"Scientism" on Wikipedia ...

[joelr]

That is the core joke. You seem to think that for your local "we", you decide for all humans, what matters and is meaningful. You don't and neither do I.

You are off topic. To apply this to the actual topic that started this, if a God shows up all humans can evaluate the evidence. If it's actually valid evidence instead of anecdotal stories there will be agreement that it's meaningful. This isn't complicated. We all generally agree that cars will get us to a location based on evidence. A few people may sit around and say "but what is real?" but the world still moves on and people drive. When the evidence is that good for a God we can all agree on that also.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

You are off topic. To apply this to the actual topic that started this, if a God shows up all humans can evaluate the evidence. If it's actually valid evidence instead of anecdotal stories there will be agreement that it's meaningful. This isn't complicated. We all generally agree that cars will get us to a location based on evidence. A few people may sit around and say "but what is real?" but the world still moves on and people drive. When the evidence is that good for a God we can all agree on that also.

No, that wouldn't be evidence of a God. You have to rule that is a powerful Alien jokester.

 

[joelr]

Yeah, but the meaning of the statement is not science. It is a first person subjective evolution.

Ha, oh, not what you wanted? Sorry, linguistics is the science of language including function and meaning.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Ha, oh, not what you wanted? Sorry, linguistics is the science of language including function and meaning.

Yeah and sometimes that is subjective and not science as for the function and meaning of an actual sentence.

 

[joelr]

No, that wouldn't be evidence of a God. You have to rule that is a powerful Alien jokester.

Wouldn't matter, it would be worshipped as a deity. If it could read your thoughts as you wondered if it were an alien and it showed up at your house pissed off right then it's functionally a God anyways. Technically a God in the Bible is a being who lives in outer space (the top of the firmament) is shiny and has exceptional genetalia (Ezekiel 8:2 in original Hebrew) "loins" in Hebrew is actually the word for man parts.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Wouldn't matter, it would be worshipped as a deity. If it could read your thoughts as you wondered if it were an alien and it showed up at your house pissed off right then it's functionally a God anyways. Technically a God in the Bible is a being who lives in outer space (the top of the firmament) is shiny and has exceptional genetalia (Ezekiel 8:2 in original Hebrew) "loins" in Hebrew is actually the word for man parts.

Well, it matters differently to me. But I know, that you know what matters to all humans, because what matters to you, is what matters to all humans in all cases.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Sorry, it's nonsense. Logical positivism was debated among philosophers for decades, meanwhile science discovered quantum mechanics, and the entire modern world. I'm going to source Feynman.
Richard Feynman, who shared the 1965 Nobel prize in physics for his work on quantum field theory, claimed that the “philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds”.
Your example about the solar system was discovered because we understand evidence. Any philosophers around at the time didn't help with that.

Yes, and the influence of logical positivism underpinned the Copenhagenist interpretation of QM, which as I understand it is still the orthodox, mainstream interpretation taught in schools and colleges. Except that neither logical positivism, nor the Copenhagenist solipsism are adequate for the purpose of understanding and describing the universe in which we live.

I suspect you have misunderstood Feynman btw, or taken the quote so far out of context that it’s meaning is lost. Physics needs metaphysics, if it is to perform the function ascribed to it by Einstein, Hawking, and others, to offer a full description of the natural world. Feynman, to whom is attributed the ironic admonition to quantum physicists to “shut up and calculate”, was as aware as anyone, that multiple competing efforts to interpret, rather than simply apply, quantum theory, required of both philosophy and science a quantum leap forward in human understanding. We stand on the brink of that leap leap forward today; QM has given us the iPhone and the H-Bomb, but in terms of what it may tell us about the fundamental nature of our reality, we are still finding our way in the dark. This, I suspect, was what Feynman (always a ready source of handy aphorisms) was referring to in the comment you quote; he may have been lamenting, as Hawking did, that the philosophers were so far behind the theoretical physicists, who were exploring calculus so complex that only a handful of mathematicians could keep pace.

This is not to say that physics doesn’t need philosophy; this is simply to say, that the philosophy of science has some catching up to do. Read Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli, and you will see that ground is being made in that direction, and that the artificial compartmentalisation of science, philosophy, and mathematics, alien to the likes of Socrates, Euclid, Plato, Pythagoras etc, is a barrier to the spirit of enquiry.

 

[joelr]

Yeah and sometimes that is subjective and not science as for the function and meaning of an actual sentence.

Yes if you make up a nonsense sentence (ahem). Actual language can be analyzed. I can write random numbers also, doesn't make it an equation? But we are not talking about "sometimes"?
There was an actual sentence, from Feynman....

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Yes if you make up a nonsense sentence (ahem). Actual language can be analyzed. I can write random numbers also, doesn't make it an equation? But we are not talking about "sometimes"?
There was an actual sentence, from Feynman....

Yeah and the content of it is not science. It was a scientist, who said it, but that doesn't make it science.

 

[joelr]

Yes, and the influence of logical positivism underpinned the Copenhagenist interpretation of QM, which as I understand it is still the orthodox, mainstream interpretation taught in schools and colleges. Except that neither logical positivism, nor the Copenhagenist solipsism are adequate for the purpose of understanding and describing the universe in which we live.

I suspect you have misunderstood Feynman btw, or taken the quote so far out of context that it’s meaning is lost. Physics needs metaphysics, if it is to perform the function ascribed to it by Einstein, Hawking, and others, to offer a full description of the natural world. Feynman, to whom is attributed the ironic admonition to quantum physicists to “shut up and calculate”, was as aware as anyone, that multiple competing efforts to interpret, rather than simply apply, quantum theory, required of both philosophy and science a quantum leap forward in human understanding. We stand on the brink of that leap leap forward today; QM has given us the iPhone and the H-Bomb, but in terms of what it may tell us about the fundamental nature of our reality, we are still finding our way in the dark. This, I suspect, was what Feynman (always a ready source of handy aphorisms) was referring to in the comment you quote; he may have been lamenting, as Hawking did, that the philosophers were so far behind the theoretical physicists, who were exploring calculus so complex that only a handful of mathematicians could keep pace.

This is not to say that physics doesn’t need philosophy; this is simply to say, that the philosophy of science has some catching up to do. Read Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli, and you will see that ground is being made in that direction, and that the artificial compartmentalisation of science, philosophy, and mathematics, alien to the likes of Socrates, Euclid, Plato, Pythagoras etc, is a barrier to the spirit of enquiry.

The Copenhagen interpretation is just following that basic rules of QM. Some mathematical tools, a wave function, and the answer uses probabilities. What it all means is not known. We cannot fully understand or describe the universe. That isn't a reflection on QM?

There is no need for metaphysics. If you are invoking some personal idea of Gods that you imagine QM cannot describe it's highly likely that psychology can. Eventually advanced brain science may also fill this gap. Right now we cannot map synapses never mind neurons. Science just has a long way to go. Some people feel some connection to outside forces, meanwhile some people have their lives changed by therapy. They are probably closely related.

I have not misunderstood Feynman, I have read Feynman. In Six Easy Pieces or Surely You're Joking (I forgot) he completely destroys philosophy and cannot stop saying how useless he feels it is.
He doesn't like philosophers at all. It's like he got into a fight with one right before he wrote the book.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

...
There is no need for metaphysics. ...
I have not misunderstood Feynman, I have read Feynman. In Six Easy Pieces or Surely You're Joking (I forgot) he completely destroys philosophy and cannot stop saying how useless he feels it is.
He doesn't like philosophers at all. It's like he got into a fight with one right before he wrote the book.

Yeah, all of that is science, as it is completely objective in all senses of the word.

 

[joelr]

Yeah and the content of it is not science. It was a scientist, who said it, but that doesn't make it science.

I already answered the question. Linguistics is a science, the sentence had meaning which you probably also inferred. Just because language isn't as specific as math doesn't change that?
Language conveys meaning and that can be measured. Your philosophy trick didn't land.

 

[joelr]

Yeah, all of that is science, as it is completely objective in all senses of the word.

"He doesn't like philosophers at all."

Huh, I can't imagine why?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

"He doesn't like philosophers at all."

Huh, I can't imagine why?

Yeah, it is the first law of science as such and the most objective fact we have about the universe.

 

[RestlessSoul]

The Copenhagen interpretation is just following that basic rules of QM. Some mathematical tools, a wave function, and the answer uses probabilities. What it all means is not known. We cannot fully understand or describe the universe. That isn't a reflection on QM?

There is no need for metaphysics. If you are invoking some personal idea of Gods that you imagine QM cannot describe it's highly likely that psychology can. Eventually advanced brain science may also fill this gap. Right now we cannot map synapses never mind neurons. Science just has a long way to go. Some people feel some connection to outside forces, meanwhile some people have their lives changed by therapy. They are probably closely related.

I have not misunderstood Feynman, I have read Feynman. In Six Easy Pieces or Surely You're Joking (I forgot) he completely destroys philosophy and cannot stop saying how useless he feels it is.
He doesn't like philosophers at all. It's like he got into a fight with one right before he wrote the book.

The Copenhagenist interpretation eschews metaphysical digression away from that which works, towards the how and why of that which is (and may be). But clearly that hasn’t prevented decades of inquiry into what QM is telling us about the sub atomic world. Bohr, Pauli and Heisenberg declared QM a closed theory nearly a century ago, but that didn’t stop Louis de Broglie, David Bohm, Hugh Everett, perhaps most dramatically John Bell, from kicking open the doors of perception. Leaving us with a plethora of evolving interpretations, and no sign yet of a consensus; not to mention that physics is yet to reach an accommodation between quantum theory and general relativity.

I’ll take your word for it, regarding Feynman and philosophers. I’ll add Six Easy Pieces to my reading list, so thank you for that. I do find his contempt (tongue in cheek, perhaps?) a little ironic given that he was undoubtedly something of a philosopher himself. All great thinkers are, of course, and physicists are no exception here. Any effort to interpret, conceptualise and communicate an aspect of reality, takes us into the realm of metaphysics. It’s unavoidable, just as physicists find talking about God unavoidable.

The likes of Einstein, Bohr, and Hawking may have been using the word God as a metaphor for the impenetrable mystery of the forces that drive the universe, but use it they did. They had to. Werner Heisenberg, writer of Physics and Philosophy - The Revolution in Modern Science, was a practicing Lutheran. Schrodinger - he of the cat - had a lifelong interest in dharmic scripture and philosophy. Carlo Rovelli turns to 1st Century Indian monk Nagarjuna to conceptualise the relational interpretation of QM. Paul Dirac made some scathing comments about religion, but that didn’t stop him frequently talking about God, who he called “a mathematician of the very highest order”, echoing Johannes Kepler’s observations about the divine nature of geometry.

In their efforts to, in the words of Carlo Rovelli, “imagine that which has not yet been imagined” physics and metaphysics remain entwined like two strands of a double helix.

 

[RestlessSoul]

I already answered the question. Linguistics is a science, the sentence had meaning which you probably also inferred. Just because language isn't as specific as math doesn't change that?
Language conveys meaning and that can be measured. Your philosophy trick didn't land.

A thing can be measured only if it maintains it’s temporary equilibrium long enough to facilitate measurement; can we really say that of meaning?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

A thing can be measured only if it maintains it’s temporary equilibrium long enough to facilitate measurement; can we really say that of meaning?

He @joelr is using 2 different meanings of measure as per Google:
-ascertain the size, amount, or degree of (something) by using an instrument or device marked in standard units.
-assess the importance, effect, or value of (something).

 

[RestlessSoul]

He @joelr is using 2 different meanings of measure as per Google:
-ascertain the size, amount, or degree of (something) by using an instrument or device marked in standard units.
-assess the importance, effect, or value of (something).

Yes, measurement, like all words, has more than one meaning; which makes the measurement of meaning all the more unlikely.

For measurements all parties can agree on, they must for agree on the appropriate metric. I understand that the standard metre is carved in marble on a wall in Paris. So if we all go to Paris, we can agree on this metric to measure the length of this sentence; but we cannot measure it's meaning. The closest we can reach is a loose consensus, founded on compromise.

This, I think, goes to the heart of a certain kind of materialist mindset, and it's innate contradiction with the world. Some thinkers want everything calibrated, defined, weighed and contained. But this can never be, for everything is always in flux. Nothing is settled, nothing is fixed, meaning can only ever come from context, and context is always fluid. Even the rock beneath our feet holds itself in balance for just a short while, in the context of eternity.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Yes, measurement, like all words, has more than one meaning; which makes the measurement of meaning all the more unlikely.

For measurements all parties can agree on, they must for agree on the appropriate metric. I understand that the standard metre is carved in marble on a wall in Paris. So if we all go to Paris, we can agree on this metric to measure the length of this sentence; but we cannot measure it's meaning. The closest we can reach is a loose consensus, founded on compromise.

This, I think, goes to the heart of a certain kind of materialist mindset, and it's innate contradiction with the world. Some thinkers want everything calibrated, defined, weighed and contained. But this can never be, for everything is always in flux. Nothing is settled, nothing is fixed, meaning can only ever come from context, and context is always fluid. Even the rock beneath our feet holds itself in balance for just a short while, in the context of eternity.

Here is the fun thing about context and the law of non-contradiction.
We are in Western culture taught to apply it to language, but the world is more than language.

So here it is as even too simple, but it gets the point across. For a given context it is always in a given limited time, space and sense and not not in that sense.
Now science abstracts away some senses and look as same sense regardless of limited time and space for different cases of the same sense. Even time and space as that is also cases of in a sense.
That is the one with gravity and how it can kill you if you e.g. fall of the top of a skyscraper. All fair and well.

But that has a limit, because for 2 humans there is never just one context as there are 2 humans. And for what matters (a measure) that can be different for 2 humans without being a contradiction, because it is 2 different times and spaces and thus can be 2 different senses.
So what they struggle with is in the absurd sense this: Same, similar and/or different.

So for false, falibible and falsification if they claim same sense for all times and spaces, I just check if I can do it differently in a different sense. And because they apparently assume that they can abstract away different time and space, they get a cognitive dissonance, which they mistake as a contradiction.
That is their trick. The world can be made the same for a given sense for all different times and spaces. And if they are over-reductive, I can just answer: No!

That is the absurd falsification of everything can be done by scientific use of fallible. Well, no, not if the differences are real and subjective.

Regards
Mikkel

 

[joelr]

The Copenhagenist interpretation eschews metaphysical digression away from that which works, towards the how and why of that which is (and may be). But clearly that hasn’t prevented decades of inquiry into what QM is telling us about the sub atomic world. Bohr, Pauli and Heisenberg declared QM a closed theory nearly a century ago, but that didn’t stop Louis de Broglie, David Bohm, Hugh Everett, perhaps most dramatically John Bell, from kicking open the doors of perception. Leaving us with a plethora of evolving interpretations, and no sign yet of a consensus; not to mention that physics is yet to reach an accommodation between quantum theory and general relativity.

There are different theories trying to get away from the wave function collapse or wave particle duality, but quantum mechanics cannot quantize the remaining force - gravity - into a "smallest unit" without infinities all over the mathematical results. So for now GR cannot join QM.

I’ll take your word for it, regarding Feynman and philosophers. I’ll add Six Easy Pieces to my reading list, so thank you for that. I do find his contempt (tongue in cheek, perhaps?) a little ironic given that he was undoubtedly something of a philosopher himself. All great thinkers are, of course, and physicists are no exception here. Any effort to interpret, conceptualise and communicate an aspect of reality, takes us into the realm of metaphysics. It’s unavoidable, just as physicists find talking about God unavoidable.

He just finds philosophy useless. Metaphysics as in physics that we haven't yet discovered is a common topic. But God and spirit realms are not part of the discussion.

The likes of Einstein, Bohr, and Hawking may have been using the word God as a metaphor for the impenetrable mystery of the forces that drive the universe, but use it they did. They had to. Werner Heisenberg, writer of Physics and Philosophy - The Revolution in Modern Science, was a practicing Lutheran. Schrodinger - he of the cat - had a lifelong interest in dharmic scripture and philosophy. Carlo Rovelli turns to 1st Century Indian monk Nagarjuna to conceptualise the relational interpretation of QM. Paul Dirac made some scathing comments about religion, but that didn’t stop him frequently talking about God, who he called “a mathematician of the very highest order”, echoing Johannes Kepler’s observations about the divine nature of geometry.
In their efforts to, in the words of Carlo Rovelli, “imagine that which has not yet been imagined” physics and metaphysics remain entwined like two strands of a double helix.

Yes they use the terms lightly but they are not part of the science. Scientists are sometimes in organized religion or explore other religions. I don't know what they actually think about those things. But there is no connection to science. It's more related to psychology.