I find Ladyman’s lukewarm reductionism kind of odd. On an explicit level, he sounds like an anti-reductionist. But then he claims that physics has universal extension and it becomes hard to see why a structuralist would have to affirm these “higher level” ontologies. If an aggregate of structuralist atoms can explain why I decide to go out for a walk, what incentives does the structuralist have to say that there actually is something like an organism? Secondly, even if we take his claim that experiments haven’t falsified the idea that physics has universal extension at face value, what reason does that give to him to say that it in fact does? For a typical simple substance believing reductionist, there’s at least metaphysical precedent; they interpret science in this way which implicates there can be no non-reductive causes. But Ladyman emptied his ontology precisely of such elements, so what’s his reason? Aside from all that, I think the move he makes to basically dismiss the “what’s the difference between physics and math then?” criticism is really really bad. You set your whole metaphysical project as a connective tissue between different scientific theories, and then, when you actually have to clarify the notion of structure sufficiently to answer something like that (which I don’t even think is that hard of a question tbh) you just handwave it away by talking about how it’s unempirical or implying how metaphysical speculation should be avoided. My dude, you’re a metaphysician, you literally claim to undertake such a project here at the beginning. This is the kind of thing that structuralism as an account hinges on to even be intelligible, no less coherent or plausible. If these kinds of questions are avoided, what’s left to even differentiate OSR from ESR? The former is essentially reduced to anti-substance centric rhetoric, with really vague claims about how only structure exists.
i'm actually very curious about the question about the "difference between physics and math". i just read a paper by susan schneider, titled 'does the mathematical nature of modern physics undermine physicalism?' and now i'm going to learn about philosophy of math and 'abstract vs concrete' existents. i'm curious, what do you think are the differences, and how do we know? like, QFT is "absurdly" abstract, and the 'fundamental particles' of the standard model are "individuated" and exhaustively described by this math. what to make of that?
@@real_pattern I haven't studied QFT yet, but going off of what I've heard as well as how this is preceded by asking the same question for earlier fields like non-relativistic QM or classical electrodynamics, I think there exists a real bind (for the physicalist anyway) because there's no real notion we have of the "physical/real" side of things. There's a sense in which we experience everyday objects as substantial, and this carries over to the notion of bodies in classical mechanics. So, what I think happens is that there's a residue of a vague sense of "realness" when people start talking about more abstract principles which can't be reduced to bodies, like electromagnetic fields. The problem is that physics probably won't ever actually give satisfactory answers to these metaphysical problems. All a physicist needs to do is make and test mathematical formalisms that are accurate. And creating the formalisms doesn't require making sure they are metaphysically sensible. I think the chief advantage of structuralism is that it simply renders nature as just consisting in the relations math discloses. Of course, that just leaves the issues of: 1. arguing that OSR should sooner be taken to be true over ESR 2. saying what it is for a structure to, essentially, exist substantially
'If an aggregate of structuralist atoms can explain why I decide to go out for a walk, what incentives does the structuralist have to say that there actually is something like an organism?' Isn't any explanation arising from lower level 'atoms' rather deficient if we're considering, for example, the property <sex drive> of an organism. There can be a certain level of explanation that proceeds from lower-level 'atoms', but the explanations at the level of behaviorism (for scientists of animal behavior) or psychology (for scientists of human behavior) are so much richer and more explanatory, that it would be absurd to cut them out of our scientific knowledge or give them a lower level of ontological (or ontic?, not sure which term I should use here) reality. I think it's that simple, isn't it?
@@johnhausmann2391 ok. But doesn’t that mean that we can’t actually reduce the richer explanation to a poorer one? The simple point I made is that any novelty of an explanation would have to resist reductionism. And likewise a “novel explanation” reducible to a different one isn’t actually novel at all.
@@johnhausmann2391I don't think many of us would contest higher-level models (say at the level of behaviourism or biology) offering incredible explainability by way of abstraction. I think the question that we're contending is whether the models offer any import outside of utility or useful fictioning. In other words, is there a meaningful "substance" that underlies higher level ontologies or is it just a convenient way of partial bookkeeping? Partial because human culture has only taken an interest in a subset of the set of all possible empirical questions. For instance, it seems that I have the freedom to construct any kind of macro-category of objects such as an "Arbitraroid", which I define as any 1metre radius spherical volume of air containing the relative proportions of Nitrogen, Oxygen, Argon directly in front of me up to 3 decimal places. Any spherical pocket of air that satisfies this is deemed an Arbitraroid. This designation was arbitrary and I don't see why we should assign it special ontological status in the same way that I don't see why we should assign any existing category (like organism) special ontological status. It seems that reducibility offers a smaller set of metaphysical assumptions and is able to maintain full explainability. In principle we can explain all physical phenomena via fundamental physics (say taking QFT + GR as fundamental for now) but it's perfectly fine to concede the difficulty in modelling higher level phenomena due to computational intractability. Intractability though is entirely independent, which is why a reductionist metaphysics is entirely compatible with our intuition that there is great utility in constructing higher-level models of the world if you recognize the utility and go no further.
Matter does matter, otherwise we could have a multiplicity of worlds all satisfied by an individual law that are a part of the patchwork of scientific laws.
i dont undestand why you need so much difficultly and so much wordiness to take in what god is. The notion of god is so simple so elementary, a peasant in china who doesnt know how to read or wright, and doesn't know anything about arguments, or a professional in Wall street have equal ability to know God.
Interesting views, particularly on probability. Wrote a book that merges the metaphysics of Many-Worlds with self-help, called "Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams." Check it out :-) Thanks!
Mentat1231 "...whereas, when you say "the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, which reference frame are you using?" Wouldn't we be using our frame of reference of time when we say the universe is 13.7 billion years old? Perhaps you mean that there is a point where all points of reference began (specifically the time when the universe began to expand)?
Watching this through for a second time. This work which Craig and several others are doing (on exorcising verificationism from Relativity and attempting to rescue the mathematics and empirical aspects from the presuppositions which were in error due to verificationism) may be the single most important project in all of Physics today. It may easily resolve the apparent inconsistencies between QM and GR. It opens up room for super-luminal transmissions; leaving entanglement, and much other quantum "weirdness" much more easily explained. This work is powerfully illustrative of the need for philosophers and scientists to collaborate with each other and work on these most complex and deep problems. I would call this the quintessential example if it weren't for one other area where similar collaboration will (I believe) yield similarly paradigm-altering results: namely, consciousness studies. In particular, I believe that the functionalist philosophers in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, who are working on conscious perception from the angles of "ecology", "embodiment", and "sensorimotor contingency" can work with cognitive scientists and revolutionize the entire enterprise of consciousness studies. To me, the greatest shame of all this is that so many scientists are so anti-philosophy (and have trained the general public, especially young people, to be likewise) that they so often miss the chance for these kinds of world-changing collaborations.
Consider the scalar (in terms of a dimensional space, an array of sorts) nature of observable artifact connectedness with the Universe. Gravity, electromagnetism, & potentially properties of entanglements. If Relativity is accurate, than the instantaneous properties have relativistic properties associated with entanglement. As such, observable entanglement is a vast system of connectedness and not an individual artifact; the difference between two or more "systems" of entanglement.
59:37 "I'm not familiar with that, I can't comment." That's the first instance I've ever encountered of Craig not having a badass expert opinion on something.
Isn't Professor William Lane Craig currently numbered "11" out of the top 100 practicing philosophers in the world today? And, given such a position, wouldn't it seem unusual for Craig NOT to have more answers than most academics. Indeed, it seems to me that that is what naturally follows being numbered among the top 1% of academic philosophers in the world today. He'd better have an answer----or else give up his seat!
There needn't be an external clock, for there to be metaphysical, absolute time which applies to the universe. Again, you are falling into verificationist-style reasoning (because there is no way to empirically observe metaphysical time, against which the Universe's "life" is judged, it therefore doesn't exist). This is faulty reasoning. Indeed, as I've mentioned, we DO routinely refer to the "age" of the Universe (~13.7 billion years), and we know what we mean.
Space itself is expanding, along with everything that exists in space... is there something more to the Universe than space and everything in it? It's like saying the ocean has no movement as a closed system, even if every water droplet in it is in constant motion. But it is a *closed* system, and that is all thermodynamics requires.
Entropy increases in the Universe over time. This is a cosmological datum. It is a standard part of any conversation about Big Bang cosmology or the dynamics of spatial inflation. If entropy increases over time, then the system is changing over time. This seems an obvious (even trivial) fact. Leibniz's argument does conclude to a cause of the Universe; it does so from the premise that the Universe is contingent. In your video, all that is added is that "past-incompleteness" shows contingency.
My point was that the Hamiltonian operator, when applied to the Universe's energy, would actually describe a dynamic change, which implies that the Universe DOES change over time. As for quantum gravity: this is a field in its infancy. I really don't think we can make such sweeping statements yet. In any case, I think it goes back to my position that a Minkowskian interpretation of STR is incorrect. The Universe is an isolated system.
I watched the video. It was very well put-together. Technically, though, it doesn't rescue the Kalam argument. It does what Craig has always suggested: default to a Leibnizean Cosmological Argument. It is interesting that the person who made the video used past-incompleteness as proof of contingency. But the argument is, nevertheless, Leibnizean.
That is a very interesting idea. I'm just not accustomed to treating Platonic ideals as concrete objects. They seem to necessarily be abstract universals (which can be instantiated in particulars, but which do not have causal relations of any kind). That seems to me to be the standard philosophical understanding of Platonic entities. I'll check it out. Thanks!
But the energy does go through transformations, in terms of Hamiltonian mechanics (potential to kinetic), and so this actually further confirms that the Universe undergoes change over time. Indeed, the idea that entropy increases over time (the second law of thermodynamics) entails this same conclusion. That seems like a bare assertion to me. The Universe is said to have existed for 13.7 billions years. That is a statement of time; so that to say it isn't applicable seems plainly false.
By the way, a Platonist can accept possible solutions as metaphysical abstracta, which are not actualized, so there is no requirement that he or she accept the Block Universe as an actuality. Platonic ideas exist timelessly, but that certainly doesn't mean that the Universe does. Thus, for the Platonist, temporal becoming is real for concrete objects, but abstract objects are immune from it.
Well, first off, the idea that the energy in the Universe is zero is absurd. There is clearly energy in the Universe. Secondly, surely you will concede that spacetime does indeed have a velocity at which it's expanding. Thirdly, Hamiltonian mechanics applied to the Universe as a closed system would show dynamical change between potential and kinetic energy. Again, I just don't see how that follows. Clearly the wave function selection would be a temporal occurence.
Are you sure the Universe isn't changing with time? I mean, does the second law of thermodynamics (or even the concept of entropy) make sense in an unchanging Universe? I'm not claiming I know the answer, but these are certainly interesting questions which Craig raises in his work. What are your thoughts? As to "slicing up the Universe" in terms of A-theory, do you mean "past", "present" and "future"? I don't see that this is necessary. The A-theorist would say that only the present exists.
Again, the problem is in differentiating our models of reality from reality itself. It was only logical positivism (specifically, verificationism) that lead Einstein and Minkowski to think that an unknowable reference frame is therefore a meaningless or non-existent one. And so, when you speak of "slicing up" the results, you are speaking in terms of inertial reference frames; whereas, when you say "the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, which reference frame are you using?
Michelson and Morley only disproved certain physical characteristics of the aether. These characteristics are not essential, and Lorentz himself defined the aether without those characteristics. It is just an absolute spatial reference frame; and the M-M experiement did nothing to that. The point is that "what they observers are aware of" and "what is actually the case" are not necessarily the same thing. Absolute simultaneity could still very well exist.
God's reference frame needn't be identical with the one that is at rest with respect to CMB, but it does seem a likely candidate. More importantly, GTR and the acceptance of such a reference frame in the first place, already give good reason to deny the Minkowskian interpretation of STR. After all, if GTR and the CMB-reference frame are correct, then there really is absolute simultaneity, and no reason to abandon the tensed theory which is so intuitively obvious.
Honestly, I disagree, based on reading Craig's work. The Minkowskian interpretation of STR seems to be no more than a reifying of a model. The model of space and time as a "block" is useful, but to try to say that time is really like that has serious philosophical (and theological) ramifications. More importantly, the ONLY justification Einstein and Minkowski had for denying Lorentz's "preferred frame" was verificationism; and verificationism is false.
Geography, I really think you need to pause for a moment and think about what you've claimed. You don't appear to be aware that this is a philosophy of physics conference. I was there, and it was filled with philosophers and physicists alike (indeed, there were atheist philosophers too). Your comment, therefore, is unfortunately quite an ignorant one, and I cannot help but think that it came from an insincere desire to go for a cheap ad hominem. Do you care about actually listening to arguments?
Several things. First, this is from a conference on physics and philosophy, so Craig holding a PhD in philosophy would qualify him to speak at this conference. Second, I should dispel any notion that I'm offended by Craig's view. I am a divine temporalist, and have published several papers arguing against divine timelessness.
When he did his first PhD (his PhD in philosophy), he had to specialize in Cosmology in order to write his thesis on the Cosmological Argument under John Hick. In fact, John Hick need the help of a physicist in the physics department at Birmingham to evaluate his PhD, as he simply did not understand the technical physics of his thesis. So I think it's safe to say he has decent knowledge of Cosmology, as is evidenced by this lecture.
