"Philosophy is dead." These days it feels like someone is trying to kill it every day. The attempt must necessarily fail though.

The simplest reply to Hawking is that "Philosophy is dead" (PID) is a philosophical statement, not experimentally verifiable and thus outside of the domain of science. So if he wants to assert the truth of PID, he must acknowledge the existence and the validity of at least one philosophical statement. Otherwise he has no claim. But by acknowledging a philosophical statement he obviously renders his statement, PID, contradictory. This is an old trap into which scientists and non-scientists have fallen again and again. (It's actually a bit embarrassing, especially for people who pride themselves on their "logical" thinking.)

What Hawking and many other scientists of the present day seem to forget or ignore is the fact that human beings have at least two roles in the world, as observers and as participants. The objective/subjective dichotomy stems from this predicament. The success of science has led to the belief that there should be a "viewpoint from nowhere", a perfectly unbiased manner of looking at the world with "all filters removed". But all science must be coded in some language and therefore necessarily pay tribute to its human origin. Scientific terms are refinements of certain terms of everyday language. We have no other basis for science than that. Our naturally acquired terms are the only ones we have to work with, it is of no use to speculate what we might say or think if we were different than we are. We literally cannot understand anything else. This does not mean that we cannot entertain thoughts of facts which obtain independently of our existence or its particulars. But any use that we may make of such thoughts or facts will necessarily bear the mark of human actions (part of which are human speech acts).

Ironically for Hawking, great physicists such as Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger were very well aware of this. Einstein in his introduction to special relativity explicitly mentions how a misguided use of the term "time" had been responsible for the misconception of "absolute time" in the Newtonian sense. (The crux was that many, but not all uses of "time" can be replaced by references to clocks.) This had left physicists puzzled with contradictions within the theory of electromagnetism which could not be brought to match the results of certain experiments.

The most abundant source of confusion in physics is undoubtably quantum theory. Heisenberg and Schrödinger, QT's biggest contributors, both wrote extensively about the relation of experimental observations and the difficulties of adequately representing them in the classical and non-classical language of physics in such a way that one might still make sense of them in everyday language. Both acknowledged the linguistic, logical and philosophical problems QT prompted.

Heisenberg in particular vigorously opposed the teachings of the Vienna school of logical positivism (founded by a group of philosophers in the 1920s) which held that all knowledge is meaningless unless it is scientificially verifiable. (Wikipedia: "the idea that all knowledge should be codifiable in a single standard language of science; and above all the project of "rational reconstruction," in which ordinary-language concepts were gradually to be replaced by more precise equivalents in that standard language"). This shows that the roles and predilections of scientists and philosophers are not always as clear-cut as modern day scientists and philosophers often tend to portray them.

There is and has always been a lot of confusion about the status of our knowledge, about what it actually consists of, about what we do and can possibly know. There are many unresolved questions and contentious viewpoints regarding concepts such as scepticism, truth and certainty. Science alone is not going to get us any further with these. Confused comments from eminent modern day physicists such as Hawking are doing nothing to rekindle a process of clarification which was started almost a hundred years ago and culminated in the 1950s and 60s with the birth of what is now called analytic philosophy based on the works of Heidegger, Austin, Moore, Wittgenstein and many others.

Anyone interested in curing him/herself from "modern" day scientism might want to have a look at

P.M.S. Hacker
Human Nature: The Categorial Framework
ISBN-10: 1444332481
ISBN-13: 978-1444332483

which is both affordable and readable.

Tyvm for the link. EUR 29 here in .de for the paperback. Bit more than that in the UK it seems. Did I say affordable?

Happy holidays and all the best.

Truly brilliant & illuminating evaluation. We salute you Leviathan.

PL

Common sense is very much a two-edged sword. There is no doubt it can be very useful, but it's equally easy to cut oneself with it.

The two most important new therories physics has produced in the past 100 years, relativity theory and quantum mechanics, both are so formidably counterintuitive that they would never have been approved by a board of "common-sense reviewers". RT and QM challenge notions of concepts as basic as space, time, place, velocity, etc. which is why their interpretations are contentious to this day. It is not that no progress in the philosophy of physics has been made but if there is any general agreement about RT and QM, it is in their application, not in their understanding.

An important thing to note is that after the success of RT and QM had been established, what counted as common sense among physicists had changed. What is called "common sense" changes with time, place and culture. Common sense is acquired, not given to us. We aren't born with it. It expands and changes with our experience. Moreover, we also have the capacity to realize this and examine our judgements and decision-making processes, yielding yet another capacity, namely, one for improving our knowledge through self-assessment. (Of which too few people make sufficient use.)

The world is a hugely complex place. When we try to make sense of it we often attempt to do so by reducing complexity. Backgammon is an example. There is no way one could explicitly oversee the myriad of ways a position may play out to. Instead we use basic tenets which seem plausible to us, enhanced by experience, math, computer simulations, etc.

The same applies to theories of the economy, global warming or the use of alternative energy. Pretty much all of the more interesting phenomena concerning the economy, weather patterns or the use and distribution of energy are so complex that common sense cannot be automatically counted among the set of useful tools of examination. Since neither the economy, the weather nor energy provision can be made test subjects in actual experiments, scientists have come up with computer models, hoping to see at least some order in the chaos of phenomena. This is already one step removed from "real" science, since experimental verification is ruled out from the start. Common sense enters the picture in that any such model has to start with something, that is, certain unquestioned axioms the model's designer takes to be correct. (Bg bot analysis works the same way.)

Hindsight can be a great deceiver. Say you have rolled out a bunch of variations of some difficult position X. Now that you know what the best strategy for X is, it is tempting to say that it is "obvious" which play or plays one should make. The more you become familiar with X, the greater that temptation will be. In some cases one will even find that with the right idea one could have skipped the rollouts and predicted their outcome by a simple argument. But again, this is hindsight. If it had been so obvious from the start, we would never even have started the rollouts (unless we were too lazy to bother thinking it through ourselves). On a certain level one may be justified in calling the new knowledge "obvious". After all the computer was successfully used to increase one's knowledge about bg and one's common sense has been expanded. But by-rote learning and understanding from first principles are very different things. This is what teachers often miss when they try to convey new knowledge. It isn't already, or even readily, obvious to their students.

The process of self-examination and questioning is regrettably little apparent in many people, including many which are otherwise quite intelligent and able. I have a hunch though that until questioning one's own judgement is no longer viewed as a weakness, little progress in the social evolution of man will be possible. (I realize that overdoing self-criticism is a danger as well, it can make you indecisive and inert.)

Before claiming the truth of that, it would have to be clarified what is meant by "the real world". If you are referring to the abolition of metaphysics, that has been fairly successfully carried out by philosophers such as Wittgenstein, though of course many other branches of philosophy disagree. To get physicists or even mathematicians away from it is a Herculean task.


I'd add that the imperfection shown by Goedel is not inner-mathematical but only apparent if math is viewed from the outside with certain, as it turns out unwarranted, expectations.

Even if the Goedel theorems were not true and math were "perfect" in any and every sense of the word, that wouldn't show that the world "runs on math" any more than an atlas of Europe shows that Europe runs on bound pages.


The idea that behind quantum uncertainties and/or entanglement phenomena there are hidden facts (only facts can be known - and this is a grammatical remark, not one about the nature of facts) which we have no access to has been refuted by experimental verification using Bell's theorem (within the error-boundaries of the experimental setup).

So according to our best experimental knowledge, it makes no sense to say that a particle has a clearly defined position and velocity at the same time. Which means we have no grounds on which to speculate that there are things going on behind a curtain we cannot lift.