The obvious difficulty is that the multiverse drags in inconceivable complexity in order to solve comparatively common, minor issues of the sort that science always faces. People don’t think of that approach as a solution unless they have a vested philosophical and emotional interest in the idea.
Tag: Adam Frank
Scientism as a mistake
Adam Frank seems to be a fairly sensible science writer and here’s something he wrote that bears a look: “It is really important to distinguish between science as a method and scientism as metaphysics.”
At Big Think: The mystery of life cannot be solved by science
As Frank says, life turns out to be a complex, adaptive system, among other things, which resists the kind of “explanation” that many researchers used to seek.
At Mind Matters News: Why some think emergence is replacing materialism in science
Frank argues that evolution is the creative force that does all this (including evolving new laws?) But it’s not clear that what he means by “evolution” is the garden variety change in life forms over time. To the extent that emergence marches with panpsychism, it probably is catching on. That means we may see ourselves in different kinds of philosophy of science arguments over evolution.
Astrophysicist Adam Frank: Materialism is on shaky ground
Frank is an expert on the final stages of evolution of stars like the sun. His computational research group has developed advanced supercomputer tools in order to study how stars form and die. So he would incline to a materialist view, surely? But no, he says, quantum physics blew all that away. And some neuroscientists just haven’t caught up.