How to Think Real Good

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3 points·norswap··3 comments

I'm struck by the first part of the Feynman quote:

>Consider an object... What is an object? Philosophers are always saying, “Well, just take a chair for example.” The moment they say that, you know that they do not know what they are talking about. Atoms are evaporating from it from time to time...

Note how deftly Feynman takes his own objects for granted: what is an atom? But that's the basis of his own paradigm, so it goes unquestioned. This is, broadly, the problem with these sorts of exercises, that people seem to be able to notice things others take for granted, but their own sacred cows remain invisible.

You basically have to have this level of dissonance in play to be able to acknowledge the deep problems of rationalism, but stil carry on with formal methods.

But that's precisely Feynman's point, isn't it?

I doubt he idealized the atom, he's just giving a simple example of a model "the object" that is objectively wrong but still useful. He's really just saying "all models are wrong, some models are useful".

I don't think that's Feynman's point, no. For one thing, it would be impossible to be a theoretical physicist without having a tremendous amount of buy-in to mathematical realism. That he, for example, believed in things like particle symmetry points to a far-more-than-contingent belief in the reality of mathematical/scientific objects. I think Feynman was just the archetypal "everything is a subset of physics" physicist, who thinks philosophers just play at science.

This is obviously not from the linked article, but it's the sense I have of him from his memoirs.

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