Philosophy

Science writer Anil Ananthaswamy Intro of surveys current theories: If nothing else, these experiments are showing that we cannot yet make any claims about the nature of reality, even if the claims are well-motivated mathematically or philosophically. And given that neuroscientists and philosophers of mind don’t agree on the nature of consciousness, claims that it collapses wave functions are premature at best and misleading and wrong at worst.Anil Ananthaswamy, “What Does Quantum Theory Actually Tell Us about Reality?” at Scientific American One wants to ask, if we cannot make any claims about the nature of reality and there is no agreement about the nature of consciousness, how does Ananthaswamy know that claims about the role of consciousness are “premature,” “misleading,” Read More ›

We’ve written some things about Jordan Peterson and a fair bit about Sam Harris: Here’s an appraisal of their recent debate in Vancouver, moderated by Bret Weinstein : Peterson and Harris spent a large part of the first night discussing what they had in common. For example, both agreed that it was important to establish an objective moral code to live by in the world. The notion of moral relativism was disavowed by both intellectuals, for mostly the same reasons. Furthermore, both agreed that not all religions were equal in their moral claims. However, here Peterson’s focus was positive; he claimed some religions were only conscious of pieces of absolute truth, while other religions, such as Christianity and perhaps Judaism, Read More ›

It wouldn’t really be “us” anyhow. Some thoughts from a political theorist: The moral philosopher Samuel Scheffler at New York University has suggested that the real problem with a fantasy of immortality is that it doesn’t make sense as a coherent desire. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed (even if usually unknown) time limit. We all start with a birth, then pass through many stages of life, before definitely ending in death. In turn, Scheffler argues, everything that we value – and thus can coherently desire in an essentially human life – must take as given the fact that we are temporally bounded beings. Sure, we can imagine what Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, says science has a problem and we need to talk: For the past 15 years, I have worked in the foundations of physics, a field which has not seen progress for decades. What happened 40 years ago is that theorists in my discipline became convinced the laws of nature must be mathematically beautiful in specific ways. By these standards, which are still used today, a good theory should be simple, and have symmetries, and it should not have numbers that are much larger or smaller than one, the latter referred to as “naturalness.” Based on such arguments from beauty, they predicted that protons should be able to decay. Read More ›

Eric Holloway, an electrical and computer engineer, offers some thoughts on how to prevent science from devolving into “scientism.” For an example of scientism, see Peter Atkins’s claim that science can answer all the Big Questions. Here’s John Mark Reynolds’s outline of the general problem: Sometimes a culture takes a right road, sometimes it passes the right way and ends up a bit lost. Western Europe had a chance at the start of seventeenth century to get a few things right, but by the eighteenth century most had taken a worse way: Enlightenment or reaction. Enlightenment lost the wisdom of the Middle Ages, creating the myth of a dark age, and the main enlightened nation, France, ended the seventeenth century Read More ›

Philip Cunningham writes, I just happened to check quantum physicist and philosopher Antoine Suarez‘s youtube channel. He loaded a new video a few months ago after being silent for a few years. Quantum nonlocal correlations come from outside space-time, they cannot be explained exclusively by material links. If the experimenter has free will, then there is free will behind the quantum phenomena. The physical reality requires an author with free will. The world is speakable because it is spoken. Quantum physics: Accessing the invisible through the visible More. Also by Suarez: What Does Quantum Physics Have to Do with Free Will? – By Antoine Suarez – July 22, 2013 Excerpt: What is more, recent experiments are bringing to light that Read More ›

But can the internet handle all the spite and unseemliness? Another risk is the ‘weaponization’ of reviewer reports. Opponents of certain types of research (for example, on genetically modified organisms, climate change and vaccines) could take critical remarks in peer reviews out of context or mischaracterize disagreements to undermine public trust in the paper, the field or science as a whole. Queries to eLife, The BMJ and EMBO Press about this problem revealed only one, mild example (see go.nature.com/2piygkb). But weaponization could be a greater concern for journals that publish work that is more likely to be politicized. One precaution would be to add a disclaimer explaining the peer-review process and its role in scientific discussion. Opening up materials and Read More ›

Science writer John Horgan well remembers going to interview Popper, who had strong views on subjectivism in physics: Words poured from him so rapidly and with so much momentum that I began to lose hope that I could ask my prepared questions. “I am over 90, and I can still think,” he declared, as if I doubted it. Popper emphasized that he had known all the titans of twentieth-century science: Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg. Popper blamed Bohr, whom he knew “very well,” for having introduced subjectivism into physics. Bohr was “a marvelous physicist, one of the greatest of all time, but he was a miserable philosopher, and one couldn’t talk to him. He was talking all the time, allowing practically only Read More ›

Peter Atkins, author of Atkins’ Physical Chemistry (11th edition, 2017) and Conjuring the Universe (2018), divides the Big Questions into two classes: One class consists of invented questions that are often based on unwarranted extrapolations of human experience. They typically include questions of purpose and worries about the annihilation of the self, such as Why are we here? and What are the attributes of the soul? They are not real questions, because they are not based on evidence. Thus, as there is no evidence for the Universe having a purpose, there is no point in trying to establish its purpose or to explore the consequences of that purported purpose. As there is no evidence for the existence of a soul (except in a metaphorical Read More ›

From previous universe: In Penrose and similarly-inclined physicists’ history of space and time (which they call conformal cyclic cosmology, or CCC), universes bubble up, expand and die in sequence, with black holes from each leaving traces in the universes that follow. And in a new paper released Aug. 6 in the preprint journal arXiv—apparent evidence for Hawking points in the CMB sky— Penrose, along with State University of New York Maritime College mathematician Daniel An and University of Warsaw theoretical physicist Krzysztof Meissner, argued that those traces are visible in existing data from the CMB. Daniel An explained how these traces form and survive from one eon to the next. “If the universe goes on and on and the black Read More ›

Most people think we are more than just live bodies but what is the “more”? Frank Turek explains, Here are some types of dualism: 2. Varieties of Dualism: Ontology 2.1 Predicate dualism 2.2 Property Dualism 2.3 Substance Dualism 3. Varieties of Dualism: Interaction 3.1 Interactionism 3.2 Epiphenomenalism 3.3 Parallelism (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy) More. If you don’t think you are 99.44% chimpanzee nd that consciousness is an illusion, you might want to consider what sort of dualism you are. Hat tip: Ken Francis See also: Alternatives to dualism: Post-modern science: The illusion of consciousness sees through itself and From Scientific American: “we may all be alters—dissociated personalities— of universal consciousness.”

f course, once he uses the term “emergent,” it’s game over.  Philosopher Paul Humphreys explains, While atomism is all about burrowing down to basic building blocks, emergence looks upward and outward, to ask whether strange new phenomena might pop out when things get sufficiently large or complex. … Emergence was popular in philosophy of science more than a century ago. Reputable figures such as John Stuart Mill, Henri Bergson and C D Broad suggested that chemistry and biology would struggle to account for the origins of life; perhaps life could only be said to ‘emerge’ from these domains, demanding its own special laws and explanations. Beginning in the 1930s, though, advances in quantum chemistry and the discovery of the structure of DNA Read More ›

Fr. Michael Chaberek author of Aquinas and Evolution, has built a website, Aquinas/Design to advance a philosophically responsible Catholic view on the question of design in nature: Thomistic evolutionists maintain that Aquinas’s philosophy/theology is incompatible with the modern theory of intelligent design (ID). At the same time they say it can be reconciled with neo-Darwinism. This may seem odd even for a non-Christian. There may be different reasons why Thomistic evolutionists chose to counter ID: Some may be ignorant of it, some may fear “the scientific community” and “the scientific consensus.” Still others may actually believe that arguments for ID somehow threaten the old Thomistic arguments for God’s existence known as the Five Ways. However, Thomistic evolutionists have never worked Read More ›

Further to Carlo Rovelli’s views on time travel (only a technological problem, not a scientific one) and the order of time in general,  views, as set out in The Order of Time, our color commentator Rob Sheldon offers, — If I can speculate about what goes on in physicist’s heads, this issue about time is an attempt to force symmetry on the universe. Sorta like the 2-yr old who wants to regularize irregular verbs. “Mommy not home; she goed to the store.” Einstein’s Special Relativity (SR) argued that time was a fourth dimension and should not be treated any differently than height, width, and length. To get the units right, one only needed to multiply time by the speed of light–c*t. Only Read More ›

Not a scientific one. Dan Falk interviews physicist Carlo Rovelli about “about the nature of time, whether it has a beginning and if humans might one day master time travel:” Could time travel ever be possible? Well, “time traveling” is what we do all our lives, isn’t it? But you mean, can we jump quickly to the past or to the future. Jumping to the far future is certainly possible. It’s only a technological problem, not a scientific one. One way is to move very fast. When you move fast, time passes very slowly for you — so if you could run fast enough around your house many times, you could do that in a time span which for you Read More ›