Why Science Needs Philosophy

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A paper at random from the above archive: On Physics, Metaphysics, and Metametaphysics.

In it, the authors argue that if scientists desire to produce a scientific image of the world, that involves interpretation, which inevitably drags in philosophy, whether scientists like it or not. The paper addresses the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, and in so doing offers two formalisms and a variety of applied ontologies and metaphysics to them.

The formalisms are collapse and no collapse. The ontology for the former is consciousness, and for the latter branching.

They then consider the metaphysics for each applied ontology and formalism. For collapse/consciousness they rule out physicalism but accept the possibility of either phenomenology or substance dualism.

For no collapse/branching they rule out the metaphysics of (David) Lewisian worlds and fictional worlds, leaving only realism.

The value of this? If you’re the shut-up-and-calculate scientist, none. But if, like Einstein, you would like to produce a scientific image of the world, as mentioned above, there is plenty of value. For those scientists, philosophy is inextricably intertwined with science.

 

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And here, from the astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, is the standard scientific response to the philosophizing presented above:

There are many ways to “interpret” quantum physics, but our interpretations are not reality. This is, at least in my opinion, the trickiest part of the whole endeavor. It’s one thing to be able to write down equations that describe the universe and agree with experiments. It’s quite another thing to accurately describe just exactly what’s happening in a measurement-independent way.

Can you?

I would argue that this is a fool’s errand. Physics is, at its core, about what you can predict, observe, and measure in this universe. Yet when you make a measurement, what is it that’s occurring? And what does that mean about reality?

He then goes on to list several competing interpretations of QM, wondering which if any might be correct, and concludes:

If you believe this line of thought is useful, you’ll answer, “Who knows; let’s try to find out.” But if you’re like me, you’ll think this line of thought offers no knowledge and is a dead end. Unless you can find an experimental benefit of one interpretation over another — unless you can test them against each other in some sort of laboratory setting — all you’re doing in choosing an interpretation is presenting your own human biases. If it isn’t the evidence doing the deciding, it’s very hard to argue that there’s any scientific merit to your endeavor at all.

However, I would simply reply that philosophy does not claim to be doing science, nor even answering questions. Rather, in this case as in so many others, it is laying out a conceptual framework of how to interpret what we know about QM while at the same time delimiting certain metaphysical frameworks on logical grounds. This, I think, has merit in its own right, and anyway, it’s unavoidable. Any thinking person on first contact with the weirdness of QM is instinctively going to ask, “But what does all this means about the nature of reality?” And to be told “Shut up and calculate” is not going to be a palatable answer to an inquiring mind even while it might be perfectly OK for doing standard science.

 

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Another example of the intersection of science and philosophy: The hard problem of consciousness. At the outset, the author of the essay notes that this problem, first mooted by the philosopher David Chalmers some thirty years ago, has shaped the field of consciousness research ever since.

 

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How the Phaedo influences us to this day:

The Phaedo entrenched most of the divisions or dualities that mark the Western mind, including soul and body, mind and matter, reason and sense experience, reason and emotion, reality and appearance, good and evil, heaven and hell… In the Western tradition, since the Phaedo, the body is the source of all evil. But in the Eastern tradition, for instance, in yoga, we can take control of the mind through the body.

Although the Phaedo is at the root of Western psychology, philosophy, and theology, it is also deeply Eastern in advocating supreme detachment and ego suppression or disintegration as the route to salvation. Also, death is an illusion … we will be reincarnated … according to our deeds (karma). These, however, are not the aspects that the West has retained.

 

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Speaking of Plato, the physicist Max Tegmark is a mathematical Platonist — however, this also means, as he says, that he advocates an an extreme “shut up and calculate” approach to science — itself an epistemology, i.e., philosophy. And, further, he advocates for the quantum multiverse, directly contradicting the “shut up and calculate” approach of the aforementioned fellow physcist Ethan Siegel, who believes speculations about a multiverse are idle.

 

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Another critical intersection between science and metaphysics is the metaphysical assumption of statistical independence. The test of Bell’s theorem shows that you cannot have locality and realism, you have to give up on one or the other. This was not testable until around 1980, but derived from a thought experiment by Einstein. When it was tested, qm won and Einstein lost. But, Sabine Hossenfelder and a few others argue that we should give up on statistical independence, which remember is a metaphysical assumption. If we do that we get superdeterminism as a replacement for quantum mechanics. Of course, if we give up on statistical independence, there goes science out there window. Plus, we are asked to believe that a giant conspiracy of nature pre-set at the big bang forbids us from running any test that gives a deterministic result to qm.

Sabine and Tim Palmer’s highly technical paper is here.