Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein • Hacker News Board

Re: Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein

#81

Post by lisper » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

circlefavshape wrote: post #43

lisper wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

Science doesn't explain anything. Scientific "laws" are just very efficiently compressed experimental/observational data

What do you think an explanation is?

Re: Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein

#82

Post by lisper » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 7:36 PM UTC

hetman wrote: post #41

lisper wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that a fatal flaw?

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 t…

> 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.

Re: Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein

#83

Post by uoaei » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 7:40 PM UTC

rz2k wrote: post #38

lisper wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that a fatal flaw?

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.

> 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. The cultural narrative of progress is so strongly asserted, yet what we know of as "history" is such a narrow and skewed perspective.

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.

Re: Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein

#84

Post by uoaei » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 7:41 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #35

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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 th…

Then it's a common mistake that many scientists and technologists make, which further informs their worldviews and ideologies.

Re: Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein

#85

Post by mannykannot » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 8:09 PM UTC

hetman wrote: post #41

lisper wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that a fatal flaw?

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 t…

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.

Re: Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein

#86

Post by lisper » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:39 PM UTC

uoaei wrote: post #84

lisper wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Then it's a common mistake that many scientists and technologists make, which further informs their worldviews and ideologies.

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.

Re: Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein

#87

Post by lisper » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:42 PM UTC

empath-nirvana wrote: post #77

lisper wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein

#88

Post by lisper » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:48 PM UTC

hetman wrote: post #47

lisper wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

How do you define "explanation"?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-explanation/

Re: Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein

#89

Post by borlanco » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:48 PM UTC

dventimi wrote: post #76

borlanco wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Believe" means you are willing to consider some results as premises for your next deduction.

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.

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.

Re: Time Doesn’t Belong to Physics – When Bergson met Einstein

#90

Post by lisper » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 9:50 PM UTC

crazydoggers wrote: post #46

lisper wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what?

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…