(June 23rd, 2018, 23:28)ipecac Wrote: A popular conception of science in general, and physics in particular, is that it provides a more or less complete description of reality, with the gaps remaining being not very significant or assuredly to be filled in due time. I've called this view Dawkinsian because he can be credited for being the populariser of this concept as well as how a certain type of worldview can be built on it.
Going with this is some sense of assuredness about science, and how our knowledge about regular behaviour in the past can be extended into proclaiming about regular laws that prevent anything irregular from behaving. This gives a very comfortable closed system, with pesky supernatural stuff assured to not happen, a sense of reliability because everything is, in principle, knowable. In short, a sense of 'we have it all figured out (or practically and essentially so)'.
The conclusion is that the idea discussed at the beginning of this post about physics giving good comprehensive view of the universe, that 'we have essentially figured everything out' just doesn't work, not least because we don't understand 95% of the stuff in the universe. It can only be sustained by an ignorance of the current state of physics. Whether physicists will be able to resolve the problems remains to be seen.
So, some derailment, but at least partially because this overlaps with the things I was about to talk about anyway .
Dawkins is a pain. In the way he thinks, the way he uses language and in his attitude to challenges to his views he reminds me of nothing more than the more extreme evangelical christians I ran into at university (and by "ran into" I do mean went to their churches, went to their discussion groups, not just pointed at them across a student bar). I'm not even convinced by the science he's famous for - the selfish gene idea as expressed by him is pretty much directly analagous to the "reductionist" viewpoint as expressed in this thread: there exists a single, fundamental level of conception from which all other phenomena can be derived (at least theoretically). If I'm going to have to defend the whole of science against the particular form he popularises (and what a strawman he has given his opponents!) I'm out of here.
Nonetheless, T-Hawk has put forward some sweeping claims in this thread around the power of the materialist/reductionist view and the implications of it, so personally find it appropriate to point out the weaknesses in our current scientific understanding. "Dark Matter" is certainly one area to look at. For some reason I don't understand it does seem to evoke particularly strong views (both within the scientific community and the broader public): I suspect it fails the "elegance" test for a lot of people, both with the "let's just suppose this exists" and the "it's 95% of stuff", in a way that wouldn't be true if it was only a few percent.
As for "knowing everything", I don't think that is the view of most scientists, certainly day-to-day. As individuals, they really can be certain they don't know everything: bump into someone in the canteen from another department who is also working at the cutting edge and mutual ignorance is the order of the day. As a broader group, I'd say that the "it's a useful model" tendency is more common than the "then we will know the mind of God" tendency. It's just that the second group sells better (possibly there's also a correlation between being totally, wierdly dedicated to ideas and making progress in awkward areas).
Objections to people invoking the "pesky supernatural" tend to come from the way that it's pretty much a waste of time in most contexts. If it's not repeatable, it's harder to do science (although possible - see most of archaeology and paleontology). If there's not a lot of evidence, it's even more difficult. If it's not possible to make testable predictions it's pretty much impossible. There's the further problem that there's no one "supernatural" model. There's a hodge-podge of beliefs and labels, and (I'm thinking now more of people who believe in "ghosts" rather than more subtle thinking) a blindness to the implications of an idea, and how much more complex it makes the world picture as a whole.
(June 23rd, 2018, 23:38)ipecac Wrote: Let's spin off one point and talk about how it relates to the main discussion: according to the most popular account, we haven't directly observed 95% of the stuff that makes up the universe, and we haven't the least idea about how it behaves. But the existence of this stuff is generally accepted based on indirect evidence. So while direct evidence is of course desired and much better, we can still reasonably talk about the existence of stuff without direct evidence
Since indirect evidence is 'allowable', I argue we can 'get at' the existence of the immaterial even if at best indirectly. Qualia points to consciousness, moral intuitions points to a moral order and free will, mathematics points to an abstract order, the immateriality of communication through a physical medium points to minds and how they relate (as well as how the immaterial can possibly be linked or interact with the material), the physical needing a beginning points to the non-physical, deep order points to a designer.
General relativity "works". It predicts the precession of Mercury, the way time flows in gravity wells, gravity waves from neutron-star pairs. It doesn't need "rescuing" by DM any more than Newtonian mechanics needed rescuing by SR/GR. However, observation suggests that there is a lot more mass out there than can be explained by the amount of observable matter. By "observable" we mean pretty much "interacts with electromagnetic radiation", because that and gravity are the only long-ranged forces.
Now, we already know of "unobservable" matter in this sense - neutrinos (compare with neutrons, which are neutral particles but do react with EM because their internals do). We only knew about them indirectly initially, from the "missing" momentum and energy from beta decay. I believe that we have subsequently been able to "observe" them more directly via their short-range "weak" interactions: even here, we're reliant on looking at the outcomes of those interactions, as in practice we rely on EM observation even in labs. Nonetheless, science went from explaining observation through the existence of a non-observable particle, through expanding on that (three different flavours of neutrinos to match election, muon, taon), predicting possible behaviour (mixing of the flavours) to finally more "direct" detection methods (flashes of light in huge tanks of water deep underground). Yet there's no huge backlash saying "those flashes of light are not direct enough", and science happily used them in models for decades prior to the "direct" detection. And neutrinos are common, with huge numbers spat out by the sun all the time. They are just very, very light (I'm not 100% sure it's been absolutely proven they have rest mass - I'd have to check).
DM is indeed different (if it exists). We don't have lab experiments with observations that can only be explained using it. But that is true of all sorts of other bits and pieces of science - all large scale gravitational behaviour and true high-energy physics has to be deduced from historical observation (see also most of archeology and paleontaology, again). But the statement "we haven't the least idea about how it behaves" is simply false. We know damn well that it's massive and doesn't react with EM. Like neutrinos for the first decade or so of their "existence" (in the model), it just sits there, as a thing, without any conceptual link to the rest. We developed one for neutrinos, it's plausible we'll develop one for DM.
Now, DM might not exist. Development of alternative frameworks of gravity may provide an explanation of the observations. A lot of physicists do find it inelegant. But it's a useful, plausible component in the overall model.
None of this actually contradicts the argument that ipecac is making across those two paragraphs, it's just me saying that there's less moral weight in this particular "gap" than he is assigning. I absolutely agree with the first sentence of the second paragraph, that indirect observation is allowable. I just disagree with the conclusions drawn from that evidence.
(Sneak preview: I personally "resolve" some of this by believing that "free will" is a "false but useful" model; its perception meshes so hard with the way our meat-brains work that trying to think "outside" it is futile on a day-to-day basis. "Moral intuition" is a difficult tool to justify using, but it's no less justifiable than any other position, and is - again - useful, in a way that nihilism isn't. )
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
(June 24th, 2018, 05:42)shallow_thought Wrote: Dawkins is a pain. In the way he thinks, the way he uses language and in his attitude to challenges to his views he reminds me of nothing more than the more extreme evangelical christians I ran into at university (and by "ran into" I do mean went to their churches, went to their discussion groups, not just pointed at them across a student bar).
Tangent: I find this interesting. If you're willing to share, why did you attend their meetings? What statements or attitudes did you consider extreme (trying to measure whether I'm one of those extreme evangelicals)? Just for curiosity's sake.
(June 24th, 2018, 05:42)shallow_thought Wrote: "Dark Matter" is certainly one area to look at. For some reason I don't understand it does seem to evoke particularly strong views (both within the scientific community and the broader public): I suspect it fails the "elegance" test for a lot of people, both with the "let's just suppose this exists" and the "it's 95% of stuff", in a way that wouldn't be true if it was only a few percent.
It could reasonably be viewed as a copout, though of course invoking the existence of something hitherto unobservable had been ultimately successful in many instances. Historically such an approach is not very satisfying at the stage when there is no evidence (e.g. Pauli and the neutrino, as below).
Quote:As for "knowing everything", I don't think that is the view of most scientists, certainly day-to-day. As individuals, they really can be certain they don't know everything: bump into someone in the canteen from another department who is also working at the cutting edge and mutual ignorance is the order of the day. As a broader group, I'd say that the "it's a useful model" tendency is more common than the "then we will know the mind of God" tendency. It's just that the second group sells better (possibly there's also a correlation between being totally, wierdly dedicated to ideas and making progress in awkward areas).
Agreed, I don't object to most scientists. Scientists are actually familiar with the discipline, warts and all, but outsiders (or polemists like Dawkins) tend to esteem science much more highly than it should be. Naturally, scientists don't generally try to deter such people from such illusions.
Quote:Objections to people invoking the "pesky supernatural" tend to come from the way that it's pretty much a waste of time in most contexts. If it's not repeatable, it's harder to do science (although possible - see most of archaeology and paleontology). If there's not a lot of evidence, it's even more difficult. If it's not possible to make testable predictions it's pretty much impossible.
More relevant examples of historical non-repeatability would be the study of biological (evolution) and geological history. How reliably can we establish the idea of e.g. monophyly is an interesting topic, but that would be a digression.
Quote:General relativity "works". It predicts the precession of Mercury, the way time flows in gravity wells, gravity waves from neutron-star pairs. It doesn't need "rescuing" by DM any more than Newtonian mechanics needed rescuing by SR/GR. However, observation suggests that there is a lot more mass out there than can be explained by the amount of observable matter. By "observable" we mean pretty much "interacts with electromagnetic radiation", because that and gravity are the only long-ranged forces.
I say "rescuing" because the theory breaks down badly under such observations, and thus is not as accurate as desired. It needs rescuing because physicists decide that the models need to account for everything, i.e. it doesn't completely meet their standards. There's inevitably some kind of subjectivity bound in the evaluation of how 'good' a model is.
Quote:Now, we already know of "unobservable" matter in this sense - neutrinos (compare with neutrons, which are neutral particles but do react with EM because their internals do). We only knew about them indirectly initially, from the "missing" momentum and energy from beta decay.
It is true that the neutrino hypothesis was successful. But it is worth remembering Pauli's half-serious lament when he postulated its existence to rescue the certain conservation laws in the case of beta decay, "I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected." He also described it as a "desperate remedy".
We are at a similar stage as when Pauli postulated the neutrino, (during which time there was no evidence to show that it existed). Unsurprisingly, not everyone is completely comfortable with the situation (as Pauli wasn't). Of course the main difference is we've moved past the initial stage where there is no evidence to the point where at the current time we have some amount of indirect evidence for dark matter.
Quote:DM is indeed different (if it exists). We don't have lab experiments with observations that can only be explained using it. But that is true of all sorts of other bits and pieces of science - all large scale gravitational behaviour and true high-energy physics has to be deduced from historical observation (see also most of archeology and paleontaology, again).
When I say direct observation, I mean that our instruments haven't directly interacted with it in any observable way. I understand that events indicating new particles detected by high-energy physics has to be repeated at least a number of times as a necessary condition to conclude that a new particle has been discovered.
Quote:But the statement "we haven't the least idea about how it behaves" is simply false. We know damn well that it's massive and doesn't react with EM.
Alright, I can modify that to 'we know almost nothing about its behaviour' and my overall point still stands.
Incidentally, I had a look at Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction. Even though it's by the same author as the VSI on Causation I pointed to above, I can't really recommend this one, the discussion there is just way too light. However, it could still be useful if you have doubts that the questions being discussed here are real questions, and that some considerable thought is being applied to them. It could also help clarify terminology and generally present issues in a more structured way than we have hit on here.
I looked at it here because THH and T-Hawk have now gone into the last major branch of metaphysics left untouched -- object permanence, change and the passage of time.
Great, I've let myself be sucked into other threads like this one instead of catching up on PB39 reporting.
I feel compelled to point out a few things that have been overlooked.
It's not true that "the supernatural" and "what can be studied by science" are necessarily disjoint.
This is frequently just assumed, and you can define things in such a way that it's true, but in Mormonism, that's not necessarily true. If you've read the Mistborn series (by a Mormon author), that's a case where the supernatural and God can very much be studied by science.
You can't presume that the Christian God is necessarily all-powerful.
This is related to the above.
This is a standard assumption even from atheists (which I've always thought is just weird), but one possible interpretation of God, even aside from Mormonism, is that God is stupendously powerful but not all-powerful -- perhaps like Eru Ilúvatar in Tolkien's Middle-earth.
If your worldview is sufficiently reductionist, there's not even such a thing as a gene.
This entire discussion was started by "Genejack Factories". It's very hard or outright impossible to say that there even is such a thing as a gene if your worldview is sufficiently reductionist.
I can go into details if people are interested.
The genetic code is not actually deterministic.
This is taught because it's close enough to the truth, and it's a good pedagogical simplification, but it's not actually true.
Sometimes a protein will cut off prematurely, just by random chance. Sometimes the wrong amino acid will be attached to a protein. (There are ways of correcting for this: the usual is that an incorrectly translated protein will fold strangely, typically such that things that should be on the inside are on the outside. That can be detected, attacked, and destroyed.)
This is before we even get into things like how selenocysteine is coded for (or even whether or not that is part of the genetic code at all), or alternative splicing.
More generally, chemical reactions are not deterministic either.
Chemical reactions rarely actually cleanly result in a single product. The technical term for that actually happening is "quantitative". (I bet that sounds strange to a non-chemist.)
For instance, if you're nitrating toluene to generate TNT (trinitrotoluene), you'll get side reactions such as nitration at the meta positions and toluene polymerization.
Why this happens varies: it can be just a roll of the dice; or it might be sensitivity to precise conditions that may not be known or are practically controllable.
I don't think I've seen "assume we have infinite resources" or "assume both evolution and genetics do not exist" yet, which both frequently happen in these sorts of philosophical discussions and are both pet peeves of mine. (Both are fine if you knowingly invoke them and understand their extreme limitations.)
(June 24th, 2018, 05:42)shallow_thought Wrote: General relativity "works". It predicts the precession of Mercury, the way time flows in gravity wells, gravity waves from neutron-star pairs. It doesn't need "rescuing" by DM any more than Newtonian mechanics needed rescuing by SR/GR. However, observation suggests that there is a lot more mass out there than can be explained by the amount of observable matter. By "observable" we mean pretty much "interacts with electromagnetic radiation", because that and gravity are the only long-ranged forces.
There's a better in-your-face example of general relativity working that many people overlook because it hasn't existed for long: GPS on smartphones.
The GPS satellites operate under different gravity than you and your smartphone, so that requires a correction for general relativity.
The accumulated error from not accounting for general relativity is approximately 50 microseconds per day. That may not sound like much, but that precision is actually needed as it involves timing signals traveling at the speed of light. And modern computing technology is now so fast that you can say things like "general relativity has large effects" and "the speed of light is slow". Your phone's GPS would stop working in only a few days if we removed the general relativity correction.
If I were to interview someone who said they don't believe in general relativity, I will pull out a smartphone and say "you are required to believe this exists for this job" and then "wait, how did you even get here in the first place"?
(I just realized this presumes the United States is involved -- GPS specifically refers to the system run by the US military. )
(June 24th, 2018, 05:42)shallow_thought Wrote: "Dark Matter" is certainly one area to look at. For some reason I don't understand it does seem to evoke particularly strong views (both within the scientific community and the broader public): I suspect it fails the "elegance" test for a lot of people, both with the "let's just suppose this exists" and the "it's 95% of stuff", in a way that wouldn't be true if it was only a few percent.
In short, such 'undetectable objects hypotheses' if wrong amount to adding epicycles to save the theory. That's why people are uncomfortable with it.
Quote:If your worldview is sufficiently reductionist, there's not even such a thing as a gene.
Yeah, we've talked through this and T-Hawk said that on his view all sciences, once sufficiently developed, would drop concepts like "genes" as being imprecise and will reformulate their findings in terms of (philosophical) atoms.
This lookback pointed me to the fact that I never explicitly addressed this question of T-Hawk's:
Quote:How about a computer virus/worm whose code includes self-mutation, so that it has the possibility of adapting itself to exploit remote-code-execution vulnerabilities and replicate itself into more computers? Would you call that process evolution by natural selection? What if it replicated itself onto hardware with enough robotic controls that it could start building more computers to make copies of itself onto? What if it mutated so much that it was capable of outputting statements like "I have free will" and responding to stimuli indistinguishably from how a human would? (Serious question, I don't know where you'd stand on any of that.)
As for "evolution by natural selection" -- there could be cases where such a process is quite similar. I have a hard time imagining how in practice the random mutations to the code could be possible without entirely breaking it, but sure. You could make meaningful and objectively true statements about features of the resultant code to the tune of "this particular piece exists because it allowed the virus to avoid identification by Kaspersky version 2018". As for free will, I think it has since become clear: I see no reason why a process of this sort couldn't eventually result in a being that has free will. I'm a materialist, I don't believe there is anything magic about free will, all sorts of material behavior could amount to having free will, just like all sorts of material behaviour can amount to forming a chain or a spring, and thus sharing in the characteristic behavior of a chain or a spring. I don't really know why you are hung up on the making of statement "I have free will" -- we don't experience free will as a statement, we experience it as acting through conscious choice, that's the characteristic behavior. That would be the key, and empirically untestable, question -- does that virus act consciously or not.
The whole question of whether it's possible to behave exactly as if you had consciousness, including asserting that you have consciousness, without actually having consciousness is what Chalmers, a major modern philosopher on the topic, hangs his thinking about consciousness on. He says it IS possible, at least logically possible. Such beings he calls "philosophical zombies", and points out that their very possibility shows that consciousness facts do not necessarily supervene on physical facts. The suggestion being that there might at least TWO sorts of 'basic facts' in the world -- atomic ones and consciousness ones. That's all explored in his A Conscious Mind, a good book. (I think he is wrong about the possibility though).
Wittgenstein's mesh analogy is very useful to think through some of the issues, I think it's worth rephrasing T-Hawk's and mine position in terms of it.
As a reminder, here is the analogy. Consider a picture and a mesh of some numbered cells. We can give a description of the picture by saying: orient the mesh a particular way and color the cells of the mesh according to the following schedule: 1 - red, 2 - blue, ..., n - red. What you get is a description, or an account of the picture given in terms of the mesh. The relationship between the picture and the mesh is like that of the world and a scientific theory. The theory in general provides an ontology (here are the cells of the mesh, connected in such and such way, and here are the properties individual cells can take), but that ontology itself doesn't say anything about the world as it really is, because any world could be described in its terms, just like any picture could be described, to some level of accuracy, by a particular mesh.
And now for the wall of text:
Now, T-Hawk says that the picture itself, at some basic level, is a mesh. It just is made of cells, with a limited set of properties. There are "really" no cups being red, but there are, really, electrons being at a particular energy level, or some other such basic granules of reality (philosophical atoms). That means that there is just one abstract mesh which is true, and that's a mesh isomorphic to the underlying mesh of reality. Other meshes, say, that of current biology, with its "cells" and "genes" can be no more than approximately and contingently right, where it just so happens that coarser cells of that mesh overlay neatly the cells of the one true mesh. Any difference between a coarser mesh and a finer mesh is also a difference of the coarser mesh with reality, i.e. an error.
What I say first of all is that we have no grounds for believing that the picture itself is a mesh. A mesh is a logical construction, a product of the mind, the reality can be quite refusing to fall neatly into any cellular structure at all. Using the picture analogy, we could just find that no matter how close we look at a curved area, it just remains curved (of course in our physical reality that's not possible, but that's why it's an analogy, not an analysis), and curved in such different ways in different places that any selection of a cell shape that works in one locality stops working in another.
Secondly, there are plenty of even uniform tesselations/tilings which are not isomorphic to each other. Squares will never map onto hexagons, no matter how finely grained you make them. Moreover, two such distinct tessellations could each give us a more accurate account of different parts of the picture. On T-Hawk's view that's an impossibility, his view entails that all tessellations which are untranslatable to the true tessellation simply have irreducible error built into them. My view is that there is no problem here at all — it's right and proper to use different meshes in different cases, and they all succeed or fail on their own terms. No mesh has a priority in "rightness" simply because of its general nature, and specific representations of mesh A can be truer to reality than those of mesh B in some local cases, whilst the opposite can be true in other local cases. The cells of these meshes, the constitutive objects of their ontology all "exist" in the sense that they are all valid conceptualizations of reality, which is what any object can ever hope to be, because the reality itself is not actually split into objects. The picture we look at is not a mesh.
I'd say my view accords with reality much better: "the book is on the table", no matter for that mesh using incredibly coarse and irregular grains, gives us a perfectly true account of a state of affairs, provided that the book really is on the table. That statement needs no translation into particle terms, and it's not clear that such a translation is even possible, as we talked about already. To pursue the analogy, it seems that the cell-boundary for a mesh of macroscopic objects just cuts "across" cells of the mesh of particles -- you have to arbitrarily make a choice what particles are "in" or "out" when making a translation. To T-Hawk it shows an inaccuracy of a coarser-grained mesh, but to me that preference is unjustified -- why shouldn't we say that it's the finer-grained mesh that's inaccurate? If I need to deal with what is in fact a straight line, but am given a hexagonal grid to represent it, it's certainly not the line's fault that it can't be represented except by approximation.
Another point that remains unclear to me is this: even on T-Hawk's view, it's quite clear that meshes other than the true one are possible. Representations using those meshes can be either true or false within whatever accuracy the mesh allows -- that is they can either properly reflect the picture or fail to do so. But in that case it seems completely unfounded to say that representations using coarser meshes are all necessarily "illusory". They might have some error in them, but clearly the amount of that error will vary from one representation to another, so that some are clearly less wrong than other. To say that the book is on the table may not give a precise particle picture, but that statement has more truth to it than saying that the book is below the table (provided, again, that the book really is on the table). There is an even subtler point. Given a fine enough mesh, I can reproduce the representation of the true mesh of reality to any degree of accuracy, even with a mesh that is not isomorphic to the real one (use a finer-grained hexagonal mesh to represent the coarser-grained true square mesh, for example).
This latter problem is actually huge, if you think about it. My, purely human-postulated, finer-grained mesh would work, it would be compatible with any experiment and if it ever fails, I could always just postulate an even finer-grained mesh. No experiment could ever tell me "hey, you've gone past the real grains of reality, hold up". So how do we know? You could say that we'd know once our ontological framework stops yielding new results, once we hit upon a mesh that can quite explain all the existing results without postulating a level of yet smaller parts. But that's a very tricky proposition to establish, and not an avenue of research that's particularly actively followed in fundamental physics, if I understand correctly. I know some people work on "flat spacetime" versions of General Relativity, or even Newtonian interpretations of results generally taken to support GR -- but is there anything similar for particle mechanics? Not to my knowledge. If anything, especially looking at "string theory" the vogue is very much in a different direction -- to go and propose things like infinitesimal dimensions; finer-grainedness for the sake of it very much seems to be the order of the day. So maybe we've already blown through the true mesh of reality, we'd never know. How likely is it, in any case, that any particular human-made mesh happens to have the cells of just the right size and form, fully corresponding to those of the true reality, and not just a close enough approximation that works for the small bit of universe that we actually observe?
I just want to thank all the participants again for re-energizing my philosophical reading, I'm enjoying this a lot. Is this why Penrose got so interested in tilings, I wonder?
(June 25th, 2018, 08:57)Bacchus Wrote: Wittgenstein's mesh analogy is very useful to think through some of the issues, I think it's worth rephrasing T-Hawk's and mine position in terms of it.
I would say that it's wrong to rephrase T-Hawk's position in that way. Taking the analogy of map vs reality, Wittgenstein and you are talking about different types of maps (descriptions and models) while T-Hawk wants to get past all that and talk about the reality itself.
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(Both are fine if you knowingly invoke them and understand their extreme limitations.)
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