Is philosophy dead?

[Reptillian]

There are certainly questions that philosophy deals with that science can't deal with because of its nature and underlying philosophical assumptions. Whole branches of philosophy like ethics and aesthetics deal with topics that science never touches. Science is merely a type of philosophy. Hawking may know a lot about his specialization, but when it comes to other topics like philosophy, he seems to be as ignorant as everyone else.

As for general relativity, (which seems to come up an aweful lot on this forum) one of the profound implications of the equivalence principle is that when I drop a ball, there isn't some strange force called gravity that reaches up and pulls down and causes it to fall, but rather the ball continues in its state of motion via Newton's 1st law and its me and the ground that are accelerating up to meet it. Gravity is just a manifestation of the "force" that causes a ball to roll forward on the floor of a bus when you step on the brake. Its what pushes you back in your car seat when you step on the accelerator. On a deeper note, gravity is locally like a special relativistic version of the centerfugal "force". I've been working on a description of dark matter/energy as a global manifestation of other pseudoforces...namely the Euler force and the Coriolis force. (its possible electromagnetism and the nuclear force may be locally understood in terms of these) The equivalence principle has also inspired me to attempt a geometric interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I haven't been making much progress on either front...primarily because my old professors think my ideas are bizarre and my peers are interested in a quantum mechanical description of gravity, not a gravity based description of quantum mechanics. Don't even get me started on my model of subatomic particles and their properties!

 

[Meow Mix]

There are certainly questions that philosophy deals with that science can't deal with because of its nature and underlying philosophical assumptions. Whole branches of philosophy like ethics and aesthetics deal with topics that science never touches. Science is merely a type of philosophy. Hawking may know a lot about his specialization, but when it comes to other topics like philosophy, he seems to be as ignorant as everyone else.

As for general relativity, (which seems to come up an aweful lot on this forum) one of the profound implications of the equivalence principle is that when I drop a ball, there isn't some strange force called gravity that reaches up and pulls down and causes it to fall, but rather the ball continues in its state of motion via Newton's 1st law and its me and the ground that are accelerating up to meet it. Gravity is just a manifestation of the "force" that causes a ball to roll forward on the floor of a bus when you step on the brake. Its what pushes you back in your car seat when you step on the accelerator. On a deeper note, gravity is locally like a special relativistic version of the centerfugal "force". I've been working on a description of dark matter/energy as a global manifestation of other pseudoforces...namely the Euler force and the Coriolis force. (its possible electromagnetism and the nuclear force may be locally understood in terms of these) The equivalence principle has also inspired me to attempt a geometric interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I haven't been making much progress on either front...primarily because my old professors think my ideas are bizarre and my peers are interested in a quantum mechanical description of gravity, not a gravity based description of quantum mechanics. Don't even get me started on my model of subatomic particles and their properties!

Sounds interesting to me.

You familiar with loop quantum gravity?

 

[Reptillian]

Sounds interesting to me.

You familiar with loop quantum gravity?

Not really, the main sources of my knowledge regarding GR and QM are "Misner, Thorne, Wheeler", "Wald", "Griffiths", and "Sakurai" Is loop quantum gravity related to Wheeler's attempt to describe subatomic charges in terms of wormholes? I certainly think thats a brilliant approach, but haven't heard about any recent attempts.

My primary motivation was in applying the equivalence principle to falling charges. I wondered whether a charged ball I dropped would radiate. After giving it some thought, I realized that a falling charged ball can't radiate without violating either the equivalence principle, or conservation of energy. Then I considered the classical electrodynamics problem of atomic stability. I realized that a charge like an electron could fall around an atom and not emit electromagnetic radiation as long as it was moving along a geodesic. The geodesic equation allows something to look like there is a force acting on it when it is moving through curved spacetime via Newton's 1st law. Since this problem was one of the motivations for quantum mechanics in the first place, it suggests that there might be a geometric interpretation of the atom and quantum mechanics in general. I discussed this with a few of my professors and they dismissed it outright since "atoms don't have enough mass". I thought that a geometric interpretation of electrictromagnetism might be a byproduct of this line of thinking. They also didn't like the fact that I was using local conditions and special relativistic pseudoforces to try and predict the global geometry.

 

[skydivephil]

Loop Quantum gravity is a gravity based description of quantum mechanics and its background indpendent. Read here:
Loop quantum gravity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Penumbra]

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

This may not be such a bad thing.

Philosophies that use the mathematical/scientific understanding of the universe of the time period are prone to becoming antiquated and irrelevant if the underlying mathematical/scientific understanding changes and progresses.

 

[England my lionheart]

Personally i think without Philosophy who is going to ask the questions

 

[wmjbyatt]

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.

Uh... no. This is just... empirically wrong. Seriously, pick up a copy of the "Journal of Philosophy" or "Mind" or any such philosophy journal. Especially the ones that focus on analytical philosophy. A modern philosophy journal looks bizarrely like a modern mathematics journal--I promise, I regularly examine both.

As a matter of fact, MOST modern philosophy is drawing its argumentation from modern mathematics and physics. The epistemological arguments stemming from Goedel and the metaphysics stemming from quantum are all amazing and, on the whole, very accurate. It is actually very difficult to get a position as a philosophy professor at a modern university without a pretty thorough general understanding of mathematics and physics both, and many professional philosophers work very closely with their colleagues in the mathematics and physics departments.

The problem is just that POPULAR philosophy is leaning more towards the continental, synthetic, and postmodern at the moment. Which is, certainly, a bit antiquated. But since the philosophy which is part of the cultural mindset of the moment is the philosophy which was part of the progressive corpus of the Academy about fifty years ago, I feel like that's understandable. It just takes a little time for cutting-edge thought to percolate from the peer-reviewed journals to the relevant hardbacks on nightstands.

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

Can't argue with him here... but at the same time, godlessness is also not necessary for a full understanding of the universe, so atheism is just a product of Occam's Razor, which is well understood to be a "general good bet" but not a necessary law of logic.

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

What kind of idiot claim is that? Multiverse M-theory is currently the model that we have that most thoroughly explains the immediately observed phenomena of the universe, but the phrasing "closest concept to model the universe" requires that we be able to measure the distance between models and actuality, and to do that we'd have to know, with precision, actuality.

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.

Oh holy crap, Derrida is tap-dancing in his grave with joy. I'm with him here, frankly, but this seems to stand in contradiction to the general theory and method of science and reason.

 

[logician]

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.

A good understanding of mathematics is helpful to study music theory.

 

[logician]

We need more good philosophers, where reason is the basis of discussion.

 

[wmjbyatt]

We need more good philosophers, where reason is the basis of discussion.

Really? Are you serious? The world of professional philosophy is chock-full of high-caliber, intelligent people who take it as granted that reason is prime. Seriously, pick up a bleedin' philosophy journal! Almost every professor of philosophy at almost every university in the States and Britain is a practicing, publishing, analytic philosopher. That's got to be a few THOUSAND, minimum, practicing professional rationalists.

No, what we need is greater literacy in regards to the current status of the field of philosophy. That is, most people--even educated people--seem to think that there hasn't been much philosophical work done in the past fifty years or so. This is just patently untrue. It just takes a while for the work to percolate through the world of professional philosophers and into mainstream consciousness.

What's damaging the field of philosophy right now is non-philosophers publishing philosophicalish books aimed at the mainstream public. So people get ahold of things like "The Secret" and think that it's philosophy, when it is, in fact, garbage. A lot of the pseudo-philosophical arguments that make their way into the mainstream consciousness are things that the field of philosophy on the whole moved past decades ago.

Frankly, in attacking the corpus of the field of philosophy as a whole, the same EXACT crime is committed that the idiot publishing pseudo-philosophy commit: a lack of research into the arguments as they stand.