"The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing."
This is a common misquote with similar frequency to perhaps "Play it again, Sam." In his Apology (not meaning apology, from apo-logia, speaking for oneself, i.e. defense) Socrates says:
"Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks he knows. I neither know nor think I know" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing?utm...).
The context is that Socrates was puzzled by the Delphic Oracle's declaration that he is the wisest man. The man mentioned is an unnamed politician who was known to be wise.
Agreed, I think there's a culture of overzealous "correction" with respect to historical quotations. It's not completely irrelevant that it's a conversation with an oracle or that his attitude was puzzlement in response to being regarded wisest, as contrasted with him just declaring it unprovoked.
But still, they are expressions of intellectual humility that come from not knowing and contrasting it to the attitude of claiming to know without really knowing, that essence is the same even with the "correction" and complements Asimov's essay either way. So I think "misquote" is a little strong here.
This wonderful essay explicitly criticizes one genre of philosophy popular in academic English literature departments, but I think it also implicitly undermines another genre popular in academic English-speaking philosophy departments. The latter frequently propound something like the so-called correspondence theory of truth, yet they also treat truth and falsity as absolutes, mutually exclusive. There's no room for approximation and degrees of accuracy.
> The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts
"All models are wrong. Some models are useful." is the way that I have heard this thesis quipped. I suppose "All models are wrong. Some models are more wrong than others." would fit Asimov's points better, but I've never actually heard that one
My father-in-law, something of a renaissance man, and also a long-time successful commodities trader, regularly uses your latter expression. The first time I heard him say it, I attempted to correct him (“some are useful”) and he confidently brushed me aside. As I’ve matured, I’ve grown confident that his (your) version is less wrong.
It isn't only about the degree of wrongness, but its type:
1. Vacuous, which provide no useful insight beyond what is obviously deducible. Such as "nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye".
2. Vanity, which provide useless elaboration of something that is very well understood in a much simpler form, with no realistic hope of any future insight. Such as most of linguistics.
3. Pointless. Explain something that is difficult to get to know,
because it matters so little. While technically correct, the actual facts matter so little that they result in no realistic improvement of any kind, and no decisions are changed as the result of the new knowledge. Such as the age of Earth.
4. Theoretically wrong, those that the article is talking about. Even though theoretically wrong, the are so nearly equivalent to the actual truth, that the difference doesn't matter in practice.
5. Practically wrong. Those that "sound good" so that people stick to them, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. Such as that obesity is caused by overeating, in spite of the near universal failure in practice, in the last instance of Ozempic making people look like walking corpses, rather than anything like a healthy body. This is the kind of errors meant by those who write to people like Asimov.
I firmly believe, more and more each day, that the human mind does not seek truth or correctness, it primarily seeks satisfaction.
The context for satisfaction is different for every individual human. Some parts of the context are shared (to various degrees). These 'shared contexts' we might call rationality, or science, or society, or religion.
Another part of the problem is that satisfaction is recursive.
We may evaluate something based on:
1. Correctness
2. Completeness
3. Satisfaction
This is obviously self-referential because if something is incorrect or incomplete, then it is also unsatisfying.
For instance, if you are only aware of Electromagnetism, then Maxwell's equations are correct, complete, and satisfying. And then some jerk discovers neutrons.
Anyway, this whole comment may fit into your first three points; or it may help someone understand a failure to communicate.
If someone ate the same three meals for 20 years and maintained a consistent weight, and then due to some physiological change started to put on weight eating the same amount, I'd find it reasonable but perhaps incorrect to attribute their weight gain to overeating. But yeah, technically at the end of the day, they could eat less :)
You have made an interesting point but I think your arguments would have more force if you exercised some restraint in categorically stating your opinions about what is wrong and in what way as facts, basically.
Anyway, while I agree on these other types of "wrong" being important, I don't know about calling 1-3. wrong, per se. Also, I'm curious what part of linguistics you consider to belong under the "vanity" label, and why it would be apt to call "pointless" facts (like the age of the Earth) wrong.
> 3. Pointless. Explain something that is difficult to get to know, because it matters so little. While technically correct, the actual facts matter so little that they result in no realistic improvement of any kind, and no decisions are changed as the result of the new knowledge. Such as the age of Earth.
It's bizarre to even consider that investigating the age of the Earth is "pointless". Finding out the age of our planet and other celestial bodies matters a lot in astronomy! Understanding the universe is the opposite of pointless, it's fascinating.
The way that Sean Carroll says it is something along the lines of, the fundamental physics governing everyday life are understood. That is to say, we can solve for what an electron, proton, etc (or a collection of maybe a few dozen) are going to do in a particular experiment. The second and third generations of charged particles are excluded from the definition of everyday life, as are any other hypothesized particles because they require higher energy levels than are relevant. Explaining how the brain works is excluded as not being fundamental, though in principle a sufficiently advanced computer would be able to simulate it.
Exactly, that's where my mind went too. I think people are tempted by a well-meaning skepticism to think that it's high minded to be skeptical of affirmative claims of knowledge, but it ends up throwing a very hard won model of everyday physics out the window.
I saw a very frustrating live "debate" between Dr Blitz (monikor of a really cool science communicator and irl PhD physicist) and a flat earther, where the flat earther essentially borrowed these arguments (eg observations aren't really predictive or generalizable or able to count in favor of specific theories, confirmed theories have no special status etc) to dismiss the evidentiary support of the earth being round. It's an intellectual car crash masquerading as a respectable position on scientific foundations.
Well, let me ask you: when your joints crack do you think the process involves something other than physics at its most basic level?
You may take it from my posing the question that I think its obvious that joint cracking is determined by physics, and I do tend to think this, but I think a compelling argument can at least be made that joint cracking might not actually be fundamentally determined by physics.
Apologies in advance if I'm missing your point (I might be!) but... If it turns out that the laws are not constant, our present understanding would be retained as a special case of a broader theory and the local predictive capabilities would still be real in their scope. And leveraging a "we don't know" to cash out as affirmative skepticism tries to make the absence of data do more than it can.
As you noted, the degree of uncertainty we're currently wrestling with is also what we would see if it was true that the laws were constant. Kind of like an anthropic principle but on behalf of the constancy of the universe's laws.
This may all be restating what you said in a different way, but for me the important upshot is that I don't come out of it with an attitude that our current physical understanding is a tenuous house of cards and that I need to watch my step because, who knows, the strong nuclear force could change at any moment.
At minimum the are quasi-stable over long enough periods of time for life to firm. In some ways we know they are not 'constant', as in before the big bang there is a firewall that looks like entropy was zero.
Now if you think that's going to matter in the next few billion years is very probable you're mistaken.
> but I think a compelling argument can at least be made that joint cracking might not actually be fundamentally determined by physics.
Wait, what? I was nodding along with you for making a great point about how this doesn't threaten our confidence in the venture of physicalist explanation of the natural world (sidebar, I think we actually do know quite a bit about what happens when joints crack), but I had a record scratch here. I think I agree with your upshot but I wouldn't agree that a compelling argument, tentative or otherwise, can be made for a non physical explanation.
It roughly goes like this: if phenomena can be truly emergent, which is to say that the phenomena is causally independent of the underlying physical system, then its reasonable to say that the emergent behavior is not determined by the physical law of the underlying system.
Terrance Deacon makes this case in "Incomplete Nature." As I said, I think its wrong, but I think its worth considering whether it could be right.
Another example: is Firefox explained by electronics?
The computer is made out of electronics, and Firefox exists in the computer and is in a way part of the computer, but electronics is not the right level to understand Firefox, and in principle you could implement Firefox on a computer that wasn't made out of electronics.
A great example, though it makes me want to head something off. You can be a brute literalist and insist it is the right level since its capable of embodying and instantiating Firefox, and so it's "just" a medium but the medium embodies the message, and knowing its configuration "in terms of electricity" does give you message, the structure, and the concepts.
Although we abstract away the electronics, it doesn't have the implication sometimes suggested by emergentism, that it exhibits a physical reality that is "independent of" its electronics. The abstracting away shouldn't be taken to mean that some new ontological thing was conjured into being that's physically real in the same sense as the electronics.
If that seems like it goes without saying or is beside the point, well, great! That's kind of what I want to hear. But in some emergentism debates it becomes important to insist there's a "more is different" thing happening that's necessary to explain physical properties.
Thanks for elaborating (would not have expected cracking knuckles to be a place where emergentism gets invoked!).
I think I agree with you that this notion of emergentism is wrong although I'm inclined to say it's more super wrong than respectably wrong. If you're interested in another philosopher, I agree with Jaegwon Kim that physics operates on casual closure, which leaves no room for this form of emergence.
He is a philosopher. I'm a physicist and I've read his book and I found it interesting. Don't know what to tell you.
Most physicists don't know all that much about the philosophical underpinnings of their discipline, so I'd rather see what philosophers have to say about it anyway. But that isn't the point. I'm saying I thought the book was well put together and thought provoking, though I don't think his argument goes through. If that interests you, read it. If you prefer to let an arbitrary label filter out whose ideas you might entertain, I guess go for it.
Oh, no, you got me wrong. I was curious about his credentials, but this doesn't mean I don't find philosophy intriguing and fascinating. I would say humanity cannot exist without philosophy. Thinking about ourselves, thinking about knowledge, thinking about what we believe about knowledge, thinking about what is and what is not, thinking about thinking -- all of these are essential.
It's just that it matters to me whether it's a philosopher who's arguing about the physical properties of the universe or a physicist.
I do think you care a bit about labels and what they stand for, after all your first post didn't fail to mention you're a physicist!
I think our confusion comes from the fact that from where I am standing there is not a lot of difference between philosophers and physicists because I'm mostly thinking about philosophers who are philosophers of physics or in adjacent fields.
I understand you're discussing philosophers engaged in epistemology, which are some of the philosophers closer to science.
I think epistemology is critical and necessary. It fascinates me. However, I wouldn't class them as physicists (unless they actually are, of course; you can wear more than one hat).
I admit I'm not familiar with Deacon, but Wikipedia states he's a "neuroanthropologist". I wonder how he would feel about a physicist making authoritative statements on neurobiology or anthropology!
This trap is not hypothetical. Remember when Michael Behe sided with Creationism and Intelligent Design, using his credentials as a scientist to try to discredit the theory of evolution? But he wasn't a scientist trained in that field, nor was he qualified to comment on it. He was a biochemist!
(I hope we've established labels do matter, insofar as they mean the person so labeled is immersed and has demonstrated high qualifications in the labeled field).
I guess what I am sort of getting at is that no amount of trusting labels to delineate intellectuals will protect you from having to actually look at something and decide whether the person has something useful or interesting to say or not.
In this particular discussion I don't particularly care whether some Joe Schmoe on the street trusts or doesn't trust Terrance Deacon on the basis of what his degree says. It doesn't matter.
And I actually think your example of Michael Behe works towards my point of view. Credentials are a very weak signal of expertise on any subject, as he demonstrates. I think at the basic level of philosophy of science or physics or whatever, the idea that we can break up disciplines into clear chunks is just silly. At some point a serious intellectual just has to do the work for themselves to digest the ideas. I'd be worse off if I had skipped Deacon's book (which, incidentally and again, I don't think really lands) if I had skipped it because he didn't have a PhD that matched mine.
> I guess what I am sort of getting at is that no amount of trusting labels to delineate intellectuals will protect you from having to actually look at something and decide whether the person has something useful or interesting to say or not.
I actually agree with this! I'm sure Deacon has interesting things to say. And yes, I can only find out about it by reading him, not by reading Wikipedia's summary -- or you.
Michael Behe didn't have the right kind of credentials: he was speaking outside his area of expertise, as was noted repeatedly during that debacle. He co-opted the mantle of capital-letter Science and misused it to maliciously confuse his audience.
> I think at the basic level of philosophy of science or physics or whatever, the idea that we can break up disciplines into clear chunks is just silly.
Of course all distinctions are man-made and therefore arbitrary. Yet you have a doctorate in Physics, and not in Neuroanthropology. At a fundamental level, you understood if Physics interested you, there was a path for you which was this path and not that other path. The border might be fuzzy, but at some level you understand not all regions are equivalent.
> At some point a serious intellectual just has to do the work for themselves to digest the ideas. I'd be worse off if I had skipped Deacon's book (which, incidentally and again, I don't think really lands) if I had skipped it because he didn't have a PhD that matched mine.
I fully agree and I'm not arguing anyone should skip Deacon (or anyone else) because they are not physicists. I just wouldn't pay the same attention to a Physics lecture by someone whose expertise doesn't lie in Physics (or to an anthropology lecture by a physicist who's not also an anthropologist). Doesn't mean I would necessarily skip it though!
I also understand you're not saying Deacon is right. Sufficiently interesting ideas are worth considering regardless of whether they are right. I don't think Julian Jaynes is right either, yet I consider "The Origin of Consciousness" an extremely interesting book!
I'm not sure how many times I have to explain I consider philosophy, epistemology and -- I'll say it -- the humanities essential? I'm not arguing about skipping anything!
I think we kind of agree. Obviously no one has enough time to personally vet every single claimant to expertise, so we use credentials to help. But I think in this particular context Deacon's specific credentials aren't really that relevant, at least to the extent that I'm vouching for him and that might (but I guess who am I, right) obviate the need to rely on his specific credentials.
The whole argument in your linked article rubs me the wrong way.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the two ways "because science" or "because God" might stop my curiosity is because 1) I'm looking for a good master's thesis topic (a problem well in my past, thank God) or 2) my immediate survival is dependent on much more immediate problems than the underlying physical phenomena that cause e.g. a lightbulb to work.
I think there's a certain set of people who, in the absence of more pressing concerns, drop everything upon experiencing a new phenomenon, in a quest to understand it. That certainly describes parts of my life. But the writer takes as axiomatic that most people don't drop everything to study whatever event because they were told that it had been explained, and not, you know, because their landlord doesn't accept white papers on the fundamental properties of reality in lieu of rent.
I think embedded in the statement "because science" is the connotation that ignorance of the underlying phenomenon is not itself dangerous to the people experiencing it. If I observed a bright light literally burning people, and I ask "how is that light burning people?", the person who knows more but simply says "its physics" shares some culpability with me if I just accept that answer incuriously and then get burnt by the light.
But if people aren't getting burnt, is it intellectual laziness to grunt "good enough" on my way to more pressing matters? Perhaps. This whole essay reads to me as a way to judge and find wanting the kind of person whose apparent curiosity stopped at how to do their job. The point of the essay (although it took a lot of curiosity on my part to tease it out) is apparently to say "don't let the fact that it is known stop you from finding out yourself", but it ended up sounding like "if you're taking anything as received knowledge, you're abdicating your responsibility as a thinking entity".
> It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn't till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison.
A philosophy professor I had when I was an undergrad, asked the question "Why did Socrates deliver the Apology in such a way that was clearly unapologetic and designed to annoy the Athenians"? His answer was that he thought Socrates was old and wanted to go out with a bang. I thought his answer had merit, and also that it was an answer I, at 19, would never have come up with. At 70, I go "oh, yeah, baby".
When my daughter was in middle school we were discussing some concept she learned in Biology that wasn't precisely wrong but wasn't right in all use cases. I told her that a model didn't have to be true to be useful. She said "that's a good way of thinking about it" and since that is such a rare complement from a teenager I have remembered it ever since.
I think it's true though. I think a good science teacher can say from the outset that we don't know it all and science is always growing and changing.
>In his discussions of such matters as "What is justice?" or "What is virtue?" he took the attitude that he knew nothing and had to be instructed by others. By pretending ignorance, Socrates lured others into propounding their views on such abstractions. Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn't know what they were talking about.
See also: Jordan Peterson et al. Our tendency to favor logical correctness over empirical correctness is one of our most dangerous cognitive biases. It's very easy to convince people to believe arguments that are perfectly logically consistent in their own self-constructed reality but have no bearing on empirical reality, over arguments that conform to empirical reality but may not have perfect logical consistency. Empirical reality is messy and it's difficult to construct a perfectly consistent set of axioms around it; constructed reality is neat and thus trivial to construct sets of perfectly consistent axioms around it.
Yes. People like to think in terms of 100% or 0%. Never anything in between. Even though almost everything falls somewhere in between. That's why I like bits and dislike q-bits, for example.
The irony of my own statement dawned on me when I discovered that some people suggest that 2 + 2 does not necessarily equal 4, but could also equal 22.
There is no doubt that the exact sciences have something more than philosophy.
It's always a pleasure to read Isaac. Well, almost, I should say.
All I can say about this as a dude with a doctorate in physics and an interest in foundations is: I guess, dude, if this is how you want to live your life.
It isn't that I agree with the person who wrote Asimov the letter (in fact, based on his description, I frankly wonder if the letter writer wasn't my father). Its just that there is something subtly wrong with Asimov's view of the progress of scientific knowledge.
At least its extremely instrumentalist. If we think of knowledge as a sort of temporary mental state which lives between setting up a physical state and making a measurement, then, yes, knowledge has progressed in exactly the way that Asimov is saying. And that is nothing to sneeze at.
But like consider quantum mechanics. People still cannot make heads or tails of what the ontology of quantum mechanics is, despite some compelling stories. And that makes perfect sense since QM is not compatible with special or general relativity! So its dumb to try and make sense of what QM tells us about what is. So why not try to understand what the ontology of QFT is? This seems reasonable, since QFT is capable of making correct predictions (at least in the scattering regime) and is invariant. But no one on earth can write down a coherent mathematical theory of QFT, so interpretation is even more difficult than QM. And this is yet to even try to tackle with conceptual gap between GR and QM/QFT, where we genuinely are perplexed but at least have good reason to think that the final interpretation of QM or spacetime has to have something to do with the way that the two theories interact.
From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.
My personal understanding here is that really there are no electrons, photons, quantum fields, masses, gravity. There is just the single substance of the universe which we have learned to manipulate and predict with ever improving precision (in limited cases). Maybe that is knowledge? Doesn't always feel like it.
As another dude with a doctorate in Physics, I have to disagree with you (at least somewhat).
> From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.
I disagree with this entirely. The existence of QFT, and our knowledge of the inconsistency between say GR and the quantum realm does not negate the idea of photons and electrons as real, measurable quantities. The fact that we have GR does not negate the fact that we still use Newtonian gravity in regimes where it is sufficiently accurate.
All the new knowledge we have learned still is (and absolutely must be) consistent with our old knowledge that has been proven correct in the regimes that they were proven correct.
This is effectively what Asimov is saying (as I understand anyway) - the knowledge that the Earth is a sphere does not invalidate the assumption that the Earth is flat approximately and locally.
I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.
String theory can tell me that we have several dimensions etc but until we have a way to measure and check it remains a conceptual framework to make predictions, rather than a description of how things really are.
GR is much closer to a description. It told us about the precession of mercury, it told us to account for time dilation so we can use GPS satellites. It also predicted black holes, which were conceptually consistent but it's only been in the last ~ 5 years that we have the closest thing yet to experimental verification with the Event Horizon Telescope and gravitational wave measurements. If another theory comes along and explains all of GR with a different explanation for black holes, we will need still more accurate measurements to discriminate between the two theories. Knowledge is only as accurate as we can measure.
The way I've heard it best described is these notions of electrons and photons etc will still be retained as a special case of whatever theory supersedes them, which is critical, because that's at the heart of the "relativity of wrong" argument.
Some take the prospect of a future revision of theories to mean our present state of knowledge is no different than any prior failed theory, which I think is an urgently, catastrophically wrong, catastrophically confused way to regard the history of scientific knowledge.
QM is so platonic though. Reality consists, ultimately, of forms that can only be described mathematically. It just happens that the math returns (what we see) as a probability distribution/wave function.
I’ve never quite understood what a quantum theory of gravity would be though. QM involves the observer but gravity engages spacetime - the place where you are observing things. A quantum field theory of gravity seems like a contradiction in terms to me. Unless quantum gravity is really about the Big Bang?
The observer/observed thing is present in every part of physics and isn't really about observers but about where we choose to draw the line between one physical system and another (with the other usually containing ourselves).
Think of it this way: classically or quantum mechanically, when we pick out a physical system to talk about we are isolating the terms for that system in the universal lagrangian and assuming that in the time of interest that the terms for our physical system couple weakly to the rest of the universe (which happens to contain us).
In principal nothing really weird is going on here and in classical mechanics the idea is totally trivial as far as it goes. On short time scales with appropriately sized actions the deviation from the isolated system and the real system (which is weakly coupled to the world) can be demonstrated to be small as long as the coupling is small.
In quantum mechanics two things complicate this situation. The first is that quantum mechanical systems sort of defy separation into distinct subsets except in special situations. Classically there is a strong sense in which we can point to two different parts of a system and call them separate, but quantum mechanically we really only know how to time evolve _the whole system_ and from a mathematical point of view its the actual object of interest. This is what we are getting at when we talk about entanglement: the two spin 1/2 particles flying away from one another in Bell style experiments are not separate things in the QM description: there is just one wave function.
But in practice I don't think there is any real reason we can't quantize gravity. I'm not an expert but loop quantum gravity seems like a reasonable approach and its very straightforward and its base: just find an acceptable description of geometry and then apply the ordinary quantum mechanical tricks we use to quantize it.
Also, you don't observe things in spacetime. Observations are always purely local. You just infer the existence of spacetime from local observations which are conveniently organized by putting them on a curved 4d Lorentzian signature manifold.
I don't think you get my point because I don't think of anything you are saying as having anything to do with what I was saying.
If you have a purely instrumentalist view of reality, where, as I said, your so-called knowledge is actually just a model of an unknown thing which you employ to predict the measurements you read out against a ruler or on a meter or something, then yes, we've made progress exactly of the kind you describe.
But I was trying to make a point about epistemology and ontology. Physics has actually been pretty catastrophic for ontology. I don't think its wrong to say that from the point of view of physics we simply do not know what anything actually is.
> I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.
Yes. But this is a fairly radical position historically and philosophically. Most people would say that there is more to existence than measurement and I while I share your instrumentalist sympathies, like most physicists, I don't see the philosophical case that we can have a consistent worldview if we denounce all knowledge not related to measurement as a total non-starter.
Think about what instrumentalism really means. When you utter the sentence the earth is an oblate spheroid, you are actually making an incredibly complicated set of statements about the outcomes of experiments. If we take the instrumentalist view the measurement doesn't actually tell us the earth is an oblate spheroid - it just tells us that if we make a series of measurements then they come out in such a way as to be concordant with a model of the earth as an oblate spheroid. Are you really prepared to give up the idea that the earth is a thing you can know about?
I actually rather think physics strongly encourages us to adopt the instrumentalist view, primarily because it seems so clear that physics has a local character. In GR there simply is no state of affairs whatever about what is happening "right now" except at the point in spacetime where you make a measurement. Really think about what that means. If we are standing at the north pole and make a measurement of some kind, how can it pertain to the earth as a distributed object in space when we know GR says there is no state of affairs pertaining to that object at the moment of the measurement?
GR tells us all about what the outcome of various measurements will be, but it also calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean. The instrumentalist is committed to the idea that the only thing we can talk about is the results of measurements. What the measurements operate on is just not something we can know. I think that's weird. Physicists often conflate their mathematical models with reality and that lets them think an instrumentalist view is sufficient: the measurements coming out such and such a way is taken as evidence that the universe is filled with objects consistent with the model. But that association is non-trivial in modern physics.
It must be the case that our measurements are interfacing with something ontologically real, so I can't agree with the minimizing tone that treats respect for them them as implicitly necessitating a total exclusion of ontology. Far from breaking the link between measurement and reality, examples like GR’s localism or QM’s treatment of particles show that measurement is what pushes us into new and unfamiliar ontological commitments.
To then suggest that Asimov's essay depends on such a radical version of instrumentalism feels unnecessary, given that his argument attaches just as well, I would say better, to a view that makes space for ontology but still underwrites the history of progress he was describing. His essay seems less a failure to follow deeper philosophical detours than a decision to keep his argument tied to that central point.
You also seem to be implying a kind of ontological "regression" in the history of knowledge which I think comes from projecting specific ontological attitudes retroactively onto the past when those distinctions weren’t even part of the vocabulary.
A big problem with Steven Jay Gould’s self-posturing as a savior of Darwinian theory was that he manufactured a crisis of his own invention about "gradualism" and then claimed to resolve it. Darwin never assumed a fixed speed of evolution, so the supposed crisis dissolves once you stop reading one into the history. A similar attitude helps in reading the history of science: early measurements and models need not be seen as knowledge of ontology that we somehow "lost" but as data accompanied by overconfident declarations that can be separated out.
If you correct for ontology in this way, treating the instruments as interfacing with whatever is ontologically real, then you see steady progress toward more accurate knowledge. Far from being subtly wrong this reinforces the core of Asimov’s point that successive models are increasingly less wrong because they are tethered to reality (e.g flat to globe to spheroid to GR’s spacetime and beyond). It's that same arc of progress carrying us through those examples into more exotic ontologies. And the sense of crisis comes not from instrumentalism's commitments but from identifying progress with 'intuitively familiar' as if outgrowing our conceptual inheritance were failure rather than discovery.
Long reply already but one more thing. I would go so far as to say that all-out instrumentalism is a way of reading what Kuhn advocated (and perhaps actually what Kuhn believed depending on who you ask), and it was key to him to get away from notions of progress that rely on ontological commitments to external reality. And so a lot of the pushback was to rescue "progress" by insisting on ontological commitments that make the notion of progress make sense. In that light I can't see a way of reading Asimov advocating progress that would commit him to that kind of instrumentalism.
I'm not a native speaker so I had to look up what "ontology" means specifically, and what I got is : "The branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being. " (among other things)
I agree in that sense that physics does not do well here. I actually think physics _cannot_ do well here. Physics (and the "hard" sciences more generally) are good at describing what something is, and how it interacts with things around it. We "know" by assembling individual pieces of information that form a consistent model, then declare that model to be true. When a piece of information outside of that model arises, we then have to call that model in question.
I do not "know" the Earth is spherical from direct experience. I do "know" it from other indirect means - reading, measurements, images from space and so on. I do not also think that Asimov is saying anything about how we know what we know - he just talks about how "science is wrong" is not a true statement. Science is always approximately correct, but how approximate is the question.
So perhaps I'm missing the point entirely here, but I don't understand your distinction of "instrumentalist knowledge" vs other kinds of knowledge. If you say physics cannot explain my knowledge that I enjoy watching the sunrise - then absolutely yes. That is not it's realm. In the same way that physics cannot explain the history of medieval China to me. A common issue among physicists is to assume that this is the only way to view the world, and I disagree with that. There are many systems of knowledge, and each is good at certain things. Rejecting one as the "global" system misses the richness of other kinds of knowledge building.
To be honest, I think you're straying from science into philosophy.
"The nature of being", "ontology", "it calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean".
Science is not about the search for meaning, it's about describing and understanding the physical and natural world. Meaning is up to you, and me, and everyone else.
Asimov was not talking about meaning.
It's easy to see that he wasn't, because nobody would make the categorical statement that there's unequivocal progress in the search for meaning, because meaning is such a cultural (and personal) thing. Meaning is not scientific, and is highly subjective. I wouldn't even know how to measure meaning. Self-reporting? Chemically measured happiness? What.
Had the English professor complained "we think we know so much, yet we're so ignorant about what it all means! People are so unfulfilled, live such empty lives! Wake up, sheeple!" I bet Asimov would have... -- well, he probably would have had humorous words for that too, but his argument would have been different.
I do not think of science as distinct from philosophy. But I'm not talking about the sort of meaning you are talking about. I'm talking about the fundamental basic question of what the physical world consists of and how we relate to it.
When I say that most people think there is more to the world than measurement, I don't mean art or love or whatever. I mean that most people think that the world is made up of things that exist whether we measure them or not, things which have their own nature which we somehow can understand. The purely instrumental thinker says we can't understand those things, we only have measurements and mathematical expressions that relate measurements.
Forgive me if this is a stupid interpretation and question, but are you basically saying that the tools we use to measure the universe actually produce our knowledge, rather than reflect an accurate model of reality? As in, in an alternative universe where we used different measurement tools, we would have discovered entirely different phenomena that we would consider to be part of the universe, but is really just a different way of interpreting the single substance of the universe?
If so this is compelling to me. In the same way that or senses impact our view of what exists and how it exists, but it's really just an interpretation of what's out there.
I'd say its subtle. The instrumentalist just says that measurements are reality period and that there isn't anything to say about what goes on between measurements. You can sort of see this at an extreme in QBism. You just write down the quantum Bayes rule and that is all you commit to saying about the universe.
I'd argue that what physics finds are (possibly non-unique) mathematical structures which correlate to the physical world. Because they are non-unique it is, in my opinion, silly to say things like "spacetime is a 4d manifold of Lorentzian signature with a connection like so and so, blah blah." There are other ways to describe the same dynamics which offer a different ontology and so we shouldn't just assume the terms in our physical models correspond to things in the universe.
I think we reasonably can say "there exists a thing in the universe or a part of the universe that has the property that we can describe it with a 4d manifold of Lorentzian signature and so on." So physics does identify properties that hold for parts of the universe on certain time, length, action scales. But I think the general vibe of physics in the 20th and 21st centuries is that we don't know what those things are beyond the properties we give them. Maybe that is what knowing what something is is?
Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with Asimov at all, I just think his characterization of physics as constituting knowledge is overly enthusiastic. Like, yes, its clear physics constitutes knowledge of some sort, but I think its much less knowledge of what things actually are than Asimov might be prepared to entertain.
The reason I raise the point is that its at least conceivable that we could have found ourselves in a world where physics discovered a fundamental ontology of the universe. Eg, maybe we could have discovered that quantum fields could be consistently described at all scales and thus we could more definitively say "yes, Virginia, the universe is composed of quantum fields." But we did not find this. Quantum Fields are widely understood to be effective descriptions of some unknown phenomenon which may not even resemble anything which makes intuitive sense with the rest of the way we think about physics. And all of that is to say nothing about quantum mechanics or quantum gravity.
This isn't a trivial observation. We seemed to know more and more about the ontology of the world up to and perhaps slightly after the annus mirabilis. Simply establishing that atoms existed was a sort of ontological climax which then unraveled into a flaccid denouement as quantum mechanics and then QFT and the inability to formulate quantum gravity cast deep doubt on what things are even made of or whether its even possible to conceive of things at all. I stress again, this might not have happened. I can imagine some possible world where t'Hooft like cellular automata were somehow confirmed and the question of ontology was well and truly put to bed or at least for any but the most extreme philosophical skeptics.
But aren't you essentially arguing that, indeed, there's wrong and there's wronger, and refuting the English professor who seemed to argue that "everyone is wrong but until shown this they are convinced they are right, therefore all knowledge is impossible"? (i.e. a slightly less new age version of "everything is relative!").
In other words, that Asimov is saying 2+2=5, while the English professor is saying "there's not difference between 5 and 'purple' as an answer!".
In other words, don't you agree with main point of the article?
I think we do understand a lot about the universe, even though there's also a huge amount we don't. I do think we understand "the basis" as Asimov put it -- it's just that even with the basis there's a lot we don't understand.
I agree, I just don't like the vibe. I would have expressed it differently, not as "we are zeroing in on knowledge," which I think is a very difficult thing to say, and more like "we are better and better at making predictions."
I grew up fascinated by these essays from maybe age 8 onward.
Now I realize the pervasive bad faith in them, e.g. dismissing Murray (The Bell Curve) and enthronizing the in-retrospect-irrelevant Jay Gould. I knew his novels were kind of silly, but he was supposed to be a Scientist educating us in the scientific view of the world, goddamn it.
> enthronizing the in-retrospect-irrelevant Jay Gould
What? Stephen Jay Gould is not irrelevant.
> I knew his novels were kind of silly
They are not silly. They belong to a different era of Science Fiction, sure. But silly? (He did engage in intentionally goofy humor, of course, but I don't think that's what you meant).
> he was supposed to be a Scientist educating us in the scientific view of the world, goddamn it.
This is an article where I agree with its statements yet disagree with its spirit. Everything written is true, but has to be put in context - the writer he's responding to was challenging these specific claims:
> what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the Universe ... We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships ... What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical Universe ...
I don't think there's anything wrong with making casual statements of this sort, but I also don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out (in response) that these statements are philosophically unrigorous. I mean, what makes something a "basic rule", and how can you tell that we have apprehended all such rules in existence?
The English Lit professor was effectively arguing we cannot know anything; that any certainty is bound to be as false as any debunked theories of the past; that people of the past were also sure of their silly notions and look where they are now; etc.
This is what Asimov is essentially rejecting (in a humorous manner; it's important to know Asimov's claims that he's "never wrong" were to be taken with humor. He was quite the comedian).
Essentially, Asimov is saying to the professor:
- You are wrong in believing nothing can be known.
- You are not saying anything new or unknown to people of science. We've thought of this and have ways of testing our ideas and of evaluating their relative merits.
- Even if two theories are wrong, it's misleading to conclude "everything is equally wrong, therefore assertions about the universe are reckless", because there are degrees of wrongness, and some knowledge that is wrong is nevertheless more useful than other knowledge that is also wrong.
We can never know if this English Lit professor ever existed or is just a rhetorical device by Asimov, but we do know one thing for certain:
Allow me to defend the professor here. Asimov is making a couple different claims and attempts to equivocate them, perhaps incorrectly. It's fairly obvious that spelling "sugar" as "sugur" is less wrong compared to spelling it as "afjkdsfk". This is because we have an objectively correct value for "sugar" that we can compare it to. This is different from refining theories and observations over time and declaring that they are less wrong!
Take stomach ulcers for example - before modern medicine people didn't know their cause, but were able to somewhat treat them using bismuth compounds. Doctors and scientists refined their theories over the years based on the concept that they are caused by stress, spicy food, and excess stomach acid, developing various cures, until Barry James Marshall discovered that they were actually caused by H. pylori. Before this discovery it would seem reasonable to think we were "less wrong", that because our theories became more refined that we were closer to the truth.
As theories of the universe become more uh, theoretical, we cannot accurately measure and gain a sense of if we are moving closer or farther from the truth. Perhaps this was the point the professor was getting at, or maybe it's just some postmodern "knowledge doesn't exist" thing - we can't really tell because Asimov only paraphrases the professor. But I increasingly get the idea that we don't actually know much of anything about the universe based on the seemingly insane theories coming out (eg string theory, infinite worlds).
Of course Asimov oversimplifies things. He's also playing to his audience and being sarcastic and humorous. He's being snarky, and when snarkiness is the goal, accuracy suffers.
We don't even know if this professor actually existed, or whether he/she was invented by Asimov for the sake of his essay.
I think the message is valuable though, even if there are nuances and exceptions to it. A "rule of thumb" if you will.
The idea Asimov was fighting against was this "new age" belief that nothing can be known, everything is equally wrong, everything is "opinion" and yours is as valid as mine, etc etc.
PS: a tangent, aren't things like string theory pretty controversial (in the sense of "is this real or fantasy") even within the Physics community?
> The idea Asimov was fighting against was this "new age" belief that nothing can be known, everything is equally wrong, everything is "opinion" and yours is as valid as mine, etc etc.
Yeah that's valid. I do find philosophical discussions about the nature of knowledge fascinating but it's often used as a bludgeon to assert one's opinion as being equal to fact.
For a second I thought this was an invocation of one of those informal "laws" (like a Murphys Law or Sturgeons Law), describing the feeling of finding one great thing and lamenting that there's no more like it.
So the hope of it being your discovery of a rich genre turns into the lament that it's one of one (how I feel about the Three Body Problem). But no, it's a real book. And looks like a great suggestion from what I can tell on wiki.
In fairness, I don't think Socrates went around Athens quizzing people chosen randomly on the street. He was having conversations with the wealthy and/or powerful who were also arrogant and considered themselves wise. Making fools of these people is of course what got him into big trouble eventually.
"The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing."
This is a common misquote with similar frequency to perhaps "Play it again, Sam." In his Apology (not meaning apology, from apo-logia, speaking for oneself, i.e. defense) Socrates says:
"... ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι."
"Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks he knows. I neither know nor think I know" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing?utm...).
The context is that Socrates was puzzled by the Delphic Oracle's declaration that he is the wisest man. The man mentioned is an unnamed politician who was known to be wise.
Is a punched-up version really a misquote? He said basically the same thing, just in a more meandering way.
Agreed, I think there's a culture of overzealous "correction" with respect to historical quotations. It's not completely irrelevant that it's a conversation with an oracle or that his attitude was puzzlement in response to being regarded wisest, as contrasted with him just declaring it unprovoked.
But still, they are expressions of intellectual humility that come from not knowing and contrasting it to the attitude of claiming to know without really knowing, that essence is the same even with the "correction" and complements Asimov's essay either way. So I think "misquote" is a little strong here.
I wonder if this is where the writers of The Big Bang Theory came up with this conversation:
Stuart: Oh, Sheldon, I'm afraid you couldn't be more wrong.
Sheldon: More wrong? Wrong is an absolute state and not subject to gradation.
Stuart: Of course it is. It's a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable, it's very wrong to say it's a suspension bridge.
This wonderful essay explicitly criticizes one genre of philosophy popular in academic English literature departments, but I think it also implicitly undermines another genre popular in academic English-speaking philosophy departments. The latter frequently propound something like the so-called correspondence theory of truth, yet they also treat truth and falsity as absolutes, mutually exclusive. There's no room for approximation and degrees of accuracy.
> The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts
> Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.
"All models are wrong. Some models are useful." is the way that I have heard this thesis quipped. I suppose "All models are wrong. Some models are more wrong than others." would fit Asimov's points better, but I've never actually heard that one
Also, some models aren't even wrong, because they fail to make testable predictions
"not even wrong"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
The map-territory relation is possibly a better fit?
More specifically how Alfred Korzybski put it: "The map is not the territory".
The map will never be the territory, and we are just looking for better maps.
My father-in-law, something of a renaissance man, and also a long-time successful commodities trader, regularly uses your latter expression. The first time I heard him say it, I attempted to correct him (“some are useful”) and he confidently brushed me aside. As I’ve matured, I’ve grown confident that his (your) version is less wrong.
It isn't only about the degree of wrongness, but its type:
1. Vacuous, which provide no useful insight beyond what is obviously deducible. Such as "nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye".
2. Vanity, which provide useless elaboration of something that is very well understood in a much simpler form, with no realistic hope of any future insight. Such as most of linguistics.
3. Pointless. Explain something that is difficult to get to know, because it matters so little. While technically correct, the actual facts matter so little that they result in no realistic improvement of any kind, and no decisions are changed as the result of the new knowledge. Such as the age of Earth.
4. Theoretically wrong, those that the article is talking about. Even though theoretically wrong, the are so nearly equivalent to the actual truth, that the difference doesn't matter in practice.
5. Practically wrong. Those that "sound good" so that people stick to them, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. Such as that obesity is caused by overeating, in spite of the near universal failure in practice, in the last instance of Ozempic making people look like walking corpses, rather than anything like a healthy body. This is the kind of errors meant by those who write to people like Asimov.
I firmly believe, more and more each day, that the human mind does not seek truth or correctness, it primarily seeks satisfaction.
The context for satisfaction is different for every individual human. Some parts of the context are shared (to various degrees). These 'shared contexts' we might call rationality, or science, or society, or religion.
Another part of the problem is that satisfaction is recursive.
We may evaluate something based on:
This is obviously self-referential because if something is incorrect or incomplete, then it is also unsatisfying.For instance, if you are only aware of Electromagnetism, then Maxwell's equations are correct, complete, and satisfying. And then some jerk discovers neutrons.
Anyway, this whole comment may fit into your first three points; or it may help someone understand a failure to communicate.
Obesity is caused by overeating though, at the very least in the same sense that nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye.
Energy intake > energy expenditure, but both intake and expenditure can vary for a variety of reasons uncorrelated with eating habits.
Sorry for being pedantic but I think that's what the above commentator meant.
> Energy intake > energy expenditure
Isn't that technically overeating though?
If someone ate the same three meals for 20 years and maintained a consistent weight, and then due to some physiological change started to put on weight eating the same amount, I'd find it reasonable but perhaps incorrect to attribute their weight gain to overeating. But yeah, technically at the end of the day, they could eat less :)
Yeah, it's not very useful in practice of course. Telling someone "eat less" has very unimpressive real world impact
You have made an interesting point but I think your arguments would have more force if you exercised some restraint in categorically stating your opinions about what is wrong and in what way as facts, basically.
Anyway, while I agree on these other types of "wrong" being important, I don't know about calling 1-3. wrong, per se. Also, I'm curious what part of linguistics you consider to belong under the "vanity" label, and why it would be apt to call "pointless" facts (like the age of the Earth) wrong.
> obviously deducible. Such as "nearsightedness is caused by the wrong shape of the eye"
Not obvious at all. According to Wikipedia it was discovered in 17th century. About only half century earlier than the discovery of bacteria.
While far-sightedness can be caused by shape, OR loss of elasticity in the lens as one ages.
> 3. Pointless. Explain something that is difficult to get to know, because it matters so little. While technically correct, the actual facts matter so little that they result in no realistic improvement of any kind, and no decisions are changed as the result of the new knowledge. Such as the age of Earth.
It's bizarre to even consider that investigating the age of the Earth is "pointless". Finding out the age of our planet and other celestial bodies matters a lot in astronomy! Understanding the universe is the opposite of pointless, it's fascinating.
Or did you mean something else?
Related:
The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481166 - Sept 2023 (124 comments)
The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29811788 - Jan 2022 (5 comments)
The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24055125 - Aug 2020 (2 comments)
The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818069 - Aug 2018 (11 comments)
The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13082585 - Dec 2016 (16 comments)
The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654774 - May 2016 (60 comments)
Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629797 - May 2015 (138 comments)
Isaac Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147968 - Feb 2010 (32 comments)
"...when I say I am glad that I live in a century when the Universe is essentially understood, I think I am justified."
Funny how we don't even fully understand what happens when we crack our joints but are certain about how the Universe "essentially" works.
The way that Sean Carroll says it is something along the lines of, the fundamental physics governing everyday life are understood. That is to say, we can solve for what an electron, proton, etc (or a collection of maybe a few dozen) are going to do in a particular experiment. The second and third generations of charged particles are excluded from the definition of everyday life, as are any other hypothesized particles because they require higher energy levels than are relevant. Explaining how the brain works is excluded as not being fundamental, though in principle a sufficiently advanced computer would be able to simulate it.
Exactly, that's where my mind went too. I think people are tempted by a well-meaning skepticism to think that it's high minded to be skeptical of affirmative claims of knowledge, but it ends up throwing a very hard won model of everyday physics out the window.
I saw a very frustrating live "debate" between Dr Blitz (monikor of a really cool science communicator and irl PhD physicist) and a flat earther, where the flat earther essentially borrowed these arguments (eg observations aren't really predictive or generalizable or able to count in favor of specific theories, confirmed theories have no special status etc) to dismiss the evidentiary support of the earth being round. It's an intellectual car crash masquerading as a respectable position on scientific foundations.
Well, let me ask you: when your joints crack do you think the process involves something other than physics at its most basic level?
You may take it from my posing the question that I think its obvious that joint cracking is determined by physics, and I do tend to think this, but I think a compelling argument can at least be made that joint cracking might not actually be fundamentally determined by physics.
We don't even know if the laws of physics are constant. In fact, it is literally unknowable.
> a compelling argument can at least be made
Absolutely! But it takes a good deal of hubris to call this knowledge.
Apologies in advance if I'm missing your point (I might be!) but... If it turns out that the laws are not constant, our present understanding would be retained as a special case of a broader theory and the local predictive capabilities would still be real in their scope. And leveraging a "we don't know" to cash out as affirmative skepticism tries to make the absence of data do more than it can.
As you noted, the degree of uncertainty we're currently wrestling with is also what we would see if it was true that the laws were constant. Kind of like an anthropic principle but on behalf of the constancy of the universe's laws.
This may all be restating what you said in a different way, but for me the important upshot is that I don't come out of it with an attitude that our current physical understanding is a tenuous house of cards and that I need to watch my step because, who knows, the strong nuclear force could change at any moment.
At minimum the are quasi-stable over long enough periods of time for life to firm. In some ways we know they are not 'constant', as in before the big bang there is a firewall that looks like entropy was zero.
Now if you think that's going to matter in the next few billion years is very probable you're mistaken.
We don't even know if the gods are real... in fact it is literally unknowable.
An yet... you're claiming to know what the gods like and don't like. Strange.
A better way I like to say it is.
Everything prove able by religion is not unique to religion.
Everything unique to religion is not proveable.
It takes a good deal of hubris to deny it.
> but I think a compelling argument can at least be made that joint cracking might not actually be fundamentally determined by physics.
Wait, what? I was nodding along with you for making a great point about how this doesn't threaten our confidence in the venture of physicalist explanation of the natural world (sidebar, I think we actually do know quite a bit about what happens when joints crack), but I had a record scratch here. I think I agree with your upshot but I wouldn't agree that a compelling argument, tentative or otherwise, can be made for a non physical explanation.
It roughly goes like this: if phenomena can be truly emergent, which is to say that the phenomena is causally independent of the underlying physical system, then its reasonable to say that the emergent behavior is not determined by the physical law of the underlying system.
Terrance Deacon makes this case in "Incomplete Nature." As I said, I think its wrong, but I think its worth considering whether it could be right.
Another example: is Firefox explained by electronics?
The computer is made out of electronics, and Firefox exists in the computer and is in a way part of the computer, but electronics is not the right level to understand Firefox, and in principle you could implement Firefox on a computer that wasn't made out of electronics.
A great example, though it makes me want to head something off. You can be a brute literalist and insist it is the right level since its capable of embodying and instantiating Firefox, and so it's "just" a medium but the medium embodies the message, and knowing its configuration "in terms of electricity" does give you message, the structure, and the concepts.
Although we abstract away the electronics, it doesn't have the implication sometimes suggested by emergentism, that it exhibits a physical reality that is "independent of" its electronics. The abstracting away shouldn't be taken to mean that some new ontological thing was conjured into being that's physically real in the same sense as the electronics.
If that seems like it goes without saying or is beside the point, well, great! That's kind of what I want to hear. But in some emergentism debates it becomes important to insist there's a "more is different" thing happening that's necessary to explain physical properties.
Thanks for elaborating (would not have expected cracking knuckles to be a place where emergentism gets invoked!).
I think I agree with you that this notion of emergentism is wrong although I'm inclined to say it's more super wrong than respectably wrong. If you're interested in another philosopher, I agree with Jaegwon Kim that physics operates on casual closure, which leaves no room for this form of emergence.
Is Terrance Deacon a physicist?
He is a philosopher. I'm a physicist and I've read his book and I found it interesting. Don't know what to tell you.
Most physicists don't know all that much about the philosophical underpinnings of their discipline, so I'd rather see what philosophers have to say about it anyway. But that isn't the point. I'm saying I thought the book was well put together and thought provoking, though I don't think his argument goes through. If that interests you, read it. If you prefer to let an arbitrary label filter out whose ideas you might entertain, I guess go for it.
Oh, no, you got me wrong. I was curious about his credentials, but this doesn't mean I don't find philosophy intriguing and fascinating. I would say humanity cannot exist without philosophy. Thinking about ourselves, thinking about knowledge, thinking about what we believe about knowledge, thinking about what is and what is not, thinking about thinking -- all of these are essential.
It's just that it matters to me whether it's a philosopher who's arguing about the physical properties of the universe or a physicist.
I do think you care a bit about labels and what they stand for, after all your first post didn't fail to mention you're a physicist!
I think our confusion comes from the fact that from where I am standing there is not a lot of difference between philosophers and physicists because I'm mostly thinking about philosophers who are philosophers of physics or in adjacent fields.
I understand you're discussing philosophers engaged in epistemology, which are some of the philosophers closer to science.
I think epistemology is critical and necessary. It fascinates me. However, I wouldn't class them as physicists (unless they actually are, of course; you can wear more than one hat).
I admit I'm not familiar with Deacon, but Wikipedia states he's a "neuroanthropologist". I wonder how he would feel about a physicist making authoritative statements on neurobiology or anthropology!
This trap is not hypothetical. Remember when Michael Behe sided with Creationism and Intelligent Design, using his credentials as a scientist to try to discredit the theory of evolution? But he wasn't a scientist trained in that field, nor was he qualified to comment on it. He was a biochemist!
(I hope we've established labels do matter, insofar as they mean the person so labeled is immersed and has demonstrated high qualifications in the labeled field).
I guess what I am sort of getting at is that no amount of trusting labels to delineate intellectuals will protect you from having to actually look at something and decide whether the person has something useful or interesting to say or not.
In this particular discussion I don't particularly care whether some Joe Schmoe on the street trusts or doesn't trust Terrance Deacon on the basis of what his degree says. It doesn't matter.
And I actually think your example of Michael Behe works towards my point of view. Credentials are a very weak signal of expertise on any subject, as he demonstrates. I think at the basic level of philosophy of science or physics or whatever, the idea that we can break up disciplines into clear chunks is just silly. At some point a serious intellectual just has to do the work for themselves to digest the ideas. I'd be worse off if I had skipped Deacon's book (which, incidentally and again, I don't think really lands) if I had skipped it because he didn't have a PhD that matched mine.
> I guess what I am sort of getting at is that no amount of trusting labels to delineate intellectuals will protect you from having to actually look at something and decide whether the person has something useful or interesting to say or not.
I actually agree with this! I'm sure Deacon has interesting things to say. And yes, I can only find out about it by reading him, not by reading Wikipedia's summary -- or you.
Michael Behe didn't have the right kind of credentials: he was speaking outside his area of expertise, as was noted repeatedly during that debacle. He co-opted the mantle of capital-letter Science and misused it to maliciously confuse his audience.
> I think at the basic level of philosophy of science or physics or whatever, the idea that we can break up disciplines into clear chunks is just silly.
Of course all distinctions are man-made and therefore arbitrary. Yet you have a doctorate in Physics, and not in Neuroanthropology. At a fundamental level, you understood if Physics interested you, there was a path for you which was this path and not that other path. The border might be fuzzy, but at some level you understand not all regions are equivalent.
> At some point a serious intellectual just has to do the work for themselves to digest the ideas. I'd be worse off if I had skipped Deacon's book (which, incidentally and again, I don't think really lands) if I had skipped it because he didn't have a PhD that matched mine.
I fully agree and I'm not arguing anyone should skip Deacon (or anyone else) because they are not physicists. I just wouldn't pay the same attention to a Physics lecture by someone whose expertise doesn't lie in Physics (or to an anthropology lecture by a physicist who's not also an anthropologist). Doesn't mean I would necessarily skip it though!
I also understand you're not saying Deacon is right. Sufficiently interesting ideas are worth considering regardless of whether they are right. I don't think Julian Jaynes is right either, yet I consider "The Origin of Consciousness" an extremely interesting book!
I'm not sure how many times I have to explain I consider philosophy, epistemology and -- I'll say it -- the humanities essential? I'm not arguing about skipping anything!
I think we kind of agree. Obviously no one has enough time to personally vet every single claimant to expertise, so we use credentials to help. But I think in this particular context Deacon's specific credentials aren't really that relevant, at least to the extent that I'm vouching for him and that might (but I guess who am I, right) obviate the need to rely on his specific credentials.
Replace the word "physics" with "God" and see if it sounds substantially different.
See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L22jhyY9ocXQNLqyE/science-as...
The whole argument in your linked article rubs me the wrong way.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the two ways "because science" or "because God" might stop my curiosity is because 1) I'm looking for a good master's thesis topic (a problem well in my past, thank God) or 2) my immediate survival is dependent on much more immediate problems than the underlying physical phenomena that cause e.g. a lightbulb to work.
I think there's a certain set of people who, in the absence of more pressing concerns, drop everything upon experiencing a new phenomenon, in a quest to understand it. That certainly describes parts of my life. But the writer takes as axiomatic that most people don't drop everything to study whatever event because they were told that it had been explained, and not, you know, because their landlord doesn't accept white papers on the fundamental properties of reality in lieu of rent.
I think embedded in the statement "because science" is the connotation that ignorance of the underlying phenomenon is not itself dangerous to the people experiencing it. If I observed a bright light literally burning people, and I ask "how is that light burning people?", the person who knows more but simply says "its physics" shares some culpability with me if I just accept that answer incuriously and then get burnt by the light.
But if people aren't getting burnt, is it intellectual laziness to grunt "good enough" on my way to more pressing matters? Perhaps. This whole essay reads to me as a way to judge and find wanting the kind of person whose apparent curiosity stopped at how to do their job. The point of the essay (although it took a lot of curiosity on my part to tease it out) is apparently to say "don't let the fact that it is known stop you from finding out yourself", but it ended up sounding like "if you're taking anything as received knowledge, you're abdicating your responsibility as a thinking entity".
> It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn't till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison.
Savage.
A philosophy professor I had when I was an undergrad, asked the question "Why did Socrates deliver the Apology in such a way that was clearly unapologetic and designed to annoy the Athenians"? His answer was that he thought Socrates was old and wanted to go out with a bang. I thought his answer had merit, and also that it was an answer I, at 19, would never have come up with. At 70, I go "oh, yeah, baby".
Sounds like he finally pissed off the wrong guy.
When my daughter was in middle school we were discussing some concept she learned in Biology that wasn't precisely wrong but wasn't right in all use cases. I told her that a model didn't have to be true to be useful. She said "that's a good way of thinking about it" and since that is such a rare complement from a teenager I have remembered it ever since.
I think it's true though. I think a good science teacher can say from the outset that we don't know it all and science is always growing and changing.
>In his discussions of such matters as "What is justice?" or "What is virtue?" he took the attitude that he knew nothing and had to be instructed by others. By pretending ignorance, Socrates lured others into propounding their views on such abstractions. Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn't know what they were talking about.
See also: Jordan Peterson et al. Our tendency to favor logical correctness over empirical correctness is one of our most dangerous cognitive biases. It's very easy to convince people to believe arguments that are perfectly logically consistent in their own self-constructed reality but have no bearing on empirical reality, over arguments that conform to empirical reality but may not have perfect logical consistency. Empirical reality is messy and it's difficult to construct a perfectly consistent set of axioms around it; constructed reality is neat and thus trivial to construct sets of perfectly consistent axioms around it.
So is this essay the source of “Less Wrong”?
Yes. People like to think in terms of 100% or 0%. Never anything in between. Even though almost everything falls somewhere in between. That's why I like bits and dislike q-bits, for example.
The irony of my own statement dawned on me when I discovered that some people suggest that 2 + 2 does not necessarily equal 4, but could also equal 22.
There is no doubt that the exact sciences have something more than philosophy.
It's always a pleasure to read Isaac. Well, almost, I should say.
All I can say about this as a dude with a doctorate in physics and an interest in foundations is: I guess, dude, if this is how you want to live your life.
It isn't that I agree with the person who wrote Asimov the letter (in fact, based on his description, I frankly wonder if the letter writer wasn't my father). Its just that there is something subtly wrong with Asimov's view of the progress of scientific knowledge.
At least its extremely instrumentalist. If we think of knowledge as a sort of temporary mental state which lives between setting up a physical state and making a measurement, then, yes, knowledge has progressed in exactly the way that Asimov is saying. And that is nothing to sneeze at.
But like consider quantum mechanics. People still cannot make heads or tails of what the ontology of quantum mechanics is, despite some compelling stories. And that makes perfect sense since QM is not compatible with special or general relativity! So its dumb to try and make sense of what QM tells us about what is. So why not try to understand what the ontology of QFT is? This seems reasonable, since QFT is capable of making correct predictions (at least in the scattering regime) and is invariant. But no one on earth can write down a coherent mathematical theory of QFT, so interpretation is even more difficult than QM. And this is yet to even try to tackle with conceptual gap between GR and QM/QFT, where we genuinely are perplexed but at least have good reason to think that the final interpretation of QM or spacetime has to have something to do with the way that the two theories interact.
From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.
My personal understanding here is that really there are no electrons, photons, quantum fields, masses, gravity. There is just the single substance of the universe which we have learned to manipulate and predict with ever improving precision (in limited cases). Maybe that is knowledge? Doesn't always feel like it.
As another dude with a doctorate in Physics, I have to disagree with you (at least somewhat).
> From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.
I disagree with this entirely. The existence of QFT, and our knowledge of the inconsistency between say GR and the quantum realm does not negate the idea of photons and electrons as real, measurable quantities. The fact that we have GR does not negate the fact that we still use Newtonian gravity in regimes where it is sufficiently accurate.
All the new knowledge we have learned still is (and absolutely must be) consistent with our old knowledge that has been proven correct in the regimes that they were proven correct.
This is effectively what Asimov is saying (as I understand anyway) - the knowledge that the Earth is a sphere does not invalidate the assumption that the Earth is flat approximately and locally.
I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.
String theory can tell me that we have several dimensions etc but until we have a way to measure and check it remains a conceptual framework to make predictions, rather than a description of how things really are.
GR is much closer to a description. It told us about the precession of mercury, it told us to account for time dilation so we can use GPS satellites. It also predicted black holes, which were conceptually consistent but it's only been in the last ~ 5 years that we have the closest thing yet to experimental verification with the Event Horizon Telescope and gravitational wave measurements. If another theory comes along and explains all of GR with a different explanation for black holes, we will need still more accurate measurements to discriminate between the two theories. Knowledge is only as accurate as we can measure.
I agree much more with your approach.
The way I've heard it best described is these notions of electrons and photons etc will still be retained as a special case of whatever theory supersedes them, which is critical, because that's at the heart of the "relativity of wrong" argument.
Some take the prospect of a future revision of theories to mean our present state of knowledge is no different than any prior failed theory, which I think is an urgently, catastrophically wrong, catastrophically confused way to regard the history of scientific knowledge.
QM is so platonic though. Reality consists, ultimately, of forms that can only be described mathematically. It just happens that the math returns (what we see) as a probability distribution/wave function.
I’ve never quite understood what a quantum theory of gravity would be though. QM involves the observer but gravity engages spacetime - the place where you are observing things. A quantum field theory of gravity seems like a contradiction in terms to me. Unless quantum gravity is really about the Big Bang?
The observer/observed thing is present in every part of physics and isn't really about observers but about where we choose to draw the line between one physical system and another (with the other usually containing ourselves).
Think of it this way: classically or quantum mechanically, when we pick out a physical system to talk about we are isolating the terms for that system in the universal lagrangian and assuming that in the time of interest that the terms for our physical system couple weakly to the rest of the universe (which happens to contain us).
In principal nothing really weird is going on here and in classical mechanics the idea is totally trivial as far as it goes. On short time scales with appropriately sized actions the deviation from the isolated system and the real system (which is weakly coupled to the world) can be demonstrated to be small as long as the coupling is small.
In quantum mechanics two things complicate this situation. The first is that quantum mechanical systems sort of defy separation into distinct subsets except in special situations. Classically there is a strong sense in which we can point to two different parts of a system and call them separate, but quantum mechanically we really only know how to time evolve _the whole system_ and from a mathematical point of view its the actual object of interest. This is what we are getting at when we talk about entanglement: the two spin 1/2 particles flying away from one another in Bell style experiments are not separate things in the QM description: there is just one wave function.
But in practice I don't think there is any real reason we can't quantize gravity. I'm not an expert but loop quantum gravity seems like a reasonable approach and its very straightforward and its base: just find an acceptable description of geometry and then apply the ordinary quantum mechanical tricks we use to quantize it.
Also, you don't observe things in spacetime. Observations are always purely local. You just infer the existence of spacetime from local observations which are conveniently organized by putting them on a curved 4d Lorentzian signature manifold.
I don't think you get my point because I don't think of anything you are saying as having anything to do with what I was saying.
If you have a purely instrumentalist view of reality, where, as I said, your so-called knowledge is actually just a model of an unknown thing which you employ to predict the measurements you read out against a ruler or on a meter or something, then yes, we've made progress exactly of the kind you describe.
But I was trying to make a point about epistemology and ontology. Physics has actually been pretty catastrophic for ontology. I don't think its wrong to say that from the point of view of physics we simply do not know what anything actually is.
> I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.
Yes. But this is a fairly radical position historically and philosophically. Most people would say that there is more to existence than measurement and I while I share your instrumentalist sympathies, like most physicists, I don't see the philosophical case that we can have a consistent worldview if we denounce all knowledge not related to measurement as a total non-starter.
Think about what instrumentalism really means. When you utter the sentence the earth is an oblate spheroid, you are actually making an incredibly complicated set of statements about the outcomes of experiments. If we take the instrumentalist view the measurement doesn't actually tell us the earth is an oblate spheroid - it just tells us that if we make a series of measurements then they come out in such a way as to be concordant with a model of the earth as an oblate spheroid. Are you really prepared to give up the idea that the earth is a thing you can know about?
I actually rather think physics strongly encourages us to adopt the instrumentalist view, primarily because it seems so clear that physics has a local character. In GR there simply is no state of affairs whatever about what is happening "right now" except at the point in spacetime where you make a measurement. Really think about what that means. If we are standing at the north pole and make a measurement of some kind, how can it pertain to the earth as a distributed object in space when we know GR says there is no state of affairs pertaining to that object at the moment of the measurement?
GR tells us all about what the outcome of various measurements will be, but it also calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean. The instrumentalist is committed to the idea that the only thing we can talk about is the results of measurements. What the measurements operate on is just not something we can know. I think that's weird. Physicists often conflate their mathematical models with reality and that lets them think an instrumentalist view is sufficient: the measurements coming out such and such a way is taken as evidence that the universe is filled with objects consistent with the model. But that association is non-trivial in modern physics.
It must be the case that our measurements are interfacing with something ontologically real, so I can't agree with the minimizing tone that treats respect for them them as implicitly necessitating a total exclusion of ontology. Far from breaking the link between measurement and reality, examples like GR’s localism or QM’s treatment of particles show that measurement is what pushes us into new and unfamiliar ontological commitments.
To then suggest that Asimov's essay depends on such a radical version of instrumentalism feels unnecessary, given that his argument attaches just as well, I would say better, to a view that makes space for ontology but still underwrites the history of progress he was describing. His essay seems less a failure to follow deeper philosophical detours than a decision to keep his argument tied to that central point.
You also seem to be implying a kind of ontological "regression" in the history of knowledge which I think comes from projecting specific ontological attitudes retroactively onto the past when those distinctions weren’t even part of the vocabulary.
A big problem with Steven Jay Gould’s self-posturing as a savior of Darwinian theory was that he manufactured a crisis of his own invention about "gradualism" and then claimed to resolve it. Darwin never assumed a fixed speed of evolution, so the supposed crisis dissolves once you stop reading one into the history. A similar attitude helps in reading the history of science: early measurements and models need not be seen as knowledge of ontology that we somehow "lost" but as data accompanied by overconfident declarations that can be separated out.
If you correct for ontology in this way, treating the instruments as interfacing with whatever is ontologically real, then you see steady progress toward more accurate knowledge. Far from being subtly wrong this reinforces the core of Asimov’s point that successive models are increasingly less wrong because they are tethered to reality (e.g flat to globe to spheroid to GR’s spacetime and beyond). It's that same arc of progress carrying us through those examples into more exotic ontologies. And the sense of crisis comes not from instrumentalism's commitments but from identifying progress with 'intuitively familiar' as if outgrowing our conceptual inheritance were failure rather than discovery.
Long reply already but one more thing. I would go so far as to say that all-out instrumentalism is a way of reading what Kuhn advocated (and perhaps actually what Kuhn believed depending on who you ask), and it was key to him to get away from notions of progress that rely on ontological commitments to external reality. And so a lot of the pushback was to rescue "progress" by insisting on ontological commitments that make the notion of progress make sense. In that light I can't see a way of reading Asimov advocating progress that would commit him to that kind of instrumentalism.
I'm not a native speaker so I had to look up what "ontology" means specifically, and what I got is : "The branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being. " (among other things)
I agree in that sense that physics does not do well here. I actually think physics _cannot_ do well here. Physics (and the "hard" sciences more generally) are good at describing what something is, and how it interacts with things around it. We "know" by assembling individual pieces of information that form a consistent model, then declare that model to be true. When a piece of information outside of that model arises, we then have to call that model in question.
I do not "know" the Earth is spherical from direct experience. I do "know" it from other indirect means - reading, measurements, images from space and so on. I do not also think that Asimov is saying anything about how we know what we know - he just talks about how "science is wrong" is not a true statement. Science is always approximately correct, but how approximate is the question.
So perhaps I'm missing the point entirely here, but I don't understand your distinction of "instrumentalist knowledge" vs other kinds of knowledge. If you say physics cannot explain my knowledge that I enjoy watching the sunrise - then absolutely yes. That is not it's realm. In the same way that physics cannot explain the history of medieval China to me. A common issue among physicists is to assume that this is the only way to view the world, and I disagree with that. There are many systems of knowledge, and each is good at certain things. Rejecting one as the "global" system misses the richness of other kinds of knowledge building.
To be honest, I think you're straying from science into philosophy.
"The nature of being", "ontology", "it calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean".
Science is not about the search for meaning, it's about describing and understanding the physical and natural world. Meaning is up to you, and me, and everyone else.
Asimov was not talking about meaning.
It's easy to see that he wasn't, because nobody would make the categorical statement that there's unequivocal progress in the search for meaning, because meaning is such a cultural (and personal) thing. Meaning is not scientific, and is highly subjective. I wouldn't even know how to measure meaning. Self-reporting? Chemically measured happiness? What.
Had the English professor complained "we think we know so much, yet we're so ignorant about what it all means! People are so unfulfilled, live such empty lives! Wake up, sheeple!" I bet Asimov would have... -- well, he probably would have had humorous words for that too, but his argument would have been different.
I do not think of science as distinct from philosophy. But I'm not talking about the sort of meaning you are talking about. I'm talking about the fundamental basic question of what the physical world consists of and how we relate to it.
When I say that most people think there is more to the world than measurement, I don't mean art or love or whatever. I mean that most people think that the world is made up of things that exist whether we measure them or not, things which have their own nature which we somehow can understand. The purely instrumental thinker says we can't understand those things, we only have measurements and mathematical expressions that relate measurements.
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Forgive me if this is a stupid interpretation and question, but are you basically saying that the tools we use to measure the universe actually produce our knowledge, rather than reflect an accurate model of reality? As in, in an alternative universe where we used different measurement tools, we would have discovered entirely different phenomena that we would consider to be part of the universe, but is really just a different way of interpreting the single substance of the universe?
If so this is compelling to me. In the same way that or senses impact our view of what exists and how it exists, but it's really just an interpretation of what's out there.
I'd say its subtle. The instrumentalist just says that measurements are reality period and that there isn't anything to say about what goes on between measurements. You can sort of see this at an extreme in QBism. You just write down the quantum Bayes rule and that is all you commit to saying about the universe.
I'd argue that what physics finds are (possibly non-unique) mathematical structures which correlate to the physical world. Because they are non-unique it is, in my opinion, silly to say things like "spacetime is a 4d manifold of Lorentzian signature with a connection like so and so, blah blah." There are other ways to describe the same dynamics which offer a different ontology and so we shouldn't just assume the terms in our physical models correspond to things in the universe.
I think we reasonably can say "there exists a thing in the universe or a part of the universe that has the property that we can describe it with a 4d manifold of Lorentzian signature and so on." So physics does identify properties that hold for parts of the universe on certain time, length, action scales. But I think the general vibe of physics in the 20th and 21st centuries is that we don't know what those things are beyond the properties we give them. Maybe that is what knowing what something is is?
Your answer here puzzles me.
It seems as if you intended it to disagree with Asimov, while in practice you actually agree with him and disagree with the English Lit professor?
Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with Asimov at all, I just think his characterization of physics as constituting knowledge is overly enthusiastic. Like, yes, its clear physics constitutes knowledge of some sort, but I think its much less knowledge of what things actually are than Asimov might be prepared to entertain.
The reason I raise the point is that its at least conceivable that we could have found ourselves in a world where physics discovered a fundamental ontology of the universe. Eg, maybe we could have discovered that quantum fields could be consistently described at all scales and thus we could more definitively say "yes, Virginia, the universe is composed of quantum fields." But we did not find this. Quantum Fields are widely understood to be effective descriptions of some unknown phenomenon which may not even resemble anything which makes intuitive sense with the rest of the way we think about physics. And all of that is to say nothing about quantum mechanics or quantum gravity.
This isn't a trivial observation. We seemed to know more and more about the ontology of the world up to and perhaps slightly after the annus mirabilis. Simply establishing that atoms existed was a sort of ontological climax which then unraveled into a flaccid denouement as quantum mechanics and then QFT and the inability to formulate quantum gravity cast deep doubt on what things are even made of or whether its even possible to conceive of things at all. I stress again, this might not have happened. I can imagine some possible world where t'Hooft like cellular automata were somehow confirmed and the question of ontology was well and truly put to bed or at least for any but the most extreme philosophical skeptics.
But aren't you essentially arguing that, indeed, there's wrong and there's wronger, and refuting the English professor who seemed to argue that "everyone is wrong but until shown this they are convinced they are right, therefore all knowledge is impossible"? (i.e. a slightly less new age version of "everything is relative!").
In other words, that Asimov is saying 2+2=5, while the English professor is saying "there's not difference between 5 and 'purple' as an answer!".
In other words, don't you agree with main point of the article?
I think we do understand a lot about the universe, even though there's also a huge amount we don't. I do think we understand "the basis" as Asimov put it -- it's just that even with the basis there's a lot we don't understand.
I agree, I just don't like the vibe. I would have expressed it differently, not as "we are zeroing in on knowledge," which I think is a very difficult thing to say, and more like "we are better and better at making predictions."
I grew up fascinated by these essays from maybe age 8 onward.
Now I realize the pervasive bad faith in them, e.g. dismissing Murray (The Bell Curve) and enthronizing the in-retrospect-irrelevant Jay Gould. I knew his novels were kind of silly, but he was supposed to be a Scientist educating us in the scientific view of the world, goddamn it.
> enthronizing the in-retrospect-irrelevant Jay Gould
What? Stephen Jay Gould is not irrelevant.
> I knew his novels were kind of silly
They are not silly. They belong to a different era of Science Fiction, sure. But silly? (He did engage in intentionally goofy humor, of course, but I don't think that's what you meant).
> he was supposed to be a Scientist educating us in the scientific view of the world, goddamn it.
Asimov? He was!
This is an article where I agree with its statements yet disagree with its spirit. Everything written is true, but has to be put in context - the writer he's responding to was challenging these specific claims:
> what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the Universe ... We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships ... What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical Universe ...
I don't think there's anything wrong with making casual statements of this sort, but I also don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out (in response) that these statements are philosophically unrigorous. I mean, what makes something a "basic rule", and how can you tell that we have apprehended all such rules in existence?
I don't think this is right.
The English Lit professor was effectively arguing we cannot know anything; that any certainty is bound to be as false as any debunked theories of the past; that people of the past were also sure of their silly notions and look where they are now; etc.
This is what Asimov is essentially rejecting (in a humorous manner; it's important to know Asimov's claims that he's "never wrong" were to be taken with humor. He was quite the comedian).
Essentially, Asimov is saying to the professor:
- You are wrong in believing nothing can be known.
- You are not saying anything new or unknown to people of science. We've thought of this and have ways of testing our ideas and of evaluating their relative merits.
- Even if two theories are wrong, it's misleading to conclude "everything is equally wrong, therefore assertions about the universe are reckless", because there are degrees of wrongness, and some knowledge that is wrong is nevertheless more useful than other knowledge that is also wrong.
We can never know if this English Lit professor ever existed or is just a rhetorical device by Asimov, but we do know one thing for certain:
He/she was wrong. The wrong kind of wrong, too!
Allow me to defend the professor here. Asimov is making a couple different claims and attempts to equivocate them, perhaps incorrectly. It's fairly obvious that spelling "sugar" as "sugur" is less wrong compared to spelling it as "afjkdsfk". This is because we have an objectively correct value for "sugar" that we can compare it to. This is different from refining theories and observations over time and declaring that they are less wrong!
Take stomach ulcers for example - before modern medicine people didn't know their cause, but were able to somewhat treat them using bismuth compounds. Doctors and scientists refined their theories over the years based on the concept that they are caused by stress, spicy food, and excess stomach acid, developing various cures, until Barry James Marshall discovered that they were actually caused by H. pylori. Before this discovery it would seem reasonable to think we were "less wrong", that because our theories became more refined that we were closer to the truth.
As theories of the universe become more uh, theoretical, we cannot accurately measure and gain a sense of if we are moving closer or farther from the truth. Perhaps this was the point the professor was getting at, or maybe it's just some postmodern "knowledge doesn't exist" thing - we can't really tell because Asimov only paraphrases the professor. But I increasingly get the idea that we don't actually know much of anything about the universe based on the seemingly insane theories coming out (eg string theory, infinite worlds).
I actually agree with you.
Of course Asimov oversimplifies things. He's also playing to his audience and being sarcastic and humorous. He's being snarky, and when snarkiness is the goal, accuracy suffers.
We don't even know if this professor actually existed, or whether he/she was invented by Asimov for the sake of his essay.
I think the message is valuable though, even if there are nuances and exceptions to it. A "rule of thumb" if you will.
The idea Asimov was fighting against was this "new age" belief that nothing can be known, everything is equally wrong, everything is "opinion" and yours is as valid as mine, etc etc.
PS: a tangent, aren't things like string theory pretty controversial (in the sense of "is this real or fantasy") even within the Physics community?
> The idea Asimov was fighting against was this "new age" belief that nothing can be known, everything is equally wrong, everything is "opinion" and yours is as valid as mine, etc etc.
Yeah that's valid. I do find philosophical discussions about the nature of knowledge fascinating but it's often used as a bludgeon to assert one's opinion as being equal to fact.
This was a very fun read. Any other recommendations similar to this?
Lockhart's Lament
For a second I thought this was an invocation of one of those informal "laws" (like a Murphys Law or Sturgeons Law), describing the feeling of finding one great thing and lamenting that there's no more like it.
So the hope of it being your discovery of a rich genre turns into the lament that it's one of one (how I feel about the Three Body Problem). But no, it's a real book. And looks like a great suggestion from what I can tell on wiki.
Yes, This was a very very very fun read.........
He’s not wrong
If nothing else, I'm glad one of the great agrees with me that Socrates was a twat.
My wife and I always argue about that, she loves Socrates and I find him utterly insufferable. Plato didn't do him any favors.
In fairness, I don't think Socrates went around Athens quizzing people chosen randomly on the street. He was having conversations with the wealthy and/or powerful who were also arrogant and considered themselves wise. Making fools of these people is of course what got him into big trouble eventually.
Which doesn't mean he wasn't an insufferable douche.