One last thought on all this God/cosmology stuff before moving on.
The crucial moment of our panel discussion occurred when John Haught said that he couldn’t imagine a universe without God. (Without God, the universe couldn’t exist.) It would have been more crucial if I had followed up a bit more, but I didn’t because I suck (and because time was precious).
Believing that something must be true about the world because you can’t imagine otherwise is, five hundred years into the Age of Science, not a recommended strategy for acquiring reliable knowledge. It goes back to the classic conflict of rationalism vs. empiricism. “Rationalism” sounds good — who doesn’t want to be rational? But the idea behind it is that we can reach true conclusions about the world by reason alone. We don’t ever have to leave the comfort of our living room; we can just sit around, sharing some single-malt Scotch and fine cigars, thinking really hard about the universe, and thereby achieve some real understanding. Empiricism, on the other hand, says that we should try to imagine all possible ways the world could be, and then actually go out and look at it to decide which way it really is. Rationalism is traditionally associated with Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, while empiricism is associated with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume — but of course these categories never quite fit perfectly well.
The lure of rationalism is powerful, and it shows up all over the place. Leibniz proclaimed various ways the world must work, such as the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Lee Smolin uses Leibnizian arguments against string theory. Many people, such as Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne, feel strongly that the world cannot simply be; there must be a reason for its existence. Paul Davies believes that the laws of physics cannot simply be, and require an explanation. William Lane Craig believes that infinity cannot be realized in Nature. Einstein felt that God did not play dice with the universe. At a less lofty level, people see bad things happen and feel the urge to blame someone.
But the intellectual history of the past five centuries has spoken loud and clear: the dream of rationalism is a false one. The right way to attain knowledge about the universe is ultimately empirical: we formulate all the hypotheses we can, and test them against data. (Making decisions about which hypotheses best explain the data is of course a knotty problem, but that’s for another time.) Broad a priori principles are certainly useful; they can help guide us in the task of formulating and testing hypotheses. But that’s all they do — if we get lazy and start thinking that they grant us true knowledge of the world, we’ve gone off the rails.
A common manifestation of the rationalist temptation is an insistence that a certain state of affairs cannot merely exist; it must be explained, we must find a reason for it. The truth is that, if things are a certain way, there might be a reason for it, but there might not be. Both are hypotheses that should be examined. I personally have a strong feeling that the low entropy of the early universe is an unusual situation that probably has a deeper explanation — it’s a clue pointing towards something we don’t understand about the universe. But I’m careful to distinguish that I don’t know this to be true. It’s perfectly conceivable that the universe simply is that way, and there is no deeper explanation. Ultimately the decision will be made by constructing comprehensive theories and comparing them to data, not by scientists stamping their feet and insisting that a better explanation must be found.
An inquisitive five-year-old might bombard you with an endless series of “Why?” questions. Sometimes you encounter an older version of this five-year-old; someone who, when you say “I have finally formulated a successful unification of all the laws of physics!” will insist on asking “But why is it that way?” If you say “it just is,” they will say “that’s not good enough.” That’s the point at which you are allowed to turn the tables. Just start asking, “Well why isn’t it good enough? Why do I need a deeper level of explanation for how the world is?” Not that it will actually change their attitude, but it can be personally satisfying.
Favorite targets for people insisting on deeper explanations include the existence of the universe itself (as Haught was indicating) and the particular laws of physics we observe (as Davies argues). The proper scientific attitude is to say: well, there may be a deeper explanation, or there may not. Before we go out and actually look at, the universe could very well be many things. It could be a single point. It could be a line or a plane. It could be non-existent. The universe could be a fiber bundle over a Riemannian manifold, an n-dimensional cellular automaton, a trajectory in Hilbert space obeying Schrödinger’s equation, a holographic projection of a conformal field theory, the dream of a disturbed demon, a layered collection of natural and supernatural dimensions, someone’s elaborate computer simulation, or any of a million other things. It could be unique or multiple, meaningful or intrinsically purposeless. It could be brought into existence by something outside itself, or it could be sustained by a distinct being, or it could simply be. If you personally find some of these alternatives unsatisfying, that is a matter for you and your therapist to work out; reality doesn’t care. The way we will find out the truth is not to insist that it must be one way or another; it’s to understand the likely consequences of each possibility, and line them up with what we actually observe.
You can see why a rationalist line of reasoning would be attractive to the theistically inclined. If you have God intervening in the world, you can judge it by science and it’s not a very good theory. If on the other hand God is completely separate from the universe, what’s the point? But if God is a necessary being, certainly existing but not necessarily poking into the operation of the world, you can have your theological cake without it being stolen by scientific party-crashers, if I may mix a metaphor. The problem is, there are no necessary beings. There is only what exists, and we should be open to all the possibilities.
None of this is to say that there is no room for logic or reason in understanding how the world could possibly work. “2+2=4” is a true statement in any possible world, once we specify the definitions of “2” and “+” and “=” and “4.” But that doesn’t mean it’s a true statement about anything that actually happens in the world. The universe might very well have been something where there weren’t two collections of two things to add together, nor sufficient computing power to perform the arithmetical operation. Once we accept some hypotheses about the world (through comparing their predictions to reality), we are allowed to use reason to draw inferences from those hypotheses. (That’s kind of what I do for a living.) But step one in that process is to be open to which sets of hypotheses are actually relevant to the real world.
The temptation of rationalism can be a hard one to resist. We human beings are not blank slates; not only do we come equipped with informal heuristics for making sense of the world we see, but we have strong desires about how the world should operate. Intellectual honesty demands that we put those desires aside, and accept the world for what it actually is, whatever that may turn out to be.
I do not understand this. In order to answer a ‘why’-question by, ‘it’s just is’, one must have ruled out all the other possible answers, because unlike any of the other (possibly valid) answers, this answer is independent of any ‘why’-question being asked, in the sense, that this is a possible answer to any ‘why’-question. This seems to me pretty much similar in attitude, as saying, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘God knows’ of ‘Because of God’ etc.
@76
Very good.
If the answer maps to the element of the same value, then the issue is not about truth but about human power. Although I fully support legitimate debates about the existence of god, it became clear very long ago that the whole new atheist movement was about nothing more than power over societal values. The intellectual dishonesty is absolutely perverse since those who perpetrate it are as equally in denial as the religious zealots.
Hm. Empiricism vs. Rationalism. This is why Conan Doyle wrote about Sherlock, not Mycroft.
The question entitling this thread is: “What Can We Know About The World Without Looking At It?”
If we are not looking at ‘the world’, what then would the ‘it’ be that is being referred to that we are not looking at? (Without looking at what!?) It’s like the world is being assumed and not assumed in the question. Is our answer possible without the biases and experiences that we gained from the world? I don’t think so (unless there is a proof somewhere that there is a unique world).
Can we know what a 7-sphere looks like without looking at it? Can we know what differentiable manifold structure it has without looking at it? Certainly not, since John Milnor proved that it has 28 differentiable structures — all different.
In a way these sticky epistemology issues (and if you delve further, even greater and some say, insoluble problems) are kind of side-stepped by science, and that is one of the reasons we see actual progress in science – progress that has real relevance to our lives. Scientists aren’t bogged down by the kind of concerns that hold back the philosophers from knowledge. Anyhow, it appears that a priori axioms are necessary whichever way you look at it, otherwise you can’t even get off the ground.
#76. Dactyl, you say
“In order to answer a ‘why’-question by, ‘it’s just is’, one must have ruled out all the other possible answers”
That is a most powerful answer, thanks.
@81
Make sure you read in context of #71
“The number of derivable implications blows us so fast as the number of initial proposition increases that there may simply not be enough time or computing power to find what you’re looking for by deductive means.”
IOW there are statements that can be made that can never be verified within a finite time, and in some cases can never be verified. So the end point of any deductive process is the same. A nice shoulder shrug.
Samuel Prime wrote: “Didn’t Einstein arrive at his two theories of relativity by an approach similar to rationalism? He hardly had much experimental basis for making the postulates he made in these theories.”
The special relativity postulates came from Lorentz and Poincare, and they got them from Michelson-Morley. So no, relativity was not invented by rationalism.
Putting aside the philosophical question of what can or cannot be known about the universe by mere thinking, there is a historical question of the relative contributions of experiment and observation on the one hand and calculation and reasoning on the other. In physics, at least, the verdict seems to incline to the rationalist side since most of the crucial episodes of scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th Centuries revolved around conceptual innovations—people had been watching objects fall for a very long time before Galileo after all—and a great many of the decisive experiments were thought experiments. A similar story can be told about more recent developments such as relativity and quantum mechanics. The modern history of science can be defined by the rejection of positivist accounts of how things get figured out, not data up, but theory down. Nobody doubts you eventually have to get out of bed and interact with the world, and sciences such as biology or geology that have a heavy descriptive component obviously more empirical, but there is a pretty good historical case for the primacy of reason.
Sean seems to advocate for a way of thinking that is more primitive than either rationalism or empiricism. “It’s perfectly conceivable that the universe simply is that way, and there is no deeper explanation.”
He advocates for the existence of “brute facts,” things that exist for no reason! And he gets to define which facts are brute.
That does not seem to be very “scientific,” but it is useful to him because it is the only way he can completely eliminate God.
We need empiricism because data is the cornerstone, the very bedrock of our knowledge.
We need rationalism in order to create a context and structure for all that data. Rationalism allows us to make forecasts for instance. That is the magic and danger of rationalism–knowledge without the dirty work of gathering data.
Rationalism should never be unhitched from the bridle of empiricism because it is easy, all too easy, to make errors of logic.
Roger (#83), have a look at chapter 4 of Ronald Clark’s biography of Einstein. Also read Einstein’s 1905 “Electrodynamics” paper to see that he does not cite actual experimental basis for his work at the time of writing — although all that came later. That doesn’t mean Einstein never cared for experiments, but that he did start his work in intuitive ‘rationalist’ imaginative ways (which he was excellent at).
Yes, Einstein’s 1905 SR paper does not cite any other papers, whether theory or experiment. There were experimental tests of relativity that had been published, but Einstein ignored them. He was just giving an exposition of the Lorentz-Poincare theory, without explaining where the theory came from. But each actual advance to the theory was accompanied with citations to the experimental evidence.
Attention string theorists: Please read this blog post.
That is all.
🙂
Found the 2+2=4 ref…very cheeky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_ontological_proof
I think there is a huge mistake with the modern science communicators who are debating about religion, philosophy and its relation to science. I’ve seen arguments that connect the rationalism with God. Of course God is free to be logical. But in fact, if he is free, it is also free to be illogical. Most of the jokes made by Chesterton on modern thought consists precisely in this way of thinking. He would say something like “I do not care Dragons look like animals existed, I marvel over the hippo looks like an animal that does not exist..” Both Dragon and the Hippo are not a necessity. And the same goes for everything in the cosmos. The number Pi may be required by the rules but the world is not. If the world were necessary there would be no room for God.
Roger, I hope that you’re not into conspiracy theories since there is nothing I can do about it. However, if you are not, then see chapter 6 of Abraham Pais’ “Subtle is the Lord” which details the research around these issues. Einstein’s approach was quite different from Lorentz and Poincare, the latter assumed the ether while Einstein did not — or else Lorentz and Poincare would have received the prize. Lorentz in his papers in fact acknowledges Einstein’s work.
Lorentz compared his relativity to Einstein’s by saying, “the chief difference being that Einstein simply postulates what we have deduced”. Lorentz gave more credit to Poincare.
Pais makes the argument that Poincare never understood special relativity. But all the scholars acknowledge that Poincare got all of the formulas correct, and did it without any help from Einstein. And it was Poincare who explicitly denied the aether, while Lorentz’s position was similar to Einstein’s.
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“…he couldn’t imagine a universe without God.”
The argument from incredulity is a logical fallacy that essentially relies on a lack of imagination in the audience.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity
Number 93, that quote of Lorentz doesn’t say Einstein copied his work from him or from Poincare. In fact he gives credit to Einstein for getting the physics right:
“The chief cause of my failure was my clinging to the idea that the variable t only can be considered as the true time and that my local time t’ must be regarded as no more than an auxiliary mathematical quantity. In Einstein’s theory, on the contrary, t’ plays the same part as t; if we want to describe phenomena in terms of x’, y’, z’, t’ we must work with these variables exactly as we could do with x, y, z, t.”
p. 321 of his book “The Theory of Electrons”. Notice he’s giving Einstein credit for the correct physical understanding of the variables and transformation, not Poincare (who assumed the ether).
Further, Lorentz made the following comment regarding Einstein’s relativity:
“I considered my time transformation only as a heuristic working hypothesis. So the theory of relativity is really solely Einstein’s work. And there can be no doubt that he would have conceived it even if the work of all his predecessors in the theory of this field had not been done at all. His work is in this respect independent of the previous theories.”
Lorentz, H.A. (1928), “Conference on the Michelson-Morley Experiment”, The Astrophysical Journal 68: 345-351
Finally, your comment about Poincare denying the ether is plainly false. Look up Poincare’s 1905 paper “On the Dynamics of the Electron” in which he assumes the ether. He may have had some equations right — except E = mc^2 — but Poincare did not have the correct physical understanding of them — not to dismiss his genius as a mathematician, of course.
Poincare wrote in 1902, “Whether the ether exists or not matters little … some day, no doubt, the ether will be thrown aside as useless.” His 1905 theory does not depend on the aether at all. He only mentions the aether when discussing the work of others. Poincare had all the equations correct, including E = mc^2.
Lorentz generously credited Einstein. It is true that Einstein’s papers included explanations of some points omitted by Lorentz. Einstein’s work can be considered independent of previous theories if you assume that Einstein would have conceived the work of all his predecessors. That is right. But it does not change the facts that those theories were conceived before Einstein, that Einstein only postulated what his predecessors proved, that this was the opinion of Lorentz, Einstein, Minkowski, and everyone else at the time, and that Lorentz credited Poincare over Einstein.
Even after 1905, when Poincare published his book Science and Method (1908) — English version 1914 — Poincare was still speculating various scenarios with the ether hypothesis, unsure whether it is useful or not. Three years earlier, Einstein already reached that conclusion. Poincare was clearly far behind and did not have the correct understanding of special relativity. A good example where you can have equations and know how to do the algebra, but not understand what you’re doing.
Therefore, Poincare’s ether speculations are in stark contrast from Einstein’s 1905 paper where he just abandons it without waffling.
–Roger: “His 1905 theory does not depend on the aether at all. He only mentions the aether when discussing the work of others.”
See pp. 131 and 152 of Poincare’s electron paper (1905) where he is dealing with the ether and specifically mentions the energy as being “mainly located in the ether parts nearest the electron.” Clearly, he is using the notion of ether by this time (1905), when Einstein abandoned it. Even in his 1908 book, Poincare was still toying with the ether hypothesis.
–“Poincare had all the equations correct, including E = mc^2.”
Physics is not merely about equations, but understanding their physical significance. The equivalence between mass and energy by means of this equation was not understood until Einstein, which is why he is credited for it.
–“But it does not change the facts that those theories were conceived before Einstein, that Einstein only postulated what his predecessors proved”
That’s like saying Euclid only postulated what the geometers before him proved. It is pretty clear by now that you have something against Einstein and are reinterpreting the history of relativity for a private agenda. That charge, by the way, can be levelled if one felt like it, against nearly any physicist today doing original work.
–“that this was the opinion of Lorentz, Einstein, Minkowski, and everyone else at the time, and that Lorentz credited Poincare over Einstein.”
Idle speculation. Lorentz already said that “the theory of relativity is really solely Einstein’s work.” That’s the point. Learn to accept it. Otherwise it is your issue not that of the physics community.
I’ve many other things to do, so I won’t be bothering to look at your response since it’s clear you do not wish to approach this issue objectively. Your interpretation of Lorentz being “generous” to Einstein proves my point since you did not prefer to say that Lorentz was being generous toward Poincare instead. You have an agenda, and I think I exposed it, but I won’t waste more time on someone’s conspiracy theory.
Samuel, you have it backwards about the aether. Poincare proved that his theory did not depend on the aether, and he never said it did. But Einstein, from about 1918 to the end of his life, always maintained that special relativity does not require abandoning the aether.
I gave you the quote where Lorentz said that Einstein postulated what was previously proved. It is not speculation. Lorentz proved something called the theorem of the corresponding states, and Einstein just assumed it as a postulate.
The theory of relativity was certainly not solely Einstein’s work. That is not just my opinion, it is the opinion of every historian who has written about the matter.
Poincare understood the physical significance of special relativity much better than Einstein. Poincare was able to address the previous work, and say who was right and who was wrong. Einstein was not able to do that.
I did not say that Lorentz was generous to Poincare because sometimes Lorentz failed to credit Poincare.
I am not claiming any conspiracy theory. Just read the Lorentz, Poincare, and Einstein papers. All of the original and brilliant ideas are in the Lorentz and Poincare papers.
You claim to be a mathematician, and you claim that Einstein’s contribution was mathematical rationalism, and yet you cannot find an idea or formula that was original to Einstein.