exchemist

Very much what the pope says in his encyclical, which I am in the middle of wading through. Building a Tower of Babel. The State needs to wake up and control these people.

I must say it is not obvious to me that more philosophy can help physics. What unsolved problems do they think that could address? It seems to me the danger is the opposite. We already have a cottage industry in string theory, going for several decades now, which I gather has yet to make a single testable prediction. Arguably that is more philosophy than science. As Pauli said of Bohmian mechanics, it seems to be an “uncashable cheque”. But I’m not a physicist of course.

My impression was that the fad du jour was ontology, as applied to physics. There have been about half a dozen threads on that, either here or on the other forum I frequent. Perhaps some chatbot has started using it and everyone thinks that's cool and is copying it. But you are right that "substrate" pops up quite a bit, perhaps now that we are cottoning onto "framework" as a probable sign of botshit.

Maintaining a “position” is not doing good, though. What you seem to want to argue is that what is felt to constitute doing good may vary from person to person. That’s true but it does not follow that one cannot persuade somebody to do good. I have given examples of this, viz. persuading someone to make a charitable donation, or, during the pandemic, to look out for neighbours as a result of a publicity campaign. Would you deny that those are examples of successful persuasion?

OK, but then I'm not sure I see the problem you think needs to be addressed. Mathematics per se has nothing to do with ontology and I don't think anybody here is arguing otherwise. Mathematics is essentially a form of abstract reasoning that happens to provide a language (more specifically a quantitive language) well-suited to express the relationships between many of the physical concepts science uses in its models. Note that the Many Worlds interpretation of QM that you refer to is not part of the QM model. It is an interpretation of the model, which is a different thing. QM is a very mathematical model, which predicts the right outcomes in terms of observation. That is good enough for science. "Shut up and calculate", if you like. The various interpretations of this model may suggest different ontologies, e.g. whether QM entities can be said to be real in between interactions, whether the wave function has any physical existence or is just a predictive tool, and so on. But we get this sort of hazy relationship to reality in science more generally. For instance in organic chemistry there is a technique used to rationalise and predict the outcomes of reactions, known as "arrow-pushing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_pushing This is a way of analysing the mechanisms of reactions by the convention that the electrons in chemical bonds rearrange themselves in a certain way during the course of the reaction. But any physical chemist will tell you it is doubtful whether the electrons actually, physically, move as shown by the arrows. So if you want to, you can have a similar debate about the ontology of chemical reaction processes. Note that no mathematics at all is involved. Chemists are happy to use the technique and treat it as "real" enough to be getting on with, for the purpose at hand - a sort of non-mathematical "shut up and calculate". But at the back of their minds there remains the caveat that it's just a technique, whose physical reality is perhaps a bit questionable. So my take on the discussion in this thread would be that yes, there certainly can be debates about ontology around the various models of science, but that arises because science deals in models and is typically fairly cagey about asserting their reality in a philosophical sense. Whether the models are mathematical or not does not really have much to do with the question, it seems to me.

True, but what does that have to do with persuading or compelling people to do good?

No. There is this thing called love. Love leads people to act for the benefit of family, friends, partners and even members of the a wider community, without self-interest. (Unless you count as self-interest the feeling of wellbeing and satisfaction one gets from having done something altruistic. But in my opinion that way leads to disappearing up one's own arsehole.) I remember being struck, during the Covid lockdown, by the enormous reservoir of goodwill that was released. Perfect strangers or neighbours one had never spoken to were suddenly willing to run errands and so on for other people. It was as if they were just aching to be given permission, socially speaking, to talk to one another and help out. This too is a form of love in its broadest sense. I'm not sure where failing to convince someone of your own belief comes into all this. Why would a person's beliefs be relevant? Can you give an example?

I'm not sure I follow your last statement. Doing or being good is generally some form of altruistic behaviour, directed towards the benefit of someone or something other than oneself. To take a trivial example, something as simple as responding to a charity appeal is doing good as a result of persuasion. By contrast, doing something for the good of others because one is forced to rather deprives the act of moral virtue. I pay my taxes each year because if I don't I can get sent to prison, not because I have chosen to donate part of my income to the National Health Service or the education system or the armed forces. I happen not to begrudge the tax demand, because firstly I can afford it and secondly I recognise the value, to me and society, of the services the State provides us all. (I have had trouble explaining to earnest tax advisers that I have no interest in their special schemes to reduce my tax liabilities. To them it is inconceivable that somebody might pay tax willingly. But that's another story.) But I can't claim any moral virtue in paying my taxes, or in stopping at a zebra crossing to let somebody cross the road. It's the law. What do you mean by failing in order to make progress? Failing in what way? And what form of progress?

Thanks for the explanation. I was wondering why the details had been made public before a fix had been applied. A leak, evidently.

Well of course one can persuade people to do good. Appeals to our better nature are commonplace, surely? Compulsion is a different matter.

Exactly. The connection to the physical world comes from the definitions of the concepts whose relationships are expressed in the mathematics. Those definitions have to be first expressed in words before any mathematics can be applied to them: concepts like mass, energy, electric charge or whatever. There is a second issue of whether concepts such as force, mass etc can be said to be "real" or whether they are merely parts of conceptual models that allow us to predict the behaviour of nature. But that issue is nothing to do with mathematics. (This, by the way, is why I don't have much time for Tegmark's "mathematic universe" idea. 🙂)

Yeah, instead we get stuff about a "tactical landscape". Hmm. 🤔

Quite.

Well exactly. And then there is the whole business of models and the relation they bear to physical reality - and what the latter can mean. QM and Relativity pose some quite uncomfortable questions about such things. Actually, it has really been arguing with creationists on discussion forums over the years that has brought home to me the implicit philosophical positions we take in science, since one has so often to rewind and start with the basics.

I know this is you being a bit tongue in cheek, but it nevertheless makes me wince a bit. 🙂 I fear that quite a lot of scientists can be tempted to denigrate philosophy without appreciating the way in which natural science itself depends on philosophical assumptions and has philosophical implications. Even today some arenas of science give rise to a fair degree of philosophical debate, interpretations of quantum theory being a case in point. (By the way, we are all miles off-topic now! Direct Democracy in Switzerland?? Eh? What? )