Why Science Needs Metaphysics
nautil.us
nautil.us
I mean, it's understandable: the extent of most people's interaction with philosophy is with cartesian-style "but can we even know we exist??" navel-gazing -- or worse, with the intentionally obscure bits of continental philosophy.
Because of this reputation, many (the majority of?) scientifically-minded people view it as a binary choice: you're either a good empiricist or you're one of those damn poststructuralist lit-crit people from the humanities department.
IMHO: people who hold this mindset risk missing out on a powerful tool for their mental toolbox.
If you took a king from the 1200s and had him look at our scientific establishment, he'd have called them monks. From this perspective, philosophy is religion without deity, and science is just philosophy of the empirical.
Disciplines of the mind do not have to have this hard separation, its a shame cynicism and scorn have been allowed to take over the public discourse. Not everyone who looks at the philosophy of science is a quack.
True, but the problem with philosophy is that it is the study of how humans embrace reality, not the study of reality itself. For the simple reason that philosophy has no tools (other than science) to establish what is true or false in the world outside our own minds. If you understand philosophy as the ways we make sense of the world, instead of a tool of finding what is true, then we would have a better time dealing with it.
This is why people look down on philosophy. While people might pretend to disagree with this, I would take the complete lack of counter examples as agreement.
PS: And because debate about word choice is so popular, information: facts provided or learned about something or someone.
Of course, philosophers often make use of results in mathematics. If you arbitrarily decide that any philosophical work that does this in some sense "doesn't count", then of course you will find that the remaining work concerns results that are less than certain! It's in the nature of questions that can't be answered through mathematical methods to have less than certain answers. You might notice that many of the most important questions in life fall into this category, though.
Nor between logic and mathematics.
There is also the idea that part of why philosophy is dismissed is because people tend to take results and say that the result isn't really part of philosophy.
Could this be because their idea of philosophy is that it has no results, so any results they are shown are concluded to be not part of philosophy?
This is what separates philosophy from math or logic.
This might seem ridiculous, how could such a system be useful? Well what about time, just because at one point A=B does not mean A still = B. [Yay, programming ;0]
Now, time is just one specific case, but Philosophy encompasses all systems of thought not just the tiny subset that is western philosophy. Some religions for example actively promote contradictory ideas.
As such, showing contradictions mean more in math suggests something is false, where in philosophy showing a contradiction only demonstrates something is false in a subset of systems of thought.
This is not why people look down on philosophy. This is why STEM people fail to learn anything about it. Other people look down on philosophy, because it's close to impossible to make a living out of philosophy.
It's not "fact" but it does provide interesting ways to think about the issue; ways that could drive experiment or further enquiry. So under a "pragmatic" theory of knowledge I would say that there is information there.
But of course that's a philosophical stance that you should not feel compelled to debate me on ;)
Looked at Philosophy of CompSci on the Stanford Plato site. Read a lot of ... words... that were just fascinated they could work "duality" into computer programs. Cause a program is source right? But it can also be object code. Ooooh. And what about interpreted scripts, what does all this really mean? ... This would appear to have no redeeming quality. Perhaps I'm wrong I've just yet to see how this could be useful or even really intriguing.
Then there's even top scientists like Feynman making mocking comments about philsci. So given even top scientists are unconvinced there's value, I start to think OK maybe I'm not missing out on much.
It's especially important to address the claims of science to be a perfect method of knowledge; in the absence of religious justifications for human activity science has been set up as a valid replacement and its important to examine its right to the throne. We have a long history of attempts at scientific decision making that claims an objectivity it ought not to have (see: forced sterilizations, eugenics, mass medication and medicalization of human behavior) and tremendous consequence resulting from this sort of claim (environmental catastrophe, for example).
If science is going to intrude on the domain of politics, of deciding what is human and who should be considered human, we seriously need to challenge the assumption of objective knowledge and think about science's fundamental dependence on metaphysical constructs. Easy to ignore if you are Feynman at the top of this pyramid, but scientific authority is just authority; it has to be accountable to something or it is going to produce monsters.
As the article states, this exploration can only occur from outside science; we can't answer claims about its validity or access to truth from within science.
The closest I've heard similar to what you're saying is stepping outside of Science-the-process to determine what things are true using Bayesian probability. For instance, Einstein stating that his theory was correct, even if the first test didn't agree. I thought this was pretty well accepted. Other than that, what kind of outside-science thought systems are we talking about?
And more usefully, where is a short intro that doesn't come with spurious, dull, or absurd statements?
You can avoid that uncomfortable question by proclaiming empirical reality to be the only reality, but that's a metaphysical claim with no greater merit than its opposite.
I dealt with this question in high school physics, it's really no big deal. When you get to a point where all you can do is make a "metaphysical claim with no greater merit than its opposite" you go find something better to do with your time.
Next we ask this expert on extraterrestrial life whether extraterrestrial life exists.
The sciences and the philosophies are incredibly intertwined and to argue otherwise or dismiss philosophy as useless is just being lazy. While in many ways they are different, fundamentally they are identical. We are seeking a better understanding and explanation of the world we live in.
IHO, from a bigger anthropological viewpoint, philosophy and religion are extremely rich areas of idea prototyping. They came first. They are based on intuition and are good-faith efforts to understand our world. Science came later and was much better at it. What needs to happen culturally is that people need to all be philosophers, they need to have a reverence toward the sacred and toward the cultures that hold it dear. However, they can't let religion, or philosophy, prematurely cut off in their minds what the realm of science can embody. There are long lists of famous scientists that did this, and even they were proven too quick to place arbitrary limits on science and prescribe "everything else" as religion, or metaphysics.
To me, philosophy/religion/metaphysics are all "pre-physics" in a way. Intuitions without proofs...yet. The intuitions of many individuals, over many centuries, however seemingly incorrect scientifically, aren't completely worthless. It's like saying art is worthless. They may not explain mechanically how something behaves, but they offer insight and new ways of thinking, which are really at the core of how to truly understand something difficult.
Note 1
"If we are embedded in a reality that can be beyond our reach, how can we hope to achieve any knowledge at all? Perhaps Kant was right, and what we think we know may simply reflect the categories of the human mind. We can perhaps only deal with things as they appear to us. How things are in themselves may forever be beyond our grasp. Alternatively, the reality that we seek to understand may not even be subject to rational understanding. It may be sufficiently chaotic and disordered to be unintelligible."
Note 2
"There is such a thing as scientific progress, and it happens through systematic trial and error or, in Karl Popper’s terminology, conjecture and refutation. A "scientific realist" has to be wary, though, about how such realism is defined. A realism that makes reality what contemporary science says it is links reality logically to the human minds of the present day. Science is then just a human product, rooted in time and place. Bringing in future science - or ideal science - may sound more plausible, but even then there is a distinction between science reflecting (or corresponding to) the nature of reality and it being simply a human construction."
That's the problem with the article, and a lot of Trigg's ideas. He assumes that "science is done by people", "people are flawed", ergo "the output of science is flawed". Which is obviously false, like saying science done by people who speak different languages would express itself differently. However you analyse the structure of an atom is irrelevant to its structure: it is what it is. Sine qua non. There's something which is an atom, whatever you call it and however you discover it.
The postulate that "the universe my not be ultimately understandable" should only be taken as a priori at the point where it appears that that is in fact the case. Which it doesn't. (Don't confuse this as a dismissal of uncertainty - that certainly exists, but even that lack of certainty can be expressed in certain terms and understood).
Editing for clarity:
By "the output of science is flawed" - I phrased this poorly. I don't mean that the interpretation of results is flawed, which it obviously can be. See phlogiston, early models of the solar system and so on. Rather, I meant that he seems to imply that the nature of what's being studied can change given the human looking at it and their understanding. Which isn't correct. Whether you understand how the solar system works or not makes no impact on what it's doing or why it's doing it.
I'd have been more accurate to say "the eventual output of the scientific process, upon where it has arrived at the correct answer, is flawed".
I didn't read this anywhere in the article, nor did I feel it was implied. He is simply arguing that statements about the capability of science must be made outside of science, and that objective reality is independent of the method of discovery (science). I see nothing controversial about this.
> The postulate that "the universe my not be ultimately understandable" should only be taken as a priori at the point where it appears that that is in fact the case. Which it doesn't.
I'm not sure this should be taken as an axiom, but rather could be a characteristic inherent of the system (à la Gödel's theorems).
Though realism may be a tempting viewpoint what we know about modern physics makes it a difficult one to defend. For example, according to the principles of quantum physics a particle has neither a definite position nor a definite velocity unless and until those quantities are measured by an observer. It is therefore not correct to say that a measurement gives a certain result because the quantity being measured had that value at the time of the measurement. In fact, in some cases individual objects don’t even have an independent existence but rather exist only as part of an ensemble of many.
A weighted coin flipping in the air is neither heads nor tails until observed. That we can't observe the property of the coin (its weighted bias) while it's in the air flipping, doesn't change the coin's properties. In fact, we wouldn't be able to measure the bias from a single observation. Yet, if I constructed the coin to be precisely heavier on heads versus tails according to some ratio, it would have that property the whole time, no?
To determine if the coin is biased you would need to repeat the experiment large number of times and see if you get experimental outcomes that do not agree with the expected values given by law of large numbers.
This is not how things are in quantum mechanics though. Uncertainty principle is an intrinsic property of quantum systems. It's not the case that the act of measuring somehow disturbs the system and changes the measured values. It's that values are undetermined at all until they are measured. And even then there is inverse relationship between how precisely you can know momentum of the particle vs its position. The more you know one the less you can know the other.
What's so wrong about this? It seems so obvious it should be uncontroversial. The first several dozen scientific hypotheses to explain any given phenomenon are all bound to be very very wrong. Even the big-t Theories have to be adjusted many many times before and after they start to get referred to as such.
We have no idea what's true until long after the fact. Many respected scientists of the early 1900s believed in and contributed to the science of eugenics. Scientists we still respect today for their contributions to other fields.
> Which is obviously false, like saying science done by people who speak different languages would express itself differently.
Again, why the scornful dismissal? The scientific establishment of the West differs in many ways from the establishment in the East. Not just language, but culture also produces differences. We managed to collaborate with the Soviets to do space missions, but it took an awful lot of work to do it. Medicine can have some very striking differences.
This has the benefit of being right, at least. Look at the history of science. Look at all the models of planetary movement we've had -- a succession of incorrect models getting closer and closer to the truth. Look at any field of scientific inquiry, and compare the results of what they had 100, 200 years ago with what we understand to be correct today. Look at the speed of light:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
In 1675 we thought the speed of light was 220,000 km/s. Jump into 1849 and it was measured at 315,000 km/s. Right now it's at 299792.458 km/s and is likely to stay there because we have now defined the meter in terms of the speed of light.
I mean, people know this. Everyone knows we still teach Newtonian physics in school even though Einstein proved them wrong before many of us on this website were even born. The history of science is a history in incremental improvement. Science IS flawed. There are plenty of things that we believe now because of science that will be disproven in the future -- some of them days or weeks from now, some of them decades away. To admit that science is flawed is not to take away from either the power or the importance of science, it is simply being honest about what we are doing.
And the output is flawed. Which is why science comes with a disclaimer 'to the best of our knowledge, this is how it works'.
We can never know how the universe works, only come up with a model that predicts all results we see. Unless that is how you define 'knowing how something works'.
[cringe cringe twitch]
Yes.
Edit: I think a scary number of you guys are conflating the process of science with our current observational model. Quantum theory is the product of science, it's not science itself.
1 - Science hasn't yet discovered why something as it is => Metaphysical explanation
2 - Mankind needs an explanation for things they cannot understand => feel better with the unknown
Scientific knowledge is the enemy of any religion as it can eventually explain why something is the way it is.
This is a bit of a myth. If you look at the metaphysical problems that, say, Aristotle was grappling with a few thousand years ago, pretty much all of them are still unsolved philosophical problems that have barely been touched by any developments in science. To pick an example at random: are statements about the future true or false?
(To say that these problems remain unsolved is not to say that there's been no progress. We understand the space of possible and plausible solutions a lot better than Aristotle did.)
Not exactly. It can explain "how" it is, but not "why" it is that way.
Unless you take "why" as a shortcut for "how it works in a more detailed framework", which is not how philosophers understand it when doing metaphysics.
There are some philosophers like Colin McGinn that think that some features of empirical reality are in principle impossible to explain with human science (it's slightly more complex than that but..) - but they are a distinct minority.
But where's the evidence for that supposition? All we really know for sure is that science hasn't explained everything yet.
Suppose we observe that when A happens, B occurs. This does not imply that A causes B. In fact, we can never confirm that A causes B, regardless of how closely we measure the reaction. 'Preposterous!' I hear you say on the other end of the intertubes.. but alas, it is true. Beyond the realm of reality and hubris we might observe that in fact X causes Y, and that A is simply an observable effect of X. Similarly, B is just an effect of Y. If you really want to explode that mind, think about how broadly this concept can be applied.
Science is not a mindset or field. It is an act of accomplishing understanding. If there is something mankind can reason about, we can also do science-y stuff with it.
"What about a poll among 33 leading thinkers at a conference in Austria in 2011. This group of physicists, mathematicians and philosophers was given 16 multiple-choice questions about the meaning of the theory, and their answers displayed little consensus."
"One of the most telling questions in the Austrian poll was whether there will still be conferences about the meaning of quantum theory in 50 years time. Forty-eight percent said “probably yes”, only 15% said “probably no”. Twelve percent said “I’ll organize one no matter what”, but that’s academics for you."
From a BBC article by Philip Ball.
When we observe this, we come up with explanations as to how it happened, describe it using mathematics or chemical symbols or whatever is appropriate. In this way, science is done.
There are still a lot of mysteries out there today. Scientists are working on explaining them.
To be fair, I actually agree with you. Science may not have all the answers today, and it may not have some answers for a very long time. But I don't think there are aspects of the universe that are inherently "unknowable". Many times throughout history we have not had access to certain facts due mostly to our technical progression and eventually we have found ways to overcome those obstacles. I see a reality that is, in fact, real and knowable, even if our access to some of that knowledge is not yet possible.
Of course, that thinking would be due to my positions on metaphysics. :-) This is where metaphysics can be important; because it can inform your choices about what can even be pursued.
The "mechanism", if you can call it that, is the wave function, which is a complex valued function, norm squared of which is probability amplitude - roughly speaking the probability that the particle is located at a point in space.
So what is really happening is the wave function is propagating though space and interfering with itself as if it were a "normal" wave (say water wave). So wave function propagates through the two slits in double slit experiment and the two resulting waves collide just like water waves would passing though the slits with the resulting troughs and crests of the wave function (remember this is complex valued function whose absolute value squared is the probability that particle is located at that location in space).
So, in the quantum model, what is "waving" and spreading through space is in a way a probability of the particle being there.
This explanation is very rough and contains a lot of inaccuracies (you really have to look at the math to know what is really going on) but it does give you some flavor of what is going on.
I think that's where I originally disagreed. I wouldn't want to call that a "mechanism", just a model, but I can see how these words become less useful as you examine them further.
I'm now thinking that there isn't such a difference between the word "mechanism" and "model". They're both synonyms for a way of perceiving a part of the universe.
Case in point: mathematics. It's completely misguided to think mathematics is empirical or within the realm of science. Math has empirical applications and is useful for scientific endeavors, but the actual discipline itself is entirely proof-based and rational.