Jun 20, 2023 04:35 PM
https://iai.tv/articles/reality-is-not-r..._auid=2020
INTRO: The craze with all things quantum is not just because of its inherent weirdness. It’s motivated by a reductionist impulse that has been animating science from Robert Hooke in the 17th century to Stephen Hawking in the 21st. The idea that we can discover the fundamental level of reality might be alluring, but it’s based on a faulty philosophy, not science, writes Peter West.
EXCERPT: . . . Many scientists and philosophers engaged in attempts to understand the fundamental nature of reality today do so within a ‘physicalist’ paradigm. Physicalism typically involves a methodological commitment to the view that, whatever the final, accurate description of reality looks like, it will be set out in terms of physical entities: things with properties like mass and velocity. And if anti-physicalist thinkers, such as the philosopher Philip Goff, are to be believed, this is a worldview that inherited from thinkers roughly contemporaneous to Robert Hooke, such as early scientists (in the sense that we would use the term) like Galileo Galilei.
Three years after the publication of Micrographia [Hooke], Margaret Cavendish wrote a commentary on the new experimental method, entitled Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. There, Cavendish challenges the idea that eventually instruments like the microscope will allow us to literally see the fundamental constituents of reality. In her view, nature is infinite and vast, and will inevitably, no matter how far ‘down’ we go, hide something from us. To some extent, Cavendish’s scepticism about the potential of microscopes (or other such instruments) has been born out. Just when experimental philosophers thought they had things worked out, another paradigm shift – motivated by new and conflicting experimental findings – took place.
The microscopic realm, once thought of as the bottom-most later of reality, has been replaced by the quantum realm; and the quantum does not succumb to human observation. Indeed, the more of it we observe, the less we seem to understand it; for the quantum realm is, or seems to be, observer-dependent. And yet, the quest to identify a ‘base layer’ that the world around us is reducible to doesn’t seem to have been given up.
Twentieth and twenty-first century thinkers, like Stephen Hawking, persisted with the idea that the world around is reducible to something...
[...] Given that we seem to be no closer to ‘seeing the world as it really is’ than Hooke and his contemporaries, perhaps it is time to give up on the idea that reality can be reduced down to either a microscopic or a quantum world. The twentieth century pragmatist Wilfred Sellars introduced the idea of the ‘manifest’ and the ‘scientific image’; two perspectives on the world (the former being the perspective of common sense, and the latter the world as described by the sciences) which need not give way to one another. Sellars denied that the manifest image was reducible to the scientific image. Instead, they are simply different frames of reference; the truth of certain claims (like ‘the table in front of me is a solid object’) vary depending on the frame of reference in which they are uttered... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: The craze with all things quantum is not just because of its inherent weirdness. It’s motivated by a reductionist impulse that has been animating science from Robert Hooke in the 17th century to Stephen Hawking in the 21st. The idea that we can discover the fundamental level of reality might be alluring, but it’s based on a faulty philosophy, not science, writes Peter West.
EXCERPT: . . . Many scientists and philosophers engaged in attempts to understand the fundamental nature of reality today do so within a ‘physicalist’ paradigm. Physicalism typically involves a methodological commitment to the view that, whatever the final, accurate description of reality looks like, it will be set out in terms of physical entities: things with properties like mass and velocity. And if anti-physicalist thinkers, such as the philosopher Philip Goff, are to be believed, this is a worldview that inherited from thinkers roughly contemporaneous to Robert Hooke, such as early scientists (in the sense that we would use the term) like Galileo Galilei.
Three years after the publication of Micrographia [Hooke], Margaret Cavendish wrote a commentary on the new experimental method, entitled Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. There, Cavendish challenges the idea that eventually instruments like the microscope will allow us to literally see the fundamental constituents of reality. In her view, nature is infinite and vast, and will inevitably, no matter how far ‘down’ we go, hide something from us. To some extent, Cavendish’s scepticism about the potential of microscopes (or other such instruments) has been born out. Just when experimental philosophers thought they had things worked out, another paradigm shift – motivated by new and conflicting experimental findings – took place.
The microscopic realm, once thought of as the bottom-most later of reality, has been replaced by the quantum realm; and the quantum does not succumb to human observation. Indeed, the more of it we observe, the less we seem to understand it; for the quantum realm is, or seems to be, observer-dependent. And yet, the quest to identify a ‘base layer’ that the world around us is reducible to doesn’t seem to have been given up.
Twentieth and twenty-first century thinkers, like Stephen Hawking, persisted with the idea that the world around is reducible to something...
[...] Given that we seem to be no closer to ‘seeing the world as it really is’ than Hooke and his contemporaries, perhaps it is time to give up on the idea that reality can be reduced down to either a microscopic or a quantum world. The twentieth century pragmatist Wilfred Sellars introduced the idea of the ‘manifest’ and the ‘scientific image’; two perspectives on the world (the former being the perspective of common sense, and the latter the world as described by the sciences) which need not give way to one another. Sellars denied that the manifest image was reducible to the scientific image. Instead, they are simply different frames of reference; the truth of certain claims (like ‘the table in front of me is a solid object’) vary depending on the frame of reference in which they are uttered... (MORE - missing details)