Funny how we don't even fully understand what happens when we crack our joints but are certain about how the Universe "essentially" works.
I saw a very frustrating live "debate" between Dr Blitz (monikor of a really cool science communicator and irl PhD physicist) and a flat earther, where the flat earther essentially borrowed these arguments (eg observations aren't really predictive or generalizable or able to count in favor of specific theories, confirmed theories have no special status etc) to dismiss the evidentiary support of the earth being round. It's an intellectual car crash masquerading as a respectable position on scientific foundations.
You may take it from my posing the question that I think its obvious that joint cracking is determined by physics, and I do tend to think this, but I think a compelling argument can at least be made that joint cracking might not actually be fundamentally determined by physics.
> a compelling argument can at least be made
Absolutely! But it takes a good deal of hubris to call this knowledge.
An yet... you're claiming to know what the gods like and don't like. Strange.
Everything prove able by religion is not unique to religion.
Everything unique to religion is not proveable.
As you noted, the degree of uncertainty we're currently wrestling with is also what we would see if it was true that the laws were constant. Kind of like an anthropic principle but on behalf of the constancy of the universe's laws.
This may all be restating what you said in a different way, but for me the important upshot is that I don't come out of it with an attitude that our current physical understanding is a tenuous house of cards and that I need to watch my step because, who knows, the strong nuclear force could change at any moment.
Now if you think that's going to matter in the next few billion years is very probable you're mistaken.
See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L22jhyY9ocXQNLqyE/science-as...
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the two ways "because science" or "because God" might stop my curiosity is because 1) I'm looking for a good master's thesis topic (a problem well in my past, thank God) or 2) my immediate survival is dependent on much more immediate problems than the underlying physical phenomena that cause e.g. a lightbulb to work.
I think there's a certain set of people who, in the absence of more pressing concerns, drop everything upon experiencing a new phenomenon, in a quest to understand it. That certainly describes parts of my life. But the writer takes as axiomatic that most people don't drop everything to study whatever event because they were told that it had been explained, and not, you know, because their landlord doesn't accept white papers on the fundamental properties of reality in lieu of rent.
I think embedded in the statement "because science" is the connotation that ignorance of the underlying phenomenon is not itself dangerous to the people experiencing it. If I observed a bright light literally burning people, and I ask "how is that light burning people?", the person who knows more but simply says "its physics" shares some culpability with me if I just accept that answer incuriously and then get burnt by the light.
But if people aren't getting burnt, is it intellectual laziness to grunt "good enough" on my way to more pressing matters? Perhaps. This whole essay reads to me as a way to judge and find wanting the kind of person whose apparent curiosity stopped at how to do their job. The point of the essay (although it took a lot of curiosity on my part to tease it out) is apparently to say "don't let the fact that it is known stop you from finding out yourself", but it ended up sounding like "if you're taking anything as received knowledge, you're abdicating your responsibility as a thinking entity".
Wait, what? I was nodding along with you for making a great point about how this doesn't threaten our confidence in the venture of physicalist explanation of the natural world (sidebar, I think we actually do know quite a bit about what happens when joints crack), but I had a record scratch here. I think I agree with your upshot but I wouldn't agree that a compelling argument, tentative or otherwise, can be made for a non physical explanation.
Terrance Deacon makes this case in "Incomplete Nature." As I said, I think its wrong, but I think its worth considering whether it could be right.
Most physicists don't know all that much about the philosophical underpinnings of their discipline, so I'd rather see what philosophers have to say about it anyway. But that isn't the point. I'm saying I thought the book was well put together and thought provoking, though I don't think his argument goes through. If that interests you, read it. If you prefer to let an arbitrary label filter out whose ideas you might entertain, I guess go for it.
It's just that it matters to me whether it's a philosopher who's arguing about the physical properties of the universe or a physicist.
I do think you care a bit about labels and what they stand for, after all your first post didn't fail to mention you're a physicist!
I think epistemology is critical and necessary. It fascinates me. However, I wouldn't class them as physicists (unless they actually are, of course; you can wear more than one hat).
I admit I'm not familiar with Deacon, but Wikipedia states he's a "neuroanthropologist". I wonder how he would feel about a physicist making authoritative statements on neurobiology or anthropology!
This trap is not hypothetical. Remember when Michael Behe sided with Creationism and Intelligent Design, using his credentials as a scientist to try to discredit the theory of evolution? But he wasn't a scientist trained in that field, nor was he qualified to comment on it. He was a biochemist!
(I hope we've established labels do matter, insofar as they mean the person so labeled is immersed and has demonstrated high qualifications in the labeled field).
In this particular discussion I don't particularly care whether some Joe Schmoe on the street trusts or doesn't trust Terrance Deacon on the basis of what his degree says. It doesn't matter.
And I actually think your example of Michael Behe works towards my point of view. Credentials are a very weak signal of expertise on any subject, as he demonstrates. I think at the basic level of philosophy of science or physics or whatever, the idea that we can break up disciplines into clear chunks is just silly. At some point a serious intellectual just has to do the work for themselves to digest the ideas. I'd be worse off if I had skipped Deacon's book (which, incidentally and again, I don't think really lands) if I had skipped it because he didn't have a PhD that matched mine.
I actually agree with this! I'm sure Deacon has interesting things to say. And yes, I can only find out about it by reading him, not by reading Wikipedia's summary -- or you.
Michael Behe didn't have the right kind of credentials: he was speaking outside his area of expertise, as was noted repeatedly during that debacle. He co-opted the mantle of capital-letter Science and misused it to maliciously confuse his audience.
> I think at the basic level of philosophy of science or physics or whatever, the idea that we can break up disciplines into clear chunks is just silly.
Of course all distinctions are man-made and therefore arbitrary. Yet you have a doctorate in Physics, and not in Neuroanthropology. At a fundamental level, you understood if Physics interested you, there was a path for you which was this path and not that other path. The border might be fuzzy, but at some level you understand not all regions are equivalent.
> At some point a serious intellectual just has to do the work for themselves to digest the ideas. I'd be worse off if I had skipped Deacon's book (which, incidentally and again, I don't think really lands) if I had skipped it because he didn't have a PhD that matched mine.
I fully agree and I'm not arguing anyone should skip Deacon (or anyone else) because they are not physicists. I just wouldn't pay the same attention to a Physics lecture by someone whose expertise doesn't lie in Physics (or to an anthropology lecture by a physicist who's not also an anthropologist). Doesn't mean I would necessarily skip it though!
I also understand you're not saying Deacon is right. Sufficiently interesting ideas are worth considering regardless of whether they are right. I don't think Julian Jaynes is right either, yet I consider "The Origin of Consciousness" an extremely interesting book!
I'm not sure how many times I have to explain I consider philosophy, epistemology and -- I'll say it -- the humanities essential? I'm not arguing about skipping anything!
I think I agree with you that this notion of emergentism is wrong although I'm inclined to say it's more super wrong than respectably wrong. If you're interested in another philosopher, I agree with Jaegwon Kim that physics operates on casual closure, which leaves no room for this form of emergence.
The computer is made out of electronics, and Firefox exists in the computer and is in a way part of the computer, but electronics is not the right level to understand Firefox, and in principle you could implement Firefox on a computer that wasn't made out of electronics.
Although we abstract away the electronics, it doesn't have the implication sometimes suggested by emergentism, that it exhibits a physical reality that is "independent of" its electronics. The abstracting away shouldn't be taken to mean that some new ontological thing was conjured into being that's physically real in the same sense as the electronics.
If that seems like it goes without saying or is beside the point, well, great! That's kind of what I want to hear. But in some emergentism debates it becomes important to insist there's a "more is different" thing happening that's necessary to explain physical properties.