Gary Williams asserts that philosophy needs to be as predictive as science, or predictive like science. I don't agree, really. Science does a good job of that. What science isn't good at is precisely what philosophy does: talking about reality. (You thought I was going to say meaning or epistemology didn't you!)
See the trouble is, science doesn't really know what reality is. It can't. Each scientific discipline starts from some basic assumption—there are quanta, there are neurons and neurotransmitters, there are molecules. Then it builds experiments to study the assumed phenomena.
Richard Dawkins and Niels Bohr will never agree about what reality is. They will find themselves unable to use their respective scientific knowledge to back up their claims beyond a certain point. Philosophy needs to get its mojo back and start not only listening to scientists (we're doing that already), but talking to them. Asking them questions.
Telling them (gasp) they might be wrong. Heck they need research projects. I have a few. “Is consciousness really intentional?” would be my number one choice.
“But I thought that to think about ecology seriously you have to be a materialist.”
No. I have to be a realist, but I'm not a materialist, at least not any more.
“But to be into science you have to be a naturalist, at least.”
No, I don't believe in nature. I've seen bunny rabbits, mountains and uranium. But I've never seen nature.
“But surely you believe in a material universe.”
Do I have to? I've seen drawings of wave packets. I've seen photos of diffusion chamber clouds. I've felt electromagnetism. But have I ever seen matter? Refer to the answer about “nature” above. Yes, I'm an ecologist without nature. And a realist without matter.
“So you claim there is no material substrate of the universe.”
Damn straight. Look, you have two choices if you're a materialist. You can believe that there are lots of substrate things. Like Democritus. Atoms, whatever. Little balls. Or you can believe that there's one thing. Like Heraclitus or Anaximander, or Spinoza. Goo. Lava.
Now for some reason little balls are uncool. Something to do with relativity or quantum theory but you're probably a bit fuzzy on that. You just know that lava is cooler than balls. And you'd be right.
Quantum theory puts paid forever to the idea that there are little balls or whatever underlying everything. Why? Ever read John Bell's little 1964 paper on local realism? That gets rid of an awful lot of scientism right there—the Dawkinsesque mechanism stuff. To have a machine you have to have parts. To have parts they have to be separate from one another. Entanglement happens, easily and frequently in the lab nowadays. Do the math…
“What about the lava? That's cool.”
Show me the lava. Sure it's cool but that's just an aesthetic judgment. Where is it? What is it? When you look for it you find electrons, gluons, alpha particles, quarks, and on and on. Out of what goo is this stuff made? Since we only find distinct, unique objects, wouldn't it be reasonable to conclude that there is no goo?
Which leads me to my prediction. You want philosophy to be predictive? Okay. Let me make an OOO prediction:
No underlying goo will be found. Period.
Let me make this a little more exciting:
The Large Hadron Collider will not find the Higgs Boson, nor will any more powerful instrument do so. The Higgs Boson is a false immediacy based on a suspicious theory of point particles. Somehow the Higgs field could be the goo in which these particles sit and have mass. There is no Higgs Boson.*
There you go. My OOO prediction.
*Luckily several physicists concur.
14 comments:
Of course we have to let the scientists battle this out in an empirical fashion, rather than say that it is just plain false.
Last year, Fermi physicists said they expected to have enough data to find or rule out the Higgs by early next year, and gave themselves a fifty-fifty chance of finding it before the end of 2010.
The Higgs boson is the last of the particles posited by the standard model of particle physics still to be found. It is said to explain why other particles have mass, and its discovery would confirm the standard model. If its existence is ruled out altogether, then other, previously less popular theories will have to be examined.
New Scientist suggests that more may be known this month, when scientists present their findings at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), which opens in Paris on 22 July.
Instead of insinuating a false demarcation between philosophy and science we need to form an alliance beyond the superficial dilemmas that keep science and philosopy torn from each other through misguided and misinformed challenges to each others respective jurisdications within the conclave of the humanities.
Science and philosophy should take on that dialogical interaction that once formed the heart of the Greeks understanding of science and philosophy. Like all relations between objects, dormant, sleeping and/or withdrawn we need to find that relation between the duel, the antithetical relation between our two disciplines divergent paths, one that will cut through the divide that separates us, and keeps us from forming new formation, a new object within both disciplines: science and philosophy, that might allow both to communicate their sensual appraisal of each others slippage toward that darker realm of forces below us in the quadruple; the fourfold.
Of course *not. We are free to make predictions and not just be the handmaids of science. And we are free to criticize the findings.
"Science and philosophy should take on that dialogical interaction that once formed the heart of the Greeks understanding of science and philosophy"
Which Greeks? If this means Aristotle then we have to get our philosophical mojo back as specified. He's nothing but a devastating critic of materialism.
"that darker realm of forces below us in the quadruple; the fourfold."
The fourfold is in your nose hair and in your packet of tissues too.
When I said that philosophy should make predictions, I didn't necessarily mean predict something new. Prediction in science doesn't necessarily mean predict something that hasn't been found. Often, when a scientist says that "our theory predicts that X should happen", they might already know that X does in fact happen. The point of saying that a theory predicts something is to say that it makes senses of it in terms of the theory, that it accounts for all the results of previous experiments in a way that is parsimonious and logically coherent.
So when I say that philosophy must make predictions, I don't literally mean that it should predict what the scientists will find in their laboratory experiments in the future, I mean only that it should make sense of current scientific data as well as offer a conceptual pathway for future experimental research. Now, often a philosophy can make predictions, and this can be seen as a corroboration of the theoretical worth of the philosophical idea. Dan Dennett, for example, predicted the results of attentional blindness from the perspective of his philosophical ideas of consciousness. When a philosophical system makes sense of scientific data, and scientific data is mutually supporting of the philosophical idea, then I think we can think of this as a corroboration of the worth of the idea.
I don't really think it is productive to see philosophy as an academic discipline autonomous from science. Yes, it should reserve some terminological distance, but it cannot be completely isolated if it is to be productive as a system of thought. Science and philosophy must talk to each other and mutually constrain each other. If philosophy argues for a soul-substance as a philosophy of mind, yet science argues that we can explain the mind without resorting to a soul, then that philosophical system needs to be thrown out. This doesn't mean that philosophy reduces to science, or that philosophy is unnecessary as a system of thought. I agree with you that philosophy must talk about reality. In a sense, I think philosophy must leap ahead of science and provide the terminological landscape to make sense of reality. And if that vocabulary satisfactorily works against the grain of our experience with reality, then we should, under ideal conditions, be able to make real predictions about reality, in the same way that theoretical physics can leap ahead of experimental physics and make predictions from pure theory alone.
You say that "Each scientific discipline starts from some basic assumption—there are quanta, there are neurons and neurotransmitters, there are molecules. Then it builds experiments to study the assumed phenomena."
I don't think this is necessarily true of how scientists think. I believe that many scientists first assume that naturalism is true. That is, they assume that what exists is natural. From this assumption, they develop a regional ontology concerning different problematics i.e. the problematic of biological systems, or chemical systems, etc. They then perform experiments and design technological tools that work to their satisfaction. On this basis of satisfaction, the inference to the best explanation is that their original assumption of naturalism is true. They don't need to "see" nature in order to have corroboration that naturalism is true. If they make their predictions on the basis of naturalism being true, and their predictions are validated through experience, then the best explanation of why those predictions were validated is that naturalism is true.
Scientists don't need to agree on what "reality is", since reality doesn't correspond to some static, eternal substance. Reality can be both pluralistic and naturalistic; there is no logically contradiction between these two ideas. And reality is always changing. As I type this sentence reality is changing to account for it.
"Look, you have two choices if you're a materialist. You can believe that there are lots of substrate things. Like Democritus. Atoms, whatever. Little balls. Or you can believe that there's one thing. Like Heraclitus or Anaximander, or Spinoza. Goo. Lava."
This is a false dichotomy. Billiard ball mechanics and "goo theory" are not the only options available to naturalistic philosophers. There is another view: complex systems theory, which looks at how differential goo-fields self-organize into complex systems that have stable, molar organizations with real affects on other bodies. The original state of the universe was smooth and lacking definition in terms of stable organizations. Dust bowls of cosmic dust or "goo" eventually self-organized into stars, planets, and galaxies. Yes, on a certain level we can see cosmic dust as ultimately composed of tiny autonomous objects as in OOO theory. But this infinite regress option is also available to the Deleuzian philosopher. All the Deleuzian needs to say is that the Goo/Object dualism regresses infinitely as well. If the cosmic goo is composed of tiny objects, then the Deleuzian can say that those tiny objects are actualizations of an underlying goo, with an infinite regress going all the way down. Accordingly, process philosophy can account for all the same insights as OOO, without claiming that "the ultimately reality is withdrawn objects". Yet I feel that the dualism between goo/objects is more explanatorily predictive than the object-monism wherein it is "objects all the way down". If it is logically possible for there to be objects all the way down, then it is logically possible for there to be both goo/objects all the way down, with the latter being the molar component in relation to the micro. I think the latter position makes better sense of reality, as well as my intuitions about the best way to talk about reality.
"Show me the lava."
What about real lava? Or oceans? Cosmic dust fields? Quantum foam (sub-Planc length reality)? Chemical solutions? Air?
Sure, you could say that "Well, ultimately these homogeneities reduce to tiny little objects". But while this might be trivially true, it would miss the point of talking about such homogeneous realities: we can better make sense of the world if we talk in this way. The reason why we don't say that everything is objects, is that we can productively talk about reality in terms of both homogeneous realities and object-oriented ones. The point is that on certain time-space scales, it is appropriate and useful to talk about reality in terms of clouds, foams, goos, lavas, processes, flows, solutions, gases, liquids, etc. And on certain time-space scales, it is appropriate and useful to talk about autonomous, heterogeneous objects. Why the metaphysical dogmatism? Why one at the expense of the other? Deleuzian metaphysics accounts for both types of realities. Does OOO?
"Science and philosophy should take on that dialogical interaction that once formed the heart of the Greeks understanding of science and philosophy."
That's the best thing i've read/heard all day!
I can't speak for Tim or Graham or anyone else on this, so this my own speculation and thought about this. Certainly, the sciences, and physics, have to do what they do -- and whether they find a Higgs boson or not is an open, empirical, experimental question, it seems to me (and that has its own fascinating ontology). My take on it is that, even if such a particle or entity were to be found, its philosophical and metaphysical implications are not immediate. Would this then be the most ultimate real building-block of the world? Metaphysically, I think we can say that it probably isn't, the Higgs boson would still have to be something and not an indeterminate "whatever."
Still, beyond all of that for me, the more interesting problem is, really, what both philosophy and the sciences are about is the creation of new objects: the Higgs boson, if it is real, has its own autonomy and life apart from any attempt to penetrate it. But the Higgs boson discovered at the LHC is really a new entity, composed of the mysterious boson, but also the mysterious collider and its incredible mechanisms and the scientists and their maths, etc, etc. The question of whether physics is descending into hell to find our most basic and elementary pieces so as to reduce the world -- this might be what some philosophers (and some scientists) want, but this isn't what is happening. Rather than reduction, the sciences are fecund with new objects, novel compounds and strange composites which both help explain, but also, at the same time, complicate the world. I agree with Earthwizard that we might try to forge new objects with the sciences, in fact, I am sure this has already happened -- many scientists have been deeply influenced by philosophical ideas and surely this is already a kind of confrontation which creates a new real unit. And the philosophy of the Greeks really was science, already.
I also liked his reference to the fourfold -- everywhere we look, be it in the eerie depths of the LHC or the sickening mess of painter Francis Bacon's studio floor -- we find weird, brash objects coming into existence. You get the sense with someone like Brassier (for instance) that these scientists are like dark wraiths trying to rid the world of its entities, when in fact they are more like alchemists, transforming lead into gold with the help of quicksilver and sulfur. I'll be excited if they discover the boson -- the world will be that much richer.
It is a good line isn't it Michael?
Joseph I like what you're saying. I don't think the LHC physicists would agree though. The Higgs Field, if it exists, fills the entire Universe, and the LHC will "discover" just a part of it. To convince the scientists that we're not just making shit up (as opposed to them, who are "empirically discovering" stuff), we have to get our mojo back. And to do that, we need to take a stand on matter. If the Higgs shows up, many will be able to say, "Hey, the Universe is made of balls or goo. It's not objects all the way down."
Tim, if the Higgs boson is shown to exist, what would your response be to those who would use it to undermine objects?
That's a good one. I might have to post on that one. I think there are several lines but for sure one of them would be yours (above).
il n'ya plus du goo
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