Royal Institute presentation that I really enjoyed. Has some visual aspects, but can be mostly listened to while driving:
The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli
> From Boltzmann to quantum theory, from Einstein to loop quantum gravity, our understanding of time has been undergoing radical transformations. Carlo Rovelli brings together physics, philosophy and art to unravel the mystery of time.
I think I'm a simpleton because I could never imagine time being it's own thing. I see time as simply the amount of change in reality we can perceptually sample. Much like how an object in motion will continue in it's motion until it meets resistance,reality in my opinion is in continuous motion that has yet to meet resistance. Time (imo)is our measure of this change divided by our ability to sample it(where this ability could be second,minute,etc...)
Again,that's my opinion as a layman. I've always wondered why time was the focus, when I at least have been more curious about universal change. Why is everything in motion? and how is everything universally connected to where it changes at the same rate?
Maybe there's already plenty of work on this and I'm being ignorant(apologies if so).
Easy. Change is when equivalence of state information is broken. It is "detected" by everything around it. If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it, it absolutely does happen, because it's in a forest.
Yes but they are investigating our relative perception of the change. It's like studying astronomy without considering the fact that the stars we perceive in the sky is just our perception of how they looked like in the past. We distinguish how things are now from what we can perceive by measuring light and EMR. Why can't we at least consider the possibility that our perception of change might be different from the actual nature and attributes of this change?
You don’t need to consider that what you see in the sky is “in the past”. The light that’s reaching us has been travelling at c, the universal speed limit. Since we cannot possibly have known about that information sooner, what we see in the sky is for all intents and purposes, “the present”.
Additionally, the hidden variables of the change are exactly what they’re talking about when people ask the question “what is time?”.
What do you mean with “actual, physical thing”?
Unless I missed some quite huge news I don’t know about any particle that “creates” time unlike Higgs boson that “creates” mass.
Obviously the “creates” is a huge over-semplification.
I am not informed well enough to answer you but can you point me in the right direction on anything that associates time being a physhical matter? How would relativity change if one looks at time as "perceived universal change'?
I'm not sure what I would recommend as an introduction to relativity. If you're mathematically minded and have a lot of time on your hands, and actually want to learn the physics, a superb book is "Spacetime and Geometry" by Sean Carrol. As for a layman introduction, I'm not sure what to recommend.
As succinctly as I can put it, in our current understanding spacetime is a 4-dimensional space whose curvature is related to the local energy-momentum content. In turn, the motion of particles in freefall is dictated by this curvature.
Two books on relativity that I found pretty accessible and enlightening were:
Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything[1] - George Musser
and
What Is Relativity?: An Intuitive Introduction to Einstein's Ideas, and Why They Matter[2] - Jeffrey O. Bennett
"An object's property had a specific value. That value became different."
How is something that's different different from something that's changed? It sounds like it's one and the same to me.
Also, you used the word "became". That word has temporal connotations. So if you define change in terms of time, you can't then go on to define time in terms of change without it being another circular definition.
I was defining time as the measurement of change. Change does not depend on measurement therefore there is no circular definition.
For example, a star is different from star light. When I look at the sky through a telescope I don't see a star,I see star light. Same can be said for any object as well,we see light emanating from an object therefore vision is perception of an object as measured by our optics.
Time is how me perceptually measure change. This distinguishment can potentially prove valuable much like how distinguishing perception of star light and the star itself is important(not so important for close objects but important at a grand scale.)
Modification,change and other words used to describe when something becomes different do not imply human measurement.
We can for example talk about a tree that fell in a forest with no human to measure that change. Did it happen? Yes. We can only say it didn't happen if we exclude all events beyond our perceptive ability from reality. In the same way,change does not depend on time but time is a measuremet of change.
The problem is that if you take the time and carefully consider all of your statements, and carefully lay them all out in a row in the right way, you will find you've got circularity hiding in them. I am confident in this statement because you are walking very well-covered ground, and lots of smart people have examined it all very closely. For instance, "change" intrinsically has a before and after element in it; you can't use it to define time. You can use it to define a measure of time (which is pretty much exactly how we in fact do it), but it isn't useful for defining time. But I do not say that is the only place circular definitions lie in your various posts here; it is only an example. It is very hard to discuss exactly what time is because the very words of our thoughts and in some sense the very temporal nature of our thoughts themselves continuously betray us. Being embedded in time is the ground state of our being and virtually an unperceived constant in our thinking, slipping in to our every concept and thought. It is very hard to extricate ourselves from that, if it is really possible at all.
It is all too easy for us to bury ourselves in so many words that we push the circularity of the argument behind so much obfuscation that we can no longer perceive the circularity, but it is still there. To truly define time, one must fundamentally start from some sort of perspective in which it does not exist, then show how it arises. This is not something you're going to pull off in English. It is soaked in time. You're going to have to use math or you are almost certainly just moving the obfuscation around. (And also deal with the question of what it means to "arise", though to some extent that's an artifact of English popping up again. There are mathematical ways of dealing with that.)
The question isn't "is before different than after?", nor is it anything about how much difference there is, or how it may relate to other differences. The question is "how is it that there is a before and after at all?", to which merely pointing out that there is a before and after isn't very helpful.
I'm in agreement about the uselessness of words to define time, but I doubt that even using math will help understand time. I'd argue that both math and time arise with thoughts, i.e with the faculty of defining concepts and reasoning about them, but defining a concept is not the same as understanding the essence of the thing that is being defined. I see mathematics as the extent to which "thought muscles" can be flexed (which admittedly is very impressive), but to understand the nature of time, one would have to "step out of thought" as well, which if possible would be a rare capability and obviously not an insight that could be conveyed with explanations or definitions...
Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these hey-look!-so-fascinating! things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any important research to do, like they are so hopeless and desperate about the current state of physics and they stopped caring about it and found a proxy to monetize their knowledge. But hey, that's not a secret anymore - everyone knows about the crisis, from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell. Sabine Hossenfelder is a legend for me. A few years back, when I was taking a Physics101 class, even the lecturer almost begged for help after the last lecture at the end of the semester: "my fellow students, please, please, consider (to continue your career in the field of) physics. Physics is stuck. It needs new ideas, new theories, new minds. Please consider this." I was stunned. That was some real thing.
I guess the fast advancement of technology in the late ~100 years made even the most brilliant minds (relatively) lazy. They gradually stopped thinking, beating their brains out year after year and here we are. No serious discovery after the quantum theory. String theory? Yeah, gazillions of dimensions - good luck with that. Higgs boson, Gravitational waves? Come on, nothing revolutionary - we're still waiting for the revolution to emerge from (upgraded!) LHC. For me, they are cleverly and beautifully marketed (minor) findings. (Maybe some of you have heard of, some (if not many) of the top universities have teams working hard doing all the "scientific-marketing" for the Nobel Prize - it's a precious prestige win in this popular world we live in).
Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it. And it's getting worse and worse by the distraction caused by all the digital "life" surrounding us, pulling and tightening its ropes every day. I imagine a true scientist as a monk. S/he doesn't think about writing a pop-sci book, appearing on TV and s/he got a distantiation even for interviews about her/his latest important research/discovery. "Monks" are needed more than ever for science nowadays.
"I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli..."
If you mean by "real scientist" that they are doing real work that advances the field, some of them are and, yes, some of them aren't. I don't mean that as a criticism, because there is real value in being a PR person for science. (Some danger if they do it poorly, but a lot of value, too.) Hawking, for instance, was certainly a real scientist by any measure, right up until his unfortunate passing, but also did good PR and wrote some very popular books. And not to pick on him, but according to his CV [1], Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn't published a paper in a decade, and if you skip three related papers in 2007-2008, hadn't published prior to that since 1998. Doesn't mean he's not doing useful stuff, or that he wasn't at least a scientist in the past, but he's certainly not on the same sort of track as Hawking was.
I think that science is grossly lacking in good spokespeople who are respected in the field, and it should be rewarded more within the academy, not less.
When a large fraction of the population has frankly anti-scientific beliefs and when funding for continued scientific endeavor depends on votes, science needs to continually justify and promote itself in the public eye.
Are there dangers to that? Yes. But it's worse than holing up in the ivory tower to only quietly do research.
I agree, but it's unlikely that they will get respect and reward within the academy. They are just as susceptible to feelings of envy as people outside the academy.
You can see this manifest itself in the academy's treatment of Carl Sagan, and in the many ramblings of Murray Gell-Mann about Richard Feynman. Sure, their expositions of the science may not have been rigorous and they weren't perfect human beings, but maybe that's what it takes to popularize science and draw people in.
I often see the role of science popularization as that of turned the science illiterate to literate, not the uneducated to the educated.
> Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it
This has been said for thousands of years. Socrates/Plato was complaining about how writing weakens the human memory.
We need to accept that human minds are limited and technology is meant to extend them. Science has advanced considerably due to computers despite the appearances.
The way out of the current “impasse” is through even more technology. We might not be able to solve all the mysteries of the universe without intelligence augmentation or superintelligent AI.
It's funny because as much as you recognize this, the people you describe as being needed are treated terribly not only by the establishment but those who think they are outside of it. Perhaps that explains this state.
Sadly, not humble, and, from my point of view, uninformed, that is, exactly what would be expected from an otherwise uninformed reader of the newspaper articles about the topics touched, especially from one not understanding how science actually works.
In reality, the "failed" fulfillment of some expectations when the best experiments up to now are performed is also what advances our knowledge, greatly, you can read, for an example, here:
Look from this perspective: not only that what some theoretical scientists whose direct "expectations" came to be unconfirmed by the LHC experiments "expected" would remain just a "plain imagination" without a huge investment in extremely advanced experiments, the same would remain for any scientist having some other ideas.
We need so advanced experiments because anything else is already known. And what we know today we wouldn't without the experiments, especially such producing "unexpected" results. There's is not an actual "crisis" in science advancing, exactly by doing experiments never before done the science does advance. The experiments like LHC are indeed a precondition for any new advancement.
For every complex problem there exists a nice and easily understandable solution... that is wrong. Even the basic explanation in many articles written about the science the authors get wrong, and the casual readers get even more wrong.
The typical complaint is that the experiments "cost much" and then the wishes of some aren't "confirmed"? Well they cost peanuts compared to the investment in military.
"Program cost US$1.508 trillion (through 2070 in then-year dollars), US$55.1B for RDT&E, $319.1B for procurement, $4.8B for MILCON, $1123.8B for operations & sustainment (2015 estimate)"
Compare with the total budget of LHC experiment of just €7.5 billion:
You'd get surely more than 200 LHCs for just one type of a military plane.
Also, the expected cost of measuring gravitational waves from space, the way that would also give us a new and otherwise inaccessible information about the Universe is 1000 times smaller than the cost of the above military plane.
The typical complaint goes on with the idea that the if scientists work on something, and it's unconfirmed by the experiment, it was unnecessary work. That's also not true at all. Most of hypotheses of what is behind the limits of our current experiments will not be confirmed by definition. If we knew, we wouldn't need to perform the experiments.
Your post kind of rambles on and fails to address the point that OP is making: Physics is, in fact, stuck. It's been almost 100 years since the initial clash between classic mechanics and quantum theory, and how much closer are we to unification?
And you take an extremely condescending tone while addressing OP's lack of humility while making statements attacking him for "especially from one not understanding how science actually works."
How does science actually work? Are we supposed to follow Popper? Or Kuhn? Or Feyerabend? Should we go with logical positivism or empiricism?
> It's been almost 100 years since the initial clash between classic mechanics and quantum theory, and how much closer are we to unification?
There is no problem with, to use your words, unification of classical mechanics and quantum theory
Classical Mechanics is recovered from Quantum Mechanics in the limit of h-bar (Planck's constant) goes to zero. In our day to day experience, Planck's constant is so small as to effectively be zero. The non-intuitive effects of Quantum Mechanics occur when we probe areas where the non-zero value of Planck's constant cannot be ignored.
There has been enormous progress in the last 100+ years in understanding how the world is described by Quantum Theory. In some ways, the so-called Standard Model of Particle Physics can be seen as the crowning achievement of that work.
The only remaining question on that front is the absence of a testable theory that describe gravitation as a quantum theory. String Theory appears to be a leading candidate for this, but it has not, so far, made any testable prediction outside of what we already know from other theories.
I'm trying to explain that it is not "stuck" in the sense in which the casual readers tend to perceive it. The scientists actually have what to do, and will have what to do, no problem with that. It's just that it's harder to get the budget for the kinds of investigations that extend the area of our knowledge. And that some "pet hypotheses" of some scientists remained unconfirmed.
What is currently written in the news about is that some specific hypotheses that intended to "deduct" what can be measured by the most advanced experiments humanity ever done weren't confirmed (or even more exactly, not most obviously confirmed) once the said experiments are made.
But that doesn't devalue the work done in making the hypotheses or the experiments themselves.
Or if I have to explain you "like you're five":
- For Newton to be able to make a theoretical "breakthrough" in 1700 the actual experiments before him were needed to provide all the facts from which he was able to develop his theory. Moreover, the conditions of stability in the dissemination and accessibility of the results of the experiments were needed.
- The same goes for Einstein. All the work of science between 1700 and 1915 was actually needed to make Einstein's "breakthrough," including the famous 1887 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper... which also didn't "confirm" the expectations of the most of the scientists of that time.
- That experiment was really immense breakthrough itself: the principles of it are even used to measure the gravitational waves today, which was achieved for the first time in 2015.
- But our discovery of the principles of electromagnetic radiation also made in 19th century was necessary too.
- In short, science needs the experiments, needs a lot of approaches from the different sides before some "breakthrough" happens and even "not confirming" expectations is a necessary part of the process.
- And even not having a new "breakthrough" of the kind the Einstein's was or of the kind of our quantum physics discoveries is also part of the process. The nature doesn't "have" to have "more unifying" laws than the ones that we already have, at least not at the level reachable by our technological limits. The nature simply is. We can learn more only by pushing the limits, making even more advanced experiments.
- At the time the experiments with the particles started, the "expectations" were exactly the opposite than now: then producing some new particles "wasn't expected." (E.g. around the middle of the 20th century the famous quip of one scientist was "who ordered that?" for the newly discovered particle -- it wasn't expected by the hypotheses of the time). Now some are "disappointed" that even newer particles don't "easily" appear. Well that is what it is. Support the science, learn how it really "works" from the actual history of actual discoveries, and if you aren't able to understand enough the discoveries themselves, do spend more energy on that before you make some claims. There are too many wrong "explanations" in the circulation, and many of those even have an agenda to be such.
Hey, thank you for your time and effort for putting all the links and information on your comments.
Firstly, I'm not against experimentalists and/or experiments and the money spent for them - it's not even "peanut" compared to military projects all around the world, as you stated. What I wanna say is that (to a curious outsider) it looks like there are so many experimentalists (and physicists-turned-to-pop-sci-writers) than theorists so physics suffers from the lack of beautiful power of imagination of human mind. True, I'm not a perfectly-informed one about all the things going on in the filed, of course, but I'm not completely uninformed one too, I guess.
Secondly, I'm not a native English speaker so I thought about the tone of my comment after I finished writing it and read it couple times and asked myself "Does it sound harsh or something like that to...anyone?". So I put down those "2 cents" and "humble" things at the bottom of my comment trying to show that I'm not an insider and I'm not trying to pick on anyone personally. Pardon me if it looked like the opposite.
> (to a curious outsider) it looks like there are so many experimentalists (and physicists-turned-to-pop-sci-writers) than theorists so physics suffers from the lack of beautiful power of imagination of human mind.
Analyzing that claim of yours that you specially marked:
"there are so many experimentalists" ... "than theorists so physics suffers from the lack of" "power of imagination."
There's no any support for any claim that "more theorists" than "experimentalists" are even needed for anything, especially that such a ratio means anything about presence or "lack" of "power of imagination" in physics.
> but I'm not completely uninformed one too, I guess.
Nobody ever said "completely." However I sincerely wish you to be a little more informed about:
I really believe that once you understand that you will have more chance for your own personal improvement and I wish you luck in that. Maybe you'll even make a contribution to some important discovery. But you'll surely have to have more insight that others, being satisfied with being "not completely uninformed" to think that you even understand the basics of something won't bring you much, at least in the areas that we touch in our discussion.
Regarding the state of physics, I've already explained that nobody can even claim that there has to be anything "revolutionary" possible (in the naive sense, the way you expect it) based on the information available to us as the result of all experiments done. From my
perspective, there were a lot of amazing discoveries in the last any N years of physics, and they are always result of the new information we experimentally obtain. But we already know so much, and measured so much with such an astonishing precision that there is not even place for some "big" changes affecting the formulas we already have. All better measurements will need always more investment from us, and will involve always the areas of the universe that are less affecting us directly (in the physical sense, I don't speculate about the state of mind).
Just to get you started thinking: some ancient Greek and Hellenistic scientists (who at that time weren't called so) already quite correctly knew how distant is the Moon measured in the number of Earth radii more than 2000 years ago. Do you know that simple number? Were you aware that if was possible to measure that at that time? Would you be able today to repeat that measurement? How much effort would you have to personally invest to repeat all the steps? Second, one Hellenistic scientist again more than 2000 years ago measured the radius of Earth also amazingly precise. Would you be able to repeat all the steps of his experiment? Are you able even to figure them out just by your own thinking?
The humanity knows about the telescopes only for 400 years. Galileo was one of the first scientists using it to figure more about the universe, but he also made the experiments on Earth, being among the first who properly described the properties of gravitation. Newton published his "Principia" only 100 years after Galileo's "On Motion" and only 80 years after the discovery of telescope and based on the enough observations happening even before the telescope existed: Tycho Brahe was the first scientist on the west who measured precisely enough the movements of the planets to make Newton's conclusions even possible, and his measurements were again available only some 80 years before Newton's "Principia." Not to mention that Kepler was already able to figure out the formulas nobody before him had based on these very measurements.
The crisis in physics is due to Kant. As long as physicists are disdainful of philosophy the crisis and deterioration will continue. They are Kantians and don't even know it.
Ayn Rand identified Kant's error in his Critique of Pure Reason and destroyed his program, she rejected Hume's rank skepticism (which Kant was answering) and showed Descartes how to validate reason (i.e. to be certain) without being omniscient. Descartes was the intellectual who started this ball rolling by turning reason unto itself and asking how does it work. He was not up to the task and injected a crude circularity at the base of reason, i.e. "I think therefore I am", which Rand identified and fixed but she is now completely ignored.
Ayn Rand? Are you serious? The woman was a demagogue, a hypocrite, and a racist homophobe among her other charming qualities. Her "philosophy" of selfishness and greed was based on a worldview of hatred, suspicion, and class warfare, and even then is self-contradictory in many ways and completely meritless in every way. Rand's legacy is one of rationalization for the misguided, unethical, immoral actions of self-centered jackasses who all think they are the ubermensch. The reason she is completely ignored is because she was a horrible human being, who did nothing but make the world a worse place.
I agree that Descartes, Hume, and Kant were wrong. However, modern scientists are not influenced by them. Their own views are much closer to Pragmatism (which is not surprising given that two of the three founders of Pragmatism, namely Peirce and James, were professional scientists).
Popper/Kuhn are both derivatives of Kant and very popular in physics when physicists grasp for a philosophy to justify their epistemology. Mach, also a Kantian, was Einstein's pole star but to Einstein's credit defended realism contra Mach's ideas.
That's because they haven't studied philosophy. I have a background in the sciences, and what I observed is that, in terms of how they think when they are actually doing science, as opposed to explaining it to people who are not scientists, they work out of a set of assumptions pretty much the same as Pragmatism.
I agree that Pragmatism is also fairly common in the sciences. But I don't considered Pragmatism to be a philosophy, it is a rejection of principles on principle so it is a dead-end. What is "shut-up and calculate" if not Pragmatism which has dominated physics for 100 years and has run its course. By holding philosophy in disdain and not studying it the physicists leave themselves vulnerable (due to ignorance) and absorb the bad philosophies I mentioned by osmosis.
> But I don't considered Pragmatism to be a philosophy, it is a rejection of principles on principle so it is a dead-end.
Huh? Philosophy books all list Pragmatism as a major philosophy, and it is far more elaborate than that. "Shut up and calculate" is not at all what the philosophies of Dewey, Peirce and James are about, it is far more elaborate.
>By holding philosophy in disdain and not studying it the physicists leave themselves vulnerable (due to ignorance) and absorb the bad philosophies I mentioned by osmosis.
I am referring to how they actually practice science, not their possibly quite inaccurate philosophical explanations of what they are doing. I am sure you are familiar with the phenomenon of someone loudly claiming they follow a certain set of principles, but then when you observe them you see they are actually doing something quite different.
What I am saying is that if you observe how scientists actually do science, it fits the philosophical principles of Pragmatism, whether the scientists realize it or not. And I am saying that as someone with a background in both the sciences and philosophy.
And what do those "time quanta" represent? "Time of light traversing the radius of an electron", really? Isn't that just another measurement device based on light quanta and distance?
No. That "time quanta" represents the smallest value Δ such that it doesn't make sense to take about events which happened between t and t+Δ. Δ may not be a constant though like Planck's constant.
Time does not exist. It is an abstraction based on the movement of matter. We use time to compare the relative motions of things.
Every instrument we use to "measure" time involves movement: pendulum, sandglass, rotation of Earth, translation of Earth around the Sun, vibration of atoms, etc.
Don't you need time to even define movement? Movement is a change of the position with respect to time. So without time you can't have movement. But obviously you are right that the two concepts are strictly related, that doesn't mean time doesn't "exist" (however you define "exist").
All our accepted model of nature assume that in some sense time
exists. But in general relativity it doesn’t make much sense to
speak of a single event. In the same way it doesn’t make much sense
to speak of a single point in the euclidean plane (you can only
localize one point relative to another one).
So some people (like Rovelli) think one should try to formulate
relativity only in terms relations of events. This might be relevant
in a more fundamental theory of spacetime but on a classical level
it’s irrelevant. You can measure the geometry of spacetime in our
solar system w/o disturbing it. The gravitational field of e.g. some
satellite is negligible to the gravitational field of planets and the
sun.
Forgive me for sounding rhetorical in this question, but I'm genuinely wondering.. Isn't saying "time doesn't exist" akin to saying "human thoughts don't exist"?
The most surprising fact is that the readings of all these instruments are in sync with each other! We take it for granted, and don't appreciate the mystery. It very well might be that the Universe forms a complex landscape with varying "laws", with the pockets where the notions of space and time become quite fuzzy and inconsistent; we might live in a rare oasis where the things more or less "make sense". Elsewhere, there might be no time at all. Popular books on physics never mention this possibility.
But "clocks" can only be in "sync" – i.e. record the same time between each "tick" – when they are in the same inertial frame – from special relativity. In addition, there is gravitational time dilation.
Thus, the "reality" is that no two clocks are in sync. As Rovelli points out in "Reality Is Not What It Seems", with the precise clocks we have today, it's possible to measure this effect for a difference in altitude of a few centimetres.
By similar logic you could argue all physical units are abstractions, which I guess they are. They are very useful in creating a simple accurate predictive model of things we observe on many scales. What's the utility of a distinction between existence and abstraction?
If you know the distinction you dont ask yourself why the abstraction exists. Researching the nature of time is a waste of... time, I guess, because you should know time is an abstract concept, a proxy for something else.
Wow ... Since you are so certain that time does not exist, why don't you write a paper showing the implications for quantizing gravity, and why the standard spacetime picture of both Special and General relativity is wrong?
I would bump the origin of the universe to the top, because no matter what universe-generating physics you come up with I can always ask, "but what set things up to work that way?" I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things. Consciousness and the origin of the universe get place 0, and the others all get place 1 because they're solvable but we don't know in which order.
I very much share that sentiment, in that I rate "the nature of consciousness" and "why does the universe, why does anything at all even exist" as fundamental questions of a completely different class, perhaps even unsolvable.
"I would bump the origin of the universe to the top, because no matter what universe-generating physics you come up with I can always ask, "but what set things up to work that way?""
Except that it might not be possible to get outside of consciousness to have any testable way of explaining what set it up to be that way.
It seems that we are hard-limited by our consciousness, and have no way of going outside of it to peek at "the universe" beyond.
> I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things.
No one knows that it is not measurable. Is love measurable? is hunger? happiness? they seem to be as measurable as consciousness, that is to say we can at least measure them in binary as either present or not.
How do you know everyone else is not a "p-zombie", indistinguishable in any external way from a human such as yourself, but devoid of internal "consciousness"/"subjective experience". Even the mere logical possibility of p-zombies indicates that consciousness is unmeasurable.
Solipsism is basically the only defense against the conclusions from the evidence of the "real" world. But if you argue for solipsism then I say you have much bigger problems than consciousness because you basically rejected everything that has ever been "known" or experienced.
If you reject our "shared reality" then anything is possible, including paradoxically, the "shared reality".
If you accept the shared reality on the other hand, consciousness is measurable to some degree. So the real question is do you or do you not accept we share experiences?
As an addendum, if it is all up to me as you suggested, I just made consciousness measurable so there is no need to keep arguing about it.
"Solipsism is basically the only defense against the conclusions from the evidence of the "real" world."
Far from it. There could very well be an external world, and one populated by plenty of other and fully real human beings even, but your own personal view or understanding of it could be distorted or false.
This could be simply because you're hallucinating, or insane, or your brain could be injured, or could be living in a virtual reality (which itself exists in some other "real" reality), or you could be the proverbial brain in a vat, or aliens (or god or a demon/devil) could be deceiving you, etc.
All those options are the same: they are either part of a shared experience or they are not. Nothing is preventing a demon from deceiving me right now, in fact one can come anytime I'd love to meet him, preferably her.
If experiencing something that's not shared is the only qualification for solipsism, then we're all solipsists, as (arguably barring the possibility of telepathy) our experiences are all private.
But that's not what solipsism typically means. Solipsism usually refers to the position that only you (or perhaps only your own mind) exist. By that commonly accepted definition, one could be mistaken or deceived in any of the ways I laid out earlier without them entailing solipsism.
Even if there is some sort of "shared context" (more commonly known as "objective reality") your view or understanding of it could still be deceived, hallucinating, simply mistaken, insane, etc. These are not solipsism. What they are are possible obstacles to your connection to any shared context or objective reality.
"Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail)."
Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born?
This might be a religious question to some, or perhaps involve a religious answer, but religion need not be involved. It's possible that in some not yet understood way an individual might exist before they're born and are somehow incarnated or embodied in to matter or the world as we know it when they're born.
Sure, it might sound kooky or something that science might never be able to answer (or maybe it could, who knows?). But the point is that that's all part of the mystery of life, and the answer could be a metaphysical or ontological one, not necessarily a religious one.
Another question regarding the nature of life is what exactly does it take to go from a non-living substance to a living one. In some way this is a question of definitions (which is difficult enough and controversial enough on its own), but even given an agreed-upon definition of life, it might not be clear how exactly the process from non-living to living take place, or at which point the non-living becomes living.
It says a lot that you felt the need to hedge against the assumption that you were talking about religious beliefs. These days it seems like there’s a materialist mindset that assumes anyone who questions certain assumptions about consciousness (e.g. that it is a creation of the brain that begins and ends when the brain does) has ventured into the terrain of religion, the supernatural, or “magic” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). It doesn’t seem to occur to people that consciousness itself is completely inexplicable and therefore all bets are off regarding its true nature. These assumptions people have are based on faith (yes, faith) in a hypothetical explanation that has yet to materialize. Until scientists cross the Explanatory Gap (which is more like a chasm), nobody has the right to tell anyone that their speculation about consciousness is kooky or unscientific or whatever. The only thing that’s unscientific is letting one’s thought be constrained by rigid dogma regarding what is and isn’t possible.
I feel your pain (if I’m understanding you correctly, that is). It sucks to be trapped in a no-man’s-land between scientific dogma and religious dogma. We need a better way forward.
The problem is one of humility. If you admit that something is at this point inexplicable then that is where you should stop explaining it. Sometimes I don't know is the only real answer. Because if you want to make this statement:
> It doesn’t seem to occur to people that consciousness itself is completely inexplicable and therefore all bets are off regarding its true nature.
Sure, but the problem is that many people don’t demonstrate this humility when they act like it’s ridiculous to wonder if consciousness exists prior to conception or after death. Ruling these out requires an unwarranted assumption about the relationship between consciousness and the brain.
I agree that people should show some humility and admit that we have no idea if or when consciousness begins and ends. Anyone who makes definitive claims about the temporal limits of consciousness should, as you said, provide an explanation of how they know this.
It goes both ways. If you claim there is an unwarranted assumption about the relationship between consciousness and the brain you have to prove it. All I see is consciousness is highly correlated with having a brain.
> I agree that people should show some humility and admit that we have no idea if or when consciousness begins and ends.
I think our understanding of it is not as vague as you claim. We can see consciousness develop in all kind of animals; infants are less conscious than adults and elders show a higher degree of loss of consciousness. Furthermore, it is linked with brain activity somehow, as damaged brains show erratic consciousness related behavior. There is a lot more to learn, a lot, but to say that we know nothing is very dishonest in my opinion.
That is assuming we are talking about the same kind of consciousness you and I. But I've got a feeling we are not.
> Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born?
If you are inventing mysteries out of thin air why stop there? What if you will yourself into existence? What if it is you that is making "time" perceivable for the rest of us? Do your half-existing-yet-unborn-brother dies every time you are reborn into this plane but not if you will yourself to be born into another parallel universe?
I didn't invent that question. It's a been a question that people have had for millenia.
Some people believe that one has a soul that exists before one is born in to a body. So in a way that's an answer to this question -- an answer that's been around for thousands of years. Clearly many people are concerned about it. I'm far from the only one, much less the first one.
I was talking about the royal you: we. But more importantly, "when" the question was first asked doesn't change the nature of the question. Sure, you (we) can ask it, but it is no more insightful that the myriad of other metaphysical questions that have been asked through history that will never be answered because they lack a fundamental grounding in the shared experience we call "reality". Are there any blue reds? We can spend a millennia thinking about it.
"Are there any blue reds? We can spend a millennia thinking about it."
It's pretty obvious that you can have blue reds: they're called purples or violets. Just squeeze some blue out of a tube of paint, and then some red, mix them together and you get a blue red. You can also have a black white: it's called gray.
Anyway, I'd agree that one could ask any number of metaphysical questions, but it could be argued that only some of them would be considered "great". One (arguable) measure to use for the greatness of questions is how many people do they occupy, and how critical do they consider those questions. Whether one exists before birth or after death would be considered "great" by this measure, whether there's a blue red would not.
Violet is not blue and it is also not red. I'm not asking for a bluish red but for a 100% blue color that it is also red.
You are misusing the language, or rather I am in this case, to ask a paradoxical question. Where are all the cat dogs? This is a never ending game because we don't agree on the language. This is exactly the realm of metaphysics.
And greatness is in the eye of the beholder. To me greatness could be quantified by how much progress has been made in answering the question. After a thousand years and possibly millions of lives wasted trying to answer "is there existence before this life?" we are not one single iota closer to an answer. That implies a pretty bad question that is not grounded in reality, or at the very least not "grammatically" grounded in reality.
"Violet is not blue and it is also not red. I'm not asking for a bluish red but for a 100% blue color that it is also red."
If you're asking if there exists something that's 100% X at the same time as being 100% not-X, I'm not sure there's much to debate about it, as there clearly isn't (at least not in this world, where things can't seem to be themselves and not themselves at the same time).
"You are misusing the language, or rather I am in this case, to ask a paradoxical question. Where are all the cat dogs? This is a never ending game because we don't agree on the language. This is exactly the realm of metaphysics."
It's the realm of semantics (ie. definitions), but I'm not convinced that every metaphysical question could be reduced to a semantic one.
If you take the question of whether one has some sort of existence (like, say, as a "soul") before birth, I think that question would still exist even after we'd agreed on the constituent definitions. Also, I don't see anything paradoxical in that question. Even were it paradoxical, its paradoxical quality would in no way disqualify it for me. Perhaps I'd be even more interested in examining it, as examining paradoxes has been a very fruitful approach throughout human history.
"To me greatness could be quantified by how much progress has been made in answering the question. After a thousand years and possibly millions of lives wasted trying to answer "is there existence before this life?" we are not one single iota closer to an answer."
There have been answers, they just haven't satisfied everyone. The same could be said of pretty much every other great question, no matter whether the answers come from science, religion, philosophy, intuition, or elsewhere.
> If you're asking if there exists something that's 100% X at the same time as being 100% not-X, I'm not sure there's much to debate about it, as there clearly isn't (at least not in this world, where things can't seem to be themselves and not themselves at the same time).
You found the loophole! Sad to see you abandoned so swiftly your own logic when the time came to evaluate your own statement. This is exactly why the metaphysical deals in the realm of ambiguity: once you define it in a clear and concise manner all the mystery disappears, and that to some, is no fun.
That is also why a question like “is there life after death?” is uninteresting: by definition life comes before death.
"a question like "is there life after death?" is uninteresting: by definition life comes before death."
You're not being charitable to the questioner by interpreting it as a paradox.
Clearly, what most people intend to ask by that question is whether one can exist in some form (as a "spirit" or as "soul", or maybe come out of the VR that is the world, or in heaven even in a body like the present one or a more perfect one, or in hell, or maybe reincarnated in as another lifeform, etc) after your physical body stops functioning. There is no paradox in that.
Not so clear, because you see, that is another question. This is why we need to define things very explicitly and then accept the implications of those definitions or we’ll never get anywhere.
Now that you accepted that there is a paradox in the original question (“is there life after death?”) you reformulated it in a way the paradox is no longer present and your meaning is less ambiguous:
“Is there something not physical that continues to exists even after the physical body no longer does?”
And that is a very interesting question, but first we have to acknowledge that it is a different question and because you asked it in a non paradoxical way it opens up avenues for exploration unavailable to the original question. I would personally start simply by asking “is there something not physical, ie. a soul, “in” a being?” That is in itself is own can of worms because even if there are “souls” they might “die” when the body does so it is not as clear cut as one might initially think, but at least is a start. I’m sure there are other approaches, but at least we should all agree: it is a different question.
My point is only unparadoxical questions can have a shot at being answered. Most of the “great questions” are paradoxes; “what came before the beginning?” sounds very profound but it will never lead anywhere, as centuries pondering it have already proven.
Then you could argue that question P (and all "metaphysical" questions) amounts to or really has the structure of something like question Q, and that it's therefore paradoxical, trivial, or uninteresting because the answer is obviously "no" ("by definition", as you point out).
I would disagree for the following reasons:
First, if you interrogate people who ask question P what they mean by it, you're likely to find out that they're not asking anything like question Q, but rather something like the following question:
R: "Can one continue to exist in some form after your physical body stops functioning?"
Now, it's true that question P and R are different on the surface, but when most people ask P what they mean by that question is R. So underneath the surface, at the meaning level, they intend to ask R. Question R is not paradoxical, trivial, or uninteresting, and it has no obvious answer that could be arrived at "by definition".
Second, I believe even trivial-seeming questions and paradoxes are frequently much deeper and more interesting than they appear. Careful study and analysis of them could yield profound insights and areas of future research. Witness all the progress in logic from studying paradoxes and other "trivial" corner cases (like the Liar's Paradox[1], Russell's Paradox[2], etc). From such study you get things like Paraconsistent logics[3] and dialetheism,[4] which can fruitfully deal with contradictions.
Third, even things that are "true by definition" can be useful and interesting. Wittgenstein argued that all logical truths are tautologies. Well, if so, they're still worthy of study and have proven to be interesting and useful.
Finally, I am not convinced that all, most, or even many "metaphysical" questions can be charitably reduced to paradoxes, nor that they are trivially answerable "by definition".
It seems to me you are more interested in the question than in the answer. You agree with me, and then spend two paragraphs justifying why you don't want to agree with me because somehow asking the wrong question still has value. It may have historical value, poetical value, emotional value, and that of course is valuable. But as to the question itself, when everyone means something else either the question is malformed or the language is useless.
And it is not so obvious what they actually mean as everyone interprets it in a different way. Some people mean still existing in this "plane", some in some other reality, some mean to be reborn, some mean to trascend, some to reincarnate, some a mix of two, or of all.
If we keep pretending the question is right when it obviously lacks meaning and all the information necessary to be able to answer it we are never gonna find out.
But again, that is what some people want, for some things to always remain a mystery, so they ask paradoxical questions.
I'm not quite sure if it works for blue and red or only certain color combinations, but it's possible to create images where an item in the scene is obviously one color, yet the light hitting the eye is another color. The brain automatically adjusts for "that's what a red object would look like in that environment," when the light coming from the photograph is actually blue.
In that way you can have a picture that's "blue red" due to perspective rather than semantics. E.g. the car in the picture is really red and the color of the ink depicting it is really blue. The red is blue.
That is interesting, but it is also an answer to a different question. The question is "are there any blue reds?" not "can we see in some circumstances reds as blue?".
Not true, what we call the color red is an electromagnetic wave with a wavelength between, according to wikipedia, 625 and 740 nanometers.
And if you are looking at a picture on a computer, the computer will call red a pixel with an rgb value of (255, 0, 0) even if nobody is looking at it.
The light coming from the car in that image would be concentrated around 450-500 nm, not 625-740 nm. Viewed in isolation, that's blue, but in the context of the rest of the image, it is red. The "redness" of the car exists only in the brain of the viewer, which has evolved to produce stablility of color in a variety of lighting conditions.
That's also why RGB monitors display more than three distinct colors. The colors are synthesized in the brain. If we were orbiting a brown dwarf, we might talk about colors within the infrared part of the spectrum as if they were intrinsic properties of light.
i would add morality to this -- at least problems in physics have a scientific framework within which they can be investigated. but why should we care? why should we be nice? of course there is plenty of rich philosophy on the subjcet
Also, what exactly is it that we mean by "free will"? Even just that question can get ugly, fast. I think I've only ever heard one definition of the concept sufficiently precise to even have a meaningful answer.
(In short, it was this: If we our model of the material universe is essentially correct, and if we assume that it is closed and that the material that we see is all there is, or at least all that can ever influence us, then suppose we define free will as the inability of any real external predictor to ever perfectly predict our actions in advance. I emphasize the word real to highlight that we are emphatically not talking about some abstract god, or something vaguely sitting outside of time, but the ability of a real device constructed out of real materials in real spacetime to predict your actions. We assumed away hypothetical infinite beings or math games at the beginning. In that case, it can be mathematically shown that you are simply too complicated to be fully correctly simulated by any system that attempts to build a model of your actions simply by external observation of you; you do not produce enough bits in your external actions to uniquely identify the state space of the inside of your head, not even if you turn the entire rest of the universe to the task (literally!). By this definition, it can be concretely answered: Yes, you have free will. Interestingly, this turns out to be true even if the universe is 100% deterministic, which definitely conflicts with most people's ideas about "free will"... but then, there's another demonstration of how rare it is for anyone to carefully define it before endlessly pontificating about it.
Also, while I consider this a valuable contribution to the field that any interested philosopher should ruminate on, I am not claiming that I 100% believe it, nor that it "solves" the problem. It is simply as I said at the beginning, the only sufficiently careful treatment of the problem that one can actually say it has an answer. Personally I find the presuppositions it is based on to be highly questionable. But it is at least worth pondering for a bit.)
> In that case, it can be mathematically shown that you are simply too complicated to be fully correctly simulated by any system that attempts to build a model of your actions simply by external observation of you; you do not produce enough bits in your external actions to uniquely identify the state space of the inside of your head, not even if you turn the entire rest of the universe to the task (literally!).
Really? Which mathematical result is this?
Do scanning techniques such as fMRI and EEG count as external?
Also the origin of the universe, why it's accelerating its expansion, how are gravity and quantum phenomena reconciled and how do they work.... I'd say it's a great time to be alive and there's no shortage of important questions!
The way you curtly replied makes you think that the question is settled, perhaps even trivial, when in reality regarding consciousness that is but one person's thought on an issue where nobody can claim to have an understanding, let alone an answer, and regarding molecular biology there is still much, much to learn.
I dont think time is any more mysterious a concept than space. Asking "what is time" is just as enigmatic as "why are there 3 dimensions and not 1,2,4 or many more?"
How can you have a thing that is "left" or "up" of another thing? How come "all the things" aren't in the same place?
nature of consciousness is the biggest one IMO, precisely because it doesn't appear to be captured by "nature of existence." we have good physical/mathematical models on hand re: causation, such that we can at least start hypothesizing about what change is, where the universe came from, what if anything differentiates life from other motion, etc.
but consciousness is so categorically different that we can't even start. "well, brains are made up of cells and further of particles, and electricity works this way and here's some results from information theory and [UTTER MAGICAL WALL / ABYSSAL GAP] then there's the subjective experience of consciousness and will. and damnit we don't have anything like a logical or explanatory connection between these two sides, but for 'well, if i destroy 'someone else's' (??? what's this possessive in our fundamental terms???) body in the right way, it stops acting as if it's conscious like me, and also my own consciousness (which i can't describe with any specificity) changes when i do weird physical things involving drugs, injury, nutrition, um... and attitudes seem to matter, and there's definitely a subconscious, i guess, and...'..."
If you accept that other people are conscious like yourself, it seems like you have accepted the physical origin of consciousness. If you don't accept that the subjective experience of consciousness is just a product of physical events, then how do you avoid viewing yourself as the only conscious entity? You can be a solipsist or not, but you can't have it both ways. Experiencing thoughts from outside yourself is a common experience, but it's generally considered a delusion.
While I think it's an interesting argument, I don't agree that accepting that some other being than me can be conscious leads to having to accept the physical origin of consciousness a priori. If you look at Buddhism or any esoteric system, they essentially posit that consciousness is a unified field from which everything manifests, like light refracted through an (infinitely) complex array of lens. The spots of light where the light terminates look separate, but if you look at where the source of the light enters the lens, it all comes from a single source. The experience of having a separate consciousness and a body or mind or thoughts that I identify as me or an I that is not you or that car or that tree is essentially just an illusion because I don't have the awareness to be conscious of that unity. Just because something appears to be separate from one perspective doesn't mean that it's separate in reality, it's just that I experience it as separate due to my limited perspective. Consciousness is an experiential vehicle by nature. It doesn't slot into the scientific method all that well no matter how we try to cram it in.
Are you or are you not experiencing my consciousness right now? Either you claim to, in which case you're lying or delusional, or you don't claim to, in which case you can't say anything about its experiential nature without contradiction. I can say I am conscious all day, but that's just something I say - it can't prove anything to you. If I was being tortured, and I didn't communicate it to you, would you notice?
Logical incoherence starts with lying to yourself. That's not wisdom.
Edit:
I can be a solipsist today and a materialist tomorrow - I'm not criticizing either viewpoint, just saying you can't reason based on believing in both simultaneously.
I think you capture what I was referring to when I said that limited awareness is what narrows consciousness -- it's like putting some of the ocean in a bucket. It's still part of the ocean, but it's not the whole ocean. What do logic and labels like solipsist and materialist have to do with consciousness? Yes, they're part of consciousness, but they're a construct: concepts and words that we're using to discuss our own unique experiences of consciousness. We can chase each other around forever in a rabbit hole of semantics about what the nature of consciousness is, and how my experience varies and is separate from your experience of it, but we're just looking at our buckets of water that we scooped up as if it's the entirety of the ocean. Meanwhile, the ocean is sloshing around us. It doesn't rely on us to be aware of it's oceanness to exist, it just is. Consciousness has more than enough space to accommodate your experience that relies very heavily on logical coherence to form a version of reality that is comfortable for you to function in, but that experiential frame isn't the ground of all being. It's just a lens that one can look through. Sure, I can't share you're exact experience, but I could empathize with you if I knew you were tortured. You can look through one lens and then another: consciousness is constantly changing and modulating our experiences, there's nothing static about it.
there's a gulf as big as the ocean between acceptance and explanation. we have good reason to assume that consciousness (whatever it is) depends on the physical. great, but what is it?
I wasn't taking sides on whether it's physical or not, so I wouldn't particularly agree with your statement.
I'm only trying to say that if you don't accept that consciousness is physical, you aren't accepting the symmetry between you and other minds, and can't reason from the assumption they have the same experience.
Once you contradict the known fact that you experience your own thoughts and not others, you descend into incoherence. It seems to me kind of like the issues people have with quantum weirdness. People are accustomed to assuming they know things for the sake of argument, but assuming you know the unknowable can sabotage your reasoning.
This is hardly casting doubt on the nature of (human) death. This is purely a question about quantum mechanics, I'd say.
On a side note, I fail to see how the experimenter is supposed to survive with probability 1 in Everett's many-worlds interpretation and thus be able to distinguish the latter from the Copenhagen interpretation. Yes, there will be one world where he survives but in the "vast majority" of worlds he will be dead. (Disregarding for a second that counting how often the world bifurcates in the many-worlds interpretation is a somewhat delicate issue.) So in terms of probabilities, he will still die with absolute certainty as the experiment gets repeated infinitely many times.
The idea is that everybody else dies with certainty, from your observation point, but you yourself can't, because the denominator of the probability fraction consists only of those futures where you exist.
It happens to be a vivid idea to me, because a long time ago I read a short story that was more fantasy/horror than science fiction, but resembled it a little in spirit. It was about a kid in a small town who discovered that the grave digger for the town seemed to know ahead of time who would die, and dug the graves in advance. The kid thought this was just mildly interesting as long as it was just elderly people he didn't care about, until one day his parents were in a car accident and because one grave was ready, he knew one was going to die. He killed the grave digger and buried him in the open grave instead, and from then on, people stopped dying. Which turned out to not be a blessing.
It really doesn't have anything to do with souls or wanting to survive. The implications of this form of immortality are not comforting to contemplate.
These questions are pretty firmly metaphysical, and there's no reason to expect science will ever have an answer. There are an infinite array of unanswerable questions about supernatural phenomena that have never been observed and probably never will.
Disclaimer: I'm a physicist who didn't finish the Phd and went to work in the tech field instead.
I wish physicists would stop writing these bullshitty popular science books. A lot of the books are popularizing unverified / unverifiable things like String Theory or Multiverse or Arrow of Time. And when they're talking about more plain things like Special Relativity, then I still cringe, because it's not something that's worth explaining to lay people: there is no situation in which some high-level bullshitty understanding of GR or SR or QM will be helpful or relevant in life, at best it will confuse you.
It is a good and necessary thing to tell students about this, so some of them become physicists, but you don't need popular science books for that, it should happen in schools, for free.
If you're going to speak about Physics to lay people, at least do it it in a way that's relevant to them, eg. look at how Feynman taught Physics. Explain how a boomerang works, or how thermodynamics relates to photosynthesis.
> it's not something that's worth explaining to lay people
Lay person here. I'd just like you to know that we experience curiosity too. Also, having read some Rovelli, I should point out that he's pretty good at highlighting when and how he's simplifying, and flagging up when he strays beyond the scientific consensus into the unverified.
> there is no situation in which some high-level bullshitty understanding of GR or SR or QM will be helpful or relevant in life, at best it will confuse you.
If I only learned and experienced things that would be 'helpful' or 'relevant' it would be a very dull life.
Yeah, science isn’t about being useful and relevant in day to day
life. It’s an important part of human culture and scientist should at
least try to communicate their findings to general public (which is
paying for it!).
I partially agree with the first comment that it isn’t really helpful
to popularize highly speculative – and thus probably false – ideas.
But well established but still “weird” discoveries like GR & QM are
interesting on their own and have huge implications on our
understanding of nature. You don’t need a science degree to be
fascinated by black holes, the big bang and quantum weirdness.
The problem with the "well established" or "settled" discoveries is that there is enough experimental evidence that is anomalous to the theories thus presented. This effects everything from the ideas from General Relativity, Special Relativity, Big Bang, Quantum Mechanics, the Standard Model of Particles, etc.
I think the biggest problem that is faced today (it hasn't really changed in centuries) is that people do not like to be considered ignorant, especially those who delve into such matters at a professional level. We actually know so little of the universe around us, but as humans, we do not like to acknowledge that we don't know.
The fact that we don't know and that our current suite of theories is incomplete and hence could very well be wrong in both minor and major ways should be driving us onward into understanding the universe around us. It really is not a problem if we don't understand. It should mean that we strive to learn more.
However, far too often, I find that the supposed knowledgeable ones exhibit an attitude of superiority that effectively closes them to a better understanding. There are those of course who are humble enough to say that they actually have little understanding even though they are at the very top of their respective fields.
Being able to be honest and say that one doesn't know is the first step on the road to acquiring some semblance of understanding. Being able to explain to someone else what the current understanding is in a simple enough manner is a good step on the way to increasing one's own knowledge.
> there is enough experimental evidence that is anomalous to the theories
Huh? I have more the impression that Λ-CDM & SM are working just too
damn good. I’m not aware of any observation that hints that we need
something completely different than GR & local QFT.
But “settled” and “well established” doesn’t mean that humans will
never find a more fundamental theory. Classical mechanics is settled,
well established and correct as it was in Newtons times. Now we just
better understand its limits and when to use different models.
GR, QM & QFT are correct and won’t go away. At some point in the
future we will have a better understanding of their limits too. But
that won’t make them wrong.
> The fact that we don't know and that our current suite of theories is incomplete and hence could very well be wrong in both minor and major ways should be driving us onward into understanding the universe around us. It really is not a problem if we don't understand. It should mean that we strive to learn more.
I’m not objecting exploring new speculative models. I’m worried
about presenting highly speculative ideas as facts or probable
solutions to the public. A lot of the pop-sci articles you read these
days are very misleading. And IMHO Rovelli, Green, Susskind, Smolin
and the like aren’t doing anyone a favor with their pop-sci books.
Don't ever use the word "correct" for any theory we use. If you actually read and understand the basis for any theory or model in use, you will come to see that each is capable of giving "close enough" predictions, but none will give perfect predictions and that there are always anomalous data that these theories and models cannot explain.
Be pragmatic and keep in mind that wonderful phrase - "All theories are wrong, but some are useful."
The problem I see is that it is a common activity to present "settled" and "well established" as fact. Often without ever highlighting the anomalies that have been found and that we only have a "belief" that it is useful.
One of the best examples is the case for "dark matter". It has never been established in any way that such "dark matter" exists. It only arises because the observed motion within galaxies does not accord with "settled" and "well established" theory. So to keep this "settled" and "well established" theory, some additional "theoretical entity" has been added to allow the observations to fit the "settled" and "well established" theory.
Now, that addition of a new "theoretical entity" is, in itself, not a problem. What becomes the problem is when every experiment fails to show that "theoretical entity". At this point, one should be saying that mayhaps the "settled" and "well established" theory is not so settled and not so well established. Mayhaps there is a problem that we then need to be looking at.
My point here is that we do not, in fact, have any real or clear understanding of the universe about us. We have models and theories that work within a limited range but they are not global. The simplest of these is that "chestnut" between general relativity and quantum mechanics (the large and the small). The funny thing here is that we can make devices that are macroscopic which exhibit, under certain circumstances, the effects we see at microscopic levels. Why? What is happening here? What are we missing in this crossover realm? Why do we see things in the laboratory and see similar things at extra-solar distances, yet the explanations of these effects do not accord with the "settled" and "well established" theory we use at those massive sizes?
I respect your point of view, but I don't really agree.
A popular science understanding of BHs, BB, QM is not really an understanding. It's just some fairy tale level understanding. To be clear, I'm not being elitist, using QM as an example, I think it was Feynman who said nobody really understands it, at best we can make calculations/predictions ("shut up and calculate").
For example, ask a lay person about BB and they will tell you it's an explosion, in the classical sense (it's not). Or, I don't think you can "understand" QM without understanding the significance of unitary linear operators for time evolution, or self-adjoint linear operators for measurements. If you would "allow" non-linearities, the world would be different.
This has value in itself, as the first step towards greater understanding. I bet most people who study physics had their interest piqued by such fairytales. Maybe you did too.
> I bet most people who study physics had their interest piqued by such fairytales.
Okay, but that's the education use-case for young people. For them, a 300+ page book that talks about the arrow of time and costs $25 is not the right thing, in my opinion.
If you look at Feynman's stuff, those are good examples, that's what got me hooked as a student. I pirated the Feynman Lectures on Physics mp3s and pdfs and chewed through it, after being initially inspired by Surely You're Joking.
> For example, ask a lay person about BB and they will tell you it's an explosion, in the classical sense
Give her Weinberg’s book to read and she’ll come to a different
conclusion. Of course those books won’t give you a deep understanding
of cosmology but that doesn’t mean they have to be completely wrong.
Stephen Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes is my favorite example of
pop-sci done right.
My initial comment was probably too much gut-reaction.
There is good popular science that is useful.
For example, maybe the designers of Mario Kart read about QCD and the strong force: this is a weird force, which---unlike electromagnetism and gravity---gets stronger (not weaker) with distance, like the pull on a rubber band. Maybe they read that, and that's how they came up with the game's rubber band mechanics.
But I do think a lot of the highly publicised stuff is unfortunate, because they deal with highly speculative stuff (ST) and/or give the reader a false sense of understanding (BB), and in general writing 300+ pages of high-level hand wavy explanations is of questionable use to me; I'd make it shorter and give it away for free.
Planck's constant, speed of light travel when you chain across space which Planck himself should have understood if he thought about transmissions of information in series. Curves when gravity pushes/pulls light from straight paths. What questions are there?
Royal Institute presentation that I really enjoyed. Has some visual aspects, but can be mostly listened to while driving:
The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli
> From Boltzmann to quantum theory, from Einstein to loop quantum gravity, our understanding of time has been undergoing radical transformations. Carlo Rovelli brings together physics, philosophy and art to unravel the mystery of time.
https://youtu.be/-6rWqJhDv7M
Posted 13 June 2018, recorded 30 April 2018.
C-SPAN videotaped Covelli speaking about his new book at a bookstore. About an hour long:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?445419-2/the-order-time
I think I'm a simpleton because I could never imagine time being it's own thing. I see time as simply the amount of change in reality we can perceptually sample. Much like how an object in motion will continue in it's motion until it meets resistance,reality in my opinion is in continuous motion that has yet to meet resistance. Time (imo)is our measure of this change divided by our ability to sample it(where this ability could be second,minute,etc...)
Again,that's my opinion as a layman. I've always wondered why time was the focus, when I at least have been more curious about universal change. Why is everything in motion? and how is everything universally connected to where it changes at the same rate?
Maybe there's already plenty of work on this and I'm being ignorant(apologies if so).
Sounds good. Next, please define "change", and explain why or how "change" exists and is detectable by humans.
That's what Rovelli is investigating/theorizing about.
Easy. Change is when equivalence of state information is broken. It is "detected" by everything around it. If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it, it absolutely does happen, because it's in a forest.
Yes but they are investigating our relative perception of the change. It's like studying astronomy without considering the fact that the stars we perceive in the sky is just our perception of how they looked like in the past. We distinguish how things are now from what we can perceive by measuring light and EMR. Why can't we at least consider the possibility that our perception of change might be different from the actual nature and attributes of this change?
You don’t need to consider that what you see in the sky is “in the past”. The light that’s reaching us has been travelling at c, the universal speed limit. Since we cannot possibly have known about that information sooner, what we see in the sky is for all intents and purposes, “the present”.
Additionally, the hidden variables of the change are exactly what they’re talking about when people ask the question “what is time?”.
Right, however relativity tells us that time is an actual, physical thing that can be affected by and affect matter.
What do you mean with “actual, physical thing”? Unless I missed some quite huge news I don’t know about any particle that “creates” time unlike Higgs boson that “creates” mass. Obviously the “creates” is a huge over-semplification.
I am not informed well enough to answer you but can you point me in the right direction on anything that associates time being a physhical matter? How would relativity change if one looks at time as "perceived universal change'?
I'm not sure what I would recommend as an introduction to relativity. If you're mathematically minded and have a lot of time on your hands, and actually want to learn the physics, a superb book is "Spacetime and Geometry" by Sean Carrol. As for a layman introduction, I'm not sure what to recommend.
As succinctly as I can put it, in our current understanding spacetime is a 4-dimensional space whose curvature is related to the local energy-momentum content. In turn, the motion of particles in freefall is dictated by this curvature.
Two books on relativity that I found pretty accessible and enlightening were:
Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything[1] - George Musser
and
What Is Relativity?: An Intuitive Introduction to Einstein's Ideas, and Why They Matter[2] - Jeffrey O. Bennett
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23848266-spooky-action-a...
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17938849-what-is-relativ...
"I see time as simply the amount of change in reality we can perceptually sample."
So if there was no one to perceive the change, there'd be no time?
Also, what is change?
Change is modification of a physhical attribute for an object. Without someone to perceive there would be change but no time.
"Change is modification of a physhical attribute for an object."
This sounds like a circular definition because "modification" is a synonym for "change".
An object's property had a specific value. That value became different.
Can we agree on that definition?
"An object's property had a specific value. That value became different."
How is something that's different different from something that's changed? It sounds like it's one and the same to me.
Also, you used the word "became". That word has temporal connotations. So if you define change in terms of time, you can't then go on to define time in terms of change without it being another circular definition.
I was defining time as the measurement of change. Change does not depend on measurement therefore there is no circular definition.
For example, a star is different from star light. When I look at the sky through a telescope I don't see a star,I see star light. Same can be said for any object as well,we see light emanating from an object therefore vision is perception of an object as measured by our optics.
Time is how me perceptually measure change. This distinguishment can potentially prove valuable much like how distinguishing perception of star light and the star itself is important(not so important for close objects but important at a grand scale.)
Modification,change and other words used to describe when something becomes different do not imply human measurement.
We can for example talk about a tree that fell in a forest with no human to measure that change. Did it happen? Yes. We can only say it didn't happen if we exclude all events beyond our perceptive ability from reality. In the same way,change does not depend on time but time is a measuremet of change.
The problem is that if you take the time and carefully consider all of your statements, and carefully lay them all out in a row in the right way, you will find you've got circularity hiding in them. I am confident in this statement because you are walking very well-covered ground, and lots of smart people have examined it all very closely. For instance, "change" intrinsically has a before and after element in it; you can't use it to define time. You can use it to define a measure of time (which is pretty much exactly how we in fact do it), but it isn't useful for defining time. But I do not say that is the only place circular definitions lie in your various posts here; it is only an example. It is very hard to discuss exactly what time is because the very words of our thoughts and in some sense the very temporal nature of our thoughts themselves continuously betray us. Being embedded in time is the ground state of our being and virtually an unperceived constant in our thinking, slipping in to our every concept and thought. It is very hard to extricate ourselves from that, if it is really possible at all.
It is all too easy for us to bury ourselves in so many words that we push the circularity of the argument behind so much obfuscation that we can no longer perceive the circularity, but it is still there. To truly define time, one must fundamentally start from some sort of perspective in which it does not exist, then show how it arises. This is not something you're going to pull off in English. It is soaked in time. You're going to have to use math or you are almost certainly just moving the obfuscation around. (And also deal with the question of what it means to "arise", though to some extent that's an artifact of English popping up again. There are mathematical ways of dealing with that.)
The question isn't "is before different than after?", nor is it anything about how much difference there is, or how it may relate to other differences. The question is "how is it that there is a before and after at all?", to which merely pointing out that there is a before and after isn't very helpful.
I'm in agreement about the uselessness of words to define time, but I doubt that even using math will help understand time. I'd argue that both math and time arise with thoughts, i.e with the faculty of defining concepts and reasoning about them, but defining a concept is not the same as understanding the essence of the thing that is being defined. I see mathematics as the extent to which "thought muscles" can be flexed (which admittedly is very impressive), but to understand the nature of time, one would have to "step out of thought" as well, which if possible would be a rare capability and obviously not an insight that could be conveyed with explanations or definitions...
You've given me a lot to ponder with your insightful comment,thank you.
I wanted to separate our perception of time from time itelf (which I called change). Isn't time something perceived?
Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these hey-look!-so-fascinating! things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don't have any important research to do, like they are so hopeless and desperate about the current state of physics and they stopped caring about it and found a proxy to monetize their knowledge. But hey, that's not a secret anymore - everyone knows about the crisis, from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell. Sabine Hossenfelder is a legend for me. A few years back, when I was taking a Physics101 class, even the lecturer almost begged for help after the last lecture at the end of the semester: "my fellow students, please, please, consider (to continue your career in the field of) physics. Physics is stuck. It needs new ideas, new theories, new minds. Please consider this." I was stunned. That was some real thing. I guess the fast advancement of technology in the late ~100 years made even the most brilliant minds (relatively) lazy. They gradually stopped thinking, beating their brains out year after year and here we are. No serious discovery after the quantum theory. String theory? Yeah, gazillions of dimensions - good luck with that. Higgs boson, Gravitational waves? Come on, nothing revolutionary - we're still waiting for the revolution to emerge from (upgraded!) LHC. For me, they are cleverly and beautifully marketed (minor) findings. (Maybe some of you have heard of, some (if not many) of the top universities have teams working hard doing all the "scientific-marketing" for the Nobel Prize - it's a precious prestige win in this popular world we live in).
Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it. And it's getting worse and worse by the distraction caused by all the digital "life" surrounding us, pulling and tightening its ropes every day. I imagine a true scientist as a monk. S/he doesn't think about writing a pop-sci book, appearing on TV and s/he got a distantiation even for interviews about her/his latest important research/discovery. "Monks" are needed more than ever for science nowadays.
Those were my humble 2 cents.
"I have hard times to imagine their writers as a real scientists. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli..."
If you mean by "real scientist" that they are doing real work that advances the field, some of them are and, yes, some of them aren't. I don't mean that as a criticism, because there is real value in being a PR person for science. (Some danger if they do it poorly, but a lot of value, too.) Hawking, for instance, was certainly a real scientist by any measure, right up until his unfortunate passing, but also did good PR and wrote some very popular books. And not to pick on him, but according to his CV [1], Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn't published a paper in a decade, and if you skip three related papers in 2007-2008, hadn't published prior to that since 1998. Doesn't mean he's not doing useful stuff, or that he wasn't at least a scientist in the past, but he's certainly not on the same sort of track as Hawking was.
I think that science is grossly lacking in good spokespeople who are respected in the field, and it should be rewarded more within the academy, not less.
When a large fraction of the population has frankly anti-scientific beliefs and when funding for continued scientific endeavor depends on votes, science needs to continually justify and promote itself in the public eye.
Are there dangers to that? Yes. But it's worse than holing up in the ivory tower to only quietly do research.
I agree, but it's unlikely that they will get respect and reward within the academy. They are just as susceptible to feelings of envy as people outside the academy. You can see this manifest itself in the academy's treatment of Carl Sagan, and in the many ramblings of Murray Gell-Mann about Richard Feynman. Sure, their expositions of the science may not have been rigorous and they weren't perfect human beings, but maybe that's what it takes to popularize science and draw people in. I often see the role of science popularization as that of turned the science illiterate to literate, not the uneducated to the educated.
I would call Tyson a good spokesman for science if he had a high regard for rigor and accuracy. But he does not. http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2016/01/fact-checking-neil-...
> Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it
This has been said for thousands of years. Socrates/Plato was complaining about how writing weakens the human memory.
We need to accept that human minds are limited and technology is meant to extend them. Science has advanced considerably due to computers despite the appearances.
The way out of the current “impasse” is through even more technology. We might not be able to solve all the mysteries of the universe without intelligence augmentation or superintelligent AI.
Computers used to be bicycles for the mind. Now with things like Facebook they’re self-driving cars for the mind.
It's funny because as much as you recognize this, the people you describe as being needed are treated terribly not only by the establishment but those who think they are outside of it. Perhaps that explains this state.
> humble 2 cents
Sadly, not humble, and, from my point of view, uninformed, that is, exactly what would be expected from an otherwise uninformed reader of the newspaper articles about the topics touched, especially from one not understanding how science actually works.
In reality, the "failed" fulfillment of some expectations when the best experiments up to now are performed is also what advances our knowledge, greatly, you can read, for an example, here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363056
Look from this perspective: not only that what some theoretical scientists whose direct "expectations" came to be unconfirmed by the LHC experiments "expected" would remain just a "plain imagination" without a huge investment in extremely advanced experiments, the same would remain for any scientist having some other ideas.
We need so advanced experiments because anything else is already known. And what we know today we wouldn't without the experiments, especially such producing "unexpected" results. There's is not an actual "crisis" in science advancing, exactly by doing experiments never before done the science does advance. The experiments like LHC are indeed a precondition for any new advancement.
For every complex problem there exists a nice and easily understandable solution... that is wrong. Even the basic explanation in many articles written about the science the authors get wrong, and the casual readers get even more wrong.
The typical complaint is that the experiments "cost much" and then the wishes of some aren't "confirmed"? Well they cost peanuts compared to the investment in military.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
"Program cost US$1.508 trillion (through 2070 in then-year dollars), US$55.1B for RDT&E, $319.1B for procurement, $4.8B for MILCON, $1123.8B for operations & sustainment (2015 estimate)"
Compare with the total budget of LHC experiment of just €7.5 billion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
You'd get surely more than 200 LHCs for just one type of a military plane.
Also, the expected cost of measuring gravitational waves from space, the way that would also give us a new and otherwise inaccessible information about the Universe is 1000 times smaller than the cost of the above military plane.
The typical complaint goes on with the idea that the if scientists work on something, and it's unconfirmed by the experiment, it was unnecessary work. That's also not true at all. Most of hypotheses of what is behind the limits of our current experiments will not be confirmed by definition. If we knew, we wouldn't need to perform the experiments.
Your post kind of rambles on and fails to address the point that OP is making: Physics is, in fact, stuck. It's been almost 100 years since the initial clash between classic mechanics and quantum theory, and how much closer are we to unification?
And you take an extremely condescending tone while addressing OP's lack of humility while making statements attacking him for "especially from one not understanding how science actually works."
How does science actually work? Are we supposed to follow Popper? Or Kuhn? Or Feyerabend? Should we go with logical positivism or empiricism?
> It's been almost 100 years since the initial clash between classic mechanics and quantum theory, and how much closer are we to unification?
There is no problem with, to use your words, unification of classical mechanics and quantum theory
Classical Mechanics is recovered from Quantum Mechanics in the limit of h-bar (Planck's constant) goes to zero. In our day to day experience, Planck's constant is so small as to effectively be zero. The non-intuitive effects of Quantum Mechanics occur when we probe areas where the non-zero value of Planck's constant cannot be ignored.
There has been enormous progress in the last 100+ years in understanding how the world is described by Quantum Theory. In some ways, the so-called Standard Model of Particle Physics can be seen as the crowning achievement of that work.
The only remaining question on that front is the absence of a testable theory that describe gravitation as a quantum theory. String Theory appears to be a leading candidate for this, but it has not, so far, made any testable prediction outside of what we already know from other theories.
> Physics is, in fact, stuck
I'm trying to explain that it is not "stuck" in the sense in which the casual readers tend to perceive it. The scientists actually have what to do, and will have what to do, no problem with that. It's just that it's harder to get the budget for the kinds of investigations that extend the area of our knowledge. And that some "pet hypotheses" of some scientists remained unconfirmed.
What is currently written in the news about is that some specific hypotheses that intended to "deduct" what can be measured by the most advanced experiments humanity ever done weren't confirmed (or even more exactly, not most obviously confirmed) once the said experiments are made.
But that doesn't devalue the work done in making the hypotheses or the experiments themselves.
Or if I have to explain you "like you're five":
- For Newton to be able to make a theoretical "breakthrough" in 1700 the actual experiments before him were needed to provide all the facts from which he was able to develop his theory. Moreover, the conditions of stability in the dissemination and accessibility of the results of the experiments were needed.
- The same goes for Einstein. All the work of science between 1700 and 1915 was actually needed to make Einstein's "breakthrough," including the famous 1887 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper... which also didn't "confirm" the expectations of the most of the scientists of that time.
- That experiment was really immense breakthrough itself: the principles of it are even used to measure the gravitational waves today, which was achieved for the first time in 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_obs...
- But our discovery of the principles of electromagnetic radiation also made in 19th century was necessary too.
- In short, science needs the experiments, needs a lot of approaches from the different sides before some "breakthrough" happens and even "not confirming" expectations is a necessary part of the process.
- And even not having a new "breakthrough" of the kind the Einstein's was or of the kind of our quantum physics discoveries is also part of the process. The nature doesn't "have" to have "more unifying" laws than the ones that we already have, at least not at the level reachable by our technological limits. The nature simply is. We can learn more only by pushing the limits, making even more advanced experiments.
- At the time the experiments with the particles started, the "expectations" were exactly the opposite than now: then producing some new particles "wasn't expected." (E.g. around the middle of the 20th century the famous quip of one scientist was "who ordered that?" for the newly discovered particle -- it wasn't expected by the hypotheses of the time). Now some are "disappointed" that even newer particles don't "easily" appear. Well that is what it is. Support the science, learn how it really "works" from the actual history of actual discoveries, and if you aren't able to understand enough the discoveries themselves, do spend more energy on that before you make some claims. There are too many wrong "explanations" in the circulation, and many of those even have an agenda to be such.
Hey, thank you for your time and effort for putting all the links and information on your comments.
Firstly, I'm not against experimentalists and/or experiments and the money spent for them - it's not even "peanut" compared to military projects all around the world, as you stated. What I wanna say is that (to a curious outsider) it looks like there are so many experimentalists (and physicists-turned-to-pop-sci-writers) than theorists so physics suffers from the lack of beautiful power of imagination of human mind. True, I'm not a perfectly-informed one about all the things going on in the filed, of course, but I'm not completely uninformed one too, I guess.
Secondly, I'm not a native English speaker so I thought about the tone of my comment after I finished writing it and read it couple times and asked myself "Does it sound harsh or something like that to...anyone?". So I put down those "2 cents" and "humble" things at the bottom of my comment trying to show that I'm not an insider and I'm not trying to pick on anyone personally. Pardon me if it looked like the opposite.
> (to a curious outsider) it looks like there are so many experimentalists (and physicists-turned-to-pop-sci-writers) than theorists so physics suffers from the lack of beautiful power of imagination of human mind.
Analyzing that claim of yours that you specially marked:
"there are so many experimentalists" ... "than theorists so physics suffers from the lack of" "power of imagination."
It is simply a "non sequitur."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy
There's no any support for any claim that "more theorists" than "experimentalists" are even needed for anything, especially that such a ratio means anything about presence or "lack" of "power of imagination" in physics.
> but I'm not completely uninformed one too, I guess.
Nobody ever said "completely." However I sincerely wish you to be a little more informed about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I really believe that once you understand that you will have more chance for your own personal improvement and I wish you luck in that. Maybe you'll even make a contribution to some important discovery. But you'll surely have to have more insight that others, being satisfied with being "not completely uninformed" to think that you even understand the basics of something won't bring you much, at least in the areas that we touch in our discussion.
Regarding the state of physics, I've already explained that nobody can even claim that there has to be anything "revolutionary" possible (in the naive sense, the way you expect it) based on the information available to us as the result of all experiments done. From my perspective, there were a lot of amazing discoveries in the last any N years of physics, and they are always result of the new information we experimentally obtain. But we already know so much, and measured so much with such an astonishing precision that there is not even place for some "big" changes affecting the formulas we already have. All better measurements will need always more investment from us, and will involve always the areas of the universe that are less affecting us directly (in the physical sense, I don't speculate about the state of mind).
Just to get you started thinking: some ancient Greek and Hellenistic scientists (who at that time weren't called so) already quite correctly knew how distant is the Moon measured in the number of Earth radii more than 2000 years ago. Do you know that simple number? Were you aware that if was possible to measure that at that time? Would you be able today to repeat that measurement? How much effort would you have to personally invest to repeat all the steps? Second, one Hellenistic scientist again more than 2000 years ago measured the radius of Earth also amazingly precise. Would you be able to repeat all the steps of his experiment? Are you able even to figure them out just by your own thinking?
The humanity knows about the telescopes only for 400 years. Galileo was one of the first scientists using it to figure more about the universe, but he also made the experiments on Earth, being among the first who properly described the properties of gravitation. Newton published his "Principia" only 100 years after Galileo's "On Motion" and only 80 years after the discovery of telescope and based on the enough observations happening even before the telescope existed: Tycho Brahe was the first scientist on the west who measured precisely enough the movements of the planets to make Newton's conclusions even possible, and his measurements were again available only some 80 years before Newton's "Principia." Not to mention that Kepler was already able to figure out the formulas nobody before him had based on these very measurements.
Reminds me of:
>I have been thinking of how very gently I have always been dealt with. I have never so much as had a violent shove in my entire life
-Maxwell
Also: do we need monks in other places? In the courts--removed from the carrots and sticks society can throw at them?
The crisis in physics is due to Kant. As long as physicists are disdainful of philosophy the crisis and deterioration will continue. They are Kantians and don't even know it.
Ayn Rand identified Kant's error in his Critique of Pure Reason and destroyed his program, she rejected Hume's rank skepticism (which Kant was answering) and showed Descartes how to validate reason (i.e. to be certain) without being omniscient. Descartes was the intellectual who started this ball rolling by turning reason unto itself and asking how does it work. He was not up to the task and injected a crude circularity at the base of reason, i.e. "I think therefore I am", which Rand identified and fixed but she is now completely ignored.
Ayn Rand? Are you serious? The woman was a demagogue, a hypocrite, and a racist homophobe among her other charming qualities. Her "philosophy" of selfishness and greed was based on a worldview of hatred, suspicion, and class warfare, and even then is self-contradictory in many ways and completely meritless in every way. Rand's legacy is one of rationalization for the misguided, unethical, immoral actions of self-centered jackasses who all think they are the ubermensch. The reason she is completely ignored is because she was a horrible human being, who did nothing but make the world a worse place.
You should read her book "Philosophy who needs it".
I agree that Descartes, Hume, and Kant were wrong. However, modern scientists are not influenced by them. Their own views are much closer to Pragmatism (which is not surprising given that two of the three founders of Pragmatism, namely Peirce and James, were professional scientists).
Popper/Kuhn are both derivatives of Kant and very popular in physics when physicists grasp for a philosophy to justify their epistemology. Mach, also a Kantian, was Einstein's pole star but to Einstein's credit defended realism contra Mach's ideas.
That's because they haven't studied philosophy. I have a background in the sciences, and what I observed is that, in terms of how they think when they are actually doing science, as opposed to explaining it to people who are not scientists, they work out of a set of assumptions pretty much the same as Pragmatism.
I agree that Pragmatism is also fairly common in the sciences. But I don't considered Pragmatism to be a philosophy, it is a rejection of principles on principle so it is a dead-end. What is "shut-up and calculate" if not Pragmatism which has dominated physics for 100 years and has run its course. By holding philosophy in disdain and not studying it the physicists leave themselves vulnerable (due to ignorance) and absorb the bad philosophies I mentioned by osmosis.
> But I don't considered Pragmatism to be a philosophy, it is a rejection of principles on principle so it is a dead-end.
Huh? Philosophy books all list Pragmatism as a major philosophy, and it is far more elaborate than that. "Shut up and calculate" is not at all what the philosophies of Dewey, Peirce and James are about, it is far more elaborate.
>By holding philosophy in disdain and not studying it the physicists leave themselves vulnerable (due to ignorance) and absorb the bad philosophies I mentioned by osmosis.
I am referring to how they actually practice science, not their possibly quite inaccurate philosophical explanations of what they are doing. I am sure you are familiar with the phenomenon of someone loudly claiming they follow a certain set of principles, but then when you observe them you see they are actually doing something quite different.
What I am saying is that if you observe how scientists actually do science, it fits the philosophical principles of Pragmatism, whether the scientists realize it or not. And I am saying that as someone with a background in both the sciences and philosophy.
Time could be composed of tiny frames(quanta) of time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronon https://archive.org/details/arxiv-hep-th0106273
And what do those "time quanta" represent? "Time of light traversing the radius of an electron", really? Isn't that just another measurement device based on light quanta and distance?
No. That "time quanta" represents the smallest value Δ such that it doesn't make sense to take about events which happened between t and t+Δ. Δ may not be a constant though like Planck's constant.
The shortest distance between two events in space and time, when there are time quanta, then there must be space quanta as well.
What do you mean? We do already have space quanta: Planck Length.
Ah, well, I heard Planck Time also already exists. What's the point then re-inventing time quanta when they already are defined?
Time does not exist. It is an abstraction based on the movement of matter. We use time to compare the relative motions of things.
Every instrument we use to "measure" time involves movement: pendulum, sandglass, rotation of Earth, translation of Earth around the Sun, vibration of atoms, etc.
Don't you need time to even define movement? Movement is a change of the position with respect to time. So without time you can't have movement. But obviously you are right that the two concepts are strictly related, that doesn't mean time doesn't "exist" (however you define "exist").
All our accepted model of nature assume that in some sense time exists. But in general relativity it doesn’t make much sense to speak of a single event. In the same way it doesn’t make much sense to speak of a single point in the euclidean plane (you can only localize one point relative to another one).
So some people (like Rovelli) think one should try to formulate relativity only in terms relations of events. This might be relevant in a more fundamental theory of spacetime but on a classical level it’s irrelevant. You can measure the geometry of spacetime in our solar system w/o disturbing it. The gravitational field of e.g. some satellite is negligible to the gravitational field of planets and the sun.
Forgive me for sounding rhetorical in this question, but I'm genuinely wondering.. Isn't saying "time doesn't exist" akin to saying "human thoughts don't exist"?
Paradoxically, thought (human or not) is the only thing we might be certain exists.
https://www.the-philosophy.com/solipsism-definition
The most surprising fact is that the readings of all these instruments are in sync with each other! We take it for granted, and don't appreciate the mystery. It very well might be that the Universe forms a complex landscape with varying "laws", with the pockets where the notions of space and time become quite fuzzy and inconsistent; we might live in a rare oasis where the things more or less "make sense". Elsewhere, there might be no time at all. Popular books on physics never mention this possibility.
But "clocks" can only be in "sync" – i.e. record the same time between each "tick" – when they are in the same inertial frame – from special relativity. In addition, there is gravitational time dilation.
Thus, the "reality" is that no two clocks are in sync. As Rovelli points out in "Reality Is Not What It Seems", with the precise clocks we have today, it's possible to measure this effect for a difference in altitude of a few centimetres.
By similar logic you could argue all physical units are abstractions, which I guess they are. They are very useful in creating a simple accurate predictive model of things we observe on many scales. What's the utility of a distinction between existence and abstraction?
If you know the distinction you dont ask yourself why the abstraction exists. Researching the nature of time is a waste of... time, I guess, because you should know time is an abstract concept, a proxy for something else.
Wow ... Since you are so certain that time does not exist, why don't you write a paper showing the implications for quantizing gravity, and why the standard spacetime picture of both Special and General relativity is wrong?
Not to nitpick, but I'm not sure the nature of time is so indisputably the greatest remaining mystery.
The nature of consciousness, life, and death can all certainly give it a run for its money.
Incidentally, would anyone happen to have a direct link to a version of this article that could be read without enabling javascript?
Yes. For me the greatest remaining mysteries are more in this order.
1. Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail).
2. Nature of Consciousness - what is consciousness, how can living matter instantiate it, how can we quantify it, etc?
3. Origin of the Universe
4. Why do we seem so alone in the Universe?
5. Resolving Quantum Mechanics / Gravity
6. Understanding Time
I would bump the origin of the universe to the top, because no matter what universe-generating physics you come up with I can always ask, "but what set things up to work that way?" I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things. Consciousness and the origin of the universe get place 0, and the others all get place 1 because they're solvable but we don't know in which order.
I very much share that sentiment, in that I rate "the nature of consciousness" and "why does the universe, why does anything at all even exist" as fundamental questions of a completely different class, perhaps even unsolvable.
"I would bump the origin of the universe to the top, because no matter what universe-generating physics you come up with I can always ask, "but what set things up to work that way?""
Except that it might not be possible to get outside of consciousness to have any testable way of explaining what set it up to be that way.
It seems that we are hard-limited by our consciousness, and have no way of going outside of it to peek at "the universe" beyond.
> I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things.
No one knows that it is not measurable. Is love measurable? is hunger? happiness? they seem to be as measurable as consciousness, that is to say we can at least measure them in binary as either present or not.
How do you know everyone else is not a "p-zombie", indistinguishable in any external way from a human such as yourself, but devoid of internal "consciousness"/"subjective experience". Even the mere logical possibility of p-zombies indicates that consciousness is unmeasurable.
Solipsism is basically the only defense against the conclusions from the evidence of the "real" world. But if you argue for solipsism then I say you have much bigger problems than consciousness because you basically rejected everything that has ever been "known" or experienced. If you reject our "shared reality" then anything is possible, including paradoxically, the "shared reality".
If you accept the shared reality on the other hand, consciousness is measurable to some degree. So the real question is do you or do you not accept we share experiences?
As an addendum, if it is all up to me as you suggested, I just made consciousness measurable so there is no need to keep arguing about it.
"Solipsism is basically the only defense against the conclusions from the evidence of the "real" world."
Far from it. There could very well be an external world, and one populated by plenty of other and fully real human beings even, but your own personal view or understanding of it could be distorted or false.
This could be simply because you're hallucinating, or insane, or your brain could be injured, or could be living in a virtual reality (which itself exists in some other "real" reality), or you could be the proverbial brain in a vat, or aliens (or god or a demon/devil) could be deceiving you, etc.
All those options are the same: they are either part of a shared experience or they are not. Nothing is preventing a demon from deceiving me right now, in fact one can come anytime I'd love to meet him, preferably her.
If experiencing something that's not shared is the only qualification for solipsism, then we're all solipsists, as (arguably barring the possibility of telepathy) our experiences are all private.
But that's not what solipsism typically means. Solipsism usually refers to the position that only you (or perhaps only your own mind) exist. By that commonly accepted definition, one could be mistaken or deceived in any of the ways I laid out earlier without them entailing solipsism.
I meant to say shared context. Everything you said is part of a shared context or not, those are the only two options.
Even if there is some sort of "shared context" (more commonly known as "objective reality") your view or understanding of it could still be deceived, hallucinating, simply mistaken, insane, etc. These are not solipsism. What they are are possible obstacles to your connection to any shared context or objective reality.
Sure, but they don't change the fact those are the only 2 options.
And in the "shared reality" option, consciousness is somewhat measurable.
"Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail)."
Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born?
This might be a religious question to some, or perhaps involve a religious answer, but religion need not be involved. It's possible that in some not yet understood way an individual might exist before they're born and are somehow incarnated or embodied in to matter or the world as we know it when they're born.
Sure, it might sound kooky or something that science might never be able to answer (or maybe it could, who knows?). But the point is that that's all part of the mystery of life, and the answer could be a metaphysical or ontological one, not necessarily a religious one.
Another question regarding the nature of life is what exactly does it take to go from a non-living substance to a living one. In some way this is a question of definitions (which is difficult enough and controversial enough on its own), but even given an agreed-upon definition of life, it might not be clear how exactly the process from non-living to living take place, or at which point the non-living becomes living.
It says a lot that you felt the need to hedge against the assumption that you were talking about religious beliefs. These days it seems like there’s a materialist mindset that assumes anyone who questions certain assumptions about consciousness (e.g. that it is a creation of the brain that begins and ends when the brain does) has ventured into the terrain of religion, the supernatural, or “magic” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). It doesn’t seem to occur to people that consciousness itself is completely inexplicable and therefore all bets are off regarding its true nature. These assumptions people have are based on faith (yes, faith) in a hypothetical explanation that has yet to materialize. Until scientists cross the Explanatory Gap (which is more like a chasm), nobody has the right to tell anyone that their speculation about consciousness is kooky or unscientific or whatever. The only thing that’s unscientific is letting one’s thought be constrained by rigid dogma regarding what is and isn’t possible.
I feel your pain (if I’m understanding you correctly, that is). It sucks to be trapped in a no-man’s-land between scientific dogma and religious dogma. We need a better way forward.
The problem is one of humility. If you admit that something is at this point inexplicable then that is where you should stop explaining it. Sometimes I don't know is the only real answer. Because if you want to make this statement:
> It doesn’t seem to occur to people that consciousness itself is completely inexplicable and therefore all bets are off regarding its true nature.
You have to, ahem, explain it.
Sure, but the problem is that many people don’t demonstrate this humility when they act like it’s ridiculous to wonder if consciousness exists prior to conception or after death. Ruling these out requires an unwarranted assumption about the relationship between consciousness and the brain.
I agree that people should show some humility and admit that we have no idea if or when consciousness begins and ends. Anyone who makes definitive claims about the temporal limits of consciousness should, as you said, provide an explanation of how they know this.
It goes both ways. If you claim there is an unwarranted assumption about the relationship between consciousness and the brain you have to prove it. All I see is consciousness is highly correlated with having a brain.
> I agree that people should show some humility and admit that we have no idea if or when consciousness begins and ends.
I think our understanding of it is not as vague as you claim. We can see consciousness develop in all kind of animals; infants are less conscious than adults and elders show a higher degree of loss of consciousness. Furthermore, it is linked with brain activity somehow, as damaged brains show erratic consciousness related behavior. There is a lot more to learn, a lot, but to say that we know nothing is very dishonest in my opinion.
That is assuming we are talking about the same kind of consciousness you and I. But I've got a feeling we are not.
> Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born?
If you are inventing mysteries out of thin air why stop there? What if you will yourself into existence? What if it is you that is making "time" perceivable for the rest of us? Do your half-existing-yet-unborn-brother dies every time you are reborn into this plane but not if you will yourself to be born into another parallel universe?
I didn't invent that question. It's a been a question that people have had for millenia.
Some people believe that one has a soul that exists before one is born in to a body. So in a way that's an answer to this question -- an answer that's been around for thousands of years. Clearly many people are concerned about it. I'm far from the only one, much less the first one.
I was talking about the royal you: we. But more importantly, "when" the question was first asked doesn't change the nature of the question. Sure, you (we) can ask it, but it is no more insightful that the myriad of other metaphysical questions that have been asked through history that will never be answered because they lack a fundamental grounding in the shared experience we call "reality". Are there any blue reds? We can spend a millennia thinking about it.
"Are there any blue reds? We can spend a millennia thinking about it."
It's pretty obvious that you can have blue reds: they're called purples or violets. Just squeeze some blue out of a tube of paint, and then some red, mix them together and you get a blue red. You can also have a black white: it's called gray.
Anyway, I'd agree that one could ask any number of metaphysical questions, but it could be argued that only some of them would be considered "great". One (arguable) measure to use for the greatness of questions is how many people do they occupy, and how critical do they consider those questions. Whether one exists before birth or after death would be considered "great" by this measure, whether there's a blue red would not.
Violet is not blue and it is also not red. I'm not asking for a bluish red but for a 100% blue color that it is also red.
You are misusing the language, or rather I am in this case, to ask a paradoxical question. Where are all the cat dogs? This is a never ending game because we don't agree on the language. This is exactly the realm of metaphysics.
And greatness is in the eye of the beholder. To me greatness could be quantified by how much progress has been made in answering the question. After a thousand years and possibly millions of lives wasted trying to answer "is there existence before this life?" we are not one single iota closer to an answer. That implies a pretty bad question that is not grounded in reality, or at the very least not "grammatically" grounded in reality.
"Violet is not blue and it is also not red. I'm not asking for a bluish red but for a 100% blue color that it is also red."
If you're asking if there exists something that's 100% X at the same time as being 100% not-X, I'm not sure there's much to debate about it, as there clearly isn't (at least not in this world, where things can't seem to be themselves and not themselves at the same time).
"You are misusing the language, or rather I am in this case, to ask a paradoxical question. Where are all the cat dogs? This is a never ending game because we don't agree on the language. This is exactly the realm of metaphysics."
It's the realm of semantics (ie. definitions), but I'm not convinced that every metaphysical question could be reduced to a semantic one.
If you take the question of whether one has some sort of existence (like, say, as a "soul") before birth, I think that question would still exist even after we'd agreed on the constituent definitions. Also, I don't see anything paradoxical in that question. Even were it paradoxical, its paradoxical quality would in no way disqualify it for me. Perhaps I'd be even more interested in examining it, as examining paradoxes has been a very fruitful approach throughout human history.
"To me greatness could be quantified by how much progress has been made in answering the question. After a thousand years and possibly millions of lives wasted trying to answer "is there existence before this life?" we are not one single iota closer to an answer."
There have been answers, they just haven't satisfied everyone. The same could be said of pretty much every other great question, no matter whether the answers come from science, religion, philosophy, intuition, or elsewhere.
> If you're asking if there exists something that's 100% X at the same time as being 100% not-X, I'm not sure there's much to debate about it, as there clearly isn't (at least not in this world, where things can't seem to be themselves and not themselves at the same time).
You found the loophole! Sad to see you abandoned so swiftly your own logic when the time came to evaluate your own statement. This is exactly why the metaphysical deals in the realm of ambiguity: once you define it in a clear and concise manner all the mystery disappears, and that to some, is no fun.
That is also why a question like “is there life after death?” is uninteresting: by definition life comes before death.
"a question like "is there life after death?" is uninteresting: by definition life comes before death."
You're not being charitable to the questioner by interpreting it as a paradox.
Clearly, what most people intend to ask by that question is whether one can exist in some form (as a "spirit" or as "soul", or maybe come out of the VR that is the world, or in heaven even in a body like the present one or a more perfect one, or in hell, or maybe reincarnated in as another lifeform, etc) after your physical body stops functioning. There is no paradox in that.
Not so clear, because you see, that is another question. This is why we need to define things very explicitly and then accept the implications of those definitions or we’ll never get anywhere.
Now that you accepted that there is a paradox in the original question (“is there life after death?”) you reformulated it in a way the paradox is no longer present and your meaning is less ambiguous:
“Is there something not physical that continues to exists even after the physical body no longer does?”
And that is a very interesting question, but first we have to acknowledge that it is a different question and because you asked it in a non paradoxical way it opens up avenues for exploration unavailable to the original question. I would personally start simply by asking “is there something not physical, ie. a soul, “in” a being?” That is in itself is own can of worms because even if there are “souls” they might “die” when the body does so it is not as clear cut as one might initially think, but at least is a start. I’m sure there are other approaches, but at least we should all agree: it is a different question.
My point is only unparadoxical questions can have a shot at being answered. Most of the “great questions” are paradoxes; “what came before the beginning?” sounds very profound but it will never lead anywhere, as centuries pondering it have already proven.
If we take the following questions:
P: "Is there life after death?"
Q: "Is X the same as not-X?"
Then you could argue that question P (and all "metaphysical" questions) amounts to or really has the structure of something like question Q, and that it's therefore paradoxical, trivial, or uninteresting because the answer is obviously "no" ("by definition", as you point out).
I would disagree for the following reasons:
First, if you interrogate people who ask question P what they mean by it, you're likely to find out that they're not asking anything like question Q, but rather something like the following question:
R: "Can one continue to exist in some form after your physical body stops functioning?"
Now, it's true that question P and R are different on the surface, but when most people ask P what they mean by that question is R. So underneath the surface, at the meaning level, they intend to ask R. Question R is not paradoxical, trivial, or uninteresting, and it has no obvious answer that could be arrived at "by definition".
Second, I believe even trivial-seeming questions and paradoxes are frequently much deeper and more interesting than they appear. Careful study and analysis of them could yield profound insights and areas of future research. Witness all the progress in logic from studying paradoxes and other "trivial" corner cases (like the Liar's Paradox[1], Russell's Paradox[2], etc). From such study you get things like Paraconsistent logics[3] and dialetheism,[4] which can fruitfully deal with contradictions.
Third, even things that are "true by definition" can be useful and interesting. Wittgenstein argued that all logical truths are tautologies. Well, if so, they're still worthy of study and have proven to be interesting and useful.
Finally, I am not convinced that all, most, or even many "metaphysical" questions can be charitably reduced to paradoxes, nor that they are trivially answerable "by definition".
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_paradox
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialetheism
It seems to me you are more interested in the question than in the answer. You agree with me, and then spend two paragraphs justifying why you don't want to agree with me because somehow asking the wrong question still has value. It may have historical value, poetical value, emotional value, and that of course is valuable. But as to the question itself, when everyone means something else either the question is malformed or the language is useless.
And it is not so obvious what they actually mean as everyone interprets it in a different way. Some people mean still existing in this "plane", some in some other reality, some mean to be reborn, some mean to trascend, some to reincarnate, some a mix of two, or of all.
If we keep pretending the question is right when it obviously lacks meaning and all the information necessary to be able to answer it we are never gonna find out.
But again, that is what some people want, for some things to always remain a mystery, so they ask paradoxical questions.
"What was I like before I was born?"
I'm not quite sure if it works for blue and red or only certain color combinations, but it's possible to create images where an item in the scene is obviously one color, yet the light hitting the eye is another color. The brain automatically adjusts for "that's what a red object would look like in that environment," when the light coming from the photograph is actually blue.
In that way you can have a picture that's "blue red" due to perspective rather than semantics. E.g. the car in the picture is really red and the color of the ink depicting it is really blue. The red is blue.
That is interesting, but it is also an answer to a different question. The question is "are there any blue reds?" not "can we see in some circumstances reds as blue?".
I thought the question was asking whether there are any reds that are blue.
Edit: This isn't as clear as it could be if I was better with GIMP, but it should illustrate the idea. https://imgur.com/a/cRWhdTJ
The question is "are" there any blue reds. In other words, regardless of who is watching it, or if anyone at all.
The question is not "can we perceive" some reds as blue.
There are no blues or reds at all if nobody is watching. Color is a purely perceptual phenomenon relying on properties of the eye and brain.
Not true, what we call the color red is an electromagnetic wave with a wavelength between, according to wikipedia, 625 and 740 nanometers.
And if you are looking at a picture on a computer, the computer will call red a pixel with an rgb value of (255, 0, 0) even if nobody is looking at it.
The light coming from the car in that image would be concentrated around 450-500 nm, not 625-740 nm. Viewed in isolation, that's blue, but in the context of the rest of the image, it is red. The "redness" of the car exists only in the brain of the viewer, which has evolved to produce stablility of color in a variety of lighting conditions.
That's also why RGB monitors display more than three distinct colors. The colors are synthesized in the brain. If we were orbiting a brown dwarf, we might talk about colors within the infrared part of the spectrum as if they were intrinsic properties of light.
i would add morality to this -- at least problems in physics have a scientific framework within which they can be investigated. but why should we care? why should we be nice? of course there is plenty of rich philosophy on the subjcet
I would add Free will to it. Does it exist?
Also, what exactly is it that we mean by "free will"? Even just that question can get ugly, fast. I think I've only ever heard one definition of the concept sufficiently precise to even have a meaningful answer.
(In short, it was this: If we our model of the material universe is essentially correct, and if we assume that it is closed and that the material that we see is all there is, or at least all that can ever influence us, then suppose we define free will as the inability of any real external predictor to ever perfectly predict our actions in advance. I emphasize the word real to highlight that we are emphatically not talking about some abstract god, or something vaguely sitting outside of time, but the ability of a real device constructed out of real materials in real spacetime to predict your actions. We assumed away hypothetical infinite beings or math games at the beginning. In that case, it can be mathematically shown that you are simply too complicated to be fully correctly simulated by any system that attempts to build a model of your actions simply by external observation of you; you do not produce enough bits in your external actions to uniquely identify the state space of the inside of your head, not even if you turn the entire rest of the universe to the task (literally!). By this definition, it can be concretely answered: Yes, you have free will. Interestingly, this turns out to be true even if the universe is 100% deterministic, which definitely conflicts with most people's ideas about "free will"... but then, there's another demonstration of how rare it is for anyone to carefully define it before endlessly pontificating about it.
Also, while I consider this a valuable contribution to the field that any interested philosopher should ruminate on, I am not claiming that I 100% believe it, nor that it "solves" the problem. It is simply as I said at the beginning, the only sufficiently careful treatment of the problem that one can actually say it has an answer. Personally I find the presuppositions it is based on to be highly questionable. But it is at least worth pondering for a bit.)
> In that case, it can be mathematically shown that you are simply too complicated to be fully correctly simulated by any system that attempts to build a model of your actions simply by external observation of you; you do not produce enough bits in your external actions to uniquely identify the state space of the inside of your head, not even if you turn the entire rest of the universe to the task (literally!).
Really? Which mathematical result is this?
Do scanning techniques such as fMRI and EEG count as external?
Also the origin of the universe, why it's accelerating its expansion, how are gravity and quantum phenomena reconciled and how do they work.... I'd say it's a great time to be alive and there's no shortage of important questions!
Consciousness: Thomas Metzinger’s “The Ego Tunnel”
Life and death: Molecular biology
The way you curtly replied makes you think that the question is settled, perhaps even trivial, when in reality regarding consciousness that is but one person's thought on an issue where nobody can claim to have an understanding, let alone an answer, and regarding molecular biology there is still much, much to learn.
I dont think time is any more mysterious a concept than space. Asking "what is time" is just as enigmatic as "why are there 3 dimensions and not 1,2,4 or many more?"
How can you have a thing that is "left" or "up" of another thing? How come "all the things" aren't in the same place?
"Nature of existence" probably encapsulates all of those ideas including time as time seems to be required for a creation/destruction type event.
nature of consciousness is the biggest one IMO, precisely because it doesn't appear to be captured by "nature of existence." we have good physical/mathematical models on hand re: causation, such that we can at least start hypothesizing about what change is, where the universe came from, what if anything differentiates life from other motion, etc.
but consciousness is so categorically different that we can't even start. "well, brains are made up of cells and further of particles, and electricity works this way and here's some results from information theory and [UTTER MAGICAL WALL / ABYSSAL GAP] then there's the subjective experience of consciousness and will. and damnit we don't have anything like a logical or explanatory connection between these two sides, but for 'well, if i destroy 'someone else's' (??? what's this possessive in our fundamental terms???) body in the right way, it stops acting as if it's conscious like me, and also my own consciousness (which i can't describe with any specificity) changes when i do weird physical things involving drugs, injury, nutrition, um... and attitudes seem to matter, and there's definitely a subconscious, i guess, and...'..."
If you accept that other people are conscious like yourself, it seems like you have accepted the physical origin of consciousness. If you don't accept that the subjective experience of consciousness is just a product of physical events, then how do you avoid viewing yourself as the only conscious entity? You can be a solipsist or not, but you can't have it both ways. Experiencing thoughts from outside yourself is a common experience, but it's generally considered a delusion.
While I think it's an interesting argument, I don't agree that accepting that some other being than me can be conscious leads to having to accept the physical origin of consciousness a priori. If you look at Buddhism or any esoteric system, they essentially posit that consciousness is a unified field from which everything manifests, like light refracted through an (infinitely) complex array of lens. The spots of light where the light terminates look separate, but if you look at where the source of the light enters the lens, it all comes from a single source. The experience of having a separate consciousness and a body or mind or thoughts that I identify as me or an I that is not you or that car or that tree is essentially just an illusion because I don't have the awareness to be conscious of that unity. Just because something appears to be separate from one perspective doesn't mean that it's separate in reality, it's just that I experience it as separate due to my limited perspective. Consciousness is an experiential vehicle by nature. It doesn't slot into the scientific method all that well no matter how we try to cram it in.
Are you or are you not experiencing my consciousness right now? Either you claim to, in which case you're lying or delusional, or you don't claim to, in which case you can't say anything about its experiential nature without contradiction. I can say I am conscious all day, but that's just something I say - it can't prove anything to you. If I was being tortured, and I didn't communicate it to you, would you notice?
Logical incoherence starts with lying to yourself. That's not wisdom.
Edit: I can be a solipsist today and a materialist tomorrow - I'm not criticizing either viewpoint, just saying you can't reason based on believing in both simultaneously.
I think you capture what I was referring to when I said that limited awareness is what narrows consciousness -- it's like putting some of the ocean in a bucket. It's still part of the ocean, but it's not the whole ocean. What do logic and labels like solipsist and materialist have to do with consciousness? Yes, they're part of consciousness, but they're a construct: concepts and words that we're using to discuss our own unique experiences of consciousness. We can chase each other around forever in a rabbit hole of semantics about what the nature of consciousness is, and how my experience varies and is separate from your experience of it, but we're just looking at our buckets of water that we scooped up as if it's the entirety of the ocean. Meanwhile, the ocean is sloshing around us. It doesn't rely on us to be aware of it's oceanness to exist, it just is. Consciousness has more than enough space to accommodate your experience that relies very heavily on logical coherence to form a version of reality that is comfortable for you to function in, but that experiential frame isn't the ground of all being. It's just a lens that one can look through. Sure, I can't share you're exact experience, but I could empathize with you if I knew you were tortured. You can look through one lens and then another: consciousness is constantly changing and modulating our experiences, there's nothing static about it.
there's a gulf as big as the ocean between acceptance and explanation. we have good reason to assume that consciousness (whatever it is) depends on the physical. great, but what is it?
I wasn't taking sides on whether it's physical or not, so I wouldn't particularly agree with your statement.
I'm only trying to say that if you don't accept that consciousness is physical, you aren't accepting the symmetry between you and other minds, and can't reason from the assumption they have the same experience.
Once you contradict the known fact that you experience your own thoughts and not others, you descend into incoherence. It seems to me kind of like the issues people have with quantum weirdness. People are accustomed to assuming they know things for the sake of argument, but assuming you know the unknowable can sabotage your reasoning.
This is very much how I think about this issue. It's a problem of a completely different class than almost anything else.
Time is a convenient measure of relative energy. (Just as the length of a king's ulna once defined distance.)
IMO, 'creation/destruction' is another convenient idea, invented because our minds are boggled by 'eternity'.
I'm not sure I can conceive of the nature of any of those things being separable from the others, so I wouldn't try to compare them.
how is death misunderstood?
I don't know, but here's some food for thought:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...
This is hardly casting doubt on the nature of (human) death. This is purely a question about quantum mechanics, I'd say.
On a side note, I fail to see how the experimenter is supposed to survive with probability 1 in Everett's many-worlds interpretation and thus be able to distinguish the latter from the Copenhagen interpretation. Yes, there will be one world where he survives but in the "vast majority" of worlds he will be dead. (Disregarding for a second that counting how often the world bifurcates in the many-worlds interpretation is a somewhat delicate issue.) So in terms of probabilities, he will still die with absolute certainty as the experiment gets repeated infinitely many times.
The idea is that everybody else dies with certainty, from your observation point, but you yourself can't, because the denominator of the probability fraction consists only of those futures where you exist.
It happens to be a vivid idea to me, because a long time ago I read a short story that was more fantasy/horror than science fiction, but resembled it a little in spirit. It was about a kid in a small town who discovered that the grave digger for the town seemed to know ahead of time who would die, and dug the graves in advance. The kid thought this was just mildly interesting as long as it was just elderly people he didn't care about, until one day his parents were in a car accident and because one grave was ready, he knew one was going to die. He killed the grave digger and buried him in the open grave instead, and from then on, people stopped dying. Which turned out to not be a blessing.
> and from then on, people stopped dying. Which turned out to not be a blessing.
This bit seems very close to Saramago's novel Death with Interruptions [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_with_Interruptions
people will really adopt convoluted schemes to convince themselves their supposed eternal soul will survive
It really doesn't have anything to do with souls or wanting to survive. The implications of this form of immortality are not comforting to contemplate.
"how is death misunderstood?"
Can one survive death in some way? (for example, through having some sort of soul or other part of you that is separate from your body)
Is there an afterlife?
After you die, can you be reborn in another body?
All of these are mysteries that might never be resolved to the complete satisfaction of the living.
These questions are pretty firmly metaphysical, and there's no reason to expect science will ever have an answer. There are an infinite array of unanswerable questions about supernatural phenomena that have never been observed and probably never will.
Those aren't mysteries, they're nonsense. "Can left be right at the same time? Such a mystery!"
Disclaimer: I'm a physicist who didn't finish the Phd and went to work in the tech field instead.
I wish physicists would stop writing these bullshitty popular science books. A lot of the books are popularizing unverified / unverifiable things like String Theory or Multiverse or Arrow of Time. And when they're talking about more plain things like Special Relativity, then I still cringe, because it's not something that's worth explaining to lay people: there is no situation in which some high-level bullshitty understanding of GR or SR or QM will be helpful or relevant in life, at best it will confuse you.
It is a good and necessary thing to tell students about this, so some of them become physicists, but you don't need popular science books for that, it should happen in schools, for free.
If you're going to speak about Physics to lay people, at least do it it in a way that's relevant to them, eg. look at how Feynman taught Physics. Explain how a boomerang works, or how thermodynamics relates to photosynthesis.
> it's not something that's worth explaining to lay people
Lay person here. I'd just like you to know that we experience curiosity too. Also, having read some Rovelli, I should point out that he's pretty good at highlighting when and how he's simplifying, and flagging up when he strays beyond the scientific consensus into the unverified.
> there is no situation in which some high-level bullshitty understanding of GR or SR or QM will be helpful or relevant in life, at best it will confuse you.
If I only learned and experienced things that would be 'helpful' or 'relevant' it would be a very dull life.
Yeah, science isn’t about being useful and relevant in day to day life. It’s an important part of human culture and scientist should at least try to communicate their findings to general public (which is paying for it!).
I partially agree with the first comment that it isn’t really helpful to popularize highly speculative – and thus probably false – ideas. But well established but still “weird” discoveries like GR & QM are interesting on their own and have huge implications on our understanding of nature. You don’t need a science degree to be fascinated by black holes, the big bang and quantum weirdness.
The problem with the "well established" or "settled" discoveries is that there is enough experimental evidence that is anomalous to the theories thus presented. This effects everything from the ideas from General Relativity, Special Relativity, Big Bang, Quantum Mechanics, the Standard Model of Particles, etc.
I think the biggest problem that is faced today (it hasn't really changed in centuries) is that people do not like to be considered ignorant, especially those who delve into such matters at a professional level. We actually know so little of the universe around us, but as humans, we do not like to acknowledge that we don't know.
The fact that we don't know and that our current suite of theories is incomplete and hence could very well be wrong in both minor and major ways should be driving us onward into understanding the universe around us. It really is not a problem if we don't understand. It should mean that we strive to learn more.
However, far too often, I find that the supposed knowledgeable ones exhibit an attitude of superiority that effectively closes them to a better understanding. There are those of course who are humble enough to say that they actually have little understanding even though they are at the very top of their respective fields.
Being able to be honest and say that one doesn't know is the first step on the road to acquiring some semblance of understanding. Being able to explain to someone else what the current understanding is in a simple enough manner is a good step on the way to increasing one's own knowledge.
> there is enough experimental evidence that is anomalous to the theories
Huh? I have more the impression that Λ-CDM & SM are working just too damn good. I’m not aware of any observation that hints that we need something completely different than GR & local QFT.
But “settled” and “well established” doesn’t mean that humans will never find a more fundamental theory. Classical mechanics is settled, well established and correct as it was in Newtons times. Now we just better understand its limits and when to use different models.
GR, QM & QFT are correct and won’t go away. At some point in the future we will have a better understanding of their limits too. But that won’t make them wrong.
> The fact that we don't know and that our current suite of theories is incomplete and hence could very well be wrong in both minor and major ways should be driving us onward into understanding the universe around us. It really is not a problem if we don't understand. It should mean that we strive to learn more.
I’m not objecting exploring new speculative models. I’m worried about presenting highly speculative ideas as facts or probable solutions to the public. A lot of the pop-sci articles you read these days are very misleading. And IMHO Rovelli, Green, Susskind, Smolin and the like aren’t doing anyone a favor with their pop-sci books.
Don't ever use the word "correct" for any theory we use. If you actually read and understand the basis for any theory or model in use, you will come to see that each is capable of giving "close enough" predictions, but none will give perfect predictions and that there are always anomalous data that these theories and models cannot explain.
Be pragmatic and keep in mind that wonderful phrase - "All theories are wrong, but some are useful."
The problem I see is that it is a common activity to present "settled" and "well established" as fact. Often without ever highlighting the anomalies that have been found and that we only have a "belief" that it is useful.
One of the best examples is the case for "dark matter". It has never been established in any way that such "dark matter" exists. It only arises because the observed motion within galaxies does not accord with "settled" and "well established" theory. So to keep this "settled" and "well established" theory, some additional "theoretical entity" has been added to allow the observations to fit the "settled" and "well established" theory.
Now, that addition of a new "theoretical entity" is, in itself, not a problem. What becomes the problem is when every experiment fails to show that "theoretical entity". At this point, one should be saying that mayhaps the "settled" and "well established" theory is not so settled and not so well established. Mayhaps there is a problem that we then need to be looking at.
My point here is that we do not, in fact, have any real or clear understanding of the universe about us. We have models and theories that work within a limited range but they are not global. The simplest of these is that "chestnut" between general relativity and quantum mechanics (the large and the small). The funny thing here is that we can make devices that are macroscopic which exhibit, under certain circumstances, the effects we see at microscopic levels. Why? What is happening here? What are we missing in this crossover realm? Why do we see things in the laboratory and see similar things at extra-solar distances, yet the explanations of these effects do not accord with the "settled" and "well established" theory we use at those massive sizes?
I respect your point of view, but I don't really agree.
A popular science understanding of BHs, BB, QM is not really an understanding. It's just some fairy tale level understanding. To be clear, I'm not being elitist, using QM as an example, I think it was Feynman who said nobody really understands it, at best we can make calculations/predictions ("shut up and calculate").
For example, ask a lay person about BB and they will tell you it's an explosion, in the classical sense (it's not). Or, I don't think you can "understand" QM without understanding the significance of unitary linear operators for time evolution, or self-adjoint linear operators for measurements. If you would "allow" non-linearities, the world would be different.
> It's just some fairy tale level understanding.
This has value in itself, as the first step towards greater understanding. I bet most people who study physics had their interest piqued by such fairytales. Maybe you did too.
> I bet most people who study physics had their interest piqued by such fairytales.
Okay, but that's the education use-case for young people. For them, a 300+ page book that talks about the arrow of time and costs $25 is not the right thing, in my opinion.
If you look at Feynman's stuff, those are good examples, that's what got me hooked as a student. I pirated the Feynman Lectures on Physics mp3s and pdfs and chewed through it, after being initially inspired by Surely You're Joking.
> For example, ask a lay person about BB and they will tell you it's an explosion, in the classical sense
Give her Weinberg’s book to read and she’ll come to a different conclusion. Of course those books won’t give you a deep understanding of cosmology but that doesn’t mean they have to be completely wrong. Stephen Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes is my favorite example of pop-sci done right.
My initial comment was probably too much gut-reaction.
There is good popular science that is useful.
For example, maybe the designers of Mario Kart read about QCD and the strong force: this is a weird force, which---unlike electromagnetism and gravity---gets stronger (not weaker) with distance, like the pull on a rubber band. Maybe they read that, and that's how they came up with the game's rubber band mechanics.
But I do think a lot of the highly publicised stuff is unfortunate, because they deal with highly speculative stuff (ST) and/or give the reader a false sense of understanding (BB), and in general writing 300+ pages of high-level hand wavy explanations is of questionable use to me; I'd make it shorter and give it away for free.
I Feynman is the right approach to teaching physics to the lay person...which book is the place to start?
Surely you're joking: not a physics book, it's about Feynman's life, it's a way to get you inspired and into the mindset.
Feynman Lectures on Physics: freshman level course that Feynman taught at MIT. Lots of material, will last you year(s).
Six easy pieces: 6 easy lectures from Feynman.
Six not so easy pieces: 6 not-so-easy lectures from Feynman.
Feynman lectures on computation.
QED is kind of fun.
Planck's constant, speed of light travel when you chain across space which Planck himself should have understood if he thought about transmissions of information in series. Curves when gravity pushes/pulls light from straight paths. What questions are there?
Your comment is gibberish (I've read it 3 times and can't make head nor tails, but maybe I'm missing something).