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> If science is tackling these questions then it's most likely doing so by making non-falsifiable claims. Nonsense. General Relativity and Quantum Field Theor

by lisper 3y ago

> If science is tackling these questions then it's most likely doing so by making non-falsifiable claims. Nonsense. General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory make plenty of falsifiable claims. So do current cosmological theories. Not only do they make falsifiable claims, many of their claims are in the process of being falsified right now by the JWST. One of the reasons it's hard for me to take philosophy seriously is that I see too many people defending it by making patently ridiculous assertions. > And if you want to disagree with the definition of science that I'm using here then that's OK. Another ridiculous assertion. You haven't given a definition of science. But it doesn't matter. Whatever your definition of science is, if it does not include GR and QFT and cosmology then it is not not worthy of serious consideration. > there's nothing wrong with doing philosophy I didn't say there was. There's nothing wrong with knitting either. That doesn't mean that there ought to be knitting departments in universities.

knightoffaith 3y ago
I think GP's point was specifically about science answering the questions like "why is there something rather than nothing?"; relativity and QFT don't say anything about this question. (Though lacking falsifiability isn't necessarily such a bad thing even for scientific theories anyway.)
- lisper 3y ago
  > relativity and QFT don't say anything about this question. Of course they do, at least QFT does: the reason there is something rather than nothing is that "nothing" is unstable. (And note that "something" and "nothing" in that sentence are terms of art with more precise meanings than the colloquial ones.)
  - knightoffaith 3y ago
    I think the spirit of the question is why anything---atoms, consciousnesses, laws of nature, quantum fields, etc.---exists, instead of nothing at all---no atoms, consciousnesses, laws of nature, fields, etc. QFT doesn't answer this question, does it?
    - lisper 3y ago
      Yes, it answers these questions for all of those things except quantum fields. Why those fields exist we do not yet know, and may never know. But reducing the question to a single thing with an unknown origin rather than many things with (allegedly) unknown origins is still progress, particularly since that last remaining "thing" is not actually a thing that exists. And if you want to go down that rabbit hole, you should read this first: https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...
      - knightoffaith 3y ago
        How does it answer why consciousness or laws of nature exist? I included atoms as only one of the items on the list for a reason. Not to say science isn't useful or that it hasn't made progress in explaining things. But the line of thought that this question is related to is, loosely, whether there need be any ultimate, necessary explanation to things and what kind of explanation that would be, or whether explanations bottom out at brute, contingent facts. This kind of topic, regardless of whether your answer is a necessary existence or brute fact, doesn't seem to be scientific---or would you disagree?
        lisper 3y ago
        > How does it answer why consciousness or laws of nature exist? That's a longer story than will fit in an HN comment. But the TL;DR is that once you have atoms, that leads to chemistry, which leads to biology, which leads to brains, which leads to consciousness and all the other interesting things that brains do. But these are all emergent phenomena. There's nothing brains do that cannot be explained in terms of atoms. > whether there need be any ultimate, necessary explanation to things and what kind of explanation that would be, or whether explanations bottom out at brute, contingent facts You're flirting with teleology here. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm making an observation here, not a value judgement. It is an open question whether there is an "ultimate, necessary explanation to things". But science can shed some light on that by demonstrating that if there is an "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" it almost certainly has nothing to do with us humans. We're just the result of rolling countless trillions of cosmic dice in one tiny corner of the multiverse. That's not the answer that most people who ask the question of "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" want to hear, but all the evidence points to that being the truth. And so the best explanation of people asking this question hoping for a different answer is that they are engaging in the same kind of wishful thinking as, say, erstwhile inventors of perpetual motion machines. Science can't prove that it's impossible to do an end-run around the laws of thermodynamics, but there is still a reason that perpetual motion is the canonical example of crackpottery.
  - andybak 3y ago
    > (And note that "something" and "nothing" in that sentence are terms of art with more precise meanings than the colloquial ones.) Bingo. You are using a much more specific definition than I was. As the other person commenting said - I was rather hoping you would grasp the spirit of my point rather than zoning on the rather hastily chosen examples. But let's stick with that for a moment. I picked "Why is there something rather than nothing" because it's often used as the poster-child of unanswerable yet important questions. You have to understand it in that spirit and interpret "everything" and "nothing" in the broadest possible terms. I wasn't claiming anything about the cosmology or quantum fields - I'm saying that "when you take into account everything science will ever be able to touch - there will be something that remains unknowable. (you'll find that at least since Kant, this is a fairly uncontroversial viewpoint within Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science) I think maybe the reason you struggle to appreciate the value of philosophy is because you use the irreducible wiggle room that is always present in language to frame discussions in such a way so that philosophy is always at a disadvantage. You're straw-manning rather than strong-manning my points and you seem very keen to frame me as some anti-science merchant of woo. (A characterisation which anyone that knows me would have highly amusing) I am a huge believer in the scientific method and it's primacy. But I don't believe anyone with any degree of reflection can maintain the view that every fact about reality will one day fall to science.
    - lisper 3y ago
      > You are using a much more specific definition than I was. But this is exactly the problem. If what you meant to ask was, "Why do quantum fields exist" why didn't you just say that? Instead you asked, "Why is there something rather than nothing" which is a vaguely defined open-ended question with a lot of emotional appeal but no intellectual substance, i.e. typical of those parts of contemporary philosophy that are not part of science. > when you take into account everything science will ever be able to touch - there will be something that remains unknowable Yes, that's true. But it's not clear that what remains unknowable actually matters. We may never know why quantum fields exist, but so what? We can know that they were not created by a personal God who loves us and wants us to be happy or any such nonsense. We can know that our lives are finite and there is no afterlife and so we have to be judicious in how we spend our time, and so wondering why quantum fields exist might not be the most important problem for us to be addressing. It's enough to know that they exist, and that they behave according to simple mathematical laws. > I don't believe anyone with any degree of reflection can maintain the view that every fact about reality will one day fall to science. We know with absolute certainty that this is the case because (tada!) science can demonstrate this (e.g. the halting problem) so we have to make our peace with the fact that there are things we cannot know. But I see no reason to believe that any question that doesn't fall to science will yield to philosophy.

by lisper 3y ago

knightoffaith 3y ago

I think GP's point was specifically about science answering the questions like "why is there something rather than nothing?"; relativity and QFT don't say anything about this question. (Though lacking falsifiability isn't necessarily such a bad thing even for scientific theories anyway.)

lisper 3y ago
> relativity and QFT don't say anything about this question. Of course they do, at least QFT does: the reason there is something rather than nothing is that "nothing" is unstable. (And note that "something" and "nothing" in that sentence are terms of art with more precise meanings than the colloquial ones.)
- knightoffaith 3y ago
  I think the spirit of the question is why anything---atoms, consciousnesses, laws of nature, quantum fields, etc.---exists, instead of nothing at all---no atoms, consciousnesses, laws of nature, fields, etc. QFT doesn't answer this question, does it?
  - lisper 3y ago
    Yes, it answers these questions for all of those things except quantum fields. Why those fields exist we do not yet know, and may never know. But reducing the question to a single thing with an unknown origin rather than many things with (allegedly) unknown origins is still progress, particularly since that last remaining "thing" is not actually a thing that exists. And if you want to go down that rabbit hole, you should read this first: https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...
    - knightoffaith 3y ago
      How does it answer why consciousness or laws of nature exist? I included atoms as only one of the items on the list for a reason. Not to say science isn't useful or that it hasn't made progress in explaining things. But the line of thought that this question is related to is, loosely, whether there need be any ultimate, necessary explanation to things and what kind of explanation that would be, or whether explanations bottom out at brute, contingent facts. This kind of topic, regardless of whether your answer is a necessary existence or brute fact, doesn't seem to be scientific---or would you disagree?
      - lisper 3y ago
        > How does it answer why consciousness or laws of nature exist? That's a longer story than will fit in an HN comment. But the TL;DR is that once you have atoms, that leads to chemistry, which leads to biology, which leads to brains, which leads to consciousness and all the other interesting things that brains do. But these are all emergent phenomena. There's nothing brains do that cannot be explained in terms of atoms. > whether there need be any ultimate, necessary explanation to things and what kind of explanation that would be, or whether explanations bottom out at brute, contingent facts You're flirting with teleology here. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm making an observation here, not a value judgement. It is an open question whether there is an "ultimate, necessary explanation to things". But science can shed some light on that by demonstrating that if there is an "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" it almost certainly has nothing to do with us humans. We're just the result of rolling countless trillions of cosmic dice in one tiny corner of the multiverse. That's not the answer that most people who ask the question of "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" want to hear, but all the evidence points to that being the truth. And so the best explanation of people asking this question hoping for a different answer is that they are engaging in the same kind of wishful thinking as, say, erstwhile inventors of perpetual motion machines. Science can't prove that it's impossible to do an end-run around the laws of thermodynamics, but there is still a reason that perpetual motion is the canonical example of crackpottery.
- andybak 3y ago
  > (And note that "something" and "nothing" in that sentence are terms of art with more precise meanings than the colloquial ones.) Bingo. You are using a much more specific definition than I was. As the other person commenting said - I was rather hoping you would grasp the spirit of my point rather than zoning on the rather hastily chosen examples. But let's stick with that for a moment. I picked "Why is there something rather than nothing" because it's often used as the poster-child of unanswerable yet important questions. You have to understand it in that spirit and interpret "everything" and "nothing" in the broadest possible terms. I wasn't claiming anything about the cosmology or quantum fields - I'm saying that "when you take into account everything science will ever be able to touch - there will be something that remains unknowable. (you'll find that at least since Kant, this is a fairly uncontroversial viewpoint within Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science) I think maybe the reason you struggle to appreciate the value of philosophy is because you use the irreducible wiggle room that is always present in language to frame discussions in such a way so that philosophy is always at a disadvantage. You're straw-manning rather than strong-manning my points and you seem very keen to frame me as some anti-science merchant of woo. (A characterisation which anyone that knows me would have highly amusing) I am a huge believer in the scientific method and it's primacy. But I don't believe anyone with any degree of reflection can maintain the view that every fact about reality will one day fall to science.
  - lisper 3y ago
    > You are using a much more specific definition than I was. But this is exactly the problem. If what you meant to ask was, "Why do quantum fields exist" why didn't you just say that? Instead you asked, "Why is there something rather than nothing" which is a vaguely defined open-ended question with a lot of emotional appeal but no intellectual substance, i.e. typical of those parts of contemporary philosophy that are not part of science. > when you take into account everything science will ever be able to touch - there will be something that remains unknowable Yes, that's true. But it's not clear that what remains unknowable actually matters. We may never know why quantum fields exist, but so what? We can know that they were not created by a personal God who loves us and wants us to be happy or any such nonsense. We can know that our lives are finite and there is no afterlife and so we have to be judicious in how we spend our time, and so wondering why quantum fields exist might not be the most important problem for us to be addressing. It's enough to know that they exist, and that they behave according to simple mathematical laws. > I don't believe anyone with any degree of reflection can maintain the view that every fact about reality will one day fall to science. We know with absolute certainty that this is the case because (tada!) science can demonstrate this (e.g. the halting problem) so we have to make our peace with the fact that there are things we cannot know. But I see no reason to believe that any question that doesn't fall to science will yield to philosophy.