Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

[T-hawk]

There is no bus, it's all an abstraction.

[TheHumanHydra]

Let the iron-tinted fluid mass of particles flow!

[darrelljs]

I don't understand intelligence, just stupidity, and I'm only reading the posts I can understand.

So Darrell's.

Krill makes a play for QoTM .

Darrell

[Bacchus]

Why move particles to move particles if you could instead move particles to move particles? A) no reason, B) you couldnt, C) who's that 'you'?

[shallow_thought]

Why move particles to move particles if you could instead move particles to move particles? A) no reason, B) you couldnt, C) who's that 'you'?

I have a nasty feeling this is actually a valid philosophical insight into existence .

[Bacchus]

If it were, then it wouldn't be.

But then that's also a Tractarian position, as it explicitly says that to understand it is to understand it to be meaningless.

[ipecac]

If it were, then it wouldn't be.

But then that's also a Tractarian position, as it explicitly says that to understand it is to understand it to be meaningless.

The Tractatus isn't half as bad. Even though it's a theory of language that dismisses itself, it doesn't go full-blown nihilistic about reality.

[shallow_thought]

A) Can the universe be explained by purely scientific / material processes?
B) If, so is a reductionist view (that the study, understanding and modelling of the universe at the smallest scales can be - at least theoretically - used to explain and derive the behaviour of the universe at larger scales) correct and appropriate?

As far as (A) is concerned, I'm going to say "yes". I don't think I need to defend the mainstream scientific view (4 billion year old Earth, evolution, Standard Model etc.) here, so the open question is which "non-physical" bits might need to be added to meet human intuition / explain rare, non-repeatable events. I'm going to assert that there is a ... lack of global consensus, shall we say? ... on that, and claim that there is no obvious need to do so, so I'm happy with my answer, certainly for the purposes of this post. Much more complex is the question of whether that has direct moral implications, and that I'm going to put off until later.

So, (B). This is probably the question I'm best qualified to pontificate on, and my answer is "no". That definitely needs some justification. I'm going to start with some basics: this is more for my benefit than for the readers of the thread . I need to build up my position from the ground, and remove some of the mental rust, before I can get to the good bits.

There are various ways you can judge a scientific model. Some of these include:
- Is it elegant?
- Is it useful?
- Is it true?

Consider for example explaining the motion of the heavenly bodies, as observable to classical astronomers. The epicyclic model of motion was useful - it allowed predictions of where these bodies would be in the future. Its elegance is questionable; it needed constant refinement and tweaking as observations improved, in ways that only made it more complex. We certainly don't consider it "true" now.

Moving on to Kepler's laws of planetary motion, these are useful (certainly within the limits of classical observation): they apply* to the planets discovered since classical times, which is not true of the epicyclic model. They are mathematically elegant. Are they "true"? Well, perhaps. They are still valid, but they have been completely superceded by Newton's mechanics.

*I think - if I'm wrong I don't believe it wrecks my use of this as an example.

Newton's mechanics is much more useful than Kepler's. It not only describes how planets move, but also cannonballs. Elegance is a much more subjective view of course, and you could probably argue either way. It's certainly more complex. Is it "true"? Is it "more true" than Kepler's? How do you define these terms and judge these questions? While it invokes this "gravity" and uses it to explain all sorts of phenomena, it doesn't explain gravity itself. How much of an advance is it from "the planets move according to this formula" to "... and this formula can be derived from this assumption"? It's only really an advance because the second model broadens the set of predictions.

The issue is that we can only judge the "truth" of a model in terms of its predictive power (and perhaps its elegance - you can argue whether this is sensible, but scientists certainly do judge things that way). So, we can add a fourth way to judge the model:

- How complete is it?

I choose the word "complete" here deliberately ("powerful" would be a less loaded choice). I believe that the heart of the "reductionist" position is that is possible to construct a sequence of increasingly broad, usefully predictive models as our understanding increases, which will converge on a single, all-powerful model (albeit still restricted by physical measurement limits and computational power). And at that point, we might be genuinely able to say that our model was "true".

The thing is, we're nowhere near such a model; I believe that to assume that scientific process would eventually generate such a model is an act of faith. I'll go into why I think this in my next post.

[ipecac]

As far as (A) is concerned, I'm going to say "yes". I don't think I need to defend the mainstream scientific view (4 billion year old Earth, evolution, Standard Model etc.)

There needs to be some nuance here.

All is not well in Physics, where non-radiative 'dark' matter and energy is invoked to save GR. However, such dark matter-energy is not accounted for in the Standard Model, and given that the conventional account has the universe to consist of ~95% dark matter-energy that means that we don't even begin to understand 95% of the universe.

Abiogenesis, the intersection of chemistry and biology, is also plagued with problems as is well known.

[shallow_thought]

As far as (A) is concerned, I'm going to say "yes". I don't think I need to defend the mainstream scientific view (4 billion year old Earth, evolution, Standard Model etc.)

There needs to be some nuance here.

All is not well in Physics, where non-radiative 'dark' matter and energy is invoked to save GR. However, such dark matter-energy is not accounted for in the Standard Model, and given that the conventional account has the universe to consist of ~95% dark matter-energy that means that we don't even begin to understand 95% of the universe.

Abiogenesis, the intersection of chemistry and biology, is also plagued with problems as is well known.

I don't disagree. However, these don't seem terribly different in nature to past mysteries that have been solved by further scientific research. Certainly (as a crude example), if one wanted to make the argument "science cannot explain the origin of life; there is no evidence it will ever be able to explain it; it is therefore best to invoke something from 'outside' to explain it; therefore life is in some sense 'special'; this has moral implications that are absent in the purely materialistic view" it's not stupid. I would want to "discuss" several of those steps in detail before accepting it, but it's an example of why the answer to (A) could have implications for the "rightness" of moral positions.

However, in the absence of a specific alternative non-material model or strong evidence of ongoing scientific failure (decades or centuries is the sort of timescale i have in mind), I'm going to take (A:yes) as my position.