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One thing that bothers me is that indeed it has been resolving inconsistencies that often lead to progress, as the author points out. What would you say to that
by H8crilA 7y ago
One thing that bothers me is that indeed it has been resolving inconsistencies that often lead to progress, as the author points out. What would you say to that? What are the still unresolved inconsistencies in physics? To me it feels more like that we just mostly ran out of the obvious inconsistencies to resolve.
- Robotbeat 7y agoDark matter, dark energy, quantum gravity.
- Will_Parker 7y agoConsciousness :trollface:
- empath75 7y agoI actually do think that to some extent, studying physics is studying the mind — specifically studying exactly how ‘reality’ differs from our intuition about it. A new discovery in physics is often also a discovery about psychology — for example — relativity exposed our intuition about time and space as incorrect.
- garmaine 7y agoGo read some a Daniel Dennett and/or Max Tengmark. Consciousness is a conceptual problem, not a physical one. It merely goes away once you start asking the right questions.
- mellosouls 7y agoAka "Consciousness Explained Away" Consciousness is still an extant and very unexplained phenomenon.
- garmaine 7y agoThat's a bit like saying phlogiston is an unexplained part of physical theory. Once you understand the underlying mechanics of thought, it stops being mysterious and really stops being a problem at all.
- mellosouls 7y agoNot at all. A quick Google of the subject will demonstrate it is still an (maybe, the) outstanding subject of philosophy and perhaps ultimately physics. Check any online encyclopedia, but if you have any respectable references that disagree, I'd be genuinely interested. Eg: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
- garmaine 7y agoI never said there was broad consensus among all philosophers and physicists, etc. It takes generations for these ideas to truly die, just as it did with other widely believed falsehoods. No one really attacked consciousness from a mechanistic perspective until Turing, and that work wasn't followed up on outside of the AI community until the 70's and 80's, and it wouldn't be until very recent advances in AI that others took these philosophical ideas originating from computer science seriously. So in the philosophy of physics and the mind, there are whole departments filled with tenured professors who came of age in their thinking at a time when consciousness was a Hard Problem, and have focused their mental tools on a class of solutions (qualia, observer-triggered wave collapse, etc.) which are irreconcilable with mechanistic physical reality, making the problem even more intractable and mysterious. It'll take another generation or two before the ideas of Dennett, Dawkins, Tegmark, etc. get more widely recognized and consciousness finally goes the way of phlogiston. For references, I recommend Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", and really anything by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins--materialistic explanations of consciousness pervade their work. For a compatible (hah!) physical perspective, I suggest Max Tegmark: https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219 https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219
- roywiggins 7y agoGR and QM are incompatible. https://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-howwhy-are-quantum-mechanics-and-relativity-incompatible/ https://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-howwhy-are-quant...
- mellosouls 7y agoThe list here might be contain some interesting examples of current explanatory gaps for you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in...
- poelzi 7y agoAt some point you can't fix a model by adding more stuff to it, if it's already inconsistent. Removing the wrong assumptions first, helps more then adding new mechanisms.