>> But for all I can tell at this moment in history I am the only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do.
What, in the whole world? That sounds a bit messianic, if I may.
The crisis in physics is not only about physics
111–120 of 179 posts
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#112As usual with Sabine, this article blatantly misrepresents how science is done and how actual scientists think, and serves mainly to portray herself as the only person in the field capable of rational thought. People in the comments here are picking up on this when it takes an unfair swipe at medicine, but it really applies to the whole article. I am not going to bother doing a line-by-line rebuttal, because I've alr…
One thing that bothers me is that indeed it has been resolving inconsistencies that often lead to progress, as the author points out. What would you say to that? What are the still unresolved inconsistencies in physics? To me it feels more like that we just mostly ran out of the obvious inconsistencies to resolve.
The list here might be contain some interesting examples of current explanatory gaps for you:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in...
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bit like saying phlogiston is an unexplained part of physical theory. Once you understand the underlying mechanics of thought, it stops being mysterious and really stops being a problem at all.
Not at all. A quick Google of the subject will demonstrate it is still an (maybe, the ) outstanding subject of philosophy and perhaps ultimately physics. Check any online encyclopedia, but if you have any respectable references that disagree, I'd be genuinely interested. Eg: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
I never said there was broad consensus among all philosophers and physicists, etc. It takes generations for these ideas to truly die, just as it did with other widely believed falsehoods. No one really attacked consciousness from a mechanistic perspective until Turing, and that work wasn't followed up on outside of the AI community until the 70's and 80's, and it wouldn't be until very recent advances in AI that others took these philosophical ideas originating from computer science seriously.
So in the philosophy of physics and the mind, there are whole departments filled with tenured professors who came of age in their thinking at a time when consciousness was a Hard Problem, and have focused their mental tools on a class of solutions (qualia, observer-triggered wave collapse, etc.) which are irreconcilable with mechanistic physical reality, making the problem even more intractable and mysterious. It'll take another generation or two before the ideas of Dennett, Dawkins, Tegmark, etc. get more widely recognized and consciousness finally goes the way of phlogiston.
For references, I recommend Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", and really anything by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins--materialistic explanations of consciousness pervade their work. For a compatible (hah!) physical perspective, I suggest Max Tegmark:
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of nitpicking, it's nitpicking - literally speaking, removing the eggs of the lice you've probably already removed from someone's hair. It's a fussy activity (of necessity), takes forever, and would probably seem quite an annoying thing to someone (likely a child) who thinks you've already solved their pressing problem and should maybe leave them alone now.
Speaking of nitpicking or the more practical nit combing, none is needed if a 0.9% suspension of Spinosad (1) is applied to a child’s dry hair and washed off after 10 minutes. You may happily and confidently send your kids back to school after this one treatment despite the horrified looks of parents and teachers ;-) (1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3273925/
Or you can just let your kid have that fuschia mohawk she wants. The eggs will fall off the shaved part and the peroxide and glue will kill off the rest in the unshaved part.
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aka "Consciousness Explained Away" Consciousness is still an extant and very unexplained phenomenon.
That's a bit like saying phlogiston is an unexplained part of physical theory. Once you understand the underlying mechanics of thought, it stops being mysterious and really stops being a problem at all.
We don't yet understand the "underlying mechanics of thought" though.
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#116There is alot going on in physics besides things directly related to the standard model. Running out of important things to study is of no concern. As a random example check out the microscopy work by recent nobel prize winner Eric Betzig. I think people fail to appreciate the many frontiers that exist in just understanding how matter interracts with itself. The past was exciting because we got to discover new buildi…
Another frontier is light/matter interactions. This is an area where a ton of progress has occurred in a wide range of areas. And that work often has direct implications. I worked on a microscope recently that coupled 6 different lasers into a single fiber for fluorescent illumination. The tools we got to work with... some are from 100 years ago and are still great, others, like spatial light modulators and other lig…
One of the other students in my lab put it this way (very paraphrased):
If you break up the Nobel Prizes and look at the optics based ones, ones that made up some new microscope, or used light in some new way, then Optics becomes a top 5 domain. In that a lot of Nobels come out of manipulating light. And a lot of the time, the sum total 'new thing' worthy of a Nobel is just a single optical object, sometimes it's five, not much more. But, the thing is, if you look at how long those experiments took to preform, from concept to working prototype taking some kind of data, then Optics varies wildly. Some, like DIC imaging, is just a single 1/4 waveplate in the middle, and it took Nomarski nearly a decade and a half to get it just right. Some, like STED, were built in Hell's living room over about a month. And that's the thing about Optics research, it's just blind luck most of the time. Sure, the equations help, but they tend to come after the apparatus is up and running. You can spend a few weekends in your living room in your underwear tinkering about while watching the game, or you can spend your entire career painstakingly laboring in the nauseating dark of the lab all alone. Incremental progress just doesn't seem to be a thing in Optics; you either get it right or you don't. Anyone that has been in totality during an eclipse knows that there is a huge difference between 99% and 100% coverage. Optics is exactly like that.
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#117There is alot going on in physics besides things directly related to the standard model. Running out of important things to study is of no concern. As a random example check out the microscopy work by recent nobel prize winner Eric Betzig. I think people fail to appreciate the many frontiers that exist in just understanding how matter interracts with itself. The past was exciting because we got to discover new buildi…
Yeah, sure, but she's writing about the foundations of physics. I'm in biophysics in part because I want to have an impact in < 1 kiloyears.
Lots going on in the foundations as well, esp. cosmology. Particle physics is hardly the end all be all. I mean the reality is that for going significantly beyond the Standard Model you just need higher and higher energies -- energies that might even be impossible for humanity to explore ever. One could build a better accelerator which Sabine opposes because it's unclear whether it will yield anything (but honestly that's science. If there were guarantees, it wouldn't be called "research"). Or one can theorize and do thought experiments and hope that one will discover mathematical constraints that rule out a big class of models.
It's not like she has a better plan. She says "new and better methods". I mean that's exactly what physicists try and pursue. I highly doubt that an ambitious young scientist wldn't try and get a cool publication if they could think of a novel theory. But the reality is that novel ideas that fit all the existing experimental constraints are very very very hard to figure out. People work on them but lack of a million new models a year is not because of some groupthink but because physics is hard.
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bit like saying phlogiston is an unexplained part of physical theory. Once you understand the underlying mechanics of thought, it stops being mysterious and really stops being a problem at all.
We don't yet understand the "underlying mechanics of thought" though.
It depends on what you mean. We understand that it is a mechanical, computational process. As opposed to, say, the reigning theory of mind in philosophical circles which is dualist. (Spiritualism in academia in the 21st century... sigh.)
We have not yet mapped out the wiring diagrams of our brains which result in the human experience of consciousness. But that's a technological limitation in brain scanning and simulation. We also haven't yet created AI machines that exhibit what we would call consciousness, but we have good ideas of how to do so and are making progress. In both cases we know there is no need to invoke dualist answers, whether it be souls, ghosts in the machine, or 'qualia.'
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#119It feels from the outside, academic research is performed by an individual or small group that culminates into a paper at the end. When attacking large problems in physics or biology this seems short sighted. A potentially better way would be to attack the problem in an organized manner with teams researching various aspects of the problem and building off of each other. Remove the whole 'paper writing/journal articl…
Grants at a coarse level attempt to serve this purpose.
Re: The crisis in physics is not only about physics
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all. A quick Google of the subject will demonstrate it is still an (maybe, the ) outstanding subject of philosophy and perhaps ultimately physics. Check any online encyclopedia, but if you have any respectable references that disagree, I'd be genuinely interested. Eg: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
I never said there was broad consensus among all philosophers and physicists, etc. It takes generations for these ideas to truly die, just as it did with other widely believed falsehoods. No one really attacked consciousness from a mechanistic perspective until Turing, and that work wasn't followed up on outside of the AI community until the 70's and 80's, and it wouldn't be until very recent advances in AI that othe…
I feel like this is a bit of an oversimplification of a complicated topic. For example, qualia is not a solution, it's a problem! And while Dennett does present an interesting picture (especially in the way he resolves qualia), there is a reason his book is nicknamed "Consciousness Explained Away" -- he simply defines away many of the interesting parts of the problem.
Also, I don't really like the way you're describing these professors of philosophy. These people have spent their lives studying this problem and adjacent topics. Sure you may be absolutely convinced that "things that conflict with our understanding of mechanistic physical reality must be untrue," others believe "what almost all people perceive to be true about their internal experience cannot be dismissed when discussing the nature of that experience." I think this topic is much more debatable than you are making it out to be.