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Comment by jblow | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this Schopenhauer quote is really painful to read. Given basic contemporary abstract thinking, it reads as completely naive.

This is not unique; I often feel this way when reading philosophy.

So I kind of understand where Hawking / Tyson / et al are coming from. I do think it is a mistake to single-handedly dismiss all of philosophy, and I agree with the sentiment in this article that physicists are following an implicit philosophy that they do not understand, so there's a contradiction there. At the same time, most philosophy is honestly pretty bad.

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It doesn't appear to be a quote from Schopenhauer, but a quote from an essay "Schopenhauer and Buddhism" by Peter Abelson.[1]

[1]http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/peter2.htm

I'm schooled in Plato and Aristotle, and the quote above seems to me very like their way of thinking, and also seems both logical and intuitive. Can you recommend some authors or titles representative of the kind of "basic contemporary abstract thinking" you're referring to?

Just focus on the first two sentences. Take the notion of causality. It underlies all of empirical science, yet it is not something that can be proved empirically. It is a given, a built in part of how we perceive things. You can read more about this if you check out the work of David Hume or Immanuel Kant.

There is nothing naive about recognizing that human knowledge is limited by our knowing apparatus. What is truly naive is to mistake the models of science with "reality itself" (a nebulous term)

IMO philosophers get into trouble because they want to nail down what is "real" or "true". They try to work by pure logic, but alway get tied up by the limitations of spoken or written language. "Infinite" for example is a logically imprecise term; there are different flavors of mathematical infinity.

Perhaps a more valid way to phrase the same sentiment would be to say that science, because of its assumptions and methodologies, can only address phenomena that are spatial, temporal, and causal. There might be real things that have none of those attributes; science and philosophers would have difficulty studying them, but that difficulty does not rule out the possibility of their existence.

edit: spoken or written

Sure, a lot of philosophers are so audacious, but not all. See, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-realism

That quote is anything but naive. Its basically a rephrasing of the findings of Kurl Godel, and I am not sure anyone would call that naive.

Which findings of Kurt Godel? Care to explain? Because for example this seems like it has nothing to do with the incompleteness theorems unless one doesn't understand the incompleteness theorems at all and is just hand-waving.

No one is hand-waving.

"Yet space, time, and causality cannot be proven to be empirically real themselves". This is akin to mathematical axioms that escape proof within a formal system. Of course one can debate whether the analogy applies for space and time as it does in arithmetic, but this is beside the point. My point was that Schopenhauer's quote was not even remotely close to being naive, especially considering when it was said (i.e. years before Godel and others proved similar conclusions).

>This is akin to mathematical axioms that escape proof within a formal system.

No it isn't. Unless you understand quantum gravity better than anyone else does, there is absolutely no connection whatsoever between the possible empirical reality of spacetime and causality, and Godel's description of mathematical incompleteness.

Spacetime is observable, not axiomatic. The whole point of theories like loop quantum gravity - and one of the main reasons that the string theories are poor relations - is that LQG theories take an explicit interest in possible mechanisms that explain the observed properties of spacetime and causality.

In the jargon, they are 'background independent.'

For example, take a look at Causal Dynamical Triangulation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_dynamical_triangulation

Its a relatively naive statement. What is 'before' and 'after' time is defining time in terms of time. While it does seem ridiculous to say something is 'before' time, it doesnt seem anywhere as ridiculous to say something is unrelated to time, beyond time, or independent from time.

The naivete is that a sophisticated philosopher would understand this, and at the very least not push forward a philosophical argument that really hinges on connotations of words instead of logical/philosophical pillars.

Anyways if the statement didnt have a famous philosophers name attached to it i doubt it would have gotten any response, its a pretty baseline/naive reaction to a complex scientific idea.

You can use Godel's proof to show that a physics model based on space, time and causality can not exmplain those. And that if there is one that explains those, it must be based on some other set of concepts, that it can not explain.

Yet, realism is in a completely different level. You can not reason about it using mathematical constructs. (Too bad that's the only tool we have.)

Can you really? Incompleteness doesn't necessarily say this. It makes certain statements about certain types of contradictions in certain types of systems. There is still a lot of work left to be done before you can apply it here.

You may be saying this has already been done elsewhere but without references u can't just throw this out there as a given.

It's notions on time and space are naive.

To ask what's before beginning of time is akin to asking what is the point more southern point of earth than the Southern pole. Answer is there is none.

In a place where space doesn't exist you wouldn't notice it not existing. Probably because you wouldn't exist as well.

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