Stephen Hawking says 'Philosophy is dead'

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by Clutch Munny

Adding to the mounting evidence that Stephen Hawking is an impressive expert on certain aspects of one discipline.

This is also a very funny and ironic response since it is not exactly obvious if philosophy is expert at anything except bull shit.

[ZEZOZE]

Originally Posted by naturalist.atheist

Not really. Just another person pointing out that philosophy, as it is known, essentially has no idea of what it is talking about

at the core that's what all philosophy is about. who the fuck knows? we shit, eat, breathe, fuck, work, play and die...we create concepts and words to describe why, but really- who knows?

obviously not me.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by ITSOZAZ

at the core that's what all philosophy is about. who the fuck knows? we shit, eat, breathe, fuck, work, play and die...we create concepts and words to describe why, but really- who knows?

obviously not me.

That is not philosophy, that is life. Philosophy is the attempt by some to answer this question with just pure thought and in many cases just out and out ignoring reality. In that sense you could call it religion.

[ZEZOZE]

naw, it's philosophy.

everything is religion. religion is just our animal behaving like it always has.

[Sock Puppet]

Damn, Mikey, don't you recognize a come-on when you see one?

[Adam]

Originally Posted by naturalist.atheist

I don't have his new book but apparently he says it in on the very first page of chapter one of his new book "The Grand Design".

Ah, so you didn't go and look then? Are you sitting in your chair?

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by Adamus Prime

Ah, so you didn't go and look then? Are you sitting in your chair?

Are you having reading comprehension difficulties?

[Adam]

Is that a no?

[naturalist.atheist]

Is that a yes?

[davidm]

I've read Hawking's book. After saying on Page One that philosophy is dead, he then spends the rest of the book philosophizing.

In fact, he comes up with something called "model dependent realism," which is that if our models of reality match predictions, then they're good models. The problem, he says, is that different domains of reality have different models and when those models overlap, they don't always make the same predictions.

In the case of quantum mechanics, for instance, he writes that model-dependent realism says that either a particle (and the universe) takes every possible path/history, or takes no path at all until observed. Both models make the same predictions. Yet their ontologies are wholly different.

This means, under Hawking's own philosophical stance, it is impossible for scientists to say anything about what reality is really like.

[davidm]

BTW, according to Hawking, there might be universe separate from ours in which the moon is literally made of Roquefort cheese. I'm sure glad we have science to guide us now and not those crazy philosophers.

Unfortunately, in this case, the philosopher Rod Serling anticipated him by several decades. In one of the programs from his old Night Gallery series, the first astronauts land on the moon to discover giant mice gamboling about.

[naturalist.atheist]

I wouldn't call that philosophizing. I would call that a fair statement of where the current scientific explanations stand.

Now you can call it philosophy if you like (and you probably will since you call pretty much everything philosophy), but if you react to the situation by looking to nature for more information and you react to new information by changing your models and are completely willing to toss your pet philosophy out the window then you are not doing philosophy, you are doing science.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by davidm

BTW, according to Hawking, there might be universe separate from ours in which the moon is literally made of Roquefort cheese. I'm sure glad we have science to guide us now and not those crazy philosophers.

Unfortunately, in this case, the philosopher Rod Serling anticipated him by several decades. In one of the programs from his old Night Gallery series, the first astronauts land on the moon to discover giant mice gamboling about.

That's M-Theory for ya. I'm not a big fan. There are competing explanations.

[davidm]

Originally Posted by naturalist.atheist

I wouldn't call that philosophizing. I would call that a fair statement of where the current scientific explanations stand.

Now you can call it philosophy if you like (and you probably will since you call pretty much everything philosophy), but if you react to the situation by looking to nature for more information and you react to new information by changing your models and are completely willing to toss your pet philosophy out the window then you are not doing philosophy, you are doing science.

It's not that simple, because so much of science is necessarily interpretative. Model-dependent realism is a philosophical stance, and it also assumes, in accepting Feynmann's sum over histories interpretation of QM, that an external world independent of observation exists. But if you accept the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, then you are pretty near philosophical idealism, and the two ontologies are totally different. So science and philosophy are always intersecting. Hawking, in adopting model dependent realism, is plumping for a philosophical concept in which two different models of QM yield the same predictions, so both models, he says are fine. But each model requires a completely different ontology -- a different reality. This is all philosophy to the core, and Hawking is doing philosophy nothwithstanding that he claims it is dead.

[Kael]

Sounds like Hawking meant it in the same sense one might say chivalry is dead. Much as n.a might writhe in ecstasy at the thought of someone else sharing his disdain for philosophy, that doesn't seem to be what Hawking attempted to communicate.

Originally Posted by naturalist.atheist

I wouldn't call that philosophizing.

No, you wouldn't. Doesn't mean it's not. Shit, this isn't even something that can be shoehorned into your 'you call everything philosophy' refrain. This is strait-up, theories-of-existence-and-knowledge-approached-with-reason-and-logic philosophy. Winging and whining about it won't change that, nor will continually harping your personal definitions for words that have already been defined.

[Gonzo]

Originally Posted by davidm

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by davidm

It's not that simple, because so much of science is necessarily interpretative. Model-dependent realism is a philosophical stance, and it also assumes, in accepting Feynmann's sum over histories interpretation of QM, that an external world independent of observation exists. But if you accept the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, then you are pretty near philosophical idealism, and the two ontologies are totally different. So science and philosophy are always intersecting. Hawking, in adopting model dependent realism, is plumping for a philosophical concept in which two different models of QM yield the same predictions, so both models, he says are fine. But each model requires a completely different ontology -- a different reality. This is all philosophy to the core, and Hawking is doing philosophy nothwithstanding that he claims it is dead.

I don't have Hawking's book and I probably won't read it because I find physics books directed at the layperson to be lame, so I can't address what you think Hawking is trying to do.

However I would expect Hawking to give his interpretation of physics equations because he has to. If you were prepared for the math you wouldn't need to read his book. So it isn't at all surprising that you would see his interpretations of physics equations as philosophy. I find it interesting that you point out that Hawking is willing to describe two different interpretations of the same equation and then say that either interpretation is fine and this somehow would be an indication that he is doing philosophy. That looks to me that he is saying that interpretation just don't matter. Not having read the book I would assume that as a scientist he is trying to say that the predictive power of the equation is what is important and the interpretation is just window dressing. Pick the color and pattern that suits your fancy. Maybe that part is philosophy.

[Gonzo]

Why spend your time refuting a book you refuse to read?

[naturalist.atheist]

I wasn't refuting the book. Just responding to a post. If you look at what I said it breaks down into two parts. The first part tells you, yet again, that I didn't read the book, and you appeared to have comprehended the part about me probably not reading it ever. The second part responded to my take on davidm's interpretation of what he read.

It might help if you carefully broke down the sentence structure and read for comprehension.

[Gonzo]

[Angakuk]

Originally Posted by davidm

I've read Hawking's book. After saying on Page One that philosophy is dead, he then spends the rest of the book philosophizing.

That is pretty much a dead on description of n.a.'s posting history in this forum. Hawking, no doubt, does it much better.

[Doctor X]

So philosophy is what you have before you have enough facts?

--J.D.

[Iacchus]

Originally Posted by davidm

This is all philosophy to the core, and Hawking is doing philosophy nothwithstanding that he claims it is dead.

Yeah, but would you at least agree that God is Dead?

[viscousmemories]

Originally Posted by Pan Narrans

And philosopause claims another victim

For the benefit of anyone else who might have to Google this.

philosopause noun, a point at which a researcher, weary of or frustrated by rigorous laboratory-based science, begins to look for nonscientific, philosophical explanations instead: "Too many of the characters [in John Horgan's book The End of Science] have entered the phase of their career that has been called 'the philosopause.' They have retired from the university or grown bored with lab work, and so have taken up professional cogitation" (Natalie Angier in The New York Times).

BACKGROUND: This term, which is perhaps loosely derived from "menopause," was originally used specifically for neuroscientists, some of whom have tended, as they've grown older, to abandon science-based attempts to map the workings of the brain and have turned instead to more general speculations about the nature of consciousness. Owing largely to advances in artificial intelligence, molecular genetics, psychopharmacology, and brain imaging, in recent years these distinct approaches have been joined in an endeavor known as neurophilosophy -- mitigating, perhaps, the impulse for neuroscientists to experience a philosopause. The term seems, however, to be taking on a new, broader life, as suggested by the citation above, in which it is applied to scientists of all stripes.

Word Watch - 99.08

[davidm]

Originally Posted by naturalist.atheist

I find it interesting that you point out that Hawking is willing to describe two different interpretations of the same equation and then say that either interpretation is fine and this somehow would be an indication that he is doing philosophy. That looks to me that he is saying that interpretation just don't matter. Not having read the book I would assume that as a scientist he is trying to say that the predictive power of the equation is what is important and the interpretation is just window dressing. Pick the color and pattern that suits your fancy. Maybe that part is philosophy.

Right. That's instrumentalism -- as opposed to scientific realism. Instrumentalism and scientific realism are competing paradigms in the philosophy of science, which philosophy, btw, Einstein was a big practioner of, with particular interest in the work of Hume.

But if Hawking is a philosophical instrumentalist, he can't very well claim that his multiple worlds, at least with respect to QM, are real, because all that matters is the model (sez Hawking) and competing models have different ontologies but they make the same predictions. All of this obviously is philosophical to the core, and in fact Hawking's whole book is about metaphysics and not physics. At the end of the book he says model-dependent realism creates its own reality. Sounds pretty philosophical to me.