, so it must already exist.
Additionally, there are events that are in the future for any observer in any reference frame anywhere in the universe (except for those already caught beyond the event horizon of a black hole, but their future consists exclusively of the black hole so it's not that interesting to the discussion). For a simple example, present day on Earth was in the future for any observer anywhere in the universe 5 seconds after the big bang, regardless of their speed. So, there is no reason to say that present day Earth must have already existed 5 seconds after the Big Bang.
Of course, the block universe model is self-consistent, so it's possible it's correct. All I'm claiming is that an evolving universe is also consistent with relativity, though the way it evolves is more complex than a single universal arrow of time.
> Bergson seems to argue that even Einstein’s concept of time, as what’s measured by a clock, is based on some more fundamental, more real, non-mathematical view of time, time as we perceive it, which might defy exact mathematical expression. What sense of time does Bergson have in mind here?
> Consider, for example, how different pre-modern notions of time are from ours. When I write about the history of time in contemporary times, I always have in the back of my mind the image of Saturn devouring his son. In it, the passage, keeping and telling of time occurs be reference to love, violence, anthropophagy and reproduction. Throughout time, it is clear that we are dealing with radically different beasts. Bergson did not draw such stark distinctions, but in Duration and Simultaneity he asked us not to forget how time was a precondition for effective action. “Le temps est pour moi ce qu'il y a de plus réel et de plus nécessaire ; c'est la condition fondamentale de l'action ; – que dis-je ? c'est l'action même.”
> Einstein’s definition of time has none of these radical elements and might even be responsible for leading us to forget about them.
This question gets at the heart of the matter: what exactly is the disagreement between Bergson and Einstein? And we get a non-answer as far as I can tell. I have no idea what "radical elements" she is referencing. There some notion about ideas like "violence" or "reproduction" being stand-ins for the concept of time? and something about time being a precondition for, or even identical to, action? Violence and reproduction and action per se all take a non-zero amount of clock time, so I don't what the conflict is here.
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Ok, enough rambling. If anyone has a reaction similar to mine, they might find a more relatable exploration of this subject in Wilfrid Sellars' concepts of the the (naive, common-sensical, person-centric) "manifest image" and the "scientific image", and the role of philosophy in reconciling them.
The only "objects" I know of that time does not "bite into" are mathematical abstractions such as integers, or God existing outside of time. No physical entity (Einstein was concerned, after all, with physics) escapes being embedded in time. Can love transcend time? Only to the degree it, like mathematics, transcends physics.
Very interesting quote, and I think in a sense that even hard sciences like physics are not only a study of the "external world", but also the "internal world" that our mind creates to represent it. So much of the conversation around quantum mechanics isn't really about the math or science, which really isn't that complicated, but around how it can be that what is _really_ happening is so different from what we perceive to be happening in our minds.
I think every break through in theoretical physics is sort of inextricably tied with a breakthrough in the study of consciousness. You have to understand both how the world works and also how the mind translates that to conscious experience of the world to really have something that most people will see as an explanation.
An understanding of light, for example, is not just an explanation of the math underlying electromagnetic waves, but also how the eye perceives those waves and translates that into vision.
It would be extremely difficult for anybody to accept the evidence provided by quantum mechanics without some additional explanation for how our mind constructs a "classical" reality to go along with it. Modern physics happened along with a materialistic explanation of the origin of mind to go along with it, I don't think either could have advanced without the other.
No, that's not true. For a very long time an explanation of how classical reality emerges from quantum mechanics was lacking, and the prevailing view was essentially "a miracle happens" (a.k.a. the wave function "collapses", whatever that might actually mean). Quantum mechanics was accepted as an explanation nonetheless simply because it explained the data better than any available alternative, and it still does.
The “angle” of time vs space is different based on perspective. Each perspective sees a different direction of time through the 4D space-time.
Yet from any perspective, the space time regions coordinates are still best represented with three real values and one imaginary value.
This is the form of coordinates in the space time interval equation, and reflects time dilation and space contraction.
So space and time are identical stuff, but from any vantage point you will see “your” time dimension acting differently than 3 spatial dimensions.
It’s a really interesting property.
I haven't got into the depths of Bergson's argument, but I think I see the point in the headline that time belongs in philosophy, and I can easily imagine he was right that Einstein was smuggling in philosophical assumptions in the particular choice of words he used to describe the implications of his findings.
Additionally, events in 4D spacetime can be either space-like separated or time-like separated, and this difference is the same for all (inertial) observers.
This is especially relevant in discussions about the arrow of time since all inertial observers agree on the order in which time-like separated events happen. So even though in the 4D spacetime model there isn't an absolute ordering of events, there exists a partial order that all (inertial) observers agree on.
But relative to two observers traveling in different directions at relativistic speeds, the way time is observed to be oriented in a space time region (where the two observers directions of motions are not parallel) is different.
Different to the point that orders of events (their observed direction of time) can be completely flipped.
Upon smoothly changing the angle of one observer A’s motion, from parallel to the other observer B, to orthogonal, to reverse parallel, the observed order (observed time) changes.
A initially sees the ordering as identical to B’s, then simultaneous (no time between events, I.e. time is orthogonal to the space-time vector between events: space-time delta vector of all space, no time), then in reverse order (negative time orientation, relative to A’s observation of time).
They both see time, different than space, but its direction through space-time is observed to be in a different direction in space-time relative to each other’s observations of the same space-time position’s of events.
The orientation of time through space-time, the space-time basis vectors, change based on observation.
Between observers, space & time get traded off with each other.
So, I don't think the relativity of simultaneity hurts the notion of an arrow of time that much. You don't get a single universal arrow of time, but there are still local arrows of time all over the place, ones that all observers agree on.
And that limit is just another form of the “speed limit” of light.
But it is interesting that within that limit, space & time can be traded against each other.
All time delta’s can be traded to space delta’s (simultanaity), but no space delta, bring 3D can ever be fully traded for time.
Two events at different locations can never be made to appear at the same location, unless you could travel at the speed of light, which we can’t.
edit: you are right, I just flew over the article.
Interviewer: Alexis Papazoglou | Senior editor for IAI News, the online magazine of the Institute of Art and Ideas, and former philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway.
Logical positivism tried to do this, and failed. Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge pretty much killed logical positivism, because he showed that no scientist is in the fully objective position that was required to set up and evaluate the experiments.
No, you don't. This is a common mistake. Science is not about knowledge, it's about explanations. The whole idea of "knowledge" is just part of a vast web of explanations that turn out to be exceptionally good at accounting for the data.
> logical positivism
The mistake of logical positivism is the unjustified assumption that there exists such a thing as "truth", and that this thing is accessible to us by thinking. It isn't. It's a consequence of the empirical observation that the scientific method converges towards something. "Truth" is just a label that we attach to the thing that it's converging to (or at least appears to be converging to -- we won't know if that limit actually exists until we get there).
However, there is also another possibility, and that is that the word "knowledge" is being used in two different ways. "Knowledge" in science is often used as a shorthand for "The best explanation we currently have in hand, one which has so far withstood all attempts to falsify it." This is different from the kind of knowledge studied by epistemology, but it is a not-entirely-unreasonable use of the word.
Seriously, philosophy is a personal endeavor. You derive your own, make your own deductions, and you believe in them. That makes it valid for you.
But ... if your philosophy is about how the world works, about some aspects of reality, and you want to ensure that both your philosophy and reality agree, then you can choose to do science:
1. From your philosophy, derive some hypothesis.
2. Check you hypothesis with some experiment.
More important, following this thread upward we see:
1. The urge of some scientists to offer science as a replacement for philosophy was scored as a fatal flaw
2. The question was asked, "Why is this a fatal flaw?"
3. That question was answered with the claim that something called "epistemology" is needed in order to make decisions based on experiences. Evidently, "epistemology" is an essential ingredient to human decisions which would be lost if we tried to replace philosophy with science.
4. But I said, no, I personally don't need "epistemology"--whatever that is--to make decisions.
5. Then it was claimed that whatever I'm doing to make decisions is inherently "philosophy." Yet, I'm not doing anything special, so if I'm doing philosophy then I guess everyone is doing philosophy, even scientists.
6. If that's true then what happened to "epistemology" and the fatal flaw of omitting it in the vain attempt to substitute science for philosophy?
This really isn't adding up.
Professional philosophers do essentially the same thing we do, they derive a set of personal beliefs that they see as trustworthy. The difference is that they go out and try to sell their philosophies to the public as if they were universal, but they aren't, so they almost always fail. Their books and publications tend to be filed under the heading "OPINIONS".
The second topic you mention is about the role of epistemology, in theory the study of knowledge but in practice an amalgam of (once again) opinions from different philosophers. It's difficult to explain epistemology without referring to those opinions, and those may be wrong anyway. Several pieces of the puzzle are still missing.
On the topic of philosophy, if there's two kinds, the kind which comprises opinions sold by professional philosophers to the public as if they're universal but aren't, and the kind which comprises the activities we all do in life, then I'm pretty sure the former is the one being held up to scrutiny as Bergson and Canales try to elbow onto the podium alongside science.
On the topic of epistemology, I don't know a thing about it and I don't think I need to in order to believe the results of experiments or go about life, which pretty much is what also was claimed further up the thread.
That's an unusual claim. It's typically attributed to the criticisms of Popper and Quine, after which the foundations were undermined.
A physicists dismissing philosophy as out of date implies that we are already on the optimum path to discovering the remaining knowledge about the universe to be learned.
It implies they believe that. Which is ultimately a dogmatic ideology. That is why I call it scientism and not science. Obviously we cannot know if that is the case or not because of the nature of time (the future holds answers that the past cannot, yet remains inaccessible to beings such as us). There is no good reason to believe that our theories aren't missing some crucial aspects which were already understood and subsequently lost. The cultural narrative of progress is so strongly asserted, yet what we know of as "history" is such a narrow and skewed perspective.
I myself am a physicist. I once had the confidence to assert that physics is the One True Way to understand life, the universe, and everything and that progress is inevitable (Newton's "shoulders of giants"). I no longer believe this is the case because of my explorations through the traditions of thought present in philosophy. For sure I can cram the lines of discourse that most interest me into quasi-physics-based theories (post-structuralism is especially interesting as a systems person) but that's not to say that physics can represent everything there is to know. Physics is a language just like any other and there are some ideas that physics simply cannot express.
Note that the scientific method is self-correcting even in this regard: if someone can demonstrate a more productive method of inquiry, someone following the scientific method would accept that new method, just as they would accept any hypothesis that is demonstrably superior to the current state of the art.
Does not follow. It suffices that such a physicist thinks philosophy isn't going to improve on science (like it hasn't so far).
It might turn out alchemy will become useful, but it's unlikely. And bear in mind alchemy provided more results than philosophy so far.
There might be something else, even better than science, that's an independent question. But why people assume philosophy will necessarily be involved in any way?
This is the trick that philosophy and religion uses that frustrates me the most. They claim all the territory we don't know anything about as if their own it and shout "scientism" and "dogmatism" when people protest :)
We don't even know if the scientific method is the best it could be in what we use it for. After all, it was only expanded with the idea of falsification in the 20th century yet we were still doing useful science before than.
No, it isn't. This is a very common myth, but it is in fact a myth. Science has no axioms.
> We don't even know if the scientific method is the best it could be in what we use it for.
That's true. But what we do know is that the scientific method is vastly more effective than anything else humans have come up with in helping us navigate our existence and exercise some degree of control over our destiny.
> After all, it was only expanded with the idea of falsification in the 20th century yet we were still doing useful science before than.
That is also true, and that is one of the reasons to believe that the scientific method is special and unlikely to be improved upon. It's not just an arbitrary choice. It is privileged, and there is actually reason to believe that this privileged status is a reflection of some underlying reality. But this is not an axiom, it's a result.
> We don't know how wide that window happens to be and how much of reality we can see through it... We don't even know if the scientific method is the best it could be in what we use it for.
It is telling that these sentiments are not followed by something beginning "analytical philosophy, in contrast..."
> [Science] was only expanded with the idea of falsification in the 20th century yet we were still doing useful science before than.
It was doing de facto, though somewhat ad hoc, falsification long before Popper focused his attention it. The philosophy of science is much more descriptive than prescriptive.
Having said this, you may be surprised to learn that I spend a some of my free time reading and thinking about various aspects of philosophy. I must say, however, that I feel that western metaphysics lost its way in its attempt to address fundamental questions through the analysis of language.
We've yet to see one example going the other way.
At best philosophers provide interesting questions. At worst they are just paperpushers categorizing the work others did into pointless and arbitrary categories and arguing about them :)
More here:
Tbh I'm suspicious of your inability to find them yourself or your quest for examples.
It's a bit sealiony.
It's very basic stuff.
If you are unable to work it out from the original link and description I gave or the previous reply, I think any more effort on my part will be a pointless time sink.
That said I can’t imagine having a good faith discussion about it; there’s nobody to defend the idea, because obviously nobody believes that they have a blinkered, over-confident belief in anything. They just think the domain of problems that their method can address is larger than the domain you think it has, I guess.
I guess I can’t imagine the mindset that would “see how the sausage is made” in science, and think that method was going to solve the universe. Everyone is aware that we’re becoming increasingly over-focused on tiny little niches.
I mean yes, of course, the undergraduate Physics student is being handed a packet of metaphysics when they get the Einstein lectures on SR and GR. And it's very seductive, if you can crack through enough of the math to hear the music in it. The idea that Einstein is a "continuator of Descartes" just means you can learn all that stuff, get A's in every single class at Cal Tech or someplace else, and in the end you are still left with the exact same Dualism.
That might be a valid critique of Science in general, but I don't see how it attacks Einstein. There is also a more subtle point about the history of measurement. We started to depend on accurate measurement of time when we needed it to circumnavigate the planet. Even without Einstein we still needed the Lorentz and Fitzgerald corrections to the classic Newton equations. It would have happened without Einstein, and maybe we'd have different metaphysics in that case. That idea is more interesting to me than what Bergson seems to be offering.
Is it just that we're more aware of the current philosophers, who will be forgotten in a century or two? Or is the philosophical opposition actually stronger now?
Yes, that's why I specifically cited Newton. I could have cited Copernicus as well, and Galileo, and a few dozen others but I didn't want to get too long-winded.
> Is it just that we're more aware of the current philosophers, who will be forgotten in a century or two? Or is the philosophical opposition actually stronger now?
If anything I think it's weaker now than in the past because the fruits of science are so evident to everyone. It is plain to everyone that smart phones did not come out of philosophy departments. The niches in which philosophers can make meaningful contributions are getting narrower and narrower, which makes them more and more desperate and shrill. But I predict they will eventually go the way of the alchemist. Or maybe the astrologer. Astrologers figured out a way to eke out a living as charlatans. Maybe philosophers will too. (Maybe they already have.)
What is the nature of consciousness?
What are things beautiful? What makes something ascetically pleasing.
Why any of this exists at all?
What is the purpose of this existence?
Is something ethical? Science can provide answer about consequences of an action but cannot determine if said action is moral or ethical.
… science is not a book of facts. It is merely a process for testing a hypothesis. It is not a replacement for philosophy, it is underpinned by philosophy.
> How do you believe the results you are getting? What makes such a belief justified?
Read David Deutsch "The Fabric of Reality" chapter 7.
> What is the nature of consciousness?
Read Daniel Dennett, "Consciousness Explained".
> What are things beautiful? What makes something ascetically pleasing.
Read Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene" (and, if you want to get deep into these weeds, "The Extended Phenotype").
> Why any of this exists at all?
What makes you think that any of this does exist at all?
> What is the purpose of this existence?
What makes you think that this existence has a purpose?
> Is something ethical? Science can provide answer about consequences of an action but cannot determine if said action is moral or ethical.
Read "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod. (The Selfish Gene addresses this as well.)
> science is not a book of facts.
That's true.
> It is merely a process for testing a hypothesis.
No, it's not "merely" that. It is a process for producing good explanations that account for observations. That turns out to be tremendously powerful.
> It is not a replacement for philosophy, it is underpinned by philosophy.
No, it isn't. The existence of philosophy (and philosophers!) can be explained by science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations
It's not lost on me that Tractatus was warmly received by philosophers, but Investigations got a frostier reception from the same group. I especially enjoyed Russell's snippy quote. Ol Ludwig struck a nerve, did he, Bert?
Ethics is supposed to answer real-life questions, like "How do I live a moral life?".
Yet philosophical movements, that actually tired to answer such questions, like the stoics and the epicureans are long gone. When you read on the actual writings of contemporary philosophers you'd see impossible moral standards - "It takes 5 dollars to save a starving African child, a night out with friends is the equivalent to abandoning a bus of drowning children to their deaths"[1]
It's impossible to live by such philosophy, except for those that think of themselves as some sort of creature of pure evil who cares nothing of right and wrong.
Because philosophy is useless as a guidance to life, right and wrong are now decided by the encyclical, the fatwa and the resolutions at the party congress, depending on your religion.
[1] https://daily-philosophy.com/peter-singers-drowning-child/
Monsters, the lot of them, just as bad as the rich-worlders. Ethics demands we all live joyless lives of endless toil until every child is fed.
Do you think an Ethiopian community is immoral because it puts effort into having enjoyable festivals, dignified funerals and large weddings? Think of all the effort that could have gone to the starving children!
Here's a more practical question for you. There's a homeless guy who hangs around my place. He's definitely not malnourished, in fact he's somewhat fat. If I give him a dollar, should he return it to me with instructions to give it to African children instead?
These philosophical thought experiments are too simplistic to offer any guidance. Five dollars does not save any starving child; he will need food for the rest of his childhood. And they also neglect the social aspect of the problem. What if the whole neighborhood or country is poor? It is more sensible to attack this problem using the tools of developmental economics; how can we alleviate the problem for everyone over time?
The only think I'd have to add is I don't think the thought experiment is merely "too simplistic". It's an evil sophistry designed to make people believe ethical conduct is unattainable.
https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE?si=FmgmYH8BDWrkIcMJ
There’s still a lot of value in philosophy when we use it to think about how we structure and rationalize the world.
Even if science gives us ever better models of the underlying reality of the universe, there’s still the understanding of how we conceptualize that reality and what it means to us. Specifically in ways that don’t require religion or supernatural beings, nor in purely psychological means of perception or physiology.
I think of it as the study of the emergent properties of complex information processing. It can do things like help us talk about the minds of others, for example future AI, potential extraterrestrial intelligences, or even other terrestrial intelligences (dolphins, octopus, etc)
https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...
I think you'll need some sense of metaphysics and epistemology and maybe even ethics to function, most people have one (they know what they think the word "reality," means, they can distinguish between thoughts and observations, they wouldn't kill unless they were seriously threatened) but when that is extended into a "let me tell you how the world works" thing it becomes philosophy done bad, which can only be resisted by knowing philosophy done right (the impassive if frustrating collection of a lot of possible solutions). It is a universal human trait to want to answer these questions, even the so-called "rationalists" have a web page with a list of doctrines. The only way to do it wrong is to come up with one answer and think that it is the answer because it's the only answer you know and that is what learning philosophy is for.
What did gain societal power is capitalism is brute-forcing its way into everything via "tech" that then pats the people in gold-plated cages, who allow their genius to be used for that on the back, while feeding them crumbs. Where nothing that can't be counted matters and destroying the environment -- both physical and that of society, that which minds get formed in -- is perfectly rational, as long as there is a cent of profit to be made.
Some people get really high on it, think someone's "won" (what?) and it might even be them, but let's not pretend any of the great scientists that get name-dropped so easily have anything to do with that, or haven't even spoken against it at length.
> Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.
-- Albert Einstein
> Let us not forget that human knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.
> What these blessed men have given us we must guard and try to keep alive with all our strength if humanity is not to lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and its joy in living.
-- Albert Einstein
> As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. [..] This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.
-- Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man" (1871)
> It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love.
-- Stephen Hawking
Science is a tool. More precisely, it's a method to make and improve and gauge tools. But those tools can't ask questions (we didn't somehow put there first), they cannot judge. They can tell you if something is fair according to your parameters and heuristics, but they know nothing of the inherent value in being fair, they can't answer "should I be fair?", and the same for everything else that actually matters.
And do you think that philosophy has shed any light on the answer to the question, "Should I be fair?" Or indeed on what the word "fair" actually means?
You're not wrong that science can't answer these questions, but what science can do is demonstrate that, for example, different people want different things, and have different ideas of what words like "fair" mean. We can then go one to (say) devise systems that maximize value according to some quality metric, but that's the best we can do. We cannot somehow derive some universal standard of "fairness" because no such thing exists. And we don't need philosophers to tell us that.
But you're doing it right now? I agree and would like to subscribe to your philosophy newsletter ^^ Kidding aside, I have to think of this talk by Erich Fromm, "Psychology for non-psychologists", where he starts off with saying there everybody is a bit of a psychologist, otherwise we wouldn't be able to even navigate and survive infancy. The same with what you just said and philosophy in general, I think. The only difference between a hot take on a forum (which is grounded in your experience and thoughts you had previously about it) and "a philosopher" would be doing it full time and for money I guess, or being known for your claims, but that's secondary IMO.
Sorry, what exactly is the "it" that am I doing right now (or was doing right then)?
> everybody is a bit of a psychologist
Sure. So?
> The same with what you just said and philosophy in general
Sure. So? Everyone is a bit of an amateur everything. That doesn't mean that everything that people do can be meaningfully elevated to the level of a profession.
> "a philosopher" would be doing it full time and for money
Yes, exactly. Everyone is an amateur philosopher just as everyone is (say) an amateur thumb-sucker at some point in their lives. That doesn't mean that there ought to be an elite cadre of thumb suckers who get paid to do it.
Why? Scientists are still human beings, they have partake in torture and genocide in the past. "I aim at the stars.. but sometimes I hit London" etc.
Whereas scientists that are alarmed by things like biodiversity loss and climate change really are pounding at our door, and have societal power in some circles but not on the whole, not enough, which is made clear by the outcomes.
"Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."