This is a tangent to my post Discipline Fundamentalism. Here is the physicist Sean Carroll making an example of my point. I’m not interested in refuting his, well, sheer bluster, since it definitely isn’t an argument. You don’t even need to know any philosophy of science to see how the article is basically a huge red herring. I’m just pointing it out as an example.
But I wish to ask a question; why is it that physicists are often such bad philosophers? Other scientific fields have their own philistines as well (i.e. Richard Dawkins, a biologist), but it is physicists who are always rearing their head to speak on matters outside their own field.
First, why is it that physicists feel obliged to speak on metaphysical matters? I think this is largely an inevitable result of modernism, with its insistence on mechanicism. Of course, no modern philosopher is necessarily such a dullard as Carroll proved himself to be (in fact, usually quite the opposite), but the strand of thought begun by Descartes, interpreted through Hume and then Ayer and the logical positivists and their verificationism are who I will blame for producing such a bowdlerized metaphysics. Metaphysics has been reduced to physics; if you look at the projects of reductionism and eliminativism you see the common streak of immediately identifying the immediately apparent physical reality with the totality of reality. “Reality,” “the world,” and such things that used to refer to a vast amount of possible objects under Platonism and Scholasticism, from ideas to angels and intentions, is assumed to be only coextensive with the physical world. Seeing as physics is the study of the physical world, and it is assumed there is only the physical world, then physics is super-posited to be metaphysics, so now whatever physics cannot find or give evidence for, there would simply exist no evidence for in any possible way. This is why physicists raise their heads when the God question comes about, and they blithely assume that their methods used to study the physical world are complete to study the complete world.
So physicists don’t really have many views within philosophy helping them out to understand that the study of physics won’t help to ascertain the existence of the immortal soul. In fact, many philosophers seem to be simply cheering them on to their doom.
Second, I think physics as a scientific discipline has long been void of scientists with a decent grasp of philosophy. I think this is seen in the resulting confusion over quantum physics, which I would guess stems from an inability to give any meaning to the data observed which goes to support quantum physics. This is why you have not disagreements about the data or the formulas, but disagreements about how to interpret them; but most don’t know that the act of interpretation is a primarily philosophical, not physical, pursuit.
No.
Metaphysics, to be blunt about it is bull. Existence is a set of cause and effect, events and interactions. I dare you to define existence any other way and still be coherent. Everything in existence must by definition have some form of interaction. If there is something in existence which is not interacting then how can it be said to exist at all? The simple answer is it can not.
Therefor everything that exist MUST on some level have observable effects on everything else. This means that all objects are observable, and if there’s some rules and order to existence then it should be possible to deduce and infer what these rules are, and how every thing operate with each other.
Now rules and ‘laws’ must exist for causality to exist, other wise existence would be nothing more then a set of disordered events and arguably could not exist at all. Hence everything in the universe is observable on some level and we are able to infer and deduce what the rules are of it’s operation (i.e. the physics of it all). There is no room left for metaphysics because by definition it is out side this system which means that it’s not interacting with it, and hence does not exist.
Your end note about quantum mechanics shows that you are not well educated in the field (understandable if you are not your self a physics). Interpretations of QM is difficult not because we aren’t philosophers but because the physical nature of quantum systems is fundamentally different then the interaction of classical systems. Hence our data and equations can seem counter intuitive. At a base level this misunderstanding has been cleared up long ago, and the vast majority of the physics community would consider all elements of a quantum systems to be waves, where the particle nature arises from a collapse of the wave function to a discrete wave packet. Do we know everything yet? Of course not, but every day we get closer and we learn more and more. The point is that we know enough now to say that pretty much every claim made involving metaphysics is bull.
You’re doing metaphysics. You’re also assuming a great deal of things with your metaphysics, and portraying perfectly the kind of bowdlerized metaphysics-cum-physicalism I was speaking about. It’s all there in your first assertion of what “existence” is, where I think you mean to say “the set of existing things only includes things with these properties…”
I could challenge you to define what you mean by “existence,” “set,” “cause and effect,” “event,” and “interaction,” where I think it would be quite obvious you haven’t voided yourself of what you call “bull.”
Hear hear! Well said in that response, Bryce. My thoughts were exactly that. Mega-FT seemed to have plenty of metaphysical assertions!
REV