The last few years have seen a number of prominent scientists step up to microphones and belittle the value of philosophy. Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are well-known examples. To redress the balance a bit, philosopher of physics Wayne Myrvold has asked some physicists to explain why talking to philosophers has actually been useful to them. I was one of the respondents, and you can read my entry at the Rotman Institute blog. I was going to cross-post my response here, but instead let me try to say the same thing in different words.
Roughly speaking, physicists tend to have three different kinds of lazy critiques of philosophy: one that is totally dopey, one that is frustratingly annoying, and one that is deeply depressing.
- “Philosophy tries to understand the universe by pure thought, without collecting experimental data.”
This is the totally dopey criticism. Yes, most philosophers do not actually go out and collect data (although there are exceptions). But it makes no sense to jump right from there to the accusation that philosophy completely ignores the empirical information we have collected about the world. When science (or common-sense observation) reveals something interesting and important about the world, philosophers obviously take it into account. (Aside: of course there are bad philosophers, who do all sorts of stupid things, just as there are bad practitioners of every field. Let’s concentrate on the good ones, of whom there are plenty.)
Philosophers do, indeed, tend to think a lot. This is not a bad thing. All of scientific practice involves some degree of “pure thought.” Philosophers are, by their nature, more interested in foundational questions where the latest wrinkle in the data is of less importance than it would be to a model-building phenomenologist. But at its best, the practice of philosophy of physics is continuous with the practice of physics itself. Many of the best philosophers of physics were trained as physicists, and eventually realized that the problems they cared most about weren’t valued in physics departments, so they switched to philosophy. But those problems — the basic nature of the ultimate architecture of reality at its deepest levels — are just physics problems, really. And some amount of rigorous thought is necessary to make any progress on them. Shutting up and calculating isn’t good enough.
- “Philosophy is completely useless to the everyday job of a working physicist.”
Now we have the frustratingly annoying critique. Because: duh. If your criterion for “being interesting or important” comes down to “is useful to me in my work,” you’re going to be leading a fairly intellectually impoverished existence. Nobody denies that the vast majority of physics gets by perfectly well without any input from philosophy at all. (“We need to calculate this loop integral! Quick, get me a philosopher!”) But it also gets by without input from biology, and history, and literature. Philosophy is interesting because of its intrinsic interest, not because it’s a handmaiden to physics. I think that philosophers themselves sometimes get too defensive about this, trying to come up with reasons why philosophy is useful to physics. Who cares?
Nevertheless, there are some physics questions where philosophical input actually is useful. Foundational questions, such as the quantum measurement problem, the arrow of time, the nature of probability, and so on. Again, a huge majority of working physicists don’t ever worry about these problems. But some of us do! And frankly, if more physicists who wrote in these areas would make the effort to talk to philosophers, they would save themselves from making a lot of simple mistakes.
- “Philosophers care too much about deep-sounding meta-questions, instead of sticking to what can be observed and calculated.”
Finally, the deeply depressing critique. Here we see the unfortunate consequence of a lifetime spent in an academic/educational system that is focused on taking ambitious dreams and crushing them into easily-quantified units of productive work. The idea is apparently that developing a new technique for calculating a certain wave function is an honorable enterprise worthy of support, while trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality is a boring waste of time. I suspect that a substantial majority of physicists who use quantum mechanics in their everyday work are uninterested in or downright hostile to attempts to understand the quantum measurement problem.
This makes me sad. I don’t know about all those other folks, but personally I did not fall in love with science as a kid because I was swept up in the romance of finding slightly more efficient calculational techniques. Don’t get me wrong — finding more efficient calculational techniques is crucially important, and I cheerfully do it myself when I think I might have something to contribute. But it’s not the point — it’s a step along the way to the point.
The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works. Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway. And part of that task is understanding the foundational aspects of our physical picture of the world, digging deeply into issues that go well beyond merely being able to calculate things. It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest. The universe is much bigger than we are and stranger than we tend to imagine, and I for one welcome all the help we can get in trying to figure it out.
Many of these comments really are extremely depressing, because they show a total ignorance of what academic philosophy really is, as many others have pointed out. I’ve been a professor of philosophy for over a decade, and many of the sweeping claims about philosophy being made here aren’t true of any professional philosopher I personally know. I suspect the problem may largely be the following: anyone can claim to be a philosopher, and there are a lot of crackpots out there. Every few weeks I get an email from some layman “philosopher” who has some crazy ideas unhinged from reality. Of course, I dismiss them as crackpots. But I imagine that many physicists, who get the same emails but don’t have firsthand knowledge of what academic philosophy is, instead take them at face value and so instead dismiss them as “philosophers”.
Ironically, these critics of philosophy don’t seem to be applying the scientific method to this issue. If you’re going to make public claims about the nature and value of philosophy, how about first doing a little research into what professional philosophers do instead of forming hasty judgments on the basis of anecdotal experience? And if you’re too busy to inform yourself properly (as I can totally understand), then how about holding your tongue, like I do about physics?
Sadly, the people with the loudest mouths (in philosophy, in physics, and elsewhere) are usually those with the least informed opinions.
Ben Goren,
“I indicated the deep and profound problems with the Trolly Problems, none of which you addressed. All you did was indicate what you think the Trolly Problems are supposed to tell you, but ignored that the intentions of the philosophers are irrelevant.”
These claims are more credible if you spend most of your discussion on them, as opposed to a few simple sentences at the end after going on for a bit longer about the other, and inaccurate, problems. Remember, you spent a lot of time linking it to Milgram, when they’re nothing alike, and your description of what it said was palpably false. Don’t post a completely inaccurate description of something and then get upset when someone points out that your description was completely inaccurate.
“The scenarios never actually arise in the real world, only in the perverted fantasies of philosophers.”
Objects in the real world almost never fall in a vacuum, and for the most part we never encounter the scenarios in psychology labs in the real world (which psychology admits in introductory classes). Does that make those fields or experiments utterly invalid or useless, too? Or can we discover interesting things from more controlled experiments that allow us to focus on one area of interest?
And this is a rather odd point to use Trolley Cases to demonstrate, since Trolley Cases actually work really well as psychological experiments — ie what do people think about such considerations and about sacrificing one person for five people — and less well as philosophical experiments since the intuitions we’d get out of that would prove that people THINK in a Utilitarian way, but not that they OUGHT to do that, which is the philosophical question. So you’re actually attacking psychology more than philosophy. Congratulations.
“In similar real-world situations, the actions proposed by the philosophers are horrifically immoral and highly illegal.
The philosophers insist that their subjects must perform one of those immoral and illegal acts, and refuse to let their subjects do the right thing.”
First, they don’t insist on that, as they offer the choice: do nothing, or flip the switch. I presume you consider the “flip the switch” option to be immoral and illegal, and are advocating for doing nothing. This just again highlights that you don’t seem to actually know what the Trolley Cases actually say.
As for flipping the switch: illegal perhaps, but we all know what the law can be at times. Immoral? Even if untrained, if you happen to know that flipping that switch will switch the track and save the lives of five people at the cost of one, do you really think that the more moral option is “Well, do nothing, because I’m not authorized to touch this stuff so I’ll let the five people die despite the fact that I KNOW I can save them”? Take the other person out of the picture. Put yourself on the train. You’re bearing down on five people, and you were told earlier in the day where the brakes are. No one else can reach them in time. Are you saying that the more moral option would be to say “I’m not the engineer, so I won’t even TRY to stop the train to save their lives” instead of “Heck, I’d better try something, even if it may not work”. To return to the drowning person example, do you really think it reasonable to say “Well, no one else is around and I could go save them, but I’m not a lifeguard so I won’t, because trying to save them would be immoral”?
Now, maybe you do. But if you do, even you should agree that you need more justification than simply saying “It’s immoral and illegal!”. So you’d need something, and I don’t see how you can get that from anything that is more scientific EDIT: than philosophical, but, hey, that might be a useful test case for you to demonstrate that science can actually solve moral problems, so go to it.
“I’d be astonished if you could get the Trolley Problem past the ethics review board of any psychology department I’m aware of, yet it’s hailed as the pinnacle of philosophical research into morality.”
Simply asking the questions would get past all ethics review boards, and no one actually asks anyone to actually DO the experiment in real life. It’s also not the pinnacle of philosophical research into morality, or discussions; it’s an interesting problem about out intuitions, but it doesn’t actually prove anything. Anyone who is a Utilitarian has to be able to answer this problem, but doing that won’t settle the philosophical question. It’s popular, but not intellectually overwhelming, as anyone who studies moral philosophy will tell you.
Sigh, you make some good points, but I think you are wrong in your final statement:
There seems to be two definitions of free will. One is the scientific definition: Can determinism or indeterminism allow us to have a will that is uncaused and that we can control? The hard incompatibilist answer is no. Neuroscience may actually prove this. This is a legitimate definition of free will that is too often dismissed by philosophers. It is not a “waste of time” because there are some people who think that indeterminism or randomness could give us the ability to have this type of free will. Also, there are philosophical implications that follow from this scientific definition and investigation of free will, which are also not a “waste of time.”
Then there is the philosophical definition of free will: As long as someone else is not controlling your brain or body, then you are free (free from coercion) to enact your will. So philosophical free will is compatible with scientific determinism because free will has been defined to accept determinism and to mean something different.
But to my mind this is freedom, not free will. In other words: Once the laws of physics have determined what your will is, are there any obstacles in the way of your ability to exercise it? This is certainly a good question, but I view it as separate from the scientific investigation of free will.
Well I think that Cosmology may feel a bit ‘under the gun’ to produce something of substantial benefit for mankind and in duress, resort to belittling some other field of thought to make itself feel better.
After all Philosophy has merely produced mathematics, logic and the entire (and tautological) basis for all Computer Science. In this regard, Cosmology has a lot of catching up to do.
This is the point: yes, nobody really knows what professional philosophers do because their work has no impact whatsoever on science. If what you did was useful, you wouldn’t have to come on here to try and explain what you do.
In Milgram, an authority figure ordered the subject to engage in immoral and illegal behavior and did not present the moral and legal response (stop and call the police) as an option.
In Trolly Car “experiments,” an authority figure orders the subject to (pretend to) engage in immoral and illegal behavior, and does not present the moral and legal response (call for help) as an option. Indeed, you’re explicitly instructed to refrain from doing the right thing.
The difference: Milgram was a realistic simulation and Trolley Car “experiments” are play-pretend; and Milgram never mentioned the possibility of doing the right thing whereas the right thing is taken right off the table with Trolley Cars. Oh: and the Trolley Cars continue to be the gold standard for philosophers long after Milgram empirically demonstrated that the exact result obtained — compliance with the authority figure without regard to moral or legal obligation — was the one one would expect.
You can trivially and empirically demonstrate that I’m off base here by indicating that philosophers regularly report on how many subjects refuse to engage in the experiment and instead insist that they’d call for help. Oh, and show that the standard experiment protocol includes a post-experiment interview assessing the patient’s mental state after being ordered to imagine engaging in multiple violent murders.
And that’s the perfect demonstration of why rank amateurs, especially philosophers, have no business in the vital fields of ethics and morality.
That’s the whole point.
If you’re not trained, you don’t know what that switch will do. Hell, you probably don’t even know how to operate it. You don’t know if the switch is even functional. You don’t know if the switch works the way you think it does, or if you’ll send another train down a different track. You don’t know if you’ve stumbled onto a movie set and the safety crew has rigged the train to come breathlessly to an halt before the schoolchildren (who are stunt doubles) but instead you’ve just murdered the film crew on the unprotected side spur. You don’t know if a remote operator has already seen and assessed the situation and made the decision based on far more information than you could possibly have.
“If you happen to know” my nether-bits.
You don’t know.
Or, if you do know, then you’re a qualified professional and you’ve drilled on exactly what procedures to follow in a crisis situation, and this entire discussion is as laughably naïve as suggesting that only decision relevant for a pilot operating an airliner in trouble is whether or not to turn the autopilot on or off.
And, in either situation, if you’re the one who’s stumbled on the scene, you’re most emphatically not responsible for the horror that’s about to unfold, regardless of what you do or don’t do to try to remedy the situation; rather, there’s a serious case of criminal negligence that you’ve just uncovered, and your real most important task is to assist in the investigation to both bring to justice those responsible as well as to help figure out how to prevent reoccurrences.
But are philosophers even remotely interested in anything like that?
No. It’s all about you heroically throwing the 400-pound fat man (my, what strength you have!) in front of the ten-ton train to derail it (yeah, right) so you’ll save the cute kitten (you’d do it for a schoolbus full of kids, so why not a kitten?), kill everybody on board the train (you know it’s empty…how?), and impress the beautiful woman watching you make important philosophical decisions.
…and people wonder why I have so little respect for philosophy….
Cheers,
b&
Pingback: The Problem with Physics » Almost Diamonds
Pingback: Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy | Blog
Re: “Perhaps defenders of philosophy could be helpful in showing us a simple example of how formal logic (widely accepted as a branch of philosophy) is helpful to physics?” —Steven Johnson.
EXAMPLE NUMBER ONE.
From “The Isaac Asimov 2013 Memorial Debate: ‘The Existence of Nothing'” at the American Museum of Natural History (YouTube video, 1:54:00).
At a moment one hour and 20 minutes into this 14th Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate entitled “The Existence of Nothing,” hosted by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, a noteworthy exchange takes place between Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss (theoretical physicist: cosmology, Arizona State University) and Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (astrophysicist: physical cosmology, science communication specialist; Director of the Hayden Planetarium, New York City)—
Dr. Krauss:
“I don’t see why people have any problems with it [the concept of ‘absolute nothing’]’… each of these lights in this room emits a photon …the photon wasn’t there before was emitted… it wasn’t in the electron, it wasn’t in the atom…it was created from ‘[absolute] nothing’ [1:20:56] and people don’t have a problem with that…”
Dr. deGrasse Tyson…interrupting [1:20:58]:
“No… Lawrence…it was created from energy…and energy is not ‘nothing’…so I won’t accept your photon [conjecture]…back up and say something else…”
Dr. Krauss:
“…well… sorry…a zero energy photon… a zero energy photon… our universe could be like a zero energy photon, a zero energy total universe and, again, as I say, if you imagine that process…and that’s what the properties of such a universe would be…it would look like ours [our universe]….”
*** *** ***
A “zero energy photon?” Our universe could be like a zero energy photon? A photon created from ‘absolute nothing’? This issue was never further pursued by Dr. deGrasse Tyson, never challenged by any of the other physicists or journalists participating in this debate including Dr. Eva Silverstein, Professor of Physics at Stanford University. A “zero energy photon,” that is, something with zero energy and zero mass, LITERALLY DOESN’T EXIST! Dr. Krauss seems to have “explained” something WITHOUT EXPLAINING ANYTHING. Dr. Eva Silverstein later declares (1:30:48 ) “there is no experimental evidence of [absolute] nothing…” and Dr. Krauss replies. “…because we live in empty space.” Dr. Krauss doesn’t explicitly say that the concept of “absolute nothing” is, itself, NON-EMPIRICAL and, therefore, EXTRA-SCIENTIFIC; Dr. Krauss doesn’t explicitly say that his conjecture of “something from absolute nothing” requires, additionally, the violation of some (rather) fundamental physical concepts such as: energy conservation, time reversal invariance, information conservation, and time-translation invariance.
In conclusion, one doesn’t even need “formal” logic to understand the need, in this example, for just plain LOGIC applied in a “rigorous conceptual analysis,” and I think that this is the basic point of Dr. Carroll’s opinion piece.
T.E.Oakley
Sent from my iPhone
Dave and S.F. seem to forget brains in vats, philosophical zombies, simulated universes, Chinese rooms, trolley problems, Objectivism, Robert Nozick and libertarian political philosophers (check out the Bleeding Heart Libertarian website for a gruesome introduction to the philosophers’ cray-cray!) I don’t think we’re getting a correct rebuttal here. As for active harm wrought to the brain, crackpot Mont Pelerin philosopher Sir Karl Popper’s incorrect theory of falsificationism has wrought terrible damage to many minds, including those who fancy themselves being scientific.
Verbose Stoic: I say “There is no magic.” You respond: “How do you know that? And please, no inductive fallacy?” Magic does not correspond to reality. Every occasion claimed to demonstrate the action of magic has vastly more probable causes. The very notion of magic is vastly more probable to be a wish fulfilment fantasy. And lastly we have an enormous body of verified knowledge incompatible with the existence of magic and a thoroughly tested set of principles (aka natural laws) which rule out magic.
The only way to deceive yourself into thinking there is an induction fallacy is by adhering, consciously or not, to the three principles I criticized philosophy for. Induction has to be justified by some sort of logical postulates, which is conceiving science, knowledge, as some sort of logical exercise. The argument only an individual’s sensory input, which denies the collective nature of science. But most of all, philosophy assumes that this is a valid objection, even though no one has ever provided the simplest sketch of how things could be otherwise. There is no Lucretius of skepticism.
The argument against induction is unsound, yet you yourself, even as you blithely claim philosophy rejects unsound arguments, make one yourself!
And that is what’s wrong with philosophy!
Although I agree with you that thinking about philosophical questions is fun and interesting, and has provided motivation for some of history’s best physicists, nevertheless I think you are too dismissive of the physicsts’ “lazy” critiques. Your post would be much more convincing if you had provided at least one example of a case where philosophical thought preceded physical thought in some useful way, rather than lagging behind. Philosophers’ efforts to “better understand” various aspects of physics have not led, as far as I can tell, to materially improved understanding of any significant topic, and their assertions about their own enterprise strike me sometimes as exceedingly arrogant.
Pingback: Science vs. Philosophy: A Bogus Battle | Special Generalist
stevenjohnson: Of course it’s easy to cite examples of bad and dangerous philosophy. It’s easy to cite examples of bad and dangerous (just about) anything. If you’re a scientist, you should know that that proves nothing.
But your post illustrates my point. To pick cases I know something about, virtually everything that philosophy’s critics have said here about trolley cases and brains in vats show a complete misunderstanding of the relevant philosophical work. Trolley cases are designed to get at data about people’s moral intuitions, not to make people choose one way or another. No philosopher I know has argued that we are brains in vats. The point is to raise a serious question about how it is that we know we aren’t, when we can’t subjectively distinguish our experiences from what they would be if we were in a vat. I don’t myself know enough about the zombies and Chinese room cases to speak to them here, so I’ll practice what I’m preaching and pass over those in silence.
Objectivism illustrates my point about confusing pseudo-philosophy with academic philosophy. Ayn Rand avoided contact with academic philosophers because she couldn’t stand any intellectual scrutiny of her ideas, and most philosophers think she’s nothing but a hack.
Like you I dislike Nozick, but I don’t see physics offering any refutations of his libertarian political theories.
Ben Goren:
Philosophy isn’t merely about creating accurate descriptions of the world. It’s also about learning how to think, and about producing ideas that are not objective at all, like those concerning moral standpoints, (among other things.) Science is about describing the world- nothing more. There is obviously some overlap between the two, but even if we were to take all the empirical areas of philosophy, like logic and metaphysics (assuming metaphysics must have a standard of evidence the same as that for any particular scientific experiment, and thus goals that conform to those as well,) philosophy would still exist as a discipline with a wide range of objects of study. One is not reducible to the other or neatly mapped onto the other.
I think you’ll find that the majority of researchers in biology or information systems would disagree with you here. There is no consensus on such foundational issues.
They might, though I haven’t heard any theologians do such a thing, but that is irrelevant, and this is a straw man. No one argued that science was reducible to or falls under philosophy, but rather that the discussion about the value of empiricism and about the scientific method is a philosophical question, which, historically and sociologically, it was and still currently is. Correct me if I’m wrong, but scientists aren’t publishing papers on minutia in epistemology or falsifiability criterion. The only way to avoid that is by rigging the definition of science in a way that divorces it from said historical and sociological facts.
That’s not an entirely empirical question though, is it? It’s a value-laden one, and hence has an inescapable philosophical dimension. It’s also not entirely a relevant question, since, as stated earlier, philosophy’s goal isn’t simply to produce knowledge the way science does, and so it cannot be fairly measured against science by that criteria.
And if you’re questioning the contributions of philosophy in general, then I’d respond that democracy, the idea of freedom, the idea of rights, the ideal of clear and rigorous thinking, and the theoretical and methodological foundations of empirical work are all valuable and indispensable contributions to human achivement.
There are comments on this thread that are hidden because too many people disliked them. They’re not spam, they’re perfectly logical and well-written arguments. Ignorance is one of the criticisms of Philosophy. Any argument is valuable, even if it is not yours.
@T.E. Oakley “his conjecture of “something from absolute nothing” requires, additionally, the violation of some (rather) fundamental physical concepts such as: energy conservation, time reversal invariance, information conservation, and time-translation invariance.”
I can’t see why the violation of fundamental physical concepts is a philosophical problem. It may just be that the concepts hold in some domains but don’t hold in others. As Krauss has said :- “The universe is the way it is , whether we like it or not.”
Those in the comments who continue to run the “philosophy isn’t worth anything/isn’t objective/isn’t [insert some positive and important trait here]: I await your non-philosophical account of why. Nearly every comment here has done philosophy, with varying degrees of ability. To offer a normative account of why philosophy isn’t worth doing is self-defeating. To say “We don’t need philosophy because X is a theory that explains reality better” is to take yourself to know what a theory is, what reality is, what explanation is, what better is, and that something is only worth doing if it “explains” “reality” “better.” If you’d can clarify what you mean by those terms without doing any philosophy, I will be very impressed.
That may well be the intentions of philosophers, yet all that does is demonstrate the continued and utter incompetence on their part. They may think they’re getting data about basic human psychology, but they’re not, and they’re doing so in an ethically inexcusable manner.
Is it really so much to ask that self-proclaimed experts on morality and human nature have at least an undergraduate non-major’s level of knowledge of the fields of psychology and ethics?
b&
Ben Goren,
You clearly still don’t get what the actual Trolley Case thought experiment is, let alone what it is aimed at, so let me try to address part of your concern so that maybe you can evaluate it reasonably:
“Or, if you do know, then you’re a qualified professional and you’ve drilled on exactly what procedures to follow in a crisis situation …”
So, let’s assume this, then, since it removes the whole nitpicky “How do you really KNOW?!?” line from it. Imagine that there are a set of procedures that either implicitly or explicitly answer what to do in these cases, and presume that we want them to be MORAL procedures. What would they say in these cases:
1) An out of control train is barreling down the track, heading for five people who will not get out of the way in time. You are standing by the switch, and can shift it to a sidetrack. This, we can presume, is what the procedures would say is the normal approach in these cases. However, you notice that there is a person on the side track, and if you do that THEY will not get out of the way in time. Is it moral to switch the train to that side track? Is it moral not to? If the procedures are moral, what will they recommend/dictate?
2) An out of control train is barreling down the track, heading for five people who will not get out of the way in time. You are standing by someone, and you know — since you are an expert — that their weight would be enough to trigger the “derail risk” sensor for hitting too large a bump, but that yours will not. Is it moral for you to push them in front of train? Is it moral not to? If the procedures are moral, what will they recommend/dictate?
Unless you want to argue that we don’t care if those procedures are moral, you should be able to answer this question in some way, or else you have nothing to say on morality (because you wouldn’t seem to have any kind of method for determining what is or isn’t moral).
“And, in either situation, if you’re the one who’s stumbled on the scene, you’re most emphatically not responsible for the horror that’s about to unfold, regardless of what you do or don’t do to try to remedy the situation …”
And yet you continually refuse to address the drowning person example. You are responsible for what actions you take or do not take, and if that action or inaction would involve more deaths than doing the opposite most people would say that you do bear some responsibility for the choice you made to act or to not act. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how you “You don’t know” example could be considered immoral unless you are holding them responsible for actions they take — flip the switch — and so unless you want to argue that you are never morally responsible for the outcomes that follow from inaction you don’t really have a case here. And I don’t recommend trying to argue that you are immune from responsibility if you choose not to act.
“…there’s a serious case of criminal negligence that you’ve just uncovered, and your real most important task is to assist in the investigation to both bring to justice those responsible as well as to help figure out how to prevent reoccurrences.
But are philosophers even remotely interested in anything like that?”
They are, in general, but the answer seems obvious and, it turns out, most people really will answer that the same way. It’s kinda like holding physicists up for criticism because they aren’t measuring the falling speed of objects intensely; that’s already been settled, and while important it’s not really something that will lead to new knowledge.
Trolley cases might. Why? Because people don’t answer them consistently. Most people answer “Sacrifice 1 to save 5” in the first case but “Don’t sacrifice 1 to save 5” in the second, despite there not being an obvious difference between the cases. That’s interesting and novel.
“No. It’s all about you heroically throwing the 400-pound fat man (my, what strength you have!) in front of the ten-ton train to derail it (yeah, right) so you’ll save the cute kitten (you’d do it for a schoolbus full of kids, so why not a kitten?), kill everybody on board the train (you know it’s empty…how?), and impress the beautiful woman watching you make important philosophical decisions.”
Back to misrepresenting it, I see. What you miss is that in the fat man case, most people say DON’T push him in front of the train, because that would be immoral. And it’s THAT answer that’s interesting and what has given Trolley Cases their importance to modern moral philosophy.
Re: Will Nelson
Einstein found the philosophical analysis of Avenarius and Mach to be useful … they criticized Newtonianism … in developing his physical intuition of physical phenomenon at high speeds … Einstein in fact claimed that he hadn’t read about the Michelson-Morley experiments … but was influenced by Lorentz. But once his own ideas had been quantified and developed, with the conceptual and mathematical assistance of Minkowski, Hilbert and his old school friend … he felt that he no longer need pay heed to Mach.
It is perhaps common, for successful scientists and mathematicians, to proudly show you the finished front of the tapestry of their work, but they don’t want you to know too much about the process by which it was produced, and they don’t want you to examine the back side of the tapestry too closely 😉
Once again, you demonstrate that you are perfectly unqualified to pontificate on this subject.
Do you have even the slightest idea of what safety devices, procedures, and protocols exist in the railway industry?
I don’t, and yet even I know that it’s not limited to your overly simplistic “Just press a button and kill either one or five people” fantasy.
How do you know that there isn’t some other alternative? What makes you think that there isn’t already something in place to prevent such disasters from happening, and that your proposed solution would even be an option should all the safety fallbacks simultaneously fail?
The absolute closest example you can find in the real world to your deranged death-by-train fantasy is an airliner forced to land. And pilots are drilled in such circumstances to aim for the clearest spot on the ground available — while, at the same time, of course, attempting to regain control, alert air traffic control of the impending disaster, and all that is, of course, well after the incredible effort that goes into preventing such situations in the first place.
I’m sure the rail industry has put similar effort into disaster preparedness. Yet you, and philosophers in general, are not only unaware of that, you’re convinced that you know better than they how to ensure railway safety. And you have the nerve to do so in the name of “morality”!
I’ve been trying to be gentle. If you knew anything at all about water safety, you’d know that untrained personnel attempting a rescue from in the water are almost certainly going to drown with the victim they’re trying to help. Yet you still, somehow, think that your completely uninformed philosophical perspective is somehow relevant!
You earlier noted that it’s useful to study Newtonian mechanics even though it assumes a perfect vacuum. You neglected to mention that, to a first approximation, aerodynamics is utterly irrelevant to daily human life, and it’s only been in the past century that an ordinary human is even going to personally experience situations in which aerodynamics plays a factor. Few people are capable of building from scratch measuring equipment capable of measuring the effects of aerodynamic drag on an apple falling from a tree, and none of us are capable of discerning the difference without the aid of precision equipment.
Such is not the case with the Trolley Car “problems.” Nobody ever actually encounters such situations, and the proper actions in the practically-never-happens event that something like that comes to pass aren’t even vaguely remotely relevant to the “solutions” proposed by philosophers. Worse, the “problems” have already been solved, best they can, by safety regulations (etc.) preventing them from arising, procedures and training designed to mitigate losses when they still happen, and investigation afterwards to be able to prevent reoccurrences.
…and yet, I bet you’ll still try to impress me with the “significance” that people in a made-up mad Nazi scientist fantasy would tell the guards to shoot three strangers rather than their wife and child….
b&
stevenjohnson,
Let me address your examples:
brain in a vat: Another in a long line of examples meant to address the issue where since all of our information about the outside world comes from our senses, and since we know that those senses can and often do misrepresent the world, how can we know that there is a world out there at all only relying on our senses? The brain in a vat asks how to tell the difference between us being a brain in a vat with appropriate neural stimulation or in fact being in a world at all. If you’re a materialist, you have to accept that this is possible, and if it is then there does seem to be a problem here. It may not be a problem that we care about in general, but as I said earlier it would be nice to have a better justification than “Well, I kinda have to trust it …”
Philosophical zombies: Attempt by David Chalmers to prove that consciousness wasn’t or wasn’t just the physical and neural correlates. Raises interesting questions, but was also pounded on by philosophers, and I think the general consensus is that it actually doesn’t prove what it set out to prove.
Chinese Room: Attempt by John Searle to demonstrate that a system doing pure symbolic manipulation could never understand. Answered by philosophers who claim the system can do it even if the individual can’t. Again, I think the general consensus is that it doesn’t prove what it set out to prove.
I’ve talked about trolley cases enough already [grin].
Objectivism: Not very popular in philosophy, at least not anymore. Neither is libertarianism.
I’m not going to talk about falsificationism here.
Onto what’s directed at me, the Inductive Fallacy is literally saying that you can’t make a universal claim on the basis that you haven’t seen anything else so far. So, the classic “There are no black swans” or “There are only white swans” cases are clear examples of the inductive fallacy; the argument was that they’d only seen white swans, so that had to be all there were, but that argument is invalid. Note that science wouldn’t normally proceed that way, as if it really wanted to demonstrate and come to know that there were only white swans it would look at how pigment is produced in swan feathers and argue that because of that mechanism it could only produce swans with white feathers. That’s not an inductive fallacy because that argument is valid, if potentially unsound (if the premises about how pigment is produced don’t work out).
When you say “There is no such thing as magic”, and defend that with “We’ve tried it and it hasn’t worked”, you commit the inductive fallacy. You can try to make an argument for it, but it has to be valid or else you don’t have an argument that works. It’s possible to make one, but likely not for magic in general without building a specifically naturalistic argument that ends up assuming its conclusion.
Now, you can say that it’s more reasonable to BELIEVE that any claimed instance of magic is wishful thinking, but that would hardly be any kind of proof that would rise to the level of knowledge.
Great post.
For those who think philosophy is worthless particularly to a physicists consider the following.
What does it mean when I put my son’s first grade painting next to the periodic table in my office (as I do physics)? It is important to me and helps guide my thoughts, among other things.
What does it mean when I consider where to place engineering controls to protect against electrical, chemical, laser and radiological hazards in the lab. None of these are paid for by grants, none of these things are published in articles, none of these things make it to textbooks, none of these things win Nobel prizes. It is part of physics—the demonstration of health and ethical standards applied to the workplace. That does not come from physics.
What does it mean when I try to develop moral, political, or economic restrictions on what can be done with products of physics research? This is not part of physics, this is something else.
Today, philosophy has justifiably changed and it can gather up all that we do that is not physics and call it its own. There is awful lot that no one is willing call physics and is part of physics. What are we to call it? Just thinking about stuff?? Or hypothesizing about stuff??
Ben Goren’s confusion about the trolley problem is profound and baffling. The procedure of making models — both hypothetical, and laboratory-controlled — is not alien to science. In science as philosophy, you invoke certain everyday entities (i.e. trolley cars, cats & boxes), and reduce out a bunch of contextual information (i.e. emergency services, the difficulty of making a quantum switch), and in both cases, it’s a necessary method of clarifying and organizing our premises and assumptions, for the sake of testing, describing, and applying them.
For some reason, Mr. Goren is viciously attacking one of the notable conceptual techniques that science actually shares with philosophy! … One that philosophy arguably helped pioneer, and which science adapted to be useful to productivity, knowledge-accumulation, and testing of reality.
(It’s funny that Ben Goren calls hypothetical philosophical models “ethically inexcusable,” when animal experiments present one of the genuine ethical dilemmas of the real world, and scientists doing wartime experiments have been complicit in some of the great atrocities of the modern age. This doesn’t indict the whole scientific enterprise, mind you, but it sure makes philosophy’s “unethical” hypotheticals look benign).
NOW — I know that conversation is derailing to this discussion, so I’ll circle back to the larger argument, just enough to put in my vote (to be counted in case anybody else argues from consensus):
For the record, add me to the roster of people who take this general position in the debate: 1) No, philosophy is not a hard science, nor does it somehow “contain” science, nor has it some kind of de facto authority over the validity of science. 2) Philosophy’s application to the scientific and technological project is currently limited, though it’s historically significant. 3) Nonetheless, there are human activities that are valuable, even without being physically and/or economically productive, or productive of new verifiable knowledge. 4) Philosophy, in its engagement with politics, ethics, behavior, art, language, truth, and belief, is extremely valuable, both in the logical tools it’s refined, and also in its (sometimes esoteric) conceptual products.
Re James
Actually, I believe I got the quotation wrong. Now that it recall, it is stated as follows: Philosophers are as useful to physicists as ornithologists are to birds.