Curt Jaimungal (Me): Philosophers vs. Physicists

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      "text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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      "text": " Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates."
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      "text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a total listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
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      "text": " I recently had on Professor of Philosophy and Physics, John Norton, on the podcast. John watched my interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson where I was on the side of defending philosophy. Then of what utility is that to the practicing scientist, even if it is of high interest to the philosopher? Physicists are steeped in philosophy even if they don't know it. Is that a problem? Is this a challenge?"
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      "text": " To Professor Norton, most physicists are already engaging in, or assuming, a philosophy. They just don't know it. Now you know that quip that some physicists love to brew it. Philosophy is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. John's critique is keen. Ornithologists aren't trying to be useful to birds. Now let's fossec out some philosophical suppositions."
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      "text": " Take the physicist who claims there's no measurement problem in quantum mechanics because all that matters is predictions. Congratulations! You've just endorsed an extreme form of instrumentalism that most philosophers abandoned decades ago for being logically untenable. Norton watched this happen in real time during my conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson."
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      "text": " To Norton, the physicist who pays no attention to the philosophy of science is likely the victim of one mediocre philosophy. Think about it. Almost every scientist has views about, well, what counts as evidence? What makes a theory good? What does it mean for something to be real? Is nature fundamentally simple or complex? Is there enough uniformity in nature to get science started slash the problem of induction to go away?"
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      "text": " Now they may say, but Kurt, I don't have philosophical positions on these things. I just do science, bro. That is a philosophical position, bro. And to Norton, it's likely a defective one. This was actually pointed out to Neil to his face by Ellie Krall on his own StarTalk podcast."
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      "text": " Your choice to set aside some world so that you can be neutral is itself a philosophical position. You became less and less useful to the moving frontier of the physical science. Well, the first thing is I don't accept your premise. The idea that what I need to do is be useful to science, to be important or worth doing as a human endeavor, is a pretty narrow view."
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      "text": " Norton makes a point that should be tattooed on every physics department wall. Philosophy of physics sets its own standards of success."
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      "text": " What field allows another field to set its own standard? Imagine if ornithologists let birds determine what counted as good ornithology. Physicists dismissing philosophy, for instance, for not being useful to them is the intellectual equivalent of a fish dismissing oceanography because it doesn't help them swim faster. Philosophy of physics, by the way, has"
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      "text": " actually contributed to physics and not in some hand wavy manner like it makes you think deep man but in concrete citable contributions. For example the whole argument HLLE is used in loop quantum gravity to critique string theory and then there's these covariance principles by Norton which is one of his most cited papers in a physics journal"
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      "text": " And then there's that Landauer's principle critique, which is what this podcast is about, which forced its proponents to actually think through their arguments instead of just assuming that information equals physical, like some anagogic incantation."
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      "text": " Emily Adlam and Jacob Berendes outlined several cases such as decoherence and Bell's theorem and more where philosophers of physics directly aided vanilla physics. I would stack that list of contributions up against many contemporary research areas in physics. It was done"
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      "text": " In large part by people who had other official jobs or who suffered significant career ramifications for working on ideas that were considered too philosophical for mainstream physics. If anyone is thinking about how to make the biggest bang for your buck in terms of making contributions to physics, I would argue that we need to invest more in philosophy of physics. By the way, you wanna know who else is doing philosophy of physics?"
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      "text": " Every physicist who's ever debunked a theory. So when Neil dismisses perpetual motion machines or free energy devices, Neil's applying standards of good science. Where do these standards come from? The answer starts with fill and ends with Neil getting defensive. Now we get to the toothsome part, Norton's demolishment of it from bit. Norton would like probably to put the letters ulsh after the B."
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      "text": " Wheeler's famous phrase has become a banzai for a certain type of speculation. The idea that reality is fundamentally information, that somehow bits are generating it. Norton's verdict is that this is coffee table philosophy. Why? Well, because he has these two different types of philosophy. So one is professional philosophy."
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      "text": " which takes something perplexing and then analyzes it until it becomes so clear you wonder why you thought any different. Then there's coffee table philosophy, which produces acrobatic wisdoms that sound clever precisely because they're meaningless. It from bit falls squarely in category two. As Norton puts it, it is on the face simply nonsense to say the real world is information."
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      "text": " But Shannon, but quantum information theory, but ADS-CFT, says the rampagious learned defender. Hold your holographic horses. Using information as a calculational tool is entirely fine. By the way, Shannon himself rejected any connection between information and thermodynamic entropy. Next, they'll tell us that consciousness is just some spicy computation. Oh wait, they already do."
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      "text": " Now, if you want to hear Norton systematically demolish poor thinking in physics, like the simulation hypothesis, then check out the full episode. Note that the critique isn't of information as a tool, but of information as a fundamental substance. It's like saying, hammers are useful. Therefore, the universe is made of Home Depot. For philosophers, it from bit is a literal claim about ontology. So what exists?"
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      "text": " For physicists, it's often just a heuristic prompt. In other words, it's like a way to generate new research directions. The real test is whether it produces good physics. And Norton's assessment of that is that this obsession with information has actually failed at producing good physics. Instead, it's produced an endlessly inflating volume of ever more improbable speculation."
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      "text": " Now you may think, come on, Kurt, this is foolishly tautological. If I engage in philosophy, then I'm engaging in it. Yes. But if I don't engage in philosophy, then that itself is engaging in philosophy. It's like when people say I don't do labels. Well, that effectively labels you as the guy who doesn't do labels. Now, this is reasonable to think."
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      "text": " The problem here is that it's conflating having philosophical assumptions with doing philosophy. Almost everyone has implicit ontological commitments about what exists, for instance, or they have views on how one obtains knowledge. So yes, it seems true for most people, for the most part, propositionally. Philosophy, though, is the systematic examination of these assumptions or propositions or schematics or what have you."
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      "text": " That is, you make them explicit, you test their coherence, you explore their implications. The physicist who says shut up and calculate isn't doing philosophy. They're just refusing to examine their instrumentalist assumptions. This isn't tautological. It's the difference between speaking English"
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      "text": " and studying linguistics. Physicists love to declare their work empirical, but do they know where that term comes from? The empiricists were a marginal medical sect in antiquity. So by the 1700s, empirics were routinely derided as medical quacks. Every time a physicist proudly declares themselves an empiricist while dismissing philosophy, somewhere in the multiverse, a Jacob Berendes loses his way function."
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