Is philosophy dead?

[Tiapan]

Stephen Hawking has just released a book called The Grand Design, written with Leonard Mlodinow.

Four points he makes are
Philosophy has not kept up with the mathematics of the universe and there fore is looking a little antiquated and irrelevant.

That God is not necessary for a full understanding of the universe and its workings

That multiverse M-theory is currently the closest concept to model the universe.

Fourthly he suggests that there may be no simple universal reduction of the universe in mathematical models, to the question of life the universe and everything.

I would have thought that in itself was worthy of some philosophical debate.

So what do you lot reckon.

Is he right or is the wrong, but before you knock him I would do some serious reading about Mach and others before commenting.

CultureLab: Stephen Hawking says there's no theory of everything


Cheers

 

[Father Heathen]

Philosophy would only be dead if thought itself were dead.

 

[Tiapan]

Philosophy would only be dead if thought itself were dead.

His arguement which I view as valid is that philosophers have not kept pace with the ever important evolving mathematics, especially string theory, being the only true truth of the universe(s).

Cheers

 

[angellous_evangellous]

I think that Hawking is just too much in love with his field.

 

[sandandfoam]

His arguement which I view as valid is that philosophers have not kept pace with the ever important evolving mathematics, especially string theory, being the only true truth of the universe(s).

Cheers

Having declared that "philosophy is dead", the authors unwittingly develop a theory familiar to philosophers since the 1980s, namely "perspectivalism". This radical theory holds that there doesn't exist, even in principle, a single comprehensive theory of the universe. Instead, science offers many incomplete windows onto a common reality, one no more "true" than another. In the authors' hands this position bleeds into an alarming anti-realism: not only does science fail to provide a single description of reality, they say, there is no theory-independent reality at all.

This appeals to me a lot.

I imagine philosophy will never be dead.
Math like reason/logic etc can never hold the keys to the kingdom because it is impossible to describe experience with numbers.

 

[Revoltingest]

I imagine philosophy will never be dead.

I agree. Every generation will rediscover & argue about what the prior generation rediscovered & argued about.

Math like reason/logic etc can never hold the keys to the kingdom because it is impossible to describe experience with numbers.

....so far. Numbers are learning fast.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Math like reason/logic etc can never hold the keys to the kingdom because it is impossible to describe experience with numbers.

Just for poops and giggles:

1) Computers are basically powerful calculators. Every thought epressed here on RF is the result of various mathematical formulas designed for us to receive the numbers in colors, words, and pictures.

2) Music is math. How expressive is that?

 

[sandandfoam]

Just for poops and giggles:

1) Computers are basically powerful calculators. Every thought epressed here on RF is the result of various mathematical formulas designed for us to receive the numbers in colors, words, and pictures.

2) Music is math. How expressive is that?

Computers neither describe nor explain experience AE, no more than a telephone does.

Music, I wish I knew enough about to engage about whether it is/is not math - but I don't.

 

[Terrywoodenpic]

You can not put the lack of a coherent mathematics, of the universe, at the feet of the Philosophers.
Philosophers can not base their work on a Maths that is at odds with itself.
Philosophy is not so much out of date as "in waiting"

 

[Venatoris]

Philosophy has not kept up with the mathematics of the universe and there fore is looking a little antiquated and irrelevant.

Perhaps the advent of modern science and mathematics has stifled the potential of the best philosophers of our time.

 

[sandandfoam]

Perhaps the advent of modern science and mathematics has stifled the potential of the best philosophers of our time.

Or maybe that's what the best modern scientists and mathematicians would have us believe. They do have a vested interest in maintaining their own positions of power.
This is nearly 50 years old and relates to theories of personality but I think it's beautiful and has a wider application:-
"If asked, most theorists were not reluctant to view their own efforts as intellectual, rational, and oriented towards cognitive clarity. Not so the subjects of their theories. These people, quite unlike the theorists themselves, were accordingly in the hands of dark forces outside their ken. They were mechanically propelled through a maze completely beyond their comprehension and worked assiduously for hedonic tidbits dispensed by an indifferent environment, or were led through their lives in some other mysterious manner."
edit - source = Lester (1963)

 

[Kilgore Trout]

Of course philosophy isn't dead. We'll always need a field which makes below average people feel smart.

 

[Revoltingest]

Of course philosophy isn't dead. We'll always need a field which makes below average people feel smart.

I thought that's why colleges had programs like women's studies, sociology, sports communication & diversity studies.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

I thought that's why colleges had programs like women's studies, sociology, sports communication & diversity studies.

Sure, but they don't have that faux intellectual cachet that philosophy does.

 

[Meow Mix]

Stephen Hawking has just released a book called The Grand Design, written with Leonard Mlodinow.

Four points he makes are
Philosophy has not kept up with the mathematics of the universe and there fore is looking a little antiquated and irrelevant.

Here I would disagree with Hawking. The fact of the matter is that some physicists are working ahead of and sometimes in spite of metaphysics, which is as patently absurd as working ahead of and in spite of empirical evidence (*cough*stringtheory*cough*).

Niels Bohr said, "Anything beyond the prediction of the outcome of experiment is metaphysics." Many physicists fail to remember that theoretical physics is half metaphysics and they never bother to really understand metaphysics. That's why you've seen all kinds of absolute horsecrap like "consciousness causes collapse of the wave function" and this over-reliance on string theory from otherwise brilliant physicists -- it's because they're abandoning metaphysics; not that they've outgrown it.

Metaphysics -- philosophy -- is keeping up with modern science just fine. There are many elements of modern physics that are more metaphysics than they are science (which is fine, since science itself is metaphysical). So no, philosophy isn't dead, and Hawking and anyone who thinks like him in this dangerous area desperately need to be reminded just what it is that's keeping science working and sane: philosophy.

That God is not necessary for a full understanding of the universe and its workings

This is true, I agree with Hawking here.

That multiverse M-theory is currently the closest concept to model the universe.

Wrooooong, Hawking. This is terrible metaphysics and awful science -- this is the crap that happens when physicists don't understand how important metaphysics is to science, and it drives foundational cosmology students like me absolutely insane.

It's actually ironic on several levels:
1) String theory is more metaphysics than science as currently conceived, so it's kind of funny that Hawking says in one breath "Philosophy is dead" and in the next expresses support for a model that's more philosophy than science at this point in time!

2) String theory has already been tested once: all string theories predicted a negative or zero lambda universe. Lo and behold, we find our universe is a positive lambda universe. String theory can only be saved by positing a flux of calibai-yau manifolds of tightly wrapped dimensions which brings the total number of possible string theories from 5-12 (depending on whether you counted sub-theories) to 10^500.

That's a lot of possible string theories. While revising a theory is common in science, it does get to a point where you're just adding Ptolemaic orbits to Ptolemaic orbits -- it gets a little too ad hoc.

3) At this time, string theories are still background dependent, meaning they treat spacetime as though it were absolute -- completely ignoring Einstein's revolution and the foresight of Machian metaphysics for describing the universe relationally. It's ridiculous to have a background dependent theory to solve the problem of quantum gravity; it's like building a bridge out of straw.

M-theory is predicted to be background independent by the end, but why waste the time with a background dependent theory now?

4) String theory is not proven finite. The mathematics behind string theory are perturbative (based on perturbation theory), which means that string theory "answers" are given as infinite series and sums. Only the first few terms are proven finite so far, and some of those first few terms are only finite within a narrow range of parameters that could easily be broken (meaning under certain possible conditions they would most definitely not be finite).

Yet every day we hear the popular scientific media claiming that string theory solves the problems of infinities that typically arise from persuits of quantum gravity... wroooong!

(Feynman used to be the biggest, baddest, scariest guy ever for grad students to present their thesis to because he would loudly interrupt them by saying "Wroooong!" and I always get that mental image in my head... *shivers*)

Fourthly he suggests that there may be no simple universal reduction of the universe in mathematical models, to the question of life the universe and everything.

This is actually true, and it's another ironic statement for him to make because that subject is entirely metaphysical.

Perhaps Hawking simply doesn't really know what philosophy consists of?

I would have thought that in itself was worthy of some philosophical debate.

So what do you lot reckon.

Is he right or is the wrong, but before you knock him I would do some serious reading about Mach and others before commenting.

CultureLab: Stephen Hawking says there's no theory of everything


Cheers

Ha, I hadn't even noticed that you, too, thought of Mach until just now. Cheers!

 

[Revoltingest]

Ha, I hadn't even noticed that you, too, thought of Mach until just now. Cheers!

Mach? Is this the guy with the useful number? How's he fit in?

 

[Meow Mix]

Mach? Is this the guy with the useful number? How's he fit in?

Mach is actually the forefather of Einstein's revolution in terms of Einstein's metaphysics -- and gave birth to the metric tensor, and essentially gave rise to the importance of background independence.

For reasons that could fill volumes of books, background dependence doesn't work in a universe with no privileged reference frame -- you can't assume that there's this giant cartesian grid of <x,y,z> coordinates in space upon which the universe moves so that we might say "Earth is at <x,y,z> in space," because different observers would disagree with these coordinates even if they started out with the same coordinates for an arbitrary origin (<0,0,0>).

A better conception of the universe is one that's completely relational, which defines distances and other ontological statuses as a state of the whole.

See: Configuration space - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An example would be to think of a very simple configuration space; say, a 3-point R^2 configuration space (a two dimensional universe which consists entirely of just 3 Euclidean points).

It's easy for ust to say "Okay, let's assign a random spot as the origin <0,0> and start describing where these points are!" but that's only because we're outside looking "in" to this universe. The problem arises, though, when you're part of the system you're wanting to describe -- this is actually right up my alley since this is the kind of stuff foundational cosmology is about.

If you were part of the configuration space described above the best way to describe the location of these points is in relation to one another, not to some fixed (background dependent) imaginary grid upon which the points move -- because if you or other observers within this universe are moving at relativistic speeds you'd disagree with other observers, and in fact you can't tell whether the things around you are moving and you're stationary or if it's the other way around.

 

[Revoltingest]

Mach is actually the forefather of Einstein's revolution in terms of Einstein's metaphysics -- and gave birth to the metric tensor, and essentially gave rise to the importance of background independence.

For reasons that could fill volumes of books, background dependence doesn't work in a universe with no privileged reference frame -- you can't assume that there's this giant cartesian grid of <x,y,z> coordinates in space upon which the universe moves so that we might say "Earth is at <x,y,z> in space," because different observers would disagree with these coordinates even if they started out with the same coordinates for an arbitrary origin (<0,0,0>).

A better conception of the universe is one that's completely relational, which defines distances and other ontological statuses as a state of the whole.

See: Configuration space - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An example would be to think of a very simple configuration space; say, a 3-point R^2 configuration space (a two dimensional universe which consists entirely of just 3 Euclidean points).

It's easy for ust to say "Okay, let's assign a random spot as the origin <0,0> and start describing where these points are!" but that's only because we're outside looking "in" to this universe. The problem arises, though, when you're part of the system you're wanting to describe -- this is actually right up my alley since this is the kind of stuff foundational cosmology is about.

If you were part of the configuration space described above the best way to describe the location of these points is in relation to one another, not to some fixed (background dependent) imaginary grid upon which the points move -- because if you or other observers within this universe are moving at relativistic speeds you'd disagree with other observers, and in fact you can't tell whether the things around you are moving and you're stationary or if it's the other way around.

Yah know, were I not already a little familiar with that stuff, I'd never figger it out from yer explanation.

Hey, maybe you're the person to ask. Just what prompted Einstein to come up with GR. Special relativity is pretty accessible, even to
those of us who need to take off our socks when counting over 10, but GR is inscrutable....you know...frame dragging & all that.

 

[Meow Mix]

Yah know, were I not already a little familiar with that stuff, I'd never figger it out from yer explanation.

Hey, maybe you're the person to ask. Just what prompted Einstein to come up with GR. Special relativity is pretty accessible, even to
those of us who need to take off our socks when counting over 10, but GR is inscrutable....you know...frame dragging & all that.

GR is the hybrid Frankensteinian child of Galileo's relativity, Lorentz contraction and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism.

Essentially Einstein started with Galileo's relativity by first coming up with his equivalence principle -- that gravity accelerates mass (as any other force, F = ma), and that this acceleration is indistinguishable from any other sort of acceleration.

So consider that you're in an elevator and can't see the external world: it could either be true that you're in an elevator on earth that's stationary, or it could also be the case that you're in an elevator in space being accelerated at ~9.8 m/s^2 and it just feels like you're in Earth's gravitational field. There are in principle no experiments you could perform within the elevator to determine which is the case, so the two phenomena are equivalent.

Now let's say for the sake of argument that the elevator's actually in space and that you're actually being accelerated at ~9.8 m/s^2 and there's a tiny hole in the door of the elevator where a water gun can squirt through as you pass it -- so the water only has motion perpendicular to your elevator's direction of motion (it's not being accelerated "upwards" like you are).

Even though the water is shooting "straight ahead," what you would experience is the water seeming to "arc" towards the floor -- just as it would in a gravitational field; but in this case it's because of your perpindicular motion relative to the water's "sideways" motion. Make sense? So the water would strike the wall or floor at a "lower" position on the other side of the elevator than its entry hole.

That seems rather ordinary -- but what's extraordinary is that instead of a water gun, Einstein was wondering what would happen if it were light passing perpendicular to the elevator. It would be bizarre if the light "arced" downwards to the observer in the elevator because according to Maxwell's equations light only travels in straight lines; it doesn't curve. However, it turns out that the light would indeed seem to arc in this hypothetical elevator towards the floor -- which is mindblowing because of the equivalence principle: if light appears bent in this elevator then light would appear bent in a gravitational field, which is impossible (from Maxwell's eqtns)!

So, if light is bent in gravitational fields but light must always travel in a straight line, what's going on? Einstein suggested the insane: light is still travelling in a straight line, it's space itself that's curved in gravitational fields!

 

[Revoltingest]

GR is the hybrid Frankensteinian child of Galileo's relativity, Lorentz contraction and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism.

Essentially Einstein started with Galileo's relativity by first coming up with his equivalence principle -- that gravity accelerates mass (as any other force, F = ma), and that this acceleration is indistinguishable from any other sort of acceleration.

So consider that you're in an elevator and can't see the external world: it could either be true that you're in an elevator on earth that's stationary, or it could also be the case that you're in an elevator in space being accelerated at ~9.8 m/s^2 and it just feels like you're in Earth's gravitational field. There are in principle no experiments you could perform within the elevator to determine which is the case, so the two phenomena are equivalent.

Now let's say for the sake of argument that the elevator's actually in space and that you're actually being accelerated at ~9.8 m/s^2 and there's a tiny hole in the door of the elevator where a water gun can squirt through as you pass it -- so the water only has motion perpendicular to your elevator's direction of motion (it's not being accelerated "upwards" like you are).

Even though the water is shooting "straight ahead," what you would experience is the water seeming to "arc" towards the floor -- just as it would in a gravitational field; but in this case it's because of your perpindicular motion relative to the water's "sideways" motion. Make sense? So the water would strike the wall or floor at a "lower" position on the other side of the elevator than its entry hole.

That seems rather ordinary -- but what's extraordinary is that instead of a water gun, Einstein was wondering what would happen if it were light passing perpendicular to the elevator. It would be bizarre if the light "arced" downwards to the observer in the elevator because according to Maxwell's equations light only travels in straight lines; it doesn't curve. However, it turns out that the light would indeed seem to arc in this hypothetical elevator towards the floor -- which is mindblowing because of the equivalence principle: if light appears bent in this elevator then light would appear bent in a gravitational field, which is impossible (from Maxwell's eqtns)!

So, if light is bent in gravitational fields but light must always travel in a straight line, what's going on? Einstein suggested the insane: light is still travelling in a straight line, it's space itself that's curved in gravitational fields!

Tis a red letter day. This old dog learnt sumthin! Popular media always leave off the salient part about the the squirt gun (whether it's light or
water being squirted), without which the equivalency argument was less than compelling. It reminds me of how even special relativity made no
sense til I read Hawking's Brief History of time. It was simple geometry & algebra applied to implications of that pesky constancy of the speed of light!
Well, spuh!

The curving of space always struck me absurd,
but your explanation's the best I've yet heard.
You've made it clear to us
what should be obvious,
bending of space is the theory preferred!

Jesus, that explains the nastiness of the math transforming from one metric of space to another. Don't even try to learn
me 'bout that'un. I can't even remember what math it was that I once knew....Laplace transmogrifiers & Lagrange
multiple pliers, etc.