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Why [Physics] Needs [Philosophy]
Posts
I'm sure his science is fine.
I am not sure what you're getting at. We agree that having the book does not make you a scientist. But what about that matters for our discussing.
Mathematics and philosophy do, as fields of inquiry, apply the same process as the physical sciences. They simply have a better way of invalidating hypothesis.[and sometimes don't even need to propose them in the first place, because they know their dealing with an invertible function]
Edit: To claim that math and philosophy are not science is to fundamentally misunderstand the scientific process.
Scientists fail to do these things all the time. There are scientists who don't do experiments, and also scientists that fail to invalidate any hypotheses.
http://www.genconnect.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/mlk.jpg
I'm sorry to say this, and I don't want to insult you or anything, but you're a bigot if you really believe that.
"Money tends to corrupt, and lots of money corrupts lotsely" - Me.
I'm not certain I understand your point, can you elaborate?
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
That does not mean religion is useless for society.
Lolken took exception to the idea that it was.
I'm not entirely sure that we have a better notion of what constitutes a religion any more than we have one of what constitutes science.
Neither one of them are very clear or distinct terms.
Scientists who don't do experiments still do work based on data from someone else's experiments.
Really? What experimental data does mathematics produce again?
I actually was planning on doing it later today! But I have been beaten to the punch. So instead of authoring a thread, without further comment I present some things that are interesting.
First, David Albert, the philosopher who reviewed Kraus's book in the New York Times, also actually holds a Ph.D. in physics and has co-authored a number of seminal physics papers with Yakir Aharonov. This makes it all the more ridiculous that Kraus has repeatedly referred to him as a 'moron philosopher' who 'probably didn't even read the book.' Here is Albert's response to the charge that his review was inappropriate because it failed to engage with the larger portion of the contents of the book (spoiler alert, he also has a problem with the physics):
Second, Kraus consistently conflates philosophers and theologians. He is one of those physicists, like Hawking, who likes to speak disparagingly of the former by lumping them in with the latter. The irony here is that many philosophers--if not the majority--think that the question of why there is anything at all, and why it is this, is either: 1) unanswerable (and hence uninteresting), or 2) nonsense, because concepts of explanation and justification cannot sensibly be applied to the universe as a whole. They accept the answer: 'it just does, and it just is.' In pointing out that Kraus has failed to answer this question by reference to quantum fields, they are not trying to score points for theology, or to claim that the real answer has to do with God. Their view is that the question is either unanswerable or nonsense, so of course, they hold, Kraus has not answered it with physics. That just follows a fortiori.
Imagine someone claimed that new advances in physics have answered the question: "is the sentence 'this sentence is false' true or false?' The philosopher objects not because they think it is a good question which goes unanswered by physics (which somehow proves that god exists?), but precisely because it is a bad one which cannot be answered at all. 'This sentence is false' is not well-formed. There is no answer to what it's truth value is, because it doesn't have one. Hence, it is certainly not the case that new advances in physics can tell us what its truth value is.
I find that this unreflective anti-philosophical sentiment is a common strain in the new atheist community. They lash out at philosophers because they associate them with mysticism. They forget that philosophers were the pioneer atheists, ever since Hume killed God in 1776.
Third and finally, Tim Maudlin, a prominent philosopher of physics, has some interesting things to say about the relationship between physics--especially fundamental physics--and philosophy. The upshot is that many of the questions philosophers are interested in now are, in a straightforward way, just about understanding the physics. But these questions nonetheless get shunned in physics departments for reasons of institutional culture. He hopes for a blending in the addressing of foundational topics--that practitioners are able to apply both the impressive formal mathematical competence of the physicist and the neatness and conceptual clarity of the philosopher.
That is not true. There are a number of areas of science where experimentation is not possible. Now, scientists do attempt to use some facts that may have been proven by people who themselves used fact, so on and so forth back to some experiment. But it is not the case that the totality of all scientific endeavor relies entirely on experimental data. Simply because there are experiments that cannot be run.
Kierkegaard didn't get the memo
"Money tends to corrupt, and lots of money corrupts lotsely" - Me.
Like what?
Establishing the block universe. Multiple things in evolution and paleontology. Of course scientists try to make good explanations for these things. But as no one can actually experiment on dinosaurs, our resources are limited. Lots of geology is like this, such as certain things with respect to weather or plate tectonics. Lots of sociology can't be done with experiments, also anthropology. Also not a science where everything is subject to experimentation.
The only K-gaard I'm up to speed on is Korsgaard, unfortunately.
Evolution, meteorology, geology and such are all done with experimental data. Paleontology is still done with data, although often more discovered data then data gleamed from experimentation.
The examples you used are really really very wrong.
I do it all for the <3's
For those whose interests are piqued by this particularly kerfuffle, here are some links to further reading:
Brian Leiter summarizes the affair (in a manner highly critical of Kraus--BL can be a bit nasty) while linking to a bunch of other stuff--like Kraus' interview in The Atlantic, Kraus' half-apology he later issued at behest of Daniel Dennett, and some relatively high-level discussion on a cosmology blog
Adam Frank argues that highly theoretical science is so untethered from direct experiment that it blends with philosophy
Again on the Leiter blog, a philosopher defends Kraus at some length; other philosophers comment in the comments.
I've long personally believed that the division between science and philosophy should be completely abolished, and I feel like this is an inevitable conclusion for a neuroscientist. The a priori/a posteriori dichotomy used to distinguish philosophy from science is complete and utter nonsense; there is no philosophy without empirical observations and there is no science without logical deduction. Every philosopher should be a scientist, and every scientist a philosopher.
Excuse me. "Discovered" data is not experimental in nature. You asked for things that aren't done in experimentation. Certainly some parts of evolution, meterology, and geology are all done in experiments. However, what experiment was run to establish the system of plate tectonics that we use today? Please, point me to the experiment that was run.
You can't. Many, if not all, of those things are based on empirical observation sure, but mere empirical observation and experimentation are two different things. I don't think that you want to equate those things. Maybe you do, but I don't. I think that there is a valuable difference between empirical observation and experimentation.
Also, I love how you overlooked sociology and anthropology. Other areas where observation is used, and experimentation is limited or non-existence.
Someone who doesn't <3 MrMr isn't a human being. I'll say it.
Observed data, but not experimental data.
Isn't the answer just "in the beginning there was nothing, but, because you can never be sure there actually is nothing, eventually that nothing happened to be something, and that something propagated?"
It's like Storrow Drive: it's two lanes, then three lanes, then two lanes. Can't explain that.
I'm not sure if Maudlin is incorrect, out of date, or if my experience is just somehow weird. Both examples that he cited are things that were explicitly discussed both in and out of lectures in my physics department in grad school. And his second point, regarding virtual particles, strikes me as one of failing to understand the physics he's talking about. Yes, the state is static and 'unchanging' over time and yes, the vacuum is a seething mass of virtual particles. It's both, and they aren't mutually exclusive. Virtual particles only exist because their creation and annihilation is so rapid (except for one very special case) that their existence doesn't violate conservation of energy beyond the bounds established by the energy-time uncertainty relation. Over any discrete period of time, the vacuum is static - its energy is constant. It is only by examining to vacuum in a frozen infinitesimal slice of time that you can see the interplay of virtual particles. So while "static" is inaccurate when referring to these moment-to-moment states, it is perfectly accurate over any time of measure. Calling it non-static would be equally invalid for any period of time, despite being completely valid for infinitesimals.
I've never been told to "shut up and calculate", nor have I ever heard anyone else told to do so or heard from a peer that they were told to do it. Perhaps his experience comes from a prior generation of physicists? Or maybe the southeast is just a more progressive physics community than I'd expect?
In my experience with, admittedly only second and third year physics courses, "shut up and calculate" was always used in a jovial sense - kind of a handwave to the fact that, whatever you may think it means, the mathematics do appear to describe the physical systems under interrogation (i.e. the transition from the weird quantum to more "normal" realm is accurately described by the equations, even if the implications of that seem - to our normal experience of the world - absurd).
But yeah, I never encountered a physicist who didn't think this was an important distinction - nor one who wasn't interested in it. "Shut up and calculate", as I understand it, is more of a refrain you resort to for the one dickhead who only wants to prove he's smarter then the lecturer when discovering the subatomic universe acts completely counter-intuitively on the attoscopic level.
I'm so glad to have another in here who agrees with my understanding of the philosophical implications of Godel to science.
ELM, that is. J, you seem to have "disagreed" with him by acknowledging exactly what I think he was saying. In other words, if you aren't making certain assumptions about the universe and its knowability, well then you've perhaps correctly ascertained the significance of Godel to physics.
I'm very interested in your assertion that "the universe doesn't do that," though.
Mathematics: starting from initial axioms / postulates which are simply accepted as true, create theorems which are also true.
Science: starting with the scientific method, which is simply accepted as a procedural means to truth, create theorems which are thus accepted as truth.
In other words, they are both in the form of: starting with a philosophical basis that we accept as a useful means of describing and resolving truth, go formalize some truths.
Math and science are both off-shoots of philosophy. Referring back to the xkcd comic, math is only "pure" until you start looking at the philosophical basis of mathematics, and the various philosophical arguments for and against it. Suddenly we have a guy to the right of math, stoicly unconcerned with whether or not math realizes his true rank in relative purity.
The main difference between math and science are how much our observations of the physical world play any critical role in the philosophical basis for resolving truth. In science, our senses and observations are fairly important aspects to the truth process. In math, much less so (though still to some degree).
This is why modern science gets so tripped up on the effects of observation when bridging the gap between physics and math.
It's also why Green Dream and saggio aren't arriving at the same notion of "truth" due to a conflict over whether or not it requires some connection to our observations of the physical world.
But Goum is just wrong. Math is not science. I think what's he's getting at is that math is philosophy, as is science.
Lol oh noes. I'll leave off this for now.
Exactly. Krauss seems to think that the challenge is along the lines of, "ha, God wins, science is false!" When instead it is simply a philosophical debate that Krauss isn't capable of handling. This is a problem I totally believe exists among a lot of physicists. They aren't of a mindset to grasp the very significant philosophical failings of the scientific work they've done. Not in some spiritual "you know not what you do" manner, but in a very real, "you are logically incorrect and don't realize it" manner.
Scientists are often very accepting of philosophically contradictory statements. It doesn't necessarily present an immediate problem to further scientific inquiry. But eventually the philosophical problem must be resolved, or it will cause problems in the science. And I think in many cases physicists chase problems for entire careers without acknowledging that a simple philosophical quandary makes their pursuit almost certainly pointless. I would not be surprised to find a physicist who mathematically formalized that "this statement is false" is a true statement, because it helped to answer some experimental or mathematical quandary, and then spent decades trying to experimentally or mathematically resolve all of the other problems this formalization created.
So can you actually give any examples? I'm not sure how a logically inconsistent statement (mathematically or otherwise) can yield an accurate result.
This really bugs me. To my understanding, Godel merely proved that in classical arithmetic that one could generate a number (representing a theorem) that could neither be proven true or false in classical arithmetic (what I learned as Robinson's Arithmetic). I think that you make a lot more out of what Godel did than is warranted. He didn't show that incompleteness is just a part of any and all systems ever. Just one particular system, and even then completeness isn't really that big of a deal. It's still sound, so we can be accurate with the things that we can prove one way or another, but it's simply limited that it can't prove every theorem positively or negatively.
Now, I'm not an expert in either logic or mathematics, so I have a bit of trouble understanding everything that's going on there.
For reference, I've used the Stanford Encyclopedia entry in composing this. Godel
His theorem was applied to more than one particular system, but it is limited to certain classes of systems. It definitely doesn't just apply to all logical systems ever, and, as you said, it doesn't actually say anything about the capabilities of a system to which it does apply as regards statements within the scope of provability.
The generalized philosophical implications are merely that a system which can be expressed therefore can't possibly generate an expression that explains the system itself. If you limit yourself to a single system of defining truth, all truths in that system will ultimately rely on some assumed axiom that cannot be proven within the system.
A lot of people try to take that in the wrong direction. I'm not saying, "haha, axioms can't be proven, therefore give into solipsism!!!" It's meant primarily as an answer to anyone who believes in a single system (be it scientific method or arithmetic or whatever) as capable of expressing "absolute" truths that do not rely on any assumptions or rely on verification from other independent systems of truth.
We verify our reasoning with our observations and our observations with reason. Neither one alone gives us meaningful defensible truth. We verify math with logic and logic with math. And so on. If you believe that there is some underlying single arbiter that can verify any of them as true or false, you're equivalently believing in God and you are denying what is at least strongly suggested by Godel, Tarski, Heisenberg, Hume, et. al.
It's not necessarily to say that an objective physical reality doesn't exist, but rather that a formal language to describe anything absolute about it can't possibly exist, because of the necessary nature of formal languages themselves. No matter what system we come up with for expressing truth, that system must necessarily always rely on some convenient assumptions that we can't know to be true or false. That doesn't mean there is no truth, it's just a facet of what truth is.
It may be the painkillers, but I think that made more sense to me than anything of yours I've read on this board, Yar.
I'm not sure why it's an important revelation, but I'll give you a high-five of agreement on this chunk at least.
This is flatly incorrect. The role of axioms in formal systems does not rely on the completeness of the system. A system is not incomplete because it cannot derive its axioms. Godel's result is that in a sufficiently recursive system there will be theorems that are true but non-derivable. But that formal systems rely on axioms that are not provable within the system was understood before Godel and is sort of a trivial observation anyway
I'm going to disagree with Shryke, here, lots of scientists don't do experiments. But as I stated above, experiments aren't the point of science, testable conclusions typically are.
Edit: In short, experiments are one way to test conclusions. They are by no means the only way.
It isn't just that axiomatic systems are axiomatic, but rather that such systems can't possibly prove their own axioms, without running into inconsistency.
To say that there will be statements that are true but not derivable is the flipside of the same coin. Because the truth of the axioms relies on something other than the system those axioms define, there will statements that can exploit this, which are expressed in the language of the system, but because of the nature of what is assumed in the axioms and how it is understood, cannot be resolved by the system.
The nature of the assumptions in ZFC, for example, such as the assumptions on infinite sets, or on the constructibility of sets from smaller subsets, are what eventually lead to certain impossibilities regarding infinite subsets of infinite sets. This is a logical cousin to the fact that the system cannot derive its own axioms.
The simpler example is in naive set theory and Russel's paradox. "The set of all sets not members of themselves." The philosophical problem is elegantly stated within. When you try to use the system to make an original statement about the system (i.e., sets of sets defined recursively by set membership) you can easily constuct nonsense. Even simpler: "this statment is false."
You do realize that he proved the completeness of logic right? All the stuff about the axioms of a system not being able to prove the system don't apply to logic.
How does Tarski fit into this? Everything that I can read on him (again SEP), suggests that he was also focused on mathematics, and didn't show a similar problem with logic. Again, he showed that mathematics has issues of completeness, but not logic. He also had some issues telling the difference between logic and math at some levels, but it seems like he largely cleared that up.
I don't know nearly enough about Heisenberg to comment on anything concerning him with this. I only know pop science stuff about uncertainty.
As for Hume, he believed that there were things that we could know for certain. So I have no idea what you're going on about with him. One of those things we can know for certain is mathematics. So how does Hume fit in with anything you've said?
I don't think that axioms actually play directly into Godel. I mean the axioms of a system are inherently improvable using that system, but that's just the nature of axioms.
Godel's thing was that there are true but non-axiomatic statements in any consistent system which the system cannot prove.
Edit: the example from Wikipedia illustrates it pretty well.
"The truth value of this statement cannot be proven using the theory T" (paraphrased from wikipedia)
It's different from "This statement is false" in that the statement is true, whereas "this is false" has an undefined truth value.