8 ms·

9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science. The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to mak

9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science. The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be. Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best fits. (Typically) But then the paradigm shifts and we are closer to reality than the current local minimum/maximum. Before reading philosophy of science, I was into m theory and string theory. Now I'm nearly sure it's bunk that might be replaced in our lifetime. I thank scientists, but I do not envy them.

dieselgate 3mo ago
> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.
- jambalaya8 3mo ago
  Aye, but we only sorta kinda "know" what things like black holes might be. We have models that make sense to us based on our understanding of science, and we think our instruments can faithfully report on what they can be with measurements we believe we are making correctly, but we have no clue what we don't know, and no real way to prove it, just theorize, and sort of bundle up what we believe is data supporting it.
  - blooalien 3mo ago
    "The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know." — Aristotle
    - shusaku 3mo ago
      The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know to whom you should ascribe a quote.
      - blooalien 3mo ago
        @shusaku> "The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know to whom you should ascribe a quote." Well, so far I see variants of this particular quote from Aristotle, Einstein, and Voltaire. Someone else probably said it earlier than any of 'em probably, but I honestly don't care enough to dig any deeper than this. Besides, half the time I've dug deeper into Mark Twain or Albert Einstein quotes (just for a couple really common examples) I find that they're attributed with saying a thing they never actually said anyhow, so... :shrug: https://motivane.com/quote/more-you-know-more-you-dont-know/ https://motivane.com/quote/more-you-know-more-you-dont-know/ https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/620163-the-more-i-learn-the-more-i-realize-how-much https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/620163-the-more-i-learn-the... https://wiseopinions.substack.com/p/voltaires-paradox-about-knowledge https://wiseopinions.substack.com/p/voltaires-paradox-about-...
    - odyssey7 3mo ago
      Could have learned a thing from Socrates.
      - BobbyTables2 3mo ago
        and Donald Rumsfeld (;->
  - jeremyjh 3mo ago
    There are so many observations that fit the theory at this point, that we know there is a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy just as well as we knew the earth orbited the sun before the voyager flight.
    - oersted 3mo ago
      Well, it seems that the question still remains somewhat open. There are theories that fit the data as well or better than the black-hole model. My naive intuition is that this is mostly just physicist publishing papers and throwing some exotic ideas out (we still don't know enough about dark matter), and that the black-hole model will remain as the consensus. But it's not as unquestionable as you say it is. > An alternative to the black hole (BH) scenario has been recently proposed in terms of a supermassive compact object composed of self-gravitating fermionic dark matter (DM). https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/546/1/staf1854/8431112 https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/546/1/staf1854/843111... > Sagittarius A* Might Not Be a Black Hole https://youtu.be/7tRww03EKlk?si=0XcJ1yw-gPj1IzQW https://youtu.be/7tRww03EKlk?si=0XcJ1yw-gPj1IzQW
      - jambalaya8 3mo ago
        I am one of those people that feel that dark matter is not something humans should be studying too much. Just like hadrons, wormholes, and those people interested in creating lab-based little black holes. It strikes me as naive and dangerous to assume all physics is meant to be studied. Just because we know splitting atoms can make really big explosions, for instance, doesn't mean it might not have had other effects on the fabric of the universe we lack the mental facilities, advanced knowledge, or context to fathom.
    - jambalaya8 3mo ago
      Still remembering how many people bought into m-branes and p-branes.
      - jeremyjh 3mo ago
        Black holes are simply a consequence of GR, which has made more successful predictions than just about any physical theory. Did M-branes make any successful predictions?
  - mmooss 3mo ago
    > we have no clue what we don't know We have very good ideas about it, including the issue described in the OP. We also don't know how gravity and the other forces work together. We don't know where other life is in the universe. We don't know how to travel to other stars. We don't know what is under the surface of Europa (but we'll soon find out). And we have a very good idea of what we know because our theories, based on our observations, predict things accurately. The original upthread comment and followup seem like taking some philosophical questions to logical extremes.
- gtowey 3mo ago
  The thing is we have a lot of models which make very accurate predictions most of the time, which are useful for doing some impressive science. But we have no accepted theory of what is actually happening behind the math. What we have is that in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we have already uncovered the most fundamental structures of the universe and further investigation into how or why things are the way they are is fruitless. This view has dominated for the last 100 years. Physics has been focused only on modeling and testing, but nobody knows exactly what the models are telling us about the universe. I agree with the above poster that this is wrong and we may yet learn that our models are only very close to reality, but the actual mechanics are different. At least I think more research should be pointed in this direction.
  - exmadscientist 3mo ago
    > in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we [are done] No. Just... no. Even advancing that fifty years to 1975, the Standard Model reigns not because people want it to reign, but because no one can knock it off its throne. There is no better idea that can explain more than the Standard Model can. It's not a conspiracy. (I did used to joke with my students that progress in physics stopped around 1975, which is around when LSD got banned, so there might well be a lack of ideas. But I'll leave that one to the reader!)
    - podocarp 3mo ago
      From my understanding of the parent I think he's not saying that nothing is trying to replace the standard model etc. But instead nobody is trying to explain the standard model (or whatever). For example, wavefunction collapse. You can see the wikipedia page for all its interpretations. There's no such page for Newtonian dynamics (even though gravity is also spooky action at a distance) and classical EM (you're telling me there's more of these fields everywhere I can't see). I think it's simply because classical experiments are a primary source and quantum experiments are a secondary source of information. The classical case you just see and know the result. Quantum experiments you're always looking at some medium that detects or measures or whatever the original interaction. So you're only interrogating the detector, not the original particles or interaction. So of course we're stuck with an interpretation problem. It's the same problem with news. The primary sources are always 100% certain what happened because they saw it. The secondary source will allow for more interpretation because they have heard from multiple primary sources, etc.
- CuriouslyC 3mo ago
  The Higgs and black holes are quite different. We've basically observed Higgs according to how we've defined them, while we've only observed phenomena consistent with black holes as we hypothesize them. Singularities are the result of theories based on (ironically named) real numbers, it's entirely possible that what we call black holes are really dark stars formed from exotic matter that can only exist in hyper-extreme conditions, like a leveled up neutron star.
  - i_no_can_eat 3mo ago
    The difference is that we have theorerically sound formation scenarious for black holes under very broad conditions, and we have absolutely no model for a formation scenario of such an exotic dark star.
    - mr_toad 3mo ago
      Observations keep poking holes in those hypotheses (I’m not sure they even count as theories). We keep finding black holes with anomalous masses, or black holes that formed too early. Part of the problem is that we have very little observational data. But another big problem is that our best ideas, based on general relativity are known to be incompatible with quantum mechanics.
      - i_no_can_eat 3mo ago
        My comment was specifically about those alternative "dark stars" hypothesis. Is there one with a formation scenario?
        CuriouslyC 3mo ago
        That's gated by a constructivist replacement for general relativity and a deeper understanding of heavy quarks. Science marches on.
- ColdStream 3mo ago
  I think it is similar to the 'All models are wrong but some are useful' adage. There is reality and there is the math at which we point at it with. The pointing will never be reality but that doesn't mean it is useless. In the same way you cannot blow the wind with the word 'Fan'. But the concept of a fan is very useful.
podocarp 3mo ago
The difference with the Copernican stuff is that you can fly a satellite (e.g. Voyager) to the edge of the solar system, look back, and see the planets orbiting the sun. There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. If I do a push up the Earth moves beneath me but no reasonable person says I'm pushing the Earth away. Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact. It's not a mathematical convenience. It's a fact you can see with a camera. The relativism or perspective argument is irrelevant because as we established you have to be very unreasonable to describe a picture of a huge ass sun that hardly moves with small planets zooming around it as earth centric. On the other hand nobody has observed any particle or ever will, we only see effects of particles (cloud chamber trails, other particles, radiation, etc). This makes it very different for the traditional "seeing is believing" claim. In this case you actually possible to argue it's a mathematical convenience. It's possible to say we are stuck in the pre Copernican age in QM, we're modelling these things in such a complicated way, maybe one day we will see aha we got it all backwards, electrons are actually made of trapped light, or some crazy theory will come out... And I can't blame string theorists and physicists in general for trying. Take for example quarks. QCD actually forbids naked quarks. That means you can never observe one on its own. How's that for a falsifiable scientific theory? Yet it is very successful in all its predictions. So obviously the Popperian "falsifiability" is too simple a criteria for science.
- wbl 3mo ago
  Humans can detect single photons with their eyes! https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172
  - Min0taur 3mo ago
    Thanks for the link, this is sick
- aurareturn 3mo ago
  In the 1500s, it might just as well be impossible to fly a spaceship to the outer edge of the solar system to confirm heliocentrism without doubt as it is right now to build a solar system sized detector to look for the graviton.
analog31 3mo ago
From what I've read, a problem with the Copernican model was that it assumed circular orbits. Galileo insisted on this as well. It doesn't matter what orbits what, if you've got the shape of the orbits wrong. Oddly enough the Catholic astronomers were willing to accept a model that had the sun going around the earth, and the planets around the sun. What settled matters for them was Newtonian physics, which provided a way to detect whether the earth was rotating or not. That was what caused them to eventually lift their ban on Copernicus. Newtonian physics also eliminated the question of whether anything in the solar system is justifiably the center of the cosmos.
- aleph_minus_one 3mo ago
  Relevant concerning your point: > What is the most misunderstood historical event? > The Galileo Affair > https://tidbits.quora.com/What-is-the-most-misunderstood-historical-event https://tidbits.quora.com/What-is-the-most-misunderstood-his...
xelxebar 3mo ago
> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. This statement itself predicades on a Platonic realist metaphysics! Indeed, what is the ideal against which things are judge right and wrong? I think the psychological roots of Enlightenment rationality run deep in the West, making it brutally hard to usurp. That said, I think we can go a long way in this one case by just throwing out the "wrong" judement and laser focusing on the particulars of utility that science provides. One zoomed-out facet sees it as a collaborative effort as squeezing out repeatable processes, a la Popper et al.
stbede 3mo ago
How do you feel about Aristotelian realism? Makes more sense to me than nominalism/conceptualism ever has.

dieselgate 3mo ago

> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.

jambalaya8 3mo ago
Aye, but we only sorta kinda "know" what things like black holes might be. We have models that make sense to us based on our understanding of science, and we think our instruments can faithfully report on what they can be with measurements we believe we are making correctly, but we have no clue what we don't know, and no real way to prove it, just theorize, and sort of bundle up what we believe is data supporting it.
- blooalien 3mo ago
  "The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know." — Aristotle
  - shusaku 3mo ago
    The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know to whom you should ascribe a quote.
    - blooalien 3mo ago
      @shusaku> "The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know to whom you should ascribe a quote." Well, so far I see variants of this particular quote from Aristotle, Einstein, and Voltaire. Someone else probably said it earlier than any of 'em probably, but I honestly don't care enough to dig any deeper than this. Besides, half the time I've dug deeper into Mark Twain or Albert Einstein quotes (just for a couple really common examples) I find that they're attributed with saying a thing they never actually said anyhow, so... :shrug: https://motivane.com/quote/more-you-know-more-you-dont-know/ https://motivane.com/quote/more-you-know-more-you-dont-know/ https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/620163-the-more-i-learn-the-more-i-realize-how-much https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/620163-the-more-i-learn-the... https://wiseopinions.substack.com/p/voltaires-paradox-about-knowledge https://wiseopinions.substack.com/p/voltaires-paradox-about-...
  - odyssey7 3mo ago
    Could have learned a thing from Socrates.
    - BobbyTables2 3mo ago
      and Donald Rumsfeld (;->
- jeremyjh 3mo ago
  There are so many observations that fit the theory at this point, that we know there is a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy just as well as we knew the earth orbited the sun before the voyager flight.
  - oersted 3mo ago
    Well, it seems that the question still remains somewhat open. There are theories that fit the data as well or better than the black-hole model. My naive intuition is that this is mostly just physicist publishing papers and throwing some exotic ideas out (we still don't know enough about dark matter), and that the black-hole model will remain as the consensus. But it's not as unquestionable as you say it is. > An alternative to the black hole (BH) scenario has been recently proposed in terms of a supermassive compact object composed of self-gravitating fermionic dark matter (DM). https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/546/1/staf1854/8431112 https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/546/1/staf1854/843111... > Sagittarius A* Might Not Be a Black Hole https://youtu.be/7tRww03EKlk?si=0XcJ1yw-gPj1IzQW https://youtu.be/7tRww03EKlk?si=0XcJ1yw-gPj1IzQW
    - jambalaya8 3mo ago
      I am one of those people that feel that dark matter is not something humans should be studying too much. Just like hadrons, wormholes, and those people interested in creating lab-based little black holes. It strikes me as naive and dangerous to assume all physics is meant to be studied. Just because we know splitting atoms can make really big explosions, for instance, doesn't mean it might not have had other effects on the fabric of the universe we lack the mental facilities, advanced knowledge, or context to fathom.
  - jambalaya8 3mo ago
    Still remembering how many people bought into m-branes and p-branes.
    - jeremyjh 3mo ago
      Black holes are simply a consequence of GR, which has made more successful predictions than just about any physical theory. Did M-branes make any successful predictions?
- mmooss 3mo ago
  > we have no clue what we don't know We have very good ideas about it, including the issue described in the OP. We also don't know how gravity and the other forces work together. We don't know where other life is in the universe. We don't know how to travel to other stars. We don't know what is under the surface of Europa (but we'll soon find out). And we have a very good idea of what we know because our theories, based on our observations, predict things accurately. The original upthread comment and followup seem like taking some philosophical questions to logical extremes.
gtowey 3mo ago
The thing is we have a lot of models which make very accurate predictions most of the time, which are useful for doing some impressive science. But we have no accepted theory of what is actually happening behind the math. What we have is that in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we have already uncovered the most fundamental structures of the universe and further investigation into how or why things are the way they are is fruitless. This view has dominated for the last 100 years. Physics has been focused only on modeling and testing, but nobody knows exactly what the models are telling us about the universe. I agree with the above poster that this is wrong and we may yet learn that our models are only very close to reality, but the actual mechanics are different. At least I think more research should be pointed in this direction.
- exmadscientist 3mo ago
  > in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we [are done] No. Just... no. Even advancing that fifty years to 1975, the Standard Model reigns not because people want it to reign, but because no one can knock it off its throne. There is no better idea that can explain more than the Standard Model can. It's not a conspiracy. (I did used to joke with my students that progress in physics stopped around 1975, which is around when LSD got banned, so there might well be a lack of ideas. But I'll leave that one to the reader!)
  - podocarp 3mo ago
    From my understanding of the parent I think he's not saying that nothing is trying to replace the standard model etc. But instead nobody is trying to explain the standard model (or whatever). For example, wavefunction collapse. You can see the wikipedia page for all its interpretations. There's no such page for Newtonian dynamics (even though gravity is also spooky action at a distance) and classical EM (you're telling me there's more of these fields everywhere I can't see). I think it's simply because classical experiments are a primary source and quantum experiments are a secondary source of information. The classical case you just see and know the result. Quantum experiments you're always looking at some medium that detects or measures or whatever the original interaction. So you're only interrogating the detector, not the original particles or interaction. So of course we're stuck with an interpretation problem. It's the same problem with news. The primary sources are always 100% certain what happened because they saw it. The secondary source will allow for more interpretation because they have heard from multiple primary sources, etc.
CuriouslyC 3mo ago
The Higgs and black holes are quite different. We've basically observed Higgs according to how we've defined them, while we've only observed phenomena consistent with black holes as we hypothesize them. Singularities are the result of theories based on (ironically named) real numbers, it's entirely possible that what we call black holes are really dark stars formed from exotic matter that can only exist in hyper-extreme conditions, like a leveled up neutron star.
- i_no_can_eat 3mo ago
  The difference is that we have theorerically sound formation scenarious for black holes under very broad conditions, and we have absolutely no model for a formation scenario of such an exotic dark star.
  - mr_toad 3mo ago
    Observations keep poking holes in those hypotheses (I’m not sure they even count as theories). We keep finding black holes with anomalous masses, or black holes that formed too early. Part of the problem is that we have very little observational data. But another big problem is that our best ideas, based on general relativity are known to be incompatible with quantum mechanics.
    - i_no_can_eat 3mo ago
      My comment was specifically about those alternative "dark stars" hypothesis. Is there one with a formation scenario?
      - CuriouslyC 3mo ago
        That's gated by a constructivist replacement for general relativity and a deeper understanding of heavy quarks. Science marches on.
ColdStream 3mo ago
I think it is similar to the 'All models are wrong but some are useful' adage. There is reality and there is the math at which we point at it with. The pointing will never be reality but that doesn't mean it is useless. In the same way you cannot blow the wind with the word 'Fan'. But the concept of a fan is very useful.

podocarp 3mo ago

The difference with the Copernican stuff is that you can fly a satellite (e.g. Voyager) to the edge of the solar system, look back, and see the planets orbiting the sun. There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. If I do a push up the Earth moves beneath me but no reasonable person says I'm pushing the Earth away. Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact. It's not a mathematical convenience. It's a fact you can see with a camera. The relativism or perspective argument is irrelevant because as we established you have to be very unreasonable to describe a picture of a huge ass sun that hardly moves with small planets zooming around it as earth centric. On the other hand nobody has observed any particle or ever will, we only see effects of particles (cloud chamber trails, other particles, radiation, etc). This makes it very different for the traditional "seeing is believing" claim. In this case you actually possible to argue it's a mathematical convenience. It's possible to say we are stuck in the pre Copernican age in QM, we're modelling these things in such a complicated way, maybe one day we will see aha we got it all backwards, electrons are actually made of trapped light, or some crazy theory will come out... And I can't blame string theorists and physicists in general for trying. Take for example quarks. QCD actually forbids naked quarks. That means you can never observe one on its own. How's that for a falsifiable scientific theory? Yet it is very successful in all its predictions. So obviously the Popperian "falsifiability" is too simple a criteria for science.

wbl 3mo ago
Humans can detect single photons with their eyes! https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172
- Min0taur 3mo ago
  Thanks for the link, this is sick
aurareturn 3mo ago
In the 1500s, it might just as well be impossible to fly a spaceship to the outer edge of the solar system to confirm heliocentrism without doubt as it is right now to build a solar system sized detector to look for the graviton.

analog31 3mo ago

From what I've read, a problem with the Copernican model was that it assumed circular orbits. Galileo insisted on this as well. It doesn't matter what orbits what, if you've got the shape of the orbits wrong. Oddly enough the Catholic astronomers were willing to accept a model that had the sun going around the earth, and the planets around the sun. What settled matters for them was Newtonian physics, which provided a way to detect whether the earth was rotating or not. That was what caused them to eventually lift their ban on Copernicus. Newtonian physics also eliminated the question of whether anything in the solar system is justifiably the center of the cosmos.

aleph_minus_one 3mo ago
Relevant concerning your point: > What is the most misunderstood historical event? > The Galileo Affair > https://tidbits.quora.com/What-is-the-most-misunderstood-historical-event https://tidbits.quora.com/What-is-the-most-misunderstood-his...

xelxebar 3mo ago

> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. This statement itself predicades on a Platonic realist metaphysics! Indeed, what is the ideal against which things are judge right and wrong? I think the psychological roots of Enlightenment rationality run deep in the West, making it brutally hard to usurp. That said, I think we can go a long way in this one case by just throwing out the "wrong" judement and laser focusing on the particulars of utility that science provides. One zoomed-out facet sees it as a collaborative effort as squeezing out repeatable processes, a la Popper et al.

stbede 3mo ago

How do you feel about Aristotelian realism? Makes more sense to me than nominalism/conceptualism ever has.