{"id":12014,"date":"2014-06-23T11:40:29","date_gmt":"2014-06-23T18:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=12014"},"modified":"2014-06-23T12:40:21","modified_gmt":"2014-06-23T19:40:21","slug":"physicists-should-stop-saying-silly-things-about-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/23\/physicists-should-stop-saying-silly-things-about-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The last few years have seen a number of prominent scientists step up to microphones and belittle the value of philosophy. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/technology\/google\/8520033\/Stephen-Hawking-tells-Google-philosophy-is-dead.html\">Stephen Hawking<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/m.theatlantic.com\/technology\/print\/2012\/04\/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete\/256203\/\">Lawrence Krauss<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/massimo-pigliucci\/neil-degrasse-tyson-and-the-value-of-philosophy_b_5330216.html\">Neil deGrasse Tyson<\/a> 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rotman.uwo.ca\/2014\/why-talk-to-philosophers\/\">my entry at the Rotman Institute blog<\/a>. I was going to cross-post my response here, but instead let me try to say the same thing in different words.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>&#8220;Philosophy tries to understand the universe by pure thought, without collecting experimental data.&#8221;<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This is the totally dopey criticism. Yes, most philosophers do not actually go out and collect data (although <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Experimental_philosophy\">there are exceptions<\/a>). But it makes no sense to jump right from there to the accusation that philosophy completely <em>ignores<\/em> 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 <em>bad<\/em> philosophers, who do all sorts of stupid things, just as there are bad practitioners of every field. Let&#8217;s concentrate on the good ones, of whom there are plenty.) <\/p>\n<p>Philosophers do, indeed, tend to think a lot. This is not a bad thing. All of scientific practice involves some degree of &#8220;pure thought.&#8221; 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&#8217;t valued in physics departments, so they switched to philosophy. But those problems &#8212; the basic nature of the ultimate architecture of reality at its deepest levels &#8212; are just physics problems, really. And some amount of rigorous thought is necessary to make any progress on them. Shutting up and calculating isn&#8217;t good enough.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>&#8220;Philosophy is completely useless to the everyday job of a working physicist.&#8221;<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now we have the frustratingly annoying critique. Because: duh. If your criterion for &#8220;being interesting or important&#8221; comes down to &#8220;is useful to me in my work,&#8221; you&#8217;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. (&#8220;We need to calculate this loop integral! Quick, get me a philosopher!&#8221;) But it also gets by without input from biology, and history, and literature. Philosophy is interesting because of its intrinsic interest, not because it&#8217;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?<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>&#8220;Philosophers care too much about deep-sounding meta-questions, instead of sticking to what can be observed and calculated.&#8221;<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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 <em>developing a new technique for calculating a certain wave function<\/em> is an honorable enterprise worthy of support, while <em>trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>This makes me sad. I don&#8217;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&#8217;t get me wrong &#8212; finding more efficient calculational techniques is crucially important, and I cheerfully <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2014\/03\/06\/effective-field-theory-and-large-scale-structure\/\">do it myself<\/a> when I think I might have something to contribute. But it&#8217;s not <em>the point<\/em> &#8212; it&#8217;s a step along the way to the point. <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;s a shame that so many physicists don&#8217;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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12014"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12019,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12014\/revisions\/12019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}