Comment by gloriousduke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gloriousduke | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Can you honestly say that you wrote this sentence in order to be understood widely?

I can't say I didn't. But perhaps my subconscious finally prodded me to go beyond lurking and post my first comment so as to ensure I engage with the masses and thereby improve the clarity of my hermetically sealed self expression. So let me rephrase that: Stuff like great novels and the writings of Nietzsche can make you feel as alive as when you consider the findings from the LHC or read the "Selfish Gene". That being said, I think we should use the ideas of science, and philosophy of science, to improve our art and make it more meaningful and fecund for ideas. Since the results of science have no intrinsic meaning at this point in time (nor do they say anything utterly conclusive about what really exists at the lowest level of ontology), we still need something else. Obfuscation is one way to encourage the reader to really understand the context and layers of some piece of writing by making them dig deeper (there was an interesting link about this a few weeks back).

Since the results of science have no intrinsic meaning at this point in time (nor do they say anything utterly conclusive about what really exists at the lowest level of ontology), we still need something else.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "intrinsic" in this context? Also, does there have to be an absolute lowest level of anything?

The answer to the first question is related to an interpretation of David Hume known as Hume's Law, paraphrased as, "you can't derive an ought from an is". In other words, the results of science cannot tell us anything conclusive about ethics/morality or what we should do day to day. The submission contained the following quote regarding neuroscience from a well-regarded paper: "it 'can help us see that all behavior is mechanical, that all behavior is produced by chains of physical events that ultimately reach back to forces beyond the agent’s control.'" Some pretty drastic changes to the rule of law could result from equating such results with "there is no free will". How do we decide what ought to comprise such changes? Secondly, as exhilarating and awe inspiring as learning the results of science can be (for me at least), how do we take knowledge and do anything with it? We can use it for technology, sure. But what if tomorrow we conclusively determine there are extraterrestrial beings through the results of one of our scientific instruments? How does society respond in relation to what the discovery means to each person despite the fact the experiment says nothing about such meaning? You could also think of it all this way: what ought we to do once we know every possible provable (or Popperian falsifiable) statement about existence?

As for the second question, to me, it makes sense that there has to be a lowest level of ontology, unless the lowest level is some sort of recursive structure (which in a sense would still be a "lowest level thing"). I believe most of us expect that there is some sort of monadic entity that is equivalent to Democritus's atom. In the standard model the quark is that sort of thing (if I'm not mistaken), but the string theorists hypothesize that a lower level (think more complete, i.e. not assuming zero dimensional entities in reality) object is the basis for a quark. Or say, if we can somehow determine our universe is a simulation, then it would be nice to know what the "basement universe" that is running this universe is. Of course, it's possible such knowledge will remain forever inaccessible, in which case, we'll probably need novels and philosophy to deal with the voids left in our hungering minds.

You must be careful not to look so broadly as to conflate a child's cry for nourishment with the tortured wailings of the soul's quest for peace. :-)

>the results of science cannot tell us anything conclusive about ethics/morality or what we should do day to day.

It depends on how you define "science". If construed broadly, to mean using reason and evidence-based approaches to evaluating claims, then science tells us a lot. Is it better for the nations of Europe to strive to live in mutual cooperation with each other? Or should they instead perpetually wage war against each other, at any cost? Imagine posing that question to both pre- and post-enlightenment peoples and contrasting the responses.

>Or say, if we can somehow determine our universe is a simulation, then it would be nice to know what the "basement universe" that is running this universe is. Of course, it's possible such knowledge will remain forever inaccessible, in which case, we'll probably need novels and philosophy to deal with the voids left in our hungering minds.

Science is presently the best cure for the voids that exist today. You'll need a really good argument for switching to novels and philosophy for the voids of the future.

>using reason and evidence-based approaches to evaluating claims

It takes some philosophy to decide how to do science. I prefer Popper's approach for the methodology.

>Or should they instead perpetually wage war against each other, at any cost?

I think we answer this question via the realization that every human is a subjective being and has a right to pursue happiness, a realization which comes from the humanities (a-hem) as much as it does from the theory of natural selection or quantum mechanics (and actually, we have no way of looking at a brain and saying it assuredly causes consciousness, so we can't even say who's a subjective being with science). Heck, the universe's "way of doing" might be a nearby gamma ray burst far harsher than any human war ;)

>You'll need a really good argument for switching to novels and philosophy for the voids of the future.

I wholeheartedly concur, but there are already concerns that if something like the multiverse is the "explanation" for the constant values in our universe, then there might be aspects of existence inaccessible to our experiments. I will need much consolation if such a thing is true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com