On 10/20/2018 3:29 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Saturday, October 20, 2018 at 2:51:30 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
On 10/20/2018 11:24 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Saturday, October 20, 2018 at 10:33:04 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
On 10/19/2018 11:32 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> On 19 Oct 2018, at 23:43, Brent Meeker
<[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 10/19/2018 11:49 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> I work with people who studied religion all the times.
You seem unaware that we can doubt Aristotle theology.
>> You seem unaware that there is not such thing. Your
"Aristotle theology" is a straw man you invented to beat with
stick labelled "primary matter". I'll bet that if you ask a
100 physicists, "Do you believe in primary matter." you'll
get 99 answers of "What??”
> Because they have been brainwashed since about 529, into
the idea that “matter” is “primary matter”.
No, they are not. It's simply irrelevant to them. They seek
theories
to explain phenomena. They don't start by assuming some
metaphysics.
They only care that the theory works. That's why it has been
physicists
like Wheeler, Tegmark, Hawking,...who have wondered why
equations work
at all.
Brent
What physicist doesn't assume some metaphysical assumptions?
The 3 mentioned above talked (1 still talks) about metaphysics
all the time, of course. Even if they adopt a theory that someone
else created, they are adopting the metaphysics of that theory.
When Sean Carroll writes about the reality of the wave function,
that's some heavy metaphysics.
Sounds like physics to me. Does Carroll say the wave function is
"primary", that there can be nothing more fundamental? No, he
doesn't. He knows that QM
and GR are incompatible and he no doubt hopes to find something
that explains both of them. Does he care whether that new thing
is "primary"? No.
Brent
https://twitter.com/seanmcarroll/status/1051238813236752386
Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll
"Realism about the wave function is a good idea. (Even better, …
about the quantum state, but I won’t be picky.)"
re: Realism about the Wave Function
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/15153/
Every language has a metaphysics.
- pt
"The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have
programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it
cannot propose a language for us to speak."
-- Richard Rorty, Contingency of Language
[pdf] http://web.augsburg.edu/~crockett/120/Rorty-Contingency.pdf
Every language has an ontology, i.e. things it talks about. But that
doesn't mean that it assumes those things are primary. Bruno wants to
criticize physicists for assuming there's something he calls "primitive
matter". But this is just his straw man. In fact physicists almost
uniformly assume that the stuff in their theories has some deeper
explanation and is NOT primary. There's a difference between saying a
metaphysics assumes things and saying that it assumes things which are
"primary".
Brent
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