Science Is A Mess And Philosophy Will Fix it?

[rug]

By Hank Campbell | June 3rd 2013 01:30 PM

Stephen Hawking recently declared that philosophy is "dead" - meaning metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that aspires to the most general understanding of space and time and other fundamental stuff of the world. Get rid of sophistry and defining into oblivion, learn some math and read some physics, he said. Pick any science and philosophers can drag it into the mud.

Philosophers disagree and say just the opposite - physics needs metaphysics more than ever.

The inability of physics to fit consciousness into the material world by mapping activity to it has been a failure, writes Raymond Tallis in The Guardian. Well, that isn't physics, that is psychologists and neuroscientists trapped in an fMRI fetish, and, yes, String Theory is mathematical and philosophical gobbledy-gook but it's hardly the default belief in physics. String Theory is a proper name, it is not a Theory on a par with Einstein or Newton or Darwin.

Can't explain how the universe came out of nothing? FAIL. And physicists can't make every particle a relevant metaphor to people working for a living. FAIL.

http://www.science20.com/cool-links/science_mess_and_philosophy_will_fix_it-113785

A response to this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/27/physics-philosophy-quantum-relativity-einstein

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

1. Philosophy dead? Hardly. I was a Physics major.

IMHO, sometimes areas steeped with academia lose contact with Earth.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. I would have hoped for better from Hawking...

at least in his use of language-- ethics and aesthetics certainly aren't dead and physics gives us few answers there.

But, while physics has given us marvelously useful things it's still just navel gazing when dealing with the infinite size of the universe or quarks on the other end of the scale. Didn't Heisenberg say something about how everything depends on measuring things that change when being measured? That's as metaphysical as it gets.

Wasn't Einstein waxing philosophical toward the end when he couldn't synthesize his two great theories? So far, every attempt to do so has resulted in some amazingly complex bullshit that Aristotle would have fun dissecting for what it is.

Now for the annoying truth of the matter-- some people are so full of themselves, or have to find something to say in a weekly press release, that they lose sight of the goal. Should scientists and philosophers, and even theologians, work together on a problem rather than spend time attacking each other we might see some progress.

[defacto7]

3. Well, two out of three ain't bad.

[ismnotwasm]

4. Oh boy

I can only quote Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

“Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half-hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He'd sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn't come. And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strength of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. And he'd give up on ecology...Then he'd tried believe in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what or even if it could theoretically exist.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

I love that book.