[HN Gopher] Time Doesn't Belong to Physics - When Bergson met Ei...
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Time Doesn't Belong to Physics - When Bergson met Einstein
Author : mellosouls
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-09-24 06:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (iai.tv)
(TXT) w3m dump (iai.tv)
| Garlef wrote:
| Ever since reading some of Nick Bostrom's works, I find it
| advisable to be very sceptical when philosophers attempt to deal
| with mathematical thought.
| b450 wrote:
| It is very hard to read philosophy in this
| phenomenological/continental tradition. There is a real
| resistance in that tradition to plainly stating a core thesis.
| There may well be defensible reasons for this - maybe it
| preserves the subtleties, peculiar texture; the holistic, or even
| contradictory nature of thought or consciousness or what have
| you. But I think a lot of the time these philosophers won't come
| right out and say what they mean because they don't really know
| what they mean, and any sufficiently plain statement of their
| views would reveal itself as either trivially correct, or
| obviously wrong. Here is an example:
|
| > Bergson seems to argue that even Einstein's concept of time, as
| what's measured by a clock, is based on some more fundamental,
| more real, non-mathematical view of time, time as we perceive it,
| which might defy exact mathematical expression. What sense of
| time does Bergson have in mind here?
|
| > Consider, for example, how different pre-modern notions of time
| are from ours. When I write about the history of time in
| contemporary times, I always have in the back of my mind the
| image of Saturn devouring his son. In it, the passage, keeping
| and telling of time occurs be reference to love, violence,
| anthropophagy and reproduction. Throughout time, it is clear that
| we are dealing with radically different beasts. Bergson did not
| draw such stark distinctions, but in Duration and Simultaneity he
| asked us not to forget how time was a precondition for effective
| action. "Le temps est pour moi ce qu'il y a de plus reel et de
| plus necessaire ; c'est la condition fondamentale de l'action ; -
| que dis-je ? c'est l'action meme."
|
| > Einstein's definition of time has none of these radical
| elements and might even be responsible for leading us to forget
| about them.
|
| This question gets at the heart of the matter: what exactly is
| the disagreement between Bergson and Einstein? And we get a non-
| answer as far as I can tell. I have no idea what "radical
| elements" she is referencing. There some notion about ideas like
| "violence" or "reproduction" being stand-ins for the concept of
| time? and something about time being a precondition for, or even
| identical to, action? Violence and reproduction and action per se
| all take a non-zero amount of clock time, so I don't what the
| conflict is here.
|
| ---
|
| Ok, enough rambling. If anyone has a reaction similar to mine,
| they might find a more relatable exploration of this subject in
| Wilfrid Sellars' concepts of the the (naive, common-sensical,
| person-centric) "manifest image" and the "scientific image", and
| the role of philosophy in reconciling them.
| tessellated wrote:
| Sorry for Kaku's old age decline, but not gonna waste my time
| listening to this crank. Has he been officially diagnosed with
| dementia yet?
|
| edit: you are right, I just flew over the article.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| This is not Michio Kaku, unless I'm very mistaken.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Kaku is mentioned just once, in a passing remark about an
| upcoming event. Mentioning him here seems bizarrely out of
| place.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| Yes, Kaku is a crackpot grifter, but he is not relevant for
| this article.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > Q: In one of your talks you mention that the correct way to
| understand Einstein's revolution is not as a theoretical, but as
| a technological revolution. Can you explain what you mean by
| that?
|
| > A: ...A very interesting question is why and how Einstein's
| work was able to shed its mundane origins and parade itself as
| theoretical, cosmological and universal.
|
| The "mundane origins" here are Einstein's uses of the mostly
| then-relatively-new technologies of clocks, trains, bullets and
| rulers. I feel that the view Canales is setting out here is a
| mistaken reading of the history, and that Einstein was addressing
| "theoretical, cosmological and universal" concepts from the
| beginning, only referring to mundane entities for pedagogical
| purposes. By the late 1880's it was becoming clear that some of
| the further implications of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory were
| at odds with cosmological assumptions, a tension made more
| pointed by Michelson and Morley's 1887 aether-wind experiment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#History
| whatshisface wrote:
| Science doesn't have a conflict with philosophy, knowledge in
| any form has a conflict with people who can write an entire
| book without learning anything about their subject.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| TFA is presented as an interview. It's not clear to me who is
| asking the questions, and who is answering.
| munchler wrote:
| Interviewee: Jimena Canales | Historian of science and author
| of The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the
| Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (2015) as well as
| Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science (2020).
|
| Interviewer: Alexis Papazoglou | Senior editor for IAI News,
| the online magazine of the Institute of Art and Ideas, and
| former philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Thanks.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| > Of course, one of the most successful aspects of science has
| been to describe the world in a sense that is true without
| relying on appearances. For example, Descartes very successfully
| describes the moon illusion (why it appears larger closer to the
| horizon) in his book on optics. As science progressed, it
| continued to correct for more and more illusions that were not
| limited to the realm of the visual. Thus Laplace corrected
| illusions of a mathematical nature, such as the commonly held
| belief that if a coin had landed heads many times in a row it
| will have a greater probability to land tails. Einstein was part
| if this tradition, taking it to a new level.
|
| Very interesting quote, and I think in a sense that even hard
| sciences like physics are not only a study of the "external
| world", but also the "internal world" that our mind creates to
| represent it. So much of the conversation around quantum
| mechanics isn't really about the math or science, which really
| isn't that complicated, but around how it can be that what is
| _really_ happening is so different from what we perceive to be
| happening in our minds.
|
| I think every break through in theoretical physics is sort of
| inextricably tied with a breakthrough in the study of
| consciousness. You have to understand both how the world works
| and also how the mind translates that to conscious experience of
| the world to really have something that most people will see as
| an explanation.
|
| An understanding of light, for example, is not just an
| explanation of the math underlying electromagnetic waves, but
| also how the eye perceives those waves and translates that into
| vision.
| lisper wrote:
| Science is about explaining the data, and "the data" includes
| our perceptions of the world. In fact, that is _all_ that we
| have direct access to. So... our perceptions of the world
| include a constant stream of overwhelming evidence that the
| world is classical, a 3-D space inhabited by objects that exist
| in particular places at particular times. So when evidence
| comes along that this isn 't actually true, it can cause some
| pretty severe cognitive dissonance, and _at best_ it demands an
| explanation of why the world _appears_ classical even though it
| isn 't. That has nothing to do with science being "about the
| internal world as well as the external world." Science is about
| explaining the data. The (hypothetical) existence of internal
| and external worlds is part of one possible explanation.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Science doesn't explain anything. Scientific "laws" are just
| very efficiently compressed experimental/observational data
| lisper wrote:
| What do you think an explanation _is_?
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| > So... our perceptions of the world include a constant
| stream of overwhelming evidence that the world is classical,
| a 3-D space inhabited by objects that exist in particular
| places at particular times. So when evidence comes along that
| this isn't actually true, it can cause some pretty severe
| cognitive dissonance, and at best it demands an explanation
| of why the world appears classical even though it isn't.
|
| It would be extremely difficult for anybody to accept the
| evidence provided by quantum mechanics without some
| additional explanation for how our mind constructs a
| "classical" reality to go along with it. Modern physics
| happened along with a materialistic explanation of the origin
| of mind to go along with it, I don't think either could have
| advanced without the other.
| lisper wrote:
| > It would be extremely difficult for anybody to accept the
| evidence provided by quantum mechanics without some
| additional explanation for how our mind constructs a
| "classical" reality to go along with it.
|
| No, that's not true. For a very long time an explanation of
| how classical reality emerges from quantum mechanics was
| lacking, and the prevailing view was essentially "a miracle
| happens" (a.k.a. the wave function "collapses", whatever
| that might actually mean). Quantum mechanics was accepted
| as an explanation nonetheless simply because it explained
| the data better than any available alternative, and it
| still does.
| 0thgen wrote:
| well said. It might seem like semantics but I think getting
| people to think of science using the way you defined it would
| resolve a lot of these debates (plus many other other
| fashionably nonsensical ideas)
| lisper wrote:
| Thanks. Just to give credit where it's due, this
| characterization of the scientific method as being about
| seeking explanations of data is not my idea, it's due to
| Karl Popper. The best accessible exposition of Popper's
| position IMHO is by David Deutsch in The Fabric of Reality,
| chapter 7. Well worth a read.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Whilst it definitely helps being able to understand it I don't
| think it's a prerequisite, you only have to look to what we
| know of the quantum world to see that.
| KHRZ wrote:
| Well history doesn't belong to historians, people can believe any
| fan fic happened, as is tradition. Medicine doesn't belong to
| biology, there's a long traditional culture of alternatives. Art
| doesn't belong to artists, because anything is subjectively art.
| Philosophy doesn't belong to philosophers, who is to say some
| published philosophy is better than some drunken rant?
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| > It has become a dominant view in the philosophy of time that
| Einstein's Theory of Relativity showed that the passage of time
| is an illusion, and that in fact the past, present, and future
| all coexist.
|
| The first paragraph is already troubling for me, the "fact the
| past, present, and future all coexist" is a gross
| misinterpretation of general relativity, a borderline esoteric
| atrology-type view, and I can't believe that such mistaken view
| grew to be the "dominant view in the philosophy".
| crazydoggers wrote:
| I don't think it's a gross misinterpretation. General
| relativity does show that what one observer would consider the
| future can exists as the present of another observer, and vice
| versa.
|
| As time is part of the 4 dimensional Minkowski space, saying
| that the future, past and present don't coexist would be like
| saying left doesn't exists when you're going right.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Bergson emphasised the cultural and technological context in
| which Einstein formulated relativity and argued that a theory of
| time that relies on clocks but doesn't understand their history
| and significance, is incomplete
|
| This is hard to get on board with. A theory of time is incomplete
| without a history of clocks? Have I misunderstood?
| uoaei wrote:
| A theory of time is only complete without a history of clocks
| if you believe a theory of time can be completely physically
| correct, period.
|
| Do you know of any completely physically correct theories?
| whatshisface wrote:
| Relativity isn't even about clocks, and is practically
| difficult to verify with any but the absolute best... its
| most common applications are related to radiation physics.
| The only conflict science has with philosophers is its role
| as a stumbling block for people with high verbal abilities
| and a belief that they don't have to know anything about the
| subject they're writing about. If they had the same attitude
| towards glassblowing or archeology they would have the same
| results.
| croes wrote:
| You wouldn't know if you would
| CreateAccntAgn wrote:
| It is incomplete in that it cannot replace older ideas of time
| in all contexts. It is perfectly valid/complete for use in
| scientific contexts. But the general population's use the idea
| of time for other purposes as well where Einsteins purely
| Relativistic formulation cannot be a stand in replacement is
| how I read it.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > It is incomplete in that it cannot replace older ideas of
| time in all contexts. It is perfectly valid/complete for use
| in scientific contexts.
|
| It seems to just be saying: your theory uses clocks to
| illustrate it but doesn't include the history of clocks. I
| don't think that's quite what you're describing.
| [deleted]
| jerf wrote:
| I find myself becoming more and more sensitive to this basic
| mistake: We know relativity is wrong somehow. We know quantum
| mechanics is wrong somehow. They're both incredibly correct with
| their predictions but they don't go together, so they can't both
| be right and in the end they both have to be wrong somehow. Two
| of the places where they are both clearly somehow wrong are
| gravity (completely missing from QM, incompatible with
| quantization in relativity) and time (both theories having
| problems with them in the extreme cases).
|
| Therefore, grand pronouncements about how the universe is
| "really" a static four-dimensional object "because that's what
| relativity says" are just wrong, for the exact same reasons.
|
| Perhaps even in the "not even wrong" sense, on the grounds that
| it is no different than taking Newtonian physics and making
| ground pronouncements about the nature of the universe. Newtonian
| physics implies things like "there can be no absolute speed limit
| in the universe"; not just that there isn't one, but that there
| _can 't_ be one for the transforms it uses to be valid. There is
| such a speed limit and the transforms it uses _aren 't_ valid.
| Declaring the universe to have this or that characteristic based
| on relativity is no different than declaring it must not have a
| speed-of-light because that's what Newtonian physics says. The
| only difference is that "everybody" knows the latter is wrong;
| the former is just as wrong.
|
| So in general getting too worked up over what Einstein's
| relativity says about the universe at this level is a waste of
| time, no pun intended.
|
| Science history being what it is, it is quite likely that if we
| ever do penetrate down to what time "really" is it'll be even
| more mind-blowing than a static four-dimensional universe, but
| that's a problem for the future. (And the current leading
| contenders in that theory race I'm not sure are any more
| disruptive than QM already was. Total chaos space/time at scales
| so small that they are in some sense literally microscopically
| microscopically microscopically microscopic may be vaguely
| unsettling, but to my mind doesn't seem to add anything
| philosophically material that QM didn't already introduce.)
| hetman wrote:
| This was a well thought out post which deserved better than the
| lazy downvotes from individuals who have nothing to contribute
| to the conversation.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It doesn't look downvoted to me. I think this post of true
| and nice, but I can't think of anything to discuss about it.
|
| Because of the way the ranking system works here, spats like
| the philosophy/physics thing will always rise to the top, I
| think.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| By my reading, a lot of it just boils down to the "all models
| are wrong, but some are useful" aphorism, but denigrating
| models' usefulness in a philosophical context, calling the
| implications of relativity and whatnot "a waste of time".
|
| I think this is overly reductive. Indeed, many consequences
| that follow from the nonexistence or impossibility of a
| certain thing, event, or effect are brittle to the physical
| model being refined to include additional effects. But plenty
| of important consequences follow from existence or
| possibility and can be directly supported through
| experimental evidence.
|
| For instance, Newtonian physics predict absolute
| simultaneity: if one observer measures that two events
| occurred at the same time, then all other observers will
| measure likewise, regardless of their relative position or
| velocity. But special relativity violates this, instead
| predicting relativity of simultaneity. As long as special
| relativity's predictions hold to any extent (which,
| experimentally, they do), then simultaneity is definitely
| relative and not absolute. There's no way to recover absolute
| simultaneity short of postulating a grand cosmic conspiracy.
| And learning that the arrow of time isn't absolute definitely
| isn't a waste of time!
|
| Also, I think it's unwarranted to say that just because some
| consequences of nonexistence have historically been
| invalidated in the past, all the consequences of nonexistence
| in our current theories are inevitably going to fall over
| with further evidence. Why should we expect a priori that we
| haven't yet discovered a single true invariant of our
| universe? After all, some observed invariants, such as the
| conservation of energy, have withstood the numerous revisions
| to our physical models, and it seems odd to blithely assert
| that they'll be invalidated any year now. In the limit, to
| say that exceptions will be discovered to every principle
| ever is to say that the universe doesn't run on any kind of
| laws.
|
| And if we do concede that at least some of our current
| models' invariants truly do hold in reality, then it's no
| longer a waste of time to study their implications, since
| some subset of our findings will remain just as accurate now
| matter how far our models are revised.
| jerf wrote:
| I would characterize it more as "All models are wrong, some
| are useful, but it is never useful to use a model in a
| domain it is _known_ to be wrong in ".
|
| We are extremely confident in the wrongness of relativity
| and QM in this matter, so using them in that particular way
| for philosophy is really a waste of time.
|
| One could sensibly write philosophy of the form " _If_
| string theory is true, then... " or " _If_ Loop Quantum
| Gravity is true, then... ", because while those are not
| proved, they are also not proved actively wrong in the
| relevant ways.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't comment about the voting on comments. It
| never does any good, and it makes boring reading._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| There's also the uncollected-garbage problem, which this case
| is a good example of.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
| whatshisface wrote:
| There could be a Newtonian speed limit if there was a drag
| force with a vertical asymptote in v through the medium that
| filled space.
| jerf wrote:
| I would call that something other than Newtonian physics,
| since that would constitute adding a term of some sort to
| some important equations, but I'm willing to agree this is
| just arguing about definitions and it doesn't really matter
| in the end since it still wouldn't be right. :)
| whatshisface wrote:
| Forces are terms added to the left hand side of 0 = ma.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Fair enough, though it's at least equally so for the intuitions
| of Bergson et. al.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Perhaps it went over my head but in summary he wanted the
| scientific process of discovery in physics research to stop
| because his philosophy couldn't keep up?
| lisper wrote:
| Yep. Pretty much. This is a not-uncommon sentiment among
| philosophers. It's the only way they can cope with the shift in
| the societal power dynamic that has happened since Newton and
| Darwin and Einstein and Turing and Bell. Science has subsumed
| philosophy, and the philosophers really hate that.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| But hasn't it always been that way? Copernicus was a
| revolution to philosophy. Newton was a revolution to
| philosophy.
|
| Is it just that we're more aware of the current philosophers,
| who will be forgotten in a century or two? Or is the
| philosophical opposition actually stronger now?
| lisper wrote:
| > But hasn't it always been that way? Copernicus was a
| revolution to philosophy. Newton was a revolution to
| philosophy.
|
| Yes, that's why I specifically cited Newton. I could have
| cited Copernicus as well, and Galileo, and a few dozen
| others but I didn't want to get too long-winded.
|
| > Is it just that we're more aware of the current
| philosophers, who will be forgotten in a century or two? Or
| is the philosophical opposition actually stronger now?
|
| If anything I think it's weaker now than in the past
| because the fruits of science are so evident to everyone.
| It is plain to everyone that smart phones did not come out
| of philosophy departments. The niches in which philosophers
| can make meaningful contributions are getting narrower and
| narrower, which makes them more and more desperate and
| shrill. But I predict they will eventually go the way of
| the alchemist. Or maybe the astrologer. Astrologers figured
| out a way to eke out a living as charlatans. Maybe
| philosophers will too. (Maybe they already have.)
| uptheroots wrote:
| Philosophy can approach many questions that currently feel
| out of the realm of science
| ajuc wrote:
| And say nothing of value about them, but sound smart while
| they do it ;)
| whatshisface wrote:
| Actual philosophers are not as bad at the false answers
| thing as some people who rise to public attention,
| instead they serve the useful purpose of making people
| realize their preconceived notions about their own
| thoughts and their relationship to reality are not as
| sound as they may have thought, by virtue of the many
| different ways others have self-consistently answered the
| same questions.
|
| I think you'll need some sense of metaphysics and
| epistemology and maybe even ethics to function, most
| people have one (they know what they think the word
| "reality," means, they can distinguish between thoughts
| and observations, they wouldn't kill unless they were
| seriously threatened) but when that is extended into a
| "let me tell you how the world works" thing it becomes
| philosophy done bad, which can only be resisted by
| knowing philosophy done right (the impassive if
| frustrating collection of a lot of possible solutions).
| It is a universal human trait to want to answer these
| questions, even the so-called "rationalists" have a web
| page with a list of doctrines. The only way to do it
| wrong is to come up with one answer and think that it is
| _the_ answer because it 's the only answer you know and
| that is what learning philosophy is for.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I think this is part of why there can be such a rejection
| when research and experiments come knocking at philosophy's
| door to refute past discussions.
| lisper wrote:
| Like what?
| crazydoggers wrote:
| Love this vsauce video for some examples
|
| https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE?si=FmgmYH8BDWrkIcMJ
|
| There's still a lot of value in philosophy when we use it
| to think about how we structure and rationalize the
| world.
|
| Even if science gives us ever better models of the
| underlying reality of the universe, there's still the
| understanding of how we conceptualize that reality and
| what it means to us. Specifically in ways that don't
| require religion or supernatural beings, nor in purely
| psychological means of perception or physiology.
|
| I think of it as the study of the emergent properties of
| complex information processing. It can do things like
| help us talk about the minds of others, for example
| future AI, potential extraterrestrial intelligences, or
| even other terrestrial intelligences (dolphins, octopus,
| etc)
| lisper wrote:
| You might enjoy this:
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-
| ontology.h...
| crazydoggers wrote:
| Love it. I like that curve ball last paragraph..
| unexpected yet follows perfectly.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| How do you believe the results you are getting? What
| makes such a belief justified?
|
| What is the nature of consciousness?
|
| What are things beautiful? What makes something
| ascetically pleasing.
|
| Why any of this exists at all?
|
| What is the purpose of this existence?
|
| Is something ethical? Science can provide answer about
| consequences of an action but cannot determine if said
| action is moral or ethical.
|
| ... science is not a book of facts. It is merely a
| process for testing a hypothesis. It is not a replacement
| for philosophy, it is underpinned by philosophy.
| lisper wrote:
| Those are all very good questions, and I can't do them
| justice in an HN comment. But here's a first cut:
|
| > How do you believe the results you are getting? What
| makes such a belief justified?
|
| Read David Deutsch "The Fabric of Reality" chapter 7.
|
| > What is the nature of consciousness?
|
| Read Daniel Dennett, "Consciousness Explained".
|
| > What are things beautiful? What makes something
| ascetically pleasing.
|
| Read Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene" (and, if you
| want to get deep into these weeds, "The Extended
| Phenotype").
|
| > Why any of this exists at all?
|
| What makes you think that any of this does exist at all?
|
| > What is the purpose of this existence?
|
| What makes you think that this existence has a purpose?
|
| > Is something ethical? Science can provide answer about
| consequences of an action but cannot determine if said
| action is moral or ethical.
|
| Read "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod.
| (The Selfish Gene addresses this as well.)
|
| > science is not a book of facts.
|
| That's true.
|
| > It is merely a process for testing a hypothesis.
|
| No, it's not "merely" that. It is a process for producing
| good explanations that account for observations. That
| turns out to be tremendously powerful.
|
| > It is not a replacement for philosophy, it is
| underpinned by philosophy.
|
| No, it isn't. The existence of philosophy (and
| philosophers!) can be explained by science.
| dventimi wrote:
| Few scientists try to answer these questions for me. I
| expect philosophers to have as much humility.
| username332211 wrote:
| On your last question ethics in particular is rather
| interesting. I think it's the field where the decline of
| philosophy is most obvious.
|
| Ethics is supposed to answer real-life questions, like
| "How do I live a moral life?".
|
| Yet philosophical movements, that actually tired to
| answer such questions, like the stoics and the epicureans
| are long gone. When you read on the actual writings of
| contemporary philosophers you'd see impossible moral
| standards - "It takes 5 dollars to save a starving
| African child, a night out with friends is the equivalent
| to abandoning a bus of drowning children to their
| deaths"[1]
|
| It's impossible to live by such philosophy, except for
| those that think of themselves as some sort of creature
| of pure evil who cares nothing of right and wrong.
|
| Because philosophy is useless as a guidance to life,
| right and wrong are now decided by the encyclical, the
| fatwa and the resolutions at the party congress,
| depending on your religion.
|
| [1] https://daily-philosophy.com/peter-singers-drowning-
| child/
| whatshisface wrote:
| Maybe living impassively at the top of a rich world
| hegemony while children are starving is wrong but we are
| too used to it to notice.
| username332211 wrote:
| Ohh, it's not just the rich world that's guilty. Do you
| think there are no bars in Haiti? Do you think they don't
| waste stuff on "personal luxuries" in Bangladesh? Do you
| think they don't waste their time and resources on
| shopping malls in Ethiopia? They waste resources that
| could have gone to the malnourished children of their own
| country!
|
| Monsters, the lot of them, just as bad as the rich-
| worlders. _Ethics demands_ we _all_ live joyless lives of
| endless toil until every child is fed.
| esafak wrote:
| > "It takes 5 dollars to save a starving African child, a
| night out with friends is the equivalent to abandoning a
| bus of drowning children to their deaths".
|
| These philosophical thought experiments are too
| simplistic to offer any guidance. Five dollars does not
| save any starving child; he will need food for the rest
| of his childhood. And they also neglect the social aspect
| of the problem. What if the whole neighborhood or country
| is poor? It is more sensible to attack this problem using
| the tools of developmental economics; how can we
| alleviate the problem for everyone over time?
| username332211 wrote:
| I completely agree. Funnily enough, the first published
| work of economics Glasgow professor of moral philosophy
| wrote a book about systemic issues. Before that,
| philosophers from Aristotle to Hume dealt with matters
| like credit and currency as ethical issues.
|
| The only think I'd have to add is I don't think the
| thought experiment is merely "too simplistic". It's an
| evil sophistry designed to make people believe ethical
| conduct is unattainable.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Rich people living in third world countries would
| definitely be included in that especially because rather
| than some vague "foreign policy" being the causal link
| for culpability they can often be the corrupt individuals
| creating the problem themselves. Saying "people who live
| in penthouses next to Indian slums might be living their
| life wrong too" is not exactly an expression of
| disagreement.
| [deleted]
| username332211 wrote:
| Perhaps I was unclear. I wasn't talking about rich
| people. Poor people need to enjoy life just as much as
| rich people, if not more. Who spends more time at bars,
| the rich or the poor?
|
| Do you think an Ethiopian community is immoral because it
| puts effort into having enjoyable festivals, dignified
| funerals and large weddings? Think of all the effort that
| could have gone to the starving children!
|
| Here's a more practical question for you. There's a
| homeless guy who hangs around my place. He's definitely
| not malnourished, in fact he's somewhat fat. If I give
| him a dollar, should he return it to me with instructions
| to give it to African children instead?
| whatshisface wrote:
| Having a party when there are people starving outside may
| actually be immoral, yes, even in Ethiopia. I'm not
| basing my argument on "Americans bad" so much as
| admitting there could be something to this whole "how are
| you so able to ignore the extreme suffering of others?"
| question... Maybe we would be better if none of us could
| do that.
| uoaei wrote:
| On the other hand, the hubris of physicists to call their
| trade a replacement for philosophy exposes the fatal flaw in
| scientism.
| lisper wrote:
| Why is that a fatal flaw?
| hetman wrote:
| It's also worth adding that the scientific method is
| fundamentally based on unprovable axiomatic assumptions.
| In other words it's still philosophy all the way down. To
| be clear, I don't think all philosophical ideas are
| equally valid and this particular set of axioms has
| proven quite useful in practice, but at best all we can
| really say is that it provides a user window for
| examining reality. We don't know how wide that window
| happens to be and how much of reality we can see through
| it.
|
| We don't even know if the scientific method is the best
| it could be in what we use it for. After all, it was only
| expanded with the idea of falsification in the 20th
| century yet we were still doing useful science before
| than.
| mannykannot wrote:
| In practice, science is, and has been, rather flexible
| about its assumptions, and, ironically, has been
| criticized for that by philosophers - and yet it has been
| remarkably successful, arguably because it gives a lot of
| weight to empiricism and not so much to debating axioms.
|
| > We don't know how wide that window happens to be and
| how much of reality we can see through it... We don't
| even know if the scientific method is the best it could
| be in what we use it for.
|
| It is telling that these sentiments are not followed by
| something beginning "analytical philosophy, in
| contrast..."
|
| > [Science] was only expanded with the idea of
| falsification in the 20th century yet we were still doing
| useful science before than.
|
| It was doing de facto, though somewhat ad hoc,
| falsification long before Popper focused his attention
| it. The philosophy of science is much more descriptive
| than prescriptive.
|
| Having said this, you may be surprised to learn that I
| spend a some of my free time reading and thinking about
| various aspects of philosophy. I must say, however, that
| I feel that western metaphysics lost its way in its
| attempt to address fundamental questions through the
| analysis of language.
| lisper wrote:
| > It's also worth adding that the scientific method is
| fundamentally based on unprovable axiomatic assumptions.
|
| No, it isn't. This is a very common myth, but it is in
| fact a myth. Science has no axioms.
|
| > We don't even know if the scientific method is the best
| it could be in what we use it for.
|
| That's true. But what we do know is that the scientific
| method is _vastly_ more effective than anything else
| humans have come up with in helping us navigate our
| existence and exercise some degree of control over our
| destiny.
|
| > After all, it was only expanded with the idea of
| falsification in the 20th century yet we were still doing
| useful science before than.
|
| That is also true, and that is one of the reasons to
| believe that the scientific method is special and
| unlikely to be improved upon. It's not just an arbitrary
| choice. It is privileged, and there is actually reason to
| believe that this privileged status is a reflection of
| some underlying reality. But this is not an _axiom_ ,
| it's a _result_.
| rz2k wrote:
| Isn't scientism the idea that we have a set of knowledge
| that is conclusively known along with a heavy reliance on
| authority, while science is about inquiry,
| experimentation and searching for theories?
|
| A physicists dismissing philosophy as out of date implies
| that we are already on the optimum path to discovering
| the remaining knowledge about the universe to be learned.
| uoaei wrote:
| > A physicists dismissing philosophy as out of date
| implies that we are already on the optimum path to
| discovering the remaining knowledge about the universe to
| be learned.
|
| It implies they _believe_ that. Which is ultimately a
| dogmatic ideology. That is why I call it scientism and
| not science. Obviously we cannot know if that is the case
| or not because of the nature of time (the future holds
| answers that the past cannot, yet remains inaccessible to
| beings such as us). There is no good reason to believe
| that our theories aren 't missing some crucial aspects
| which were already understood and subsequently lost.
|
| I myself am a physicist. I once had the confidence to
| assert that physics is the One True Way to understand
| life, the universe, and everything and that progress is
| inevitable (Newton's "shoulders of giants"). I no longer
| believe this is the case because of my explorations
| through the traditions of thought present in philosophy.
| For sure I can cram the lines of discourse that most
| interest me into quasi-physics-based theories (post-
| structuralism is especially interesting as a systems
| person) but that's not to say that physics can represent
| everything there is to know. Physics is a language just
| like any other and there are some ideas that physics
| simply cannot express.
| lisper wrote:
| No, scientism is simply the belief that the scientific
| method is applicable to all areas of intellectual
| inquiry, and that it's the most productive such method.
| The dismissal of philosophy is a straightforward
| corollary to that belief.
|
| Note that the scientific method is self-correcting even
| in this regard: if someone can demonstrate a more
| productive method of inquiry, someone following the
| scientific method would accept that new method, just as
| they would accept _any_ hypothesis that is demonstrably
| superior to the current state of the art.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Because even if you have experimental results in your
| favor, you still need epistemology to tell you why you
| can believe the results of the experiments. And you can't
| derive epistemology _from_ experiments.
|
| Logical positivism tried to do this, and failed. Michael
| Polanyi's _Personal Knowledge_ pretty much killed logical
| positivism, because he showed that no scientist is in the
| fully objective position that was required to set up and
| evaluate the experiments.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Why is that flaw fatal? Just borrow epistemology from the
| philosophers of whatever. Purity and inter-field spats
| are stupid, scientists just want the results.
| shellac wrote:
| > Michael Polanyi's _Personal Knowledge_ pretty much
| killed logical positivism, because he showed that no
| scientist is in the fully objective position that was
| required to set up and evaluate the experiments.
|
| That's an unusual claim. It's typically attributed to the
| criticisms of Popper and Quine, after which the
| foundations were undermined.
| lisper wrote:
| > you still need epistemology to tell you why you can
| believe the results of the experiments
|
| No, you don't. This is a common mistake. Science is not
| about _knowledge_ , it's about _explanations_. The whole
| idea of "knowledge" is just part of a vast web of
| _explanations_ that turn out to be exceptionally good at
| accounting for the data.
|
| > logical positivism
|
| The mistake of logical positivism is the unjustified
| assumption that there exists such a thing as "truth", and
| that this thing is accessible to us by thinking. It
| isn't. It's a consequence of the empirical observation
| that the scientific method converges towards something.
| "Truth" is just a label that we attach to the thing that
| it's converging to (or at least appears to be converging
| to -- we won't know if that limit actually exists until
| we get there).
| uoaei wrote:
| Then it's a common mistake that many scientists and
| technologists make, which further informs their
| worldviews and ideologies.
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, that's true. Many people, including scientists,
| don't actually understand how the scientific method
| works.
|
| However, there is also another possibility, and that is
| that the word "knowledge" is being used in two different
| ways. "Knowledge" in science is often used as a shorthand
| for "The best explanation we currently have in hand, one
| which has so far withstood all attempts to falsify it."
| This is different from the kind of knowledge studied by
| epistemology, but it is a not-entirely-unreasonable use
| of the word.
| hetman wrote:
| How do you define "explanation"?
| dventimi wrote:
| Speech which conjures in the mind of the listener a model
| of the world with which they can make deductions about
| their sensory experiences
| lisper wrote:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-
| explanation/
| dventimi wrote:
| Explain "believe."
| borlanco wrote:
| "Believe" means you are willing to consider some results
| as premises for your next deduction.
| dventimi wrote:
| What I'm willing to do is very personal. Personally, I
| don't need epistemology to judge whether I'm willing to
| consider some results for my next deduction, and no
| philosopher is in a position to tell me otherwise.
| borlanco wrote:
| What you say means you're a philosopher too!
|
| Seriously, philosophy is a personal endeavor. You derive
| your own, make your own deductions, and you believe in
| them. That makes it valid for you.
|
| But ... if your philosophy is about how the world works,
| about some aspects of reality, and you want to ensure
| that both your philosophy and reality agree, then you can
| choose to do science:
|
| 1. From your philosophy, derive some hypothesis.
|
| 2. Check you hypothesis with some experiment.
| dventimi wrote:
| Not to me, it doesn't. To me, philosophy is a profession
| inhabited by professionals working in academic
| departments, teaching students, and publishing in
| journals. That's not me. I'm just a human doing human
| things. We've existed for millions of years before
| philosophers and their departments and their journals
| came along.
| ajuc wrote:
| We've seen countless subjects on which philosophers argued
| for centuries solved by physicists and mathematicians.
|
| We've yet to see one example going the other way.
|
| At best philosophers provide interesting questions. At
| worst they are just paperpushers categorizing the work
| others did into pointless and arbitrary categories and
| arguing about them :)
| bee_rider wrote:
| What's scientism?
| mellosouls wrote:
| It has a couple of definitions but the relevant one here
| is a blinkered, complacent over-confident belief in the
| power of science to explain everything, often accompanied
| by an ignorant dismissal of philosophy.
|
| More here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
| RichardCA wrote:
| It's nearly always a strawman, waiting for someone to
| come along and rescue it with a steelman. And that seems
| to be what Bergson is trying to do.
|
| I mean yes, of course, the undergraduate Physics student
| is being handed a packet of metaphysics when they get the
| Einstein lectures on SR and GR. And it's very seductive,
| if you can crack through enough of the math to hear the
| music in it. The idea that Einstein is a "continuator of
| Descartes" just means you can learn all that stuff, get
| A's in every single class at Cal Tech or someplace else,
| and in the end you are still left with the exact same
| Dualism.
|
| That might be a valid critique of Science in general, but
| I don't see how it attacks Einstein. There is also a more
| subtle point about the history of measurement. We started
| to depend on accurate measurement of time when we needed
| it to circumnavigate the planet. Even without Einstein we
| still needed the Lorentz and Fitzgerald corrections to
| the classic Newton equations. It would have happened
| without Einstein, and maybe we'd have different
| metaphysics in that case. That idea is more interesting
| to me than what Bergson seems to be offering.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| If scientists had the slightest bit of societal power, our
| response to climate change wouldn't be this shameful, and
| climate activists wouldn't be so successfully marked for the
| daily sessions of "5 minutes of hate".
|
| What did gain societal power is capitalism is brute-forcing
| its way into everything via "tech" that then pats the people
| in gold-plated cages, who allow their genius to be used for
| that on the back, while feeding them crumbs. Where nothing
| that can't be counted matters and destroying the environment
| -- both physical and that of society, that which minds get
| formed in -- is perfectly rational, as long as there is a
| cent of profit to be made.
|
| Some people get really high on it, think someone's "won"
| (what?) and it might even be them, but let's not pretend
| _any_ of the great scientists that get name-dropped so easily
| have anything to do with that, or haven 't even spoken
| against it at length.
|
| > Our entire much-praised technological progress, and
| civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the
| hand of a pathological criminal.
|
| -- Albert Einstein
|
| > Let us not forget that human knowledge and skills alone
| cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. Humanity
| has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral
| standards and values above the discoverers of objective
| truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha,
| Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the
| achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.
|
| > What these blessed men have given us we must guard and try
| to keep alive with all our strength if humanity is not to
| lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and its joy
| in living.
|
| -- Albert Einstein
|
| > As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are
| united into larger communities, the simplest reason would
| tell each individual that he ought to extend his social
| instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same
| nation, though personally unknown to him. [..] This virtue,
| one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise
| incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and
| more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient
| beings.
|
| -- Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man" (1871)
|
| > It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the
| people you love.
|
| -- Stephen Hawking
|
| Science is a tool. More precisely, it's a _method_ to make
| and improve and gauge tools. But those tools can 't ask
| questions (we didn't somehow put there first), they cannot
| judge. They can tell you if something is fair according to
| your parameters and heuristics, but they know nothing of the
| inherent value in being fair, they can't answer "should I be
| fair?", and the same for everything else that actually
| matters.
| lisper wrote:
| > Science is a tool. More precisely, it's a method to make
| and improve and gauge tools. But those tools can't ask
| questions (we didn't somehow put there first), they cannot
| judge. They can tell you if something is fair according to
| your parameters and heuristics, but they know nothing of
| the inherent value in being fair, they can't answer "should
| I be fair?", and the same for everything else that actually
| matters.
|
| And do you think that philosophy has shed any light on the
| answer to the question, "Should I be fair?" Or indeed on
| what the word "fair" actually _means_?
|
| You're not wrong that science can't answer these questions,
| but what science _can_ do is demonstrate that, for example,
| different people want different things, and have different
| ideas of what words like "fair" mean. We can then go one
| to (say) devise systems that maximize value according to
| some quality metric, but that's the best we can do. We
| cannot somehow derive some universal standard of "fairness"
| because no such thing exists. And we don't need
| philosophers to tell us that.
| 725686 wrote:
| Anytime this philosophy vs. science comes up I like to quote
| Richard Feynman:
|
| "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as
| ornithology is to birds."
| lisper wrote:
| > We have first order knowledge of things
|
| No, we don't. We only have first-order knowledge of our
| _perceptions_ of things. And quantum mechanics shows us that
| those perceptions can be radically different from the underlying
| reality.
|
| Of course, Einstein can be forgiven for making this mistake
| because he didn't know about the Bell inequality and the
| subsequent experiments, so it is understandable that he would
| cling to the hope that something would come along and rescue QM
| from the EPR paradox by somehow extracting classical reality from
| the Schroedinger equation. But modern thinkers cannot be so
| readily absolved.
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