
Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy - seliopou
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/23/physicists-should-stop-saying-silly-things-about-philosophy/
======
asgard1024
I found the following, I think apt, quote from Dan Dennett:

"In a review of Steven Pinker's book, How the Mind Works, in New York Review
of Books, the British geneticist Steve Jones had the following comment to
make: "To most wearers of white coats, philosophy is to science as pornography
is to sex. It is cheaper, easier and some people seem, bafflingly, to prefer
it." Now that view is all too common, and I understand it from the depths of
my soul. I appreciate why people think this, but I think it is also important
to combat this stereotype in a friendly and constructive spirit, and no place
better than in a center for research in cognitive science. What philosophers
can be good at – there aren't many things we can be good at – is helping
people figure out what the right questions are. When people ask me whether
there's been any progress in philosophy I say, "Oh yes, mathematics,
astronomy, physics, physiology, psychology – these all started out as
philosophy, and once we philosophers got them whipped into shape we set them
off on their own to be sciences. We figured out how to ask the right the
questions, and and then we turned them over to other specialists to answer."

~~~
bladedtoys
>"Oh yes, mathematics, astronomy, physics, physiology, psychology – these all
started out as philosophy, and once we philosophers got them whipped into
shape we set them off on their own to be sciences. We figured out how to ask
the right the questions, and and then we turned them over to other specialists
to answer."

To this I might add a rhetorical question: how would science have gone about
discovering the scientific method? Indeed, in which discipline would that
question fall even today?

~~~
abruzzi
An the answer to a rhetorical question in case anyone is interested:
Philosophy of Science. Specifically read Hume (Inquiry Concerning Human
Understanding) who demonstrated that inductive reasoning to universal laws
(empiricism) was fundamentally based on circular reasoning. Then Karl Popper
developed the idea of falsification to show that while Hume is correct--you
cannot prove natural laws as true, you can prove them false. He essentially
codified the idea that scientific laws have to be testable, and falsifiable.
So scientific laws are contingent. They are they closest we have to the truth,
until someone devises a test that proves them wrong.

~~~
SatvikBeri
Philosophy of Science is definitely the right field to explore. It's worth
noting that aspects of Popper's views are pretty controversial. Popper
literally argued that evidence cannot increase the probability a hypothesis is
true–for example, collecting a sample of 1,000,000 crows and observing that
all of them are black cannot increase your confidence in the belief "at least
99% of crows are black." It can only decrease your confidence in opposing
theories such as "at least 99% of crows are white." Very few people would
agree with that view today.

The general problem of whether we can increase the probability that a theory
is true by observing favorable evidence is the problem of induction, and there
are no clear cut answers. A lot of philosophy focuses on situations like this:
where all the proposed answers have flaws, but some have fewer flaws than
others.

For example, one approach that's been gaining popularity is Bayesianism.
Bayesianism is the idea that we have some prior belief in the probability of a
hypothesis, and that we can update our confidence in that hypothesis by
observing evidence and comparing the relative probabilities that evidence
would hold in worlds where the hypothesis was true vs. worlds where the
hypothesis was false. The key weakness of Bayesianism is the question of where
priors come from, and how to formulate good priors. This is a glaring
weakness, but all proposed solutions have glaring weaknesses–that's what makes
Philosophy of Science hard.

------
imurray
Somewhat related: I'm currently enjoying Scott Aaronson's "Quantum computing
since Democritus". A snippet:

 _Not every branch of science was scouted out ahead of time by philosophy, but
some were. And in recent history, I think quantum computing is really the
poster child here. It 's fine to tell people to "Shut up and calculate," but
the question is, what should they calculate? At least in quantum computing,
which is my field, the sorts of things that we like to calculate — capacities
of quantum channels, error probabilities of quantum algorithms — are things
people would never have thought to calculate if not for philosophy._

For more:
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/](http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/)
— it's been posted here a bunch of times, although without any comments.

------
abruzzi
Most people have a very mistaken view of modern philosophy, and unfortunately
this article does little to clarify. Today, analytic philosophy (as opposed to
the continental philosophers) is fairly rigorous and usually narrow focused.
It can be about modeling systems (for example Bayesian epistemology, various
forms of modal logic). It can be about decision analysis (game theory) It can
be about number theory (Frege, Gödel, etc.) and it can be about scientific
theory (Popper, Kuhn, Quine, Ulian). Some of these things have been profoundly
influential, and important to the modern world.

~~~
davorak
What divides these rigorous branches of philosophy form mathematics then? If
it is because it is applied in some sense then they could fall under applied
mathematics.

~~~
abruzzi
There are similarities, but in analytic philosophy you find a much greater
focus on foundational issues. So Frege tries (and fails) to derive all
mathematics from logic. Later Bertrand Russell tries to derive mathematics
from set theory. (Leading to the most unintentionally funny line in all
philosophy. Somewhere around page 300, he gets to the line: "From this
proposition it will follow...that 1+1=2")

~~~
davorak
If I could restructure our naming system is there a good reason for me to
label those who focus on foundational issues in mathematics as philosophers
rather then mathematicians? Right now I would be inclined to label them the
latter.

~~~
exelius
The reason is largely historical [1]. Before about 100 or so years ago, almost
every serious scientist or mathematician was effectively a philosopher as well
(hence the Ph in PhD). Aristotle was (and still is, albeit augmented with more
modern interpretations) foundational to almost every scholastic curriculum.
"Philosophy" literally means "the study of knowledge", and for much of human
history, it has been where big ideas came from.

Philosophy gave us many of the things we consider science: the scientific
method is the direct result of many of the enlightenment philosophers' quest
to determine "what is real" versus "what is not real". Once you have an agreed
upon, repeatable definition of a process to get to "real", you can move on
from there.

Once the total knowledge of our species began to expand toward the middle of
the 19th century, it was no longer sufficient for a scholar to be a
"philosopher". You had to specialize in something. So philosophy became
dominated by the left-over "soft" topics like ethics and personal philosophy,
leaving many people working in "hard" disciplines to shun the label of
"philosopher".

Interestingly enough, the classification problem is still one of the most
hotly debated problems in philosophy. How much of our classification comes
from a truly singular concept versus linguistic commonality? I don't have the
answer, but we've been asking the question for a long time.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy#History)

------
vijayboyapati
The trouble, I feel, with the overlap between science and philosophy is that
most modern practitioners of what we know as "science" only have exposure to
one epistomological world view: positivism. Granted, this world view has
created a great abundance of valuable and life improving knowledge for
humanity - as Bacon would have described it, it is good for more than
disputation (no offense, to Ol' Aristotle) - but it does not encompass the
entire sphere of knowledge. There is authentic knowledge to be gained from
disciplines which are entirely a priori - such as mathematics, or as some
argue, economics.

~~~
inscrutablemike
Mathematics is not a-priori. No form of knowledge is.

~~~
abruzzi
Care to elaborate? A-priori is generally used to mean that it does not rely on
experience or observation. So while the words and symbols we use to explain
2+2=4 (i.e. Two, plus, four, equals) are leaned concepts, the truth and the
ability to understand that truth is independent of that experience.

~~~
Torgo
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that math isn't invented, it is
discovered. I am not sure this is true. I think they are models that are not
true or untrue, just consistent and more or less useful than other particular
models. It is trivially true that if I have two things in my left hand and two
things in my right hand and I put them together, there are four things because
this can be mapped onto identity of things. But really quickly it doesn't
scale and you need non-real concepts to solve more complex problems. Roman
numerals mapped to things (I,II,III) but Arabic were more symbolic and enabled
more complex calculations (but still were base-10, which is a choice, not
reality, some bases are better for certain calculations than others.) But
again they still represented things in some sense. Zero was invented, it had
to be invented because it's not representing a thing that can be counted, it's
the lack of a thing so it's, I think, fundamentally a concept and not "real."
It's still fairly intuitive (despite the fact that it took millions of years
to invent) but then there are concepts like infinity. But then it turned out
that that just described an infinite number of "things", there was also
uncountably infinite. Then there are imaginary numbers. They can solve real
problems, but I don't even know what they are. They seem to be an artifact of
math that let you solve quadratic equations even though they map into
something that can't even be said to be a "lack" of something, like zero is.
It is a mapping into a completely virtual space. It was invented to solve
problems, but it's not real in any material sense. I'm not a math person, so
there are a lot more that I don't know anything about. Maybe I missed the
point of your statement, but I wanted to explain what I think. That math isn't
reality, it is a human invention that describes reality. You can have things
in math that aren't reality but are useful models.

~~~
abruzzi
The a-priori/a-posteriori distinction is essentially: is its truth subject to
observation of the world. Most mathematicians will argue that even complex
ideas like imaginary numbers are the result of the system of mathematics, and
can be arrived at and proved without observing the world. Physics is
a-posteriori because the math involved is used to describe the world, and the
correct formulas and the truth of the formulas cannot be arrive at without
observation. Even if someones work is just performing certain calculations on
others work, somewhere, working backwards, observation is necessary. If you
start with imaginary numbers, and work backwards to simpler and simpler math,
it is purely self referential. You don't need anything other than the base
concepts to prove the truth, and the base concepts are true by definition, not
by observation. You don't have to see a triangle to know it has three sides.
It has three sides because that is the definition of a triangle.

------
jgallag8
The author seems to be saying that the main reason physicists should pay
attention to philosophers is that philosophy can be useful in the study of
physics.

I think he could have made his point better by noting that pretty much any
thinking about why we study physics leads directly to philosophy. What is the
point of doing science? What is knowledge, and why should we be interested in
it? These are just the sort of questions philosophy as a discipline is
intended to answer.

Any physicist who is interested in any 'meta' questions about his/her work is
necessarily interested in philosophy. One can disagree with the particular
methodologies of modern academic philosophy, but it is hard to see how any
intellectually curious person can dismiss the field entirely.

It seems to me that this is a stronger argument for the relevance of
philosophy to science.

~~~
michaelsbradley
As I read Dr. Carroll's blog post, I was reminded encouragingly of how a
famous philosopher and Parisian professor[1] – the student of a great medieval
experimentalist[2] – in 1265 began his opus magnum with a critique aimed at
those who argued that philosophy was the pinnacle of human intellectual
pursuit, encompassing all else. See _Article One, Question One of the First
Part_ [3] in the Summa Theologica[4]:

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_the_Great](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_the_Great)

[3]
[http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm](http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm)

[4]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Theologica](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Theologica)

------
rudimental
Best quote:

"Nevertheless, there are some physics questions where philosophical input
actually is useful. Foundational questions, such as the quantum measurement
problem, the arrow of time, the nature of probability, and so on. Again, a
huge majority of working physicists don’t ever worry about these problems. But
some of us do! And frankly, if more physicists who wrote in these areas would
make the effort to talk to philosophers, they would save themselves from
making a lot of simple mistakes."

Philosophers interests overlap at times with mathematicians, linguists,
psychologists, physicists. Sometimes they have valuable things to say to each
other. E.g. Experimental philosophy is a trend in philosophy, and people who
have never done scientific experiments before could learn how to do them
better from scientists who have that experience and knowledge. I support
people that find common ground and work together to help each other tackle the
puzzles they're working on.

------
guygurari
I found the article vague and unconvincing. If philosophy is useful for
physics research, where is the evidence? What new thing did philosophy
contribute to physics in the last 100 years?

I am a physicist who cares deeply about the foundational issues mentioned in
the article. And yet I honestly don't see any meaningful input about these
issues coming from philosophers.

~~~
vacri
If it weren't for philosophy, you wouldn't have the scientific method in the
first place. I'd consider that to be astoundingly useful for physics research.
A simple example: ever make a hypothesis? Congratulations, you've just done
some philosophy. Tested for or against that hypothesis? Now you're using
methods developed by philosophy.

The whole idea of what is robust investigation and what is weak is philosophy.
It doesn't come naturally - quite the opposite. Doing science 'right' is hard
and counter-intuitive, but it was philosophy that figured out how to do it in
a robust fashion.

If you don't see how philosophy is entwined with physics (or other sciences),
then the fault is your misunderstanding of philosophy, not philosophy itself
(philosophy is not another name for religion or the supernatural). And any
time someone says "Before we test for X, we have to first define what we mean
by X" is doing the fundamental function of philosophy. Given that physics has
done a lot of defining and solidifying of terms over the last century,
philosophy has definitely had a hand.

~~~
guygurari
It used to be that philosophers/scientists/mathematicians etc. had a lot of
overlap. That is why I constrained my question to the last 100 years. I agree
with you that philosophy had useful input for scientific research in the
distant past. Can you offer more recent examples? It seems to me philosophy
has not been relevant for a long time.

~~~
SatvikBeri
One example is falsifiability. As of today, statements which are unfalsifiable
are seen as pseudoscience and not science. This distinction was largely
promoted by Karl Popper, a philosopher. And widespread adoption of
falsifiability happened mostly in the 60s and 70s IIRC.

Prior to that point, theories were often accepted as true if they had a lot of
explanatory power, in other words, if they seemed to explain a large set of
observations. This made it very difficult to rigorously argue that, e.g.,
Astrology should not be considered scientific, because it seemed to have a lot
of confirming evidence.

This is one of those things that seems really obvious in hindsight, but was a
surprisingly big advance in how science was conducted in several fields. A
more concrete example is how it affected social sciences like Psychology.
Prior to Popper there were a lot of widely held theories that made no
falsifiable predictions, today theories that seem to explain everything are
generally seen as substantially less rigorous and scientific than ones that
are falsifiable.

~~~
guygurari
Interesting. Let me stick to physics because that is the field I am most
familiar with. If the idea of falsifiability was not well understood before
the 60s, then how did physics manage to progress after Newton? I mean well
before the 60s physicists had discovered mechanics, electrodynamics, special
relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, etc.
There were many other proposed theories, but these were the theories that
survived empirical tests. Theories that made no testable predictions did not
survive. So, based on the history of physics, it seems to me that physicists
understood this idea well before Popper came along. Do you agree?

If you agree, then perhaps Popper was responsible for spreading this idea to
the social sciences, but he was not the one who introduced it to science.

Now, falsifiability is in fact an outdated notion, and this too was
appreciated well before the 60s. As a first example, consider quantum
mechanics which was formulated in the beginning of the 20th century. It
postulates that the state of a system is described by a wave function, but
only certain aspects of the wave function can be observed. The theory makes
many testable predictions, but not all aspects of it can be tested (and
therefore falsified). Popper argued against this theory (along with Einstein),
but it turns out he was wrong. So it seems to me that, not only did physicists
understand falsifiability before Popper, but they actually understood more
than Popper did (or at least some of them did, like Schrodinger).

A second point about falsifiability is that it is in fact quite a naive and
unproductive idea, even without the complexities of quantum mechanics. It is
true that theories cannot be proven, but it is also true that they generally
cannot be falsified, except in very simple cases. If I have a theory that the
sun rises every day, this theory can be falsified. But most theories rely
heavily on statistical measurements, which are inherently uncertain. Therefore
we can only assign a probability to whether the theory agrees with
measurements or not. If we start thinking that we actually 'falsified' some
theories, this can actually damage the progression of science. If you like
Bayesian statistics, for each theory we can assign a probability of it being
correct, based on our measurements, but the probability is rarely 0 or 1.
This, again, is well understood by physicists, and I don't think this idea was
introduced to physics by philosophers.

~~~
vacri
People worked during the day and not at night for ages before astronomers came
along and described how the sun and the earth relate to each other. So, based
on the history of human work, humans understood the solar system well before
astronomers came along, otherwise no work would have been achieved. Do you
agree?

------
davorak
> (Aside: of course there are bad philosophers, who do all sorts of stupid
> things, just as there are bad practitioners of every field. Let’s
> concentrate on the good ones, of whom there are plenty.)

The impression that most physicists I know is that the percentage of bad
philosophers or bad philosophy papers is much high then in chemistry, physics,
biology and several others.

I could not take the arguments here and convince those friends/peers
otherwise.

> Philosophers are, by their nature, more interested in foundational questions
> where the latest wrinkle in the data is of less importance than it would be
> to a model-building phenomenologist.

The problem is that philosophers have so little data to work with. The
problems they are pointed at often need tremendous amounts of data or very
hard to collect data. Instead of making an incremental improvement on
collecting that data or analyzing existing data it seems to often be the case
that philosophers decided to work with guess work instead.

>The idea is apparently that developing a new technique for calculating a
certain wave function is an honorable enterprise worthy of support, while
trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture
reality is a boring waste of time.

A theoretical paper that examines the various quantum calculation techniques
through the lens of information theory and attempts to make rigorous claims on
which methods or fundamentally more simple(form an information theory
definition) sounds like solid science and an interesting read. "trying to
understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality" \-
does not sound like something I would want to fund or read.

>And part of that task is understanding the foundational aspects of our
physical picture of the world, digging deeply into issues that go well beyond
merely being able to calculate things.

I would want an example of an issue where calculation plays no role. Being
able to communicate the ideas to fellow humans might be thought to involve not
calculation, I would argue that starting with the simplest mathematical models
then isomorphically(or at least minimize information lose) tweaking for human
understanding would be the non-practical ideal method and use considerable
calculation.

------
seanewest
There is a whole other sector of philosophy that is almost completely divorced
from science that is often called "Continental Philosophy". It deals with all
of the classic problems -- meaning, love, truth, etc. The U.S. tends to not
hear a lot about it, but it's huge in the non-english speaking world. Check it
out:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy)

~~~
robotresearcher
It's also frequently pretty silly.

For the science-trained reader it can be painful to read. For example a
popular rhetorical technique in this area is to take a well-defined scientific
idea and use it as if it was a metaphor, then use the metaphor to imply some
claim, then claim that the scientific idea entailed the claim.

Also, explaining things in an elliptical and opaque way is often considered
OK, since it provides a certain kind of experience for the reader. In the
Anglo-American tradition, clarity is an objective, rather than giving off a
vibe where you kind of get the idea.

These guys point out some howling examples where technical terms are abused to
the point of meaninglessness:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1861971249/o/qid=97...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1861971249/o/qid=979258668/sr=2-4/026-0995052-9994019)

------
goldenkey
Philosophy is more concerned with consciousness being a black-box and thus
physical measurements not being able to be fully trusted. Science assumes a
physical world that does not lie above untrusted surface. However, philosophy
takes nothing for granted. It's possible that you are the only real conscious
person, and everyone else is just merely 'reactive.'

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism)

There is not a divide between Philosophy and Physics. Their axioms are merely
different. Physics has axioms. Philosophy is about life, and therefore
examines it with NO precepts. In order to discover the truth about the
universe, one must make no assumptions. One must simply understand the level
of truth each thought holds. This is the 'golden key.'

------
skizm
I might misunderstand philosophy, but I think about it like this: scientists
gather data, run experiments, etc. while philosophers draw conclusions. Sure
most/maybe all scientists draw their own conclusions (it is pretty much the
only way to get published) but sometimes the conclusions are not so obvious.

Does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle mean we have free will? Can free
will exist? What sort of (theoretical) evidence would we need to disprove free
will?

Is that line of questioning philosophy or science? I'm really not sure. I
think you take a headlong leap into science when you start running tests, but
I'm not sure at what point talk turns from philosophy to science.

In the end, everyone is just trying to make a more accurate map, right?

~~~
Amezarak
You don't need to go all the way to physics for free will - you need look no
farther than psychology to determine whether free will exists or not.
Actually, you don't need to look any farther than a serious philosophical
treatment of what you mean by "free will" to see that the question itself is a
confused one based on untenable (or even more confused) assumptions.

Nevertheless the belief in free will is very important for human happiness; or
at least, happy and/or successful people tend to believe in free will, or just
that their will is free and they're the master of their fates and the captain
of their souls.

That is often the motive behind free will arguments, which generally have a
very powerful smell of rationalization about them, but a thing is not
necessarily true because human happiness (or even life) requires believing it
is true or leads to the feeling it must be true.

------
bambax
While a physicist should be commended for defending philosophy, I'm still not
convinced that "asking deep questions about what it all means" isn't a
complete waste of time.

Regardless of whether anything " _means_ " anything, I really don't get why it
should.

Uncovering actionable (and often very surprising) laws of nature sound much
more exciting to me than pondering about "meaning", especially when done by
people who don't have a deep understanding of physics.

The only people who should be philosophizing are the physicists, but they'd
rather do physics instead, and I think that's a good thing.

------
squozzer
Some of the problem, as Locke1689 said, lies in how non-philosophers perceive
philosophy. I'm betting most of the laity were exposed to philosophy through
low-level survey courses where notions such as substrata and monads were
thrown about. While interesting and entertaining, to the typical physics
major, it seems akin to teaching chemistry using alchemy and cosmology using
geocentrism.

Young physicists also seem unusually biased towards mathematical forms of
expression, as opposed to "mere" human language.

~~~
jimbokun
"I'm betting most of the laity were exposed to philosophy through low-level
survey courses where notions such as substrata and monads were thrown about."

But at least it was a good grounding for becoming a functional programmer!

------
DanielBMarkham
Reminds me of an anecdote: for a long time, when faced with the non-
intuitiveness that is quantum theory, physicists had one simple rule _shut up
and do the math._

------
pervycreeper
The criticism certainly goes both ways, with the understanding of many (most?)
in philosophy and the humanities in general of what science actually is and
has done is deeply depressing (see Soakl and Bricmont's "Intellectual
Impostures"). My personal observation is that there is a lot of resentment,
envy, and repressed inferiority complexes that humanist academics hold towards
scientists.

------
aidenn0
I think a big part of why many physicists reject philosophy as a useful
endeavor is that a lot of popularly-known philosophy places inductive
reasoning below deductive reasoning.

------
hackuser
HN naturally attracts people with expertise in STEM. Is it really meaningful
or interesting that they think their own field is more valuable and important
than others?

------
oso2k
I've heard many research scientists say, "Science is what I'm doing when I
don't know what I'm doing."

~~~
sigmaml
I heard a variant thereof. ``Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what
I'm doing. Science is what I'm doing once I figure that out!"

------
hyperliner
We need someone to tell us not just how things work, but why they work.

------
bdfh42
3:0 to Physicists I think

~~~
ISL
Sean Carroll is a physicist, and a good one.

------
mathattack
Something I think Philosophers should also stop saying silly things about
Physics.

