osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
That's exactly what I mean. I wanted to know if there are formal arguments for that position.
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Just Curious: What is the logical and scientific basis for accepting physicalism/materialism is fact
- Thread starter osgart
- Start date
That's exactly what I mean. I wanted to know if there are formal arguments for that position.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
You won't find me making any such arguments, but you probably already know that by now.
“The world is but a show, vain and empty, a mere nothing, bearing the semblance of reality. Set not your affections upon it. Break not the bond that uniteth you with your Creator, and be not of those that have erred and strayed from His ways. Verily I say, the world is like the vapor in a desert, which the thirsty dreameth to be water and striveth after it with all his might, until when he cometh unto it, he findeth it to be mere illusion.”
Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 328-329
PureX
Veteran Member
So are the emotional world, the intellectual world, and the ideological world.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
No, because the physical reality is not all of reality. This material world is just a refection of the spiritual world, the world of heaven.
“The spiritual world is like unto the phenomenal world. They are the exact counterpart of each other. Whatever objects appear in this world of existence are the outer pictures of the world of heaven.”
The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 10
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
My position is that I have no evidence of anything supernatural. I am very agnostic about the four possibilities.
I still maintain religious convictions though.
I'm convinced to the possibility that there is completely undetected physics out there and an intelligent eternal foundational reality that precedes the knowable universe. I'm also atheist.
People who prefer their own safety have at least a bit of a tendency towards accepting physicalism and materialism. Every time I see a car hurtling towards me at the intersection, I am driven to get out of the way. If, of course, you don't accept either physicalism or materialism, you may well not bother, but just stay there and wait to see what happens.
Do you?
When somebody aims a gun at my head, I have a tendency to be frightened that if he pulls the trigger, a bullet might come out and make a sort of physical contact with my skull that I may well find problematic. If you don't, you may well not accept materialism. So how do you feel then?
If some stupid drunk tries to push me into the campfire on a camping trip with too much alcohol (this has happened), I try very hard to avoid the fire. I think most people do. I suspect that's because they have a kind of suspicion that physicalism and materialism are pretty much what the world we inhabit are about.
How about you? What makes you suspect that physicalism and materialism might not be fact -- and more importantly (if you do think that), how do your reactions to physical situations support your idea? Or do you, in fact, like everybody else, actually behave as if you believe them to be fact?
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
I'm not even arguing against the physical world being real; far from it. I'm checking up on the philosophical conviction that nothing exists but the physical world; especially as is known of. It's a totally different argument. No, I'm not that insane as to think that the physical world doesn't exist.
Heyo
Veteran Member
I know of no atheist holding that position and I know of no arguments for that position. It might just be a theists straw man, a misrepresentation of methodological naturalism.
Even if I deny the existence of the supernatural and the spiritual, there are still disciplines handling abstract subjects like mathematics. It would be hard to argue that numbers, forms and formulas don't exist.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
Probably you know more people than me, I am not much of a socialite. I only know people on forums and I don't know any atheists who believe there is anything beyond the material world. They all make fun of me when I talk about a spiritual world or an afterlife.
Heyo
Veteran Member
I see the problem.
You and other people accusing atheists of only acknowledging the physical world, only acknowledge the physical and spiritual world. When we dismiss the spiritual, there is only the physical left.
I do acknowledge the physical and several layers of abstraction. Platonic ideals are not real, not of the physical world. Science can't handle them but they do exist and they can be explored by maths and philosophy. Human constructs like laws and rights are not real and they are used in jurisprudence.
Mathematicians can agree upon their formulas because there is inner consistency in maths. Jurists can agree upon laws (although they usually don't) when there is consistency in the law. That makes them somewhat useful.
I don't see that consistency in the spiritual. There is no method to come to any agreement. That's why I content its existence.
RestlessSoul
Well-Known Member
You can’t do classical physics without the assumption that material entities interact with each other in ways which are deterministic, and subject to empirical analysis. But quantum mechanics appears to indicate that it is not the material entities themselves that are real, but rather that the interactions between them are. Furthermore, these interactions being by definition dynamic, in a sense the material world may be said to be entirely without substance.
Heyo
Veteran Member
Even if they are (and it isn't just our not understanding how they aren't), reality must at one point be an emerging property. Contemplating quantum weirdness doesn't help us in calculating anything above the nanometer scale and classical physics is pretty good at those scales. Quantum mechanics won't overthrow any theory in the ranges they were tested in. Relativity didn't overthrow Newtonian mechanics for most practical purposes (including but not limited to calculating a trajectory to Pluto).
Will that comfort you when I drop an entirely unsubstantial anvil on your foot?
RestlessSoul
Well-Known Member
As well as being dreamers, we are practical creatures, so we go with what works; if the material world is a mirage, it is a most convincing one, and we must live in it, seemingly on it's terms, not our own. Though we know that nothing is what it seems, we navigate as best we can with whatever tools are available, and which appear to serve us..
So what are the philosophical implications for us, when we bring into question the solidity of the ground we thought we stood on? Carlo Rovelli's answer to this question, in his book 'Helgoland' is to say "it renders lighter, the bittersweet flowing of our lives".
Neither theories nor hypotheses in the sciences can, generally speaking, be falsified. The term is typically misused to mean something like "evidence can be presented that demonstrates the hypotheses/theory to be false." However, there is a very good reason why Popper and followers used words like falsifiability and falsification rather than "testable" or "confirmation" or similar terms that mean any scientific hypothesis or theory must be such that empirical (and in some cases theoretical) tests may show it to be wrong, incorrect, false, etc.
Falsification is supposed to solve to problems: Hume's problem of induction and the demarcation problem. It solves the latter simply by asserting falsifiability to demarcate scientific hypotheses/theories from non-scientific/pseudoscientific ones. It is partially in this sense that the term is too often thrown about today. But the bigger problem falsification/falsifiability was supposed to solve is the former: that of Hume's problem of induction.
Popper granted that Hume's argument was sound, and that there is no way to confirm the truth of some hypothesis or more generally any proposition through induction (and by extension through any sort of empirical methods). However, he believed that scientific practice, knowledge, and progress must rest on something solid. Hence falsifiability.
An example:
Suppose one believes that all swans are white. One tries to support this empirically by observing thousands of swans. But, as with the problem of the sun rising tomorrow, no amount of this kind of inductive evidence suggests that all swans are indeed white. There is no logical validity to any sort of argument that says "because the sun has risen in the past, and always has, it will tomorrow" or "because all previously observed swans have been white, all swans are white". Indeed, Hume and Popper and others argued that such experiences/observations couldn't even count as evidence, let alone confirmation. It is simply (they argue) invalid inference and therefore fundamentally unsound.
However, Popper's falsification method proposed an alternative. We may never be able to confirm that all swans are white, but a single observation of a black swan proves this hypothesis false.
Hence falsification: there can never by any evidence that confirms or supports any scientific hypothesis/theory, only evidence that falsifies it.
This part is hard to swallow, and is therefore usually ignored in textbooks, popular science, science education, and (I'm ashamed to say) all to often by practicing scientists in scientific literature.
After all, the implication is that a theory of e.g., gravity I come up with today is as good a theory as is general relativity, because it has not yet been falsified.
It also doesn't work. In practice, scientific theories are not like the "theories" one finds in the philosophy of science literature of Popper's time, which are usually represented using symbolic logic and make no contact with scientific practice. Most scientific theories cannot be states in simple terms like this. And even those that can be written down in mathematical form cannot be falsified in the manner Popper suggested.
Presupposition, usually. At least in part. Actually, there is a sense in which practice in certain sciences cannot so easily rest on physicalist grounds:
"The alleged closure (also referred to as completeness) of physics implies that anything that has a physical effect must itself be physical. This is one of the reasons why many philosophers of science have taken physicalism for granted. Physicalism started as an ontological doctrine of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists and says (roughly) that ultimately everything is explainable by physics...To define physicalism as the doctrine that all facts, including intention and meaning, are reducible to physical facts, or as the claim that every physically acceptable effect has a physically acceptable cause, is not as clear as it seems...
The claim that physics is closed and the idea of physicalism indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of physics. There are a number of non-trivial presuppositions of the natural sciences, such as the necessity to distinguish between the observer and the observed. Physics is based on experiments and fundamental theories. In order to test, or support, a hypothesized cause-effect relationship experimentally, it is indispensable that the experimenter has the freedom to deliberately choose (within well-understood limits) a stimulus and then to record the response. Clearly we cannot make measurements on a closed system on which outside influences are disregarded by definition. Yet, there are no known first principles for open systems: the first principles of physics refer to strictly closed and isolated systems where no distinction between cause and effect is possible.
Since all first principles of physics are invariant under time translation and time reversal, concepts such as “past”, “present”, or “future” have no place in fundamental physics. Accordingly there are no physical laws which cover memory and intentions. Memory of past episodes is a necessary precondition of personal identity—in the sense that a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person.
We conclude that the space-like time of physics does not take into account all aspects of time. In particular, the “arrow of becoming” cannot be consistently integrated into a universally valid picture of physics. Since physics systematically leaves out human intentions, the first principles of physics are not even enough to describe physical experiments or engineering physics exhaustively." (pp. 158-159)
Primas, H. (2017). Knowledge and Time. Springer.
Similarly:
"The assertion that “modern science is premised on the assumption that the material world is a causally closed system” (Heil, 1998, p. 23) is in striking contradiction to experimental science. Every experiment requires an irreversible dynamics. No experiment refers to a closed physical system. In a strictly deterministic world it would neither be possible to perform meaningful experiments nor to verify the partially causal behavior of a physical system. We conclude that science neither assumes that the material world is a causally closed system, nor that physical laws imply the causal closure of physics"
Primas, H. (2009). Complementarity of Mind and Matter. In H. Atmanspracher & H. Primas (Eds.) Recasting Reality: Wolfgang Pauli's Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science (p. 171). Springer.
This is in direct contradiction not only with much current scientific practice, but also most of the origins of modern science, which emerged rather directly based on theological and metaphysical presuppositions that were absolutely inconsistent with and opposed to (reductive) materialism or physicalism. One can conduct scientific research under the assumption of solipsism or similar idiocy (such as the so-called "simulation hypothesis" nonsense). It's hard to imagine that one would do so, as why would one bother to investigate the external world if one denied its existence, but it is not logically impossible.
More importantly, a key (contextual) ingredient in the emergence of the scientific endeavor was a belief in a rationally order cosmos alongside the motivation to know the nature of this order (its "laws") as a means of knowing God, proving attributes about God, etc. This turned out to be an enormous boon for the physical/natural sciences, as e.g., a core foundation of modern physics (the action principle) developed directly out of an assumption about God's perfection. We can (and do) reject all the theological assumptions and so forth that were made by Newton, Maupertuis, Euler, etc., regardless of whether we use the results today. But the point is that these essential contributions to physics and the natural sciences (not to mention the generally unacknowledged debt that chemistry owes to alchemical principles and practices) did not require the assumption of materialism.
Nor is this a necessary assumption today. It is, in fact, explicitly rejected by a number of prominent scientists in their actual scientific work and in the scientific literature:
"Quantum Mechanics has taught us that we must change our way of thinking about “realism”, and that this cannot be synonymous of “materialism”."
D’Ariano, G. M. (2015). It from Qubit. In It From Bit or Bit From It? (pp. 25-35). Springer.
“The only reality is mind and observations”
Henry, R. C. (2005). The mental universe. Nature, 436(7047), 29-29.
“Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure”
Tegmark, M. (2008). The mathematical universe. Foundations of Physics, 38(2), 101-150.
"the traditional conception of physical knowledge (originated in classical physics) based on realism, objectivity and determinism had to be abandoned and to be replaced by a new one.”
Paty, M. (1999). Are quantum systems physical objects with physical properties? European Journal of Physics 20: 373-388.
and so on.
I'm tired, so at the moment glib quotes seem to suffice here. But one wonders why on earth the assumption of physicalism or materialism should ever be thought to be necesssary? It is one thing to assert that we, as scientists, tends towards reductive materialism or something like this (and these tendencies vary by field). But it is quite another to posit that it is a precondition for engaging in scientific research. This latter position is simply false.
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
So then do we have varied interpretations in modern science as to how to conduct experiments and gather results?
Are scientists forced to only look at patterns, regularities, and consistencies?
So possibly science has to expand their definition of possible cause and effect relationships?
So basically we have to take a scientific approach to discover which philosophical basis to take in order to gain only useful results?
In modern science what are the axioms they assume to be true? Or do we start from non assumption?
Perhaps reductionism/physicalism is an open ended question that can't be resolved. Maybe we are forced to focus on abstract realities in the sciences?
I know string theory is the only theory that connects quantum mechanics with general relativity mathematically; but it is not able to experiment.
So it seems to me that there is a controversial issue on how to proceed in modern science from any philosophical position.
Objectivity is not something to be abandoned though.
It seems we are stuck with how to extract truth value from reality by way of abstract conceptualization.
Is mathematics an extension that goes beyond observation?
It seems science leaves explanation to the work of philosophers. I know there are popular scientists who philosophize from their point of view.
Absolutely, and in several quite fundamental ways that can (and do) often cross both different fields and entire disciplines. For example, from medical sciences to particle physics to climate science to social psychology and elsewhere, many of the same statistical methods are used. And indeed, early statistical methods were developed for modeling measurements and measurement errors using simple linear models. This is remains a common application. Thus a large component of scientific research involves statistical methods and the probability theory upon which they are based (based in the sense that although functional analysis, linear algebra, Fourier transforms, and other widely used mathematical tools do not typically involve probability theory, statistical inference and statistics more generally involves the use of random variables, where are defined via probability theory).
But there has and remains a fundamental divide as to what probability and randomness mean. The two most commonly identified camps are "frequentists" and "Bayesians", but there are those who fit into neither and there are divisions within each. The point is that there is a fundamental disagreement about what it means for an outcome to have a probability of less than one percent or more by "chance".
Additionally, in some sciences there is disagreement over the purpose of the very enterprise itself. In physics, for example, there is a widely and long held belief that physics isn't really intended to tell us about the world, but rather about how we experience it via telling us what will or will likely happen in experiments or during controlled observations (I suspect that many who hold such operationalist or instrumentalist views actually do not subscribe totally to this view, but are rather content to practice in such a manner). Others are adamant about the importance of physics and the natural sciences to tell us facts about the world, or at least tell us about an objectively existing external reality.
Then there are differences that are more about the nature of a particular field or one's training. Somewhat surprisingly, most people do not seem to be aware that for over a century now physicists (largely independently of their particular field or fields) opt early on to pursue either a career as a theorist or an experimentalists. In the main, then, since the days of Einstein, Pauli, Heisenberg, etc., fewer and fewer physicists who actually develop physical theories or work on them have ever performed a single experiment at all (Pauli was so famous for being totally inept to the point of being a curse that the term "the Pauli effect" was coined to describe how experiments he was even near tended to develop technical difficulties or run into other problems).
Experimentalists are trained differently, delving into the complexities of devices and device physics and many other aspects that are a part of the nuances of physics experiments today, even fairly "simple" ones in e.g., photonics. They often think quite differently than theorists about they "entities" described by physical theories and about what it is that experiments do. But they rely on communications with theorists to help determine how to develop experiments that will be taken to be tests of particular theories.
Thus the entire myth of the scientific method falls flat when considering what is typically taken to be the most exact science. Textbooks and popular science talk about how scientists formulate hypotheses and then test them using experiments. But in physics, theories are developed and "tested" and critiqued and revamped and explored often for many years without any experiments at all. And the experiments are not performed by the people who work on the theories.
There are plenty of other discipline specific examples. Evolution is one (the so-called "modern synthesis" is horribly dated). Cognitive science and neuroscience is another (e.g., the disagreements over the various theories that fall under the umbrella of embodied cognition and those that oppose this in favor of what I've dubbed "classical cognition"). And so on.
No. We aren't forced to look at anything. It is generally true that most empirical research is guided by these elements or constrained by them. But inconsistencies are an important tool. And keep in mind that at some level it is hard to imagine any kind of systematic observation or framework that doesn't in some sense involve patterns, regularities, and consistencies. It's sort of the foundation of cognition (well, categorization is and these are ways of approaching categorization). We can't even speak without engaging in such conceptual frameworks that are guided and shaped by our subjective and intersubjective experiences.
There is no generally agreed definition of cause and effect across sciences. It isn't even generally agreed that there should be one or that it is meaningful in many cases to think in this manner.
No.
Axioms are for logic and mathematics, Few scientific fields can rely on these, and when they do they run the risk that mathematics doesn't because we can't axiomatize reality. Nor is it possible to start from non-assumptions. It is about trying to keep in mind what assumptions you are relying on and keeping in mind how your results depend upon these.
String theory is not even a theory. "Theory" here (by the way) is a rather technical thing. Physicists tend to use it to describe an actual equation or set of equations that fit within some sort of framework (Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, etc.) governed by particular symmetries and their conservation laws. The main point is that in physics a theory is something (generally speaking) you can write down. String theorists acknowledge (often somewhat delightedly) that we don't know what string theory is or will be yet. So most of the work on it consists of starting assumptions that not only have no empirical basis but also aren't based on more than hand-waving mathematics either.
It is 60+ years of consistent failure to provide any kinds of physical results that weren't demonstrated to be wrong or to fail (or to "predict" correctly what we already knew, the way that string theorists speak of string theory "predicting" supersymmetry because string theory requires SUSY).
In some ways it can, just as logic can. How much so depends largely on the field. Thus one can derive physical results from equations without any experiments or experimental basis, the way that both the special and the general theory of relativity were or gravitational waves or the Higgs or any number of other results.
The philosophical position is based on the fact that if something is shown to exist, it will be put under the umbrella of the physical. Example; if "X" is believed to be spiritual in nature, once "X" is shown to be real, it will be considered a part of the physical world.
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
So there's no logical formulation of the argument? It's presumed, or assumed to be the obvious truth of reality.
How would they define physical?