Is science at odds with philosophy?

SelfSim said:

Well if I knew that, then I'd have the understanding, no?
I don't think anyone can rule anything out there yet(?) More work needed!

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I'm not sure you understood what I meant. I'm saying that under the scientific materialists view there is only one interpretation which is that everything works according to the naturalistic and material view.

stevevw said:

I'm not sure you understood what I meant. I'm saying that under the scientific materialists view there is only one interpretation which is that everything works according to the naturalistic and material view.

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That has no impact on doing the science, so its ignorable.

stevevw said:

From what I understand he uses human wellbeing and flourishing as the basis for measuring morality. He assumes human wellbeing as the basis and science is the measuring stick to establish moral right and wrong.

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As I suggested, there's an implicit 'ought' - humans 'ought' to have maximum(?) wellbeing and flourishing. It may seem obvious and common sense, but it's a moral value judgement, not a scientific principle. The rest is, presumably, the equally obvious idea that science can inform us on the most effective or efficient ways to achieve that goal.

But some interpret disturbing the quantum state as the observer determining what we percieve as reality.

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That applies to any and all observations, quantum or otherwise. That's what perception does. It's surprising how often our perception of reality turns out to be mistaken.

Take a gong as an example of the observer effect - it doesn't have a sound property until you disturb it by striking it, then it produces a sound that can give you all kinds of information about its characteristics. How you perform an observation can affect what you observe, just as how you hit a gong can affect what you hear. It's the same for quantum observations, but the kind of results you get are not like those you'd expect classically.

Yes that’s what I am saying that more so than most other scientific findings the results of quantum experiments brings in philosophy more than ever because there is more than one way to interpret reality and for some this means that reality may not be as the classical interpretation claims.

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QM interpretations are not interpretations of reality, they're conceptual interpretations of the QM formalism that may be useful models; they all fit the data, so it's hard to choose between them. The philosophical issues concerning reality have always been around. Einsteinian relativity raises similar philosophical considerations. Reality is just a convenient abstraction to encapsulate what accounts for the patterns in the results of our observations.

some say the observer is a person so this has led to a number of ideas to explain what is happeniong that involve the mind and consciousness as creating reality.

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In QM an 'observer' is any system that makes a quantum measurement. It's a hang-over from early QM thought experiments in the days when measurement apparatus and people were treated as classical objects.

Everyone's consciousness creates their own internal model of reality, but there's no evidence that consciousness has any influence on the results of quantum measurements. The idea of consciousness collapsing the wave function is an extinct version of the Copenhagen interpretation; it just didn't work, it made things worse by adding a whole slew of additional problems and unanswerable questions, from dualist problems of interaction to issues of consistent histories.

This has also led to other ideas like hologram worlds and the multiverse depending on which interpretation you take. But primarily these are based on reality being determined by the observer and not being a set state as classical science has said.

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This is completely wrong. The holographic principle comes from quantum gravity in String Theory and has become more widely known through its realisation in the AdS/CFT correspondence and its application to the black hole information paradox.

Multiverses are predictions of established physical theories. The quantum multiverse (Everettian 'Many Worlds') is what you get from accepting the unmodified quantum formalism, i.e. if the wavefunction doesn't collapse. It's superposition writ large.

The number of ideas and hypothesis that seem to step beyond the classical measurements of physics that have been generated by quantum physics has increased 10 fold.

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Sure, but scientific ideas and hypotheses are not philosophy. Certainly, the fundamental and counterintuitive nature of QM has generated a resurgence in philosophical questions about reality and consciousness, but that's no surprise. People love to try and put humans or consciousness at the centre of the universe or reality, but the more we discover the more we find that we are just one small part of the world, and the reality we're central to and can construct and change with our consciousness alone is in our heads.

I'm meaning that the scientists assume everything has a naturalistic cause so even if a finding did fall outside the natural world i.e. miracles and had an effect on the natural world then I think scientists would try to come up with some naturalistic explanation. That is the default position of most scientists that there cannot be a supernatural cause and yet that is still a philosophical position to take.

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No; I explained this before. Scientists don't assume naturalism, they make observations; you can speculate all you like about the supernatural, but if something has a detectable influence on the physical world it is, by definition, a physical influence. If the cause of the influence is unknown, it is just an unknown physical influence.

Scientific hypotheses must be testable, so they require observables. Observables are physical. If you like, you can call the cause gravity 'supernatural' - we don't have a full explanation for what causes it; but whatever you call it, it's a physical influence and science will treat it as such. Names and speculations without observables are just names & speculations.

That you call it Woo suggests that you know that it is definitely something that cannot happen.

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I'd go further than that. By 'quantum woo' I mean asinine claims that use the word 'quantum' to give spurious sciencey-sounding authority to nonsense that has nothing to do with QM.

When you talk about QM, you're talking about something very specific, with a formal mathematical description. It may have some counterintuitive and unexpected characteristics, but they're well-defined - IOW, it doesn't mean 'anything goes'.

Don't they call consciousness the Hard Problem for a reason.

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Kind of. Chalmers describes consciousness in terms of a number of easy problems and one hard problem, the problem of subjective experience; why, as Nagel puts it, there is 'something it is like' to be conscious. But, yes, there is a reason it's called the hard problem.

I havn't heard of any definitive findings about consciousness either way. In fact from what I have read it would be near impossible for science to determine ideas like experiences and perception of the world into bits of matter to even test this.

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You haven't been reading the right material. I recommend Antonio Damasio's books, and other popular presentations, such as Stanislas Dehaene's Consciousness and the Brain.

I'm only going off what I have read where there seems to be a number of articles that claim the findings of quantum physics does point to fundemental changes in how we see reality and therefore this makes philosophy more relevant because it introduces questions and ideas beyond scientific materialist view.

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As I said before, whenever there is a paradigm shift in physics we revise our ideas of reality. Philosophy remains as relevant as ever.

I suspect that, as usual, you won't accept any of this because you're looking for confirmation of a pre-existing belief. If you're looking for support or confirmation of mystical, magical, or supernatural influences or realms 'beyond science', you'll find an inexhaustible supply online, so fill your boots. But I'm betting you won't find a single verifiable piece of evidence, and my advice is: don't give them your money or your time.

SelfSim said:

How to maintain the integrity of the complete set of underlying QM assumptions however, eludes our understanding.

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Best avoid assumptions then...

Gottservant said:

What's it like to be in Heaven?

Do animals go to Heaven after they die?

Etc.

Simple questions, that have Evolutionistic consequences - will I find a mate in Heaven? is my adaptation going to last when I'm in Heaven? - but which are not strictly part of the Evolutionary canon.

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Those questions have no relevance to evolution whatsoever.

These are things you said it was possible to discover ("The problem for science is that it is possible to discover things, for which no word is enough.")...

How do you think these things can be discovered? why is it a problem for science?

SelfSim said:

That has no impact on doing the science, so its ignorable.

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I was speaking more philosophically about how we can determine what nature is. The materialist take the view that only the science method can determine nature. So yes the science can be done but that only tells us how nature behaves. It doesn' t tell us essentially what it is.

Understanding nature is fundamentally beyond the scientific method, which leaves us with philosophy. The materialist view which is that nature is basically matter beyond our mental state is metaphysics in that its making claims about what nature is.

double post

stevevw said:

I was speaking more philosophically about how we can determine what nature is. The materialist take the view that only the science method can determine nature. So yes the science can be done but that only tells us how nature behaves. It doesn' t tell us essentially what it is.

Understanding nature is fundamentally beyond the scientific method, which leaves us with philosophy. The materialist view which is that nature is basically matter beyond our mental state is metaphysics in that its making claims about what nature is.

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Armchair philosophy isn't going to tell you what nature is.

Ultimately some questions are meaningless, such as asking what the fundamental stuff of reality or nature is made of, or questions about what such abstractions are. They're useful abstractions, defined in vague terms of what we observe and how we categorise those observations.

What is a chair, really? What is a game, really? These concepts are also just useful abstractions, e.g. something you can sit on (defining a game is not so easy).

stevevw said:

I was speaking more philosophically about how we can determine what nature is. The materialist take the view that only the science method can determine nature. So yes the science can be done but that only tells us how nature behaves. It doesn' t tell us essentially what it is.

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Which is exactly why science doesn't require inputs from philosophical materialism .. its just excess baggage that adds nothing but 'noise' as far as science is concerned. It doesn't really matter what view 'the materialist' takes there, as far as science is concerned, because that view is just another belief about what science is doing. My advice would be just to ignore it.

stevevw said:

Science isn't trying to answer the question of 'what nature really is'.

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I agree. Science may have models it categorises under the term 'nature', but they are testable models. Science never tests for 'what nature actually is' because that is a philosophical question. Science tests its models and then assigns those test results as what it means, whenever it mentions 'nature'.
Materialists also do that, but what it means is completely different to what science means. Materialists just mean more beliefs for what nature is.

stevevw said:

Understanding nature is fundamentally beyond the scientific method,

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Beyond what's testable in science, is just an untestable belief .. so there is no question for science to answer there.

stevevw said:

.. which leaves us with philosophy. The materialist view which is that nature is basically matter beyond our mental state is metaphysics in that its making claims about what nature is.

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So the materialist there, is just propagating more beliefs which just obscures our view of objective (physical) reality.
Notice that those people nonetheless, also lay claim to, and use with gay abandon, the meanings science has carefully distinguished, such as 'matter' and 'nature'. So this is the materialist's net contribution to humanity .. ie: adding to confusion, by propagating more beliefs (as if we need more 'em!)

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

Best avoid assumptions then...

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I'll call ya on that from time to time y'know .. (No complaining about that from now on then, eh?)

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

What is a chair, really? What is a game, really? These concepts are also just useful abstractions, e.g. something you can sit on ..

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So the question we should be asking is, why does it work so well to imagine that chairs possess a property of facilitating sitting, and why the measurement of said facilitation can be regarded as something objective?
Clearly none of that holds until one has already a concept of useful degree of precision for measuring such a property .. which is of course, the key concept that underpins all of quantitative science.

Landon Caeli said:

My style is a little different, in that I prefer home-grown thought almost exclusively, but I have learned to use links, because I know it is expected much of the time.

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"Home grown thoughts" are also known as "opinions".

When "opinions" are not based on facts or, at least a knowledge of the topic, they are known as "uninformed opinions".

OB

Landon Caeli said:

I read once that his ideas were so successful because he was not only an expert mathematician, but he was able to mentally visualize things better than most people.

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I wonder what kind of chess player he would have made?

Landon Caeli said:

I don't suppose Albert Einstein was parroting things already known when he came up with new ideas.

...I read once that his ideas were so successful because he was not only an expert mathematician, but he was able to mentally visualize things better than most people.

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Einstein's ideas weren't 'home grown', (visualisation capabilities, or not).

AV1611VET said:

I wonder what kind of chess player he would have made?

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Certainly nowhere near an Artificial Intelligence chess player's scores.

Landon Caeli said:

Einstein was a visionary, and understood philosophy at a young age.

"At age 13, when he had become more seriously interested in philosophy (and music),[29] Einstein was introduced to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant became his favorite philosopher, his tutor stating: "At the time he was still a child, only thirteen years old, yet Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear to him."
Albert Einstein - Wikipedia

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Reference link for that is broken .. (no idea of his source) .. and it was written by some dude in 2007.

Either way, that doesn't demonstrate that his abilities to conceive testable notions in physics were 'home grown', (unless its your opinion his particular instance of education is what you mean by 'home grown')?

Landon Caeli said:

I would say it was his abilities at being an expert mathematician and a philosopher that made him the true polymath that he was.

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Yes .. only because, technically speaking, nothing can prevent one from voicing their own opinions?

Landon Caeli said:

I don't suppose Albert Einstein was parroting things already known when he came up with new ideas.

...I read once that his ideas were so successful because he was not only an expert mathematician, but he was able to mentally visualize things better than most people.

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Which only says that it would probably be a good idea to be at least as much of an expert in a relevant area as Einstein in mathematics before one takes their "new idea" as interesting.