Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Curt Jaimungal: Philosophers vs. Physicists

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Starting point is 00:00:27 or go to explorevolvo.com. 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? To Professor Norton, most physicists are already engaging in, or assuming, a philosophy. They just don't know it.

Starting point is 00:01:01 Now, you know that quip that some physicists love to brew it, philosophy is as useful to scientists as orinthology is to birds. John's critique is keen. Ornithologists aren't trying to be useful to birds. Now let's fosick out some philosophical suppositions. 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

Starting point is 00:01:36 decades ago for being logically untenable. Norton watched this happen in real time during my conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. 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? 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

Starting point is 00:02:28 to Neil to his face by Ellie Kroll on his own Star Talk podcast. Your choice to set aside some world, like, so that you can be neutral. Yes. Is itself a philosophical position? Oh, 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. Norton makes a point that should be tattooed on every physics department wall. Philosophy of physics sets its own standards of success. What field allows another field to set its own standard?

Starting point is 00:03:10 Imagine if oranthologists let birds determine what counted as good orinthology. 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 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, H-O-L-E, 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. And then there's that Landauer's principle critique, which is what this podcast is about,

Starting point is 00:03:58 which forced his proponents to actually think through their arguments instead of just assuming that information equals physical, like some analogic incantation. Emily Adlam and Jacob Berndes outlined several cases such as decoherence and Bell's theorem and more were 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 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.

Starting point is 00:04:36 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 want to know who else is doing philosophy of physics? 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 Phil 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 flip it. with the letters Osh after the B.

Starting point is 00:05:17 Wheeler's famous phrase has become a bansai 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,

Starting point is 00:05:38 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 acro-oomatic 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. But Shannon, but quantum information theory, but ADSC of T, says the rampagious learned defender.

Starting point is 00:06:11 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:06:48 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. 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 evermore improbable speculation. Now you may think, come on, Kurt, this is foolishly tautological. If I engage in philosophy,

Starting point is 00:07:34 then I'm engaging in it, yes, but if I don't engage in philosophy, then that itself is engaged, 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. 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. That is, you make them explicit, you test their coherence, you explore their implications.

Starting point is 00:08:19 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 and studying linguistics. Physicists love to declare their work empirical, but do they know where that terms 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 Berndes

Starting point is 00:08:57 loses his wave function.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Curt Jaimungal: Philosophers vs. Physicists

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