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

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

#91

Post by lisper »

johnnyworker wrote: post #40
lisper wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Pretty much. This is a not-uncommon sentiment among philosophers. It's the only way they can cope with the shift in the societal power dynamic that has happened since Newton and Darwin and Einstein and Turing and Bell. Science has subsumed philosophy, and the philosophers really hate that.

If scientists had the slightest bit of societal power, our response to climate change wouldn't be this shameful, and climate activists wouldn't be so successfully marked for the daily sessions of "5 minutes of hate". What did gain societal power is capitalism is brute-forcing its way into everything via "tech" that then pats the people in gold-plated cages, who allow their genius to be used for that on the back, whil…

> Science is a tool. More precisely, it's a method to make and improve and gauge tools. But those tools can't ask questions (we didn't somehow put there first), they cannot judge. They can tell you if something is fair according to your parameters and heuristics, but they know nothing of the inherent value in being fair, they can't answer "should I be fair?", and the same for everything else that actually matters.

And do you think that philosophy has shed any light on the answer to the question, "Should I be fair?" Or indeed on what the word "fair" actually means?

You're not wrong that science can't answer these questions, but what science can do is demonstrate that, for example, different people want different things, and have different ideas of what words like "fair" mean. We can then go one to (say) devise systems that maximize value according to some quality metric, but that's the best we can do. We cannot somehow derive some universal standard of "fairness" because no such thing exists. And we don't need philosophers to tell us that.

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

#92

Post by lisper »

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.

No, scientism is simply the belief that the scientific method is applicable to all areas of intellectual inquiry, and that it's the most productive such method. The dismissal of philosophy is a straightforward corollary to that belief.

Note that the scientific method is self-correcting even in this regard: if someone can demonstrate a more productive method of inquiry, someone following the scientific method would accept that new method, just as they would accept any hypothesis that is demonstrably superior to the current state of the art.

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

#93

Post by crazydoggers »

lisper wrote: post #90
crazydoggers wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You might enjoy this: https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...

Love it. I like that curve ball last paragraph.. unexpected yet follows perfectly.

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

#94

Post by dang »

hetman wrote: post #32
jerf wrote: post #16

I find myself becoming more and more sensitive to this basic mistake: We know relativity is wrong somehow. We know quantum mechanics is wrong somehow. They're both incredibly correct with their predictions but they don't go together, so they can't both be right and in the end they both have to be wrong somehow. Two of the places where they are both clearly somehow wrong are gravity (completely missing from QM, incomp…

[flagged]

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There's also the uncollected-garbage problem, which this case is a good example of.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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

#95

Post by dventimi »

borlanco wrote: post #89
dventimi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not to me, it doesn't. To me, philosophy is a profession inhabited by trained professionals working in academic departments, teaching students, and publishing in journals. That's not me. I'm just a human doing human things. We've existed for millions of years before philosophers and their departments and their journals came along.

More important, following this thread upward we see:

1. The urge of some scientists to offer science as a replacement for philosophy was scored as a fatal flaw

2. The question was asked, "Why is this a fatal flaw?"

3. That question was answered with the claim that something called "epistemology" is needed in order to make decisions based on experiences. Evidently, "epistemology" is an essential ingredient to human decisions which would be lost if we tried to replace philosophy with science.

4. But I said, no, I personally don't need "epistemology"--whatever that is--to make decisions.

5. Then it was claimed that whatever I'm doing to make decisions is inherently "philosophy." Yet, I'm not doing anything special, so if I'm doing philosophy then I guess everyone is doing philosophy, even scientists.

6. If that's true then what happened to "epistemology" and the fatal flaw of omitting it in the vain attempt to substitute science for philosophy?

This really isn't adding up.

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

#96

Post by foobar1962 »

jerf wrote: post #16

I find myself becoming more and more sensitive to this basic mistake: We know relativity is wrong somehow. We know quantum mechanics is wrong somehow. They're both incredibly correct with their predictions but they don't go together, so they can't both be right and in the end they both have to be wrong somehow. Two of the places where they are both clearly somehow wrong are gravity (completely missing from QM, incomp…

> I find myself becoming more and more sensitive to this basic mistake: We know relativity is wrong somehow. We know quantum mechanics is wrong somehow.

Please don't use the word "wrong". Alchemy is wrong. Astrology is wrong. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics get many things right but are probably "incomplete" in the same way Newtonian mechanics wasn't wrong, only incomplete.

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

#97

Post by skullgrid »

jerf wrote: post #16

I find myself becoming more and more sensitive to this basic mistake: We know relativity is wrong somehow. We know quantum mechanics is wrong somehow. They're both incredibly correct with their predictions but they don't go together, so they can't both be right and in the end they both have to be wrong somehow. Two of the places where they are both clearly somehow wrong are gravity (completely missing from QM, incomp…

"All models are wrong, some are useful"

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

#98

Post by likeabbas »

lisper wrote: post #4

> We have first order knowledge of things No, we don't. We only have first-order knowledge of our perceptions of things. And quantum mechanics shows us that those perceptions can be radically different from the underlying reality. Of course, Einstein can be forgiven for making this mistake because he didn't know about the Bell inequality and the subsequent experiments, so it is understandable that he would cling to t…

>But modern thinkers cannot be so readily absolved

No, but they can go on a 40 year goose chase trying to reconcile the many different string theories that don't have any physical evidence to substantiate.

QFT is one of the most successful theories we've created, but GR is still our best theory regarding gravity. There's still no evidence for the graviton. We probably need something else besides QFT to describe the nature of reality

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

#99

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

foobar1962 wrote: post #96
jerf wrote: post #16

I find myself becoming more and more sensitive to this basic mistake: We know relativity is wrong somehow. We know quantum mechanics is wrong somehow. They're both incredibly correct with their predictions but they don't go together, so they can't both be right and in the end they both have to be wrong somehow. Two of the places where they are both clearly somehow wrong are gravity (completely missing from QM, incomp…

> I find myself becoming more and more sensitive to this basic mistake: We know relativity is wrong somehow. We know quantum mechanics is wrong somehow. Please don't use the word "wrong". Alchemy is wrong. Astrology is wrong. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics get many things right but are probably "incomplete" in the same way Newtonian mechanics wasn't wrong, only incomplete.

Newton mechanics was wrong: because it didn’t account for the relativistic terms, all the equations are off by some amount. It turns out that we can ignore the error in practical contexts, but that’s still being “wrong”. Another example: the math of a geocentric solar system is often precise enough for practical purposes and so, when it’s simpler, it can be useful to use it instead of Newtonian or relativistic models.

I think this is important because physicists that popularize often make grandiose claims about how reality is when they should know better and then these claims form popular imagination in ways that shutdown thought.

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

#100

Post by throw310822 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #12

> Bergson emphasised the cultural and technological context in which Einstein formulated relativity and argued that a theory of time that relies on clocks but doesn’t understand their history and significance, is incomplete This is hard to get on board with. A theory of time is incomplete without a history of clocks? Have I misunderstood?

It's to take in due account the cuckoos, of course.
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