really
\nscrewed up<\/a>. And I’ve got to call him on it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
He was arguing with a post-modernist. My opinion of post-modernism is
\nmixed, but mostly very negative. There’s a kernel of value at the heart of it,
\nbut most of the practitioners of postmodern analysis have turned it into
\nsomething fit only for mockery.<\/p>\n
The argument that Phil got involved in was about “meaning” and “objectivity”.
\nHis opponent said “Gravity may well exist. But if we can’t describe it, it’s
\nhardly objective. And we can’t possibly know its meaning”.<\/p>\n
That’s classic postmodernism. Gravity may<\/em> exist; and then moving
\ninto very fuzzy zones of intention and meaning. What does gravity
\nmean?<\/em> To even ask the question is to create a huge amount of strange
\ncontext. Why should gravity mean<\/em> anything? It can only mean something
\nin a universe where gravity had some intention. And that, in turn, is a way of
\nembedding some kind of theism into the context of the discussion: meaning is
\nan artifact of consciousness; if there’s no consciousness that created gravity
\nfor a purpose, than how can it mean<\/em> anything?<\/p>\n So far, I’m with Phil, when he says:<\/p>\n
\n I think this is completely wrong. It’s objective whether we can
\ndescribe it or not. Gravity exists. Since the Earth has been orbiting the Sun
\nfor 4.55 billion years — a good 4.549 billion years before humans were around
\n— we can be pretty sure gravity is objective.<\/p>\n
But it’s the last word he used that got me really scratching my head.
\n“Meaning?” Of gravity? Why should gravity have a meaning? It’s a law of
\nnature, not a piece of art.<\/p>\n
You can look for meaning in the Mona Lisa, or a sonnet, or in a child’s smile.
\nYou can argue over the meaning with someone else, and you can both disagree
\nand yet both be right. When something is created with artistic intent — or
\njust simply created by the human with or without that intent — it’s open to
\ninterpretation.<\/p>\n
But the Universe itself as a physical object isn’t like that. You can look for
\nmeaning if you’d like, but the Universe is a semi-random collection of energy
\nand matter, and based on all the evidence I have seen was not created with
\nintent. A nebula is beautiful in form and color, but is simply a collection of
\nparticles, photons, fields, and motions. It has no meaning outside of your
\npersonal interpretation of it. But whether you think it has emotions and is
\nalive or not, it will still do what it does: make stars. Nebulae have been
\ndoing this for billions of years before us, and will continue to do so long
\nafter we are gone.<\/p>\n
You might even ascribe purpose to a nebula: its job is to create stars. But
\nthat’s what’s called the Pathetic Fallacy: ascribing human characteristics to
\ninanimate objects. The nebula doesn’t want to do anything. It just does things
\naccording to the laws of physics.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
But then, he goes off the rails.<\/p>\n
\n You might want to use the same reductionist reasoning on humans too, and say
\nwe are nothing more than machines and have no free will, no choice but to obey
\nwhatever laws of physics command us. And I cannot discount that, but I suspect
\nwe are richer than that. The laws of physics are not binary; they don’t say to
\nus “Behave this way or that.” There are huge, perhaps even uncountable numbers
\nof choices that lie before us. It’s not just a matter of cranking all our
\natomic states and field equations through a black box and determining what we
\nmust perforce do; there are probabilities involved, so that our actions may be
\npredictable in a sense but are not fundamentally determined in advance.\n<\/p>\n
That is the difference between us and a nebula. We can choose. And that’s why
\na post-modernist relativism can work when describing Mozart, but will fail
\nwhen applied to a black hole. The event horizon of a black hole cares not what
\nwe think of it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This is what I call “sloppy dualism”. Classic dualism is the belief that
\nthere are two separate parts to our beings: bodies, which are physical, and
\nspirits, which are something else. Phil has been very clear in the past:
\nhe utterly rejects religious beliefs in “spirits” or “souls”; dualism is
\njust religious nonsense. But the implication of what he’s saying tries to sneak
\ndualism in by a back door. It’s almost like a “god of the gaps” argument;
\na “free will of the gaps” kind of dualism. He’s claiming to argue in favor of
\na purely scientific universe, with no room for the supernatural. But he tries
\nto sneak a little bit of space in to the fuzziness of how things work to make
\nroom for his own free will. <\/p>\n
Physics – the realm of scientific description and exploration of way the universe
\nworks, using mathematics as its tool – describes how all matter and energy interact.
\nWithout dualism – that is, without believing that there is something fundamentally
\ndifferent<\/em> about consciousness, something that can’t be described by the
\nmere interactions of matter and energy – it makes no sense to talk about
\nchoice<\/em> for people, but not for other collections of matter. If you’re
\ntruly a materialist, then there’s no fundamental difference between a person and
\na black hole in terms of physics. We’re both made up of some complex mix of matter
\nand energy, interacting with other bits of matter and energy in all sorts of
\nways.<\/p>\n What Phil is doing is asserting that we are, somehow, different. He starts
\noff OK; the way that physics appears to work, things are not completely deterministic. There’s
\na lot of fuzziness and probabilistic nondeterminism.<\/p>\n
But moving from non-determinism to choice<\/em> is a problem. If you’re consistent,
\nand you reject non-physical entities and influences in the world, then you<\/em>
\nare no exception.<\/p>\n There’s no scientific<\/em> reason to believe that we have free will.
\nThere’s no buffer zone that we’ve found in any of the physical laws of how the
\nuniverse works to make room for free will. There’s non-determinism; but there’s
\nnot choice<\/em>. Choice is the introduction of something, dare I say it,
\nsupernatural: some influence that isn’t part of the physical interaction,
\nwhich allows some clusters of matter and energy to decide<\/em> how they’ll
\ncollapse a probabilistic waveform into a particular reality.<\/p>\n There’s nothing wrong with believing that there’s something more than
\nthe simple physical to the world; something that allows this thing we call
\nconsciousness. But it’s not a scientific belief. And for all his hedging, Phil
\nis clearly saying that he believes<\/em> that the math of physics isn’t,
\nand can’t be<\/em> all that describes how the universe works. And once you
\nmake room for that kind of supernatural, it’s hard to explain just why
\nyour<\/em> kind of supernatural belief is perfectly rational, and someone
\nelse’s kind of supernatural belief is silly.<\/p>\n The funny thing is that at the end of the day, I agree with him. I’ve mentioned
\nbefore that I’m a theist. The reason<\/em> that I’m a theist is because I believe
\nin consciousness. But I suspect that Phil would be horrified to be put into the same
\nbucket as a theist, believing in some kind of supernatural phenomena. But that sure
\nseems to be what he’s saying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the history of this blog, I’ve gone after lots of religious folks. I’ve mocked lots and lots of christians, a few muslims, some Jews, some newagers, and even one stupid Hindu. Today, I’m doing something that’s probably going to get me into trouble with a lot of readers. I’m going to mock a very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-physics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-d1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}