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Wow, the negativity around here is shocking. Philosophy dares to poke at the structures built up by science, and people are aghast. The article basically says
by pc2g4d 10y ago
Wow, the negativity around here is shocking. Philosophy dares to poke at the structures built up by science, and people are aghast.
The article basically says that, because there are wildly-different but equally-plausible interpretations of the underlying physics, materialism is not a fully defined platform to stand on---it's not free of unproven assumptions, but rather trades one set of assumptions for another. He raises genuine debates regarding quantum mechanics to illustrate this.
Ultimately it's unlikely that any philosophy will be wholly consistent and not depend on contradictory assumptions. So what the author has pointed out isn't a fatal flaw per se in materialism. But it's fair to point out its current limits. And it's frustrating to see so many people close themselves off to that sort of analysis.
- xelxebar 10y agoWell, the article spends most of its time complaining about the ontology of modern physics, calling it "unclear" among other names. That kind of rhetoric stands more as a testament to the author's lack of mathematical maturity than anything physically meaningful. Perhaps there's a good point here about the current state of pedagogy in physics these days.
- pc2g4d 10y ago"Adam Frank is professor of astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York and the co-founder of NPR's blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture where he is also a regular contributor. He is the author of several books, the latest being About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang (2011)." I'm assuming a professor of astronomy has a good command of the math, but maybe I'm wrong?