61–70 of 179 posts
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On the other hand, the hubris of physicists to call their trade a replacement for philosophy exposes the fatal flaw in scientism.
What’s scientism?
More here:
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On your last question ethics in particular is rather interesting. I think it's the field where the decline of philosophy is most obvious. Ethics is supposed to answer real-life questions, like "How do I live a moral life?". Yet philosophical movements, that actually tired to answer such questions, like the stoics and the epicureans are long gone. When you read on the actual writings of contemporary philosophers you'd…
Maybe living impassively at the top of a rich world hegemony while children are starving is wrong but we are too used to it to notice.
Monsters, the lot of them, just as bad as the rich-worlders. Ethics demands we all live joyless lives of endless toil until every child is fed.
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Maybe living impassively at the top of a rich world hegemony while children are starving is wrong but we are too used to it to notice.
Ohh, it's not just the rich world that's guilty. Do you think there are no bars in Haiti? Do you think they don't waste stuff on "personal luxuries" in Bangladesh? Do you think they don't waste their time and resources on shopping malls in Ethiopia? They waste resources that could have gone to the malnourished children of their own country! Monsters, the lot of them, just as bad as the rich-worlders. Ethics demands w…
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On the other hand, the hubris of physicists to call their trade a replacement for philosophy exposes the fatal flaw in scientism.
What’s scientism?
I mean yes, of course, the undergraduate Physics student is being handed a packet of metaphysics when they get the Einstein lectures on SR and GR. And it's very seductive, if you can crack through enough of the math to hear the music in it. The idea that Einstein is a "continuator of Descartes" just means you can learn all that stuff, get A's in every single class at Cal Tech or someplace else, and in the end you are still left with the exact same Dualism.
That might be a valid critique of Science in general, but I don't see how it attacks Einstein. There is also a more subtle point about the history of measurement. We started to depend on accurate measurement of time when we needed it to circumnavigate the planet. Even without Einstein we still needed the Lorentz and Fitzgerald corrections to the classic Newton equations. It would have happened without Einstein, and maybe we'd have different metaphysics in that case. That idea is more interesting to me than what Bergson seems to be offering.
> 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 is incomplete in that it cannot replace older ideas of time in all contexts. It is perfectly valid/complete for use in scientific contexts. But the general population's use the idea of time for other purposes as well where Einsteins purely Relativistic formulation cannot be a stand in replacement is how I read it.
It seems to just be saying: your theory uses clocks to illustrate it but doesn't include the history of clocks. I don't think that's quite what you're describing.
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Ohh, it's not just the rich world that's guilty. Do you think there are no bars in Haiti? Do you think they don't waste stuff on "personal luxuries" in Bangladesh? Do you think they don't waste their time and resources on shopping malls in Ethiopia? They waste resources that could have gone to the malnourished children of their own country! Monsters, the lot of them, just as bad as the rich-worlders. Ethics demands w…
Rich people living in third world countries would definitely be included in that especially because rather than some vague "foreign policy" being the causal link for culpability they can often be the corrupt individuals creating the problem themselves. Saying "people who live in penthouses next to Indian slums might be living their life wrong too" is not exactly an expression of disagreement.
> It has become a dominant view in the philosophy of time that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that the passage of time is an illusion, and that in fact the past, present, and future all coexist. The first paragraph is already troubling for me, the "fact the past, present, and future all coexist" is a gross misinterpretation of general relativity, a borderline esoteric atrology-type view, and I can't believe t…
As time is part of the 4 dimensional Minkowski space, saying that the future, past and present don’t coexist would be like saying left doesn’t exists when you’re going right.
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…
There could be a Newtonian speed limit if there was a drag force with a vertical asymptote in v through the medium that filled space.
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There could be a Newtonian speed limit if there was a drag force with a vertical asymptote in v through the medium that filled space.
I would call that something other than Newtonian physics, since that would constitute adding a term of some sort to some important equations, but I'm willing to agree this is just arguing about definitions and it doesn't really matter in the end since it still wouldn't be right. :)
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Ohh, it's not just the rich world that's guilty. Do you think there are no bars in Haiti? Do you think they don't waste stuff on "personal luxuries" in Bangladesh? Do you think they don't waste their time and resources on shopping malls in Ethiopia? They waste resources that could have gone to the malnourished children of their own country! Monsters, the lot of them, just as bad as the rich-worlders. Ethics demands w…
Rich people living in third world countries would definitely be included in that especially because rather than some vague "foreign policy" being the causal link for culpability they can often be the corrupt individuals creating the problem themselves. Saying "people who live in penthouses next to Indian slums might be living their life wrong too" is not exactly an expression of disagreement.
Do you think an Ethiopian community is immoral because it puts effort into having enjoyable festivals, dignified funerals and large weddings? Think of all the effort that could have gone to the starving children!
Here's a more practical question for you. There's a homeless guy who hangs around my place. He's definitely not malnourished, in fact he's somewhat fat. If I give him a dollar, should he return it to me with instructions to give it to African children instead?