Comment by pierrebai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pierrebai | Hacker News Reader

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I think Feynman take on this is more interesting and less muddled. For example, in the video series "The Pleasure of finding things out", he clearly lays out that something can only ever be explained by taking something else for granted, and at some point you need to stop the regression and just admit that you have to take something as true on faith (or simply admit that you cannot know.) [1]

You also get to understand that all there is is always action at a distance. The mechanical philosophy as based on an error: that direct action (a physical object pushing another for example) exists. In reality, again as Feynman brilliantly explains, it just electromagnetism between atoms, so action at a distance.

I'm not even going to go into what "intelligible" theories is even supposed to mean. Again, it's either intellectual fappery or infinite philosophical regression. The notion that someone could know something as an absolute truth as never existed. Every explanation at every epoch was based on assumptions, It's just that at times, people were not aware of their own limits.

Also, who pretends that nature is reducible to physics? We can't even calculate precisely the interaction of three atomic particles. These kind of claim are always an annoying strawman.

[1] https://vimeo.com/340695809

I think Feynman illustrates the failure of the Mechanical Philosophy very well, but that is not incompatible with what Chomsky is saying here. In physics, you can model action at a distance with waves, fields and so on, which are part of a model. An intelligible theory means a genuine explanation, of the kind that Feynman refers to, which he admits is a difficult or impossible problem. We have abandoned a genuine explanation of nature that is intuitive to us (i.e. a mechanical view of the world), and now use models to explain the natural world.

Models of physics for example include concepts like waves and forces, which we don't observe directly, but build into the model because they make concepts like gravitation intelligible to us. If gravitation did not involve action at a distance (e.g. a universe with aether), physicists probably wouldn't even study it (the most interesting things to study are usually things that only occur in controlled conditions, that do not conform to our [mechanical] intuitions).

That we can't form intelligible theories of concepts like gravitation without these models, is not really surprising, since we did not evolve to study quantum physics or organic chemistry (could not possibly be selected for by evolution). Instead our science-forming cognitive capacities, which determine what counts as a genuine explanation to us, are shaped/limited by our evolutionary heritage, which is trained on the kinds of phenomena that animals like us normally encounter. [edited]

> The mechanical philosophy [w]as based on an error: that direct action (a physical object pushing another for example) exists. In reality, again as Feynman brilliantly explains, it['s] just electromagnetism between atoms, so action at a distance.

To be fair, even that is not entirely accurate, right? Electromagnetic interaction involves a photon being "fired" by an electron or proton and "hitting" another electron or proton. So in some sense QM and the standard model do contain "physical contact". Of course, the electrons and protons and photons can't be conceived of as simple physical objects that would follow our intuitions of what an object is, even in something like the MWI, so there is no hope of intelligibility/intuitive understanding there.

Also, while we do have a "direct physical contact" theory for 3 of the fundamental forces, we do not have a definitive one for gravity, so we are, from this point of view, right where Newton left this debate.

Chomsky refers to Galileo, who thought that theories are intelligible, only if we can “duplicate [their posits] by means of appropriate artificial devices.” So in modern terms - compute.

> I'm not even going to go into what "intelligible" theories is even supposed to mean

The idea seems silly now because we know that fundamental physics isn’t directly intelligible to us. But before Newton, the hard-headed ‘scientific’ approach was to analyze nature without any appeal to magical hidden forces, action at a distance, etc. etc. Turns out that’s not possible, but who could have known?

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